Left: Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer | Right: Photo by Melissa Hegge


Bauhaus classics, reframed


Knoll draws on Bauhaus ideals to reframe four iconic tubular steel collections by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in a palette of ultra-matte colour.


Four celebrated furniture collections by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – the Wassily Chair, Laccio Tables, MR Chair, and MR Tables – have been re-envisioned by Knoll in three ultra-matte colours: an archival dark red, white, and onyx. Well-known for their polished steel frames, the tubular steel designs take on new identities in the saturated finishes, their iconic forms perceived in surprising new ways.


Roots in the Bauhaus The furniture in the new Knoll release was originally designed between 1925 and 1928 when Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were active at the Bauhaus – the revolutionary art and design school founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany.


The Bauhaus sought to unite the creative endeavours of art, design, and industry until they became, as Gropius described it, “inseparable components of a new architecture.” The school – repeatedly upended by political and wartime upheaval across Europe – opened its doors in 1919 and closed them in 1933. During this short period, the roots of Modernism were established by the pioneering designers who dared to push the limits of material, form and function across architecture, textile, and object design.


Marcel Breuer: A Pioneer in Material Innovation A champion of the Modern movement and protégé of Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer is equally renowned


for his achievements in architecture and furniture design. His work embodies the driving objective of the Bauhaus: to reconcile art and industry.


Breuer was still an apprentice at the Bauhaus when his experiments with new materials began to revolutionise interiors. He was the first to use tubular steel in his furniture designs after famously becoming inspired by the construction of his own bicycle. His resulting works – including the Wassily Chair and Laccio Tables – remain among the most identifiable pieces of modern furniture.


As political tensions of the 1930s escalated, many Bauhaus luminaries fled Germany. Gropius and Breuer both immigrated to the United States. Gropius taught at Harvard University and opened an architecture practice. Marcel Breuer, having shifted his full focus to architecture, joined Gropius’s studio in Cambridge. There, the two would mentor a junior architect named Florence Knoll.


Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Modernism’s Maestro Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – Mies, familiarly – borders on the mythic in the world of architecture. His ‘less-is-more’ design philosophy is heralded as the gold standard by generations of architects.


Mies first gained attention in Germany for his residential projects and visionary proposals for glass and steel skyscrapers. In 1929, he and Lilly Reich designed the German Pavilion for the Industrial Exposition in Barcelona. The pavilion debuted


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