Barcelona chair was among the one of the elite class furniture goods. The Barcelona chair, couch and table were the state of the art creation of the famous and very popular George Kolbe. Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. His work reflect the revival of Germany’s cultural competence and prove without any doubt their creative accomplishments and commercial feasibility.

The much popular Barcelona chair was the result of the efforts of both Mies and Lilly Reich who was his long time partner. Reich was a highly skilled architect and designer and her master pieces are still very much famous. She has an honor to become the first female member of Deutscher Werkbund an organization whose main objective was the German Design Industry, its quality, evolution and promotion.

It is hard to find who gave more when two people contribute to a design. Nevertheless the fact that Mies did furniture design only with Reich, he did not design furniture before his association with Reich and that he did not patent any more designs after he left her.

The Barcelona chair designs had been inspired by ancient folding camping chairs. The modern style of furniture gave more liberty and diversity to the designers. The Barcelona chair was the pioneer of modern furniture and its design had changed the whole concept of classic furniture.

In original Chair chrome plated steel was used. The frames were bolted together. Leather straps were introduced to suspend the cushions covered with ivory colored pig hide. In 1950 the chair was redesigned using stainless steel. The seamless frames formed a fluid structure. The bovine leather was used instead of pig hide.

Knoll holds the sole right to manufacture original chairs. The originals carry the signature of the maestro and are accompanied with Certificate of Authenticity.

The Barcelona chair does not come easy on the pocket, thus it is but natural that Barcelona chair imitations are available all over. The attraction with this marvelous item has not declined in the years. In market most of the cheap chairs are not of admirable quality and also do not last long. Also only few manufacturers reproduce Barcelona chairs with promising excellence.

The fame of chair can be measured from the fact that online Barcelona chair autocad tutorials are also available to designers who wish to design similar chairs for their clients.

The Barcelona chair was the pride of erstwhile Germany at the world exposition. This master piece was considered as a symbol of royalty. Even today it is a collector’s item and a veritable eye soother.

Barcelona Coffee Table is a Classic Coffee Table. I must confess I have  never experienced such an elegant looking table in my whole life. It adds the luxury and elegance of everything that you take on this. It’s simply one of the most beautiful thing I have ever have in my life and in home !

This was originally called the “Dessau table”. But with tha passage of time its name
changed and is now called “Barcelona Table”. It first appeared a the Tugendhat House,
Brno, Czechoslovakia. This table was first manufactured and btought to the market by
Berliner Metallgewerbe Joseph Muller. In 1931, its production was moved to Bamberg
Metallwerkstatten, Berlin. The table is the perfect compliment to the Barcelona Chairs
from Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. Its assembly requires minimal effort and you can use
Barcelona Coffee Table anywhere you wish to in your house.

Its frame is made of solid polished stainless steel and is 30 x 12mm in diameter. Clear
tempered glass top, whose thickness is 19 mm. A table for the individuals who really
want to enjoy their life.

There are several reasons you should include Barcelona chair and stool to your furniture collection. This amazing chair is just perfect piece of comfort and beauty for you if you like modern design and need to make your room unique and different from all your acquaintances. The distinct feature of  Barcelona chair and stool is that it comes with many beautiful color options so you can make your boring room a total different life and style with by adding this chair in red, yellow, blue or any other colour.

Following are few more reasons to add this sophisticated and creative thing part of your living:

1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created it for the king and queen of Spain in the 1920′s so it’s a royal furniture and your will feel it !
2. It was selected by the most renowned designers in the art world to win a Museum of Modern Art award.
3. Barcelona Chair & Stool  is not just eye-catching but it is a durable and comfortable of its kind because it’s frame is made from the heaviest wood available, the leather is of most superior quality and  and the legs are supported with the tubular steel.

Nottingham Contemporary - Mies van der Rohe Award

Caruso St John’s Nottingham Contemporary is among scores of projects nominated for this year’s Mies van der Rohe Award, the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture.

Other nominees for the €60,000 Mies van der Rohe prize and €20,000 runner-up special mention include David Lea and Pat Borer’s Wise Building, Wiel Arets’ V Tower and Zaha Hadid’s Stirling Prize-winning Maxxi museum.

The prize, organised by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, is awarded for a building in the EU that displays excellence in conceptual, technical and constructive terms.

Winners receive a sculpture inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition which, despite, being dismantled shortly after, is considered one of the most important works of the 20th century.

Other nominees include Office Kersten Geers David van Severen for the Villa Voka and EXPO, both in Kortrijk, Belgium; 51n4E for C-Mine in Genk, Belgium; Biq Architecten for Lakerlopen housing, in Eindhoven; Snelder Architecten for Panta Rhei College, Amstelveen, Netherlands; Philippe Schmit Architects for the Museum Villa Vauban in Luxembourg; Archistudio Studniarek & Pilinkiewicz for the Regional Court in Katowice, Poland; Mecanoo for its theatre and congress centre La Llotja de Lleida in Spain; and NORD for its Natural Science Centre in Bjerringbro, Denmark.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) has long been considered one of the most important architects of the 20th century, and his significance to the field of modern architecture is beyond dispute. In Europe, before World War II, Mies emerged as one of the most innovative leaders of the modern movement, producing visionary projects for glass and steel and executing a number of small but critically significant buildings. In the United States, after 1938, he transformed the architectonic expression of the steel frame in American architecture and left a nearly unmatched legacy of teaching and building.

Mies began his career in Europe, becoming one of the pivotal leaders of the architectural avant-garde by the early 1920s. Born in 1886 in Aachen, Germany, Mies van der Rohe had his most important early apprenticeship in the offices of Peter Behrens between 1908 and 1911. After World War I, Mies joined the utopian artists of the Novembergruppe and founded the avant-garde magazine G (Gestaltung). Around 1920, Mies designed several projects for glass skyscrapers in central Berlin, in crystalline, vertical facets of glass and suspended floor planes, just as German expressionists such as Bruno Taut and Hugo Häring were calling for a revolutionary architecture of transparency and organicism.

After 1923, Mies’s style shifted, and he came heavily under the influence of Dutch neo-plasticism and Russian suprematism. The former influence, along with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, drove Mies to experiment with independent walls and ceilings arranged in an open, pin-wheeling manner. The latter influence drove Mies to consider the reduction and abstraction of these elements into dynamic and contrapuntal compositions of pure shapes in space.

These experiments culminated in one of Mies van der Rohe’s most significant works, the German Pavilion built for the Barcelona World Exposition in 1929. Commonly known as the Barcelona Pavilion, this small, temporary structure, has been reconstructed, and remained one of the most recognized objects in the architectural history of modernism. Composed mainly of a raised terrace and a simple rectangular structure with eight cruciform columns, it set an important precedent for the Farnsworth House.

In 1930, Mies succeeded Hannes Meyer as director of the Dessau Bauhaus, remaining in that position until the Bauhaus was forcibly closed by the National Socialist government in 1933. After his arrival in the United States in 1937, Mies van der Rohe went on to significantly change the American architectural landscape, particularly during the rebuilding that immediately followed World War II.

he accepted a position as head of the architecture department at the Armour Institute of Technology, soon to be renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology. At his inaugural lecture as director of the department in 1938, Mies stated:

“In its simplest form architecture is rooted in entirely functional considerations, but it can reach up through all degrees of value to the highest sphere of spiritual existence into the realm of pure art.”

This sentence summarized what had become Mies van der Rohe’s consistent approach to design: to begin with functional considerations of structure and materials, then to refine the detailing and expression of those materials until they transcended their technical origins to become a pure art of structure and space.

In 1939, he began preliminary designs for the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology on the south side of Chicago. Its composition of low-slung rectangular buildings, arranged as subtly juxtaposed figures on a cleared urban site would constitute one of the most important examples of modernist urban design. In 1946, Mies would begin his work on the Farnsworth house, in which he was able, as in the Barcelona Pavilion, to pursue his ideas of structure and space, with minimal requirements of program. After World War II, Mies would become perhaps the most significant designers of American skyscrapers, transforming the common steel frames of such structures into subtle expressions of module, proportion and detail. Buildings such as 860-880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago (1949-51) and the Seagram Building in New York (1958) have become canonical monuments of modernism and are studied by scholars and architects all over the world.

Farnsworth House Mies van der rohe

The Farnsworth House is one of the most significant of Mies van der Rohe’s works, equal in importance to such canonical monuments as the Barcelona Pavilion, built for the 1929 International Exposition and the 1954-58 Seagram Building in New York. Its significance is two-fold. First, as one of a long series of house projects, the Farnsworth House embodies a certain aesthetic culmination in Mies van der Rohe’s experiment with this building type. Second, the house is perhaps the fullest expression of modernist ideals that had begun in Europe, but which were consummated in Plano, Illinois. As historian Maritz Vandenburg has written in his monograph on the Farnsworth House:

“Every physical element has been distilled to its irreducible essence. The interior is unprecedentedly transparent to the surrounding site, and also unprecedentedly uncluttered in itself. All of the paraphernalia of traditional living –rooms, walls, doors, interior trim, loose furniture, pictures on walls, even personal possessions – have been virtually abolished in a puritanical vision of simplified, transcendental existence. Mies had finally achieved a goal towards which he had been feeling his way for three decades.”

In many ways also, Mies van der Rohe was able to realize spatial and structural ideals that were impossible in larger projects, such as the Seagram Building. For example, the I-beams of the Farnsworth House are both structural and expressive, whereas in the Seagram Building they are attached to exterior as symbols for what is necessarily invisible behind fireproof cladding. In addition, the one-story Farnsworth house with its isolated site allowed a degree of transparency and simplicity impossible in the larger, more urban projects.

The significance of the Farnsworth House was recognized even before it was built. In 1947 a model of the Farnsworth House was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Describing it, along with the unbuilt Resor House, as a “radical departure from his last European domestic projects,” Philip Johnson noted that it went further than the Resor house in its expression of the floating volume: “The Farnsworth house with its continuous glass walls is an even simpler interpretation of an idea. Here the purity of the cage is undisturbed. Neither the steel columns from which it is suspended nor the independent floating terrace break the taut skin.” In the actual construction, the aesthetic idea was progressively refined and developed through the choices of materials, colors and details. While subsequent debates and lawsuits sometimes questioned the practicality and livability of its design, the Farnsworth House would increasingly be considered, by architects and scholars alike, to constitute one of the crystallizing and pivotal moments of Mies van der Rohe’s long artistic career

First conceived in 1945 as a country retreat for the client, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, the house as finally built appears as a structure of Platonic perfection against a complementary ground of informal landscape. This landscape is an integral aspect of Mies van der Rohe’s aesthetic conception. The house faces the Fox River just to the south and is raised 5 feet 3 inches above the ground, its thin, white I-beam supports contrasting with the darker, sinuous trunks of the surrounding trees. The calm stillness of the man-made object contrasts also with the subtle movements, sounds, and rhythms of water, sky and vegetation.

The dominance of a single, geometric form in a pastoral setting, with a complete exclusion of extraneous elements normally associated with habitation, reinforces the architect’s statement about the potential of a building to express “dwelling” in its simplest essence. While the elongated rectangle of the house lies parallel to the course of the Fox River, the perpendicular cross axis, represented by the suspended stairways, faces the river directly. With its emphatically planar floors and roof suspended on the widely-spaced, steel columns, the one-story house appears to float above the ground, infinitely extending the figurative space of the hovering planes into the surrounding site.

At the same time, the prismatic composition of the house maintains a sense of boundary and centrality against the vegetative landscape, thus maintaining its temple-like aloofness. The great panes of glass redefine the character of the boundary between shelter and that which is outside. The exterior glazing and the intermittent partitions of the interior work together dialectically, shifting the viewer’s awareness between the thrill of exposure to the raw elements of nature and the comforting stability of architectonic enclosure.

The architecture of the house represents the ultimate refinement of Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist expression of structure and space. It is composed of three strong, horizontal steel forms – the terrace, the floor of the house, and the roof – attached to attenuated, steel flange columns.

Since its completion in 1951, the Farnsworth house has been meticulously maintained and restored. The most important restoration took place in 1972, when then owner Peter Palumbo hired the firm of Mies van der Rohe’s grandson, Dirk Lohan, to restore the house to its original 1951 appearance. A second restoration took place in 1996, after a devastating flood damaged the interior. Although the house was built to resist floods in 1951, building in the surrounding area has caused higher flood levels in recent decades.

Massive terraces wrap around the upper story. Below, a vast living space is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass walls that look out on the garden below, so that even on a rainy day it is bright, almost cheerful. The space is divided only by a semicircular wood wall that creates a dining nook and a free-standing wall of solid onyx that separates the main seating area from a study, and that glows in the afternoon light. Two of the exterior walls even roll down like car windows, letting in the sound of chirping birds.

“The whole living area is really overwhelming,” said Anita Cremers, a tourist from Utrecht, the Netherlands, who visited the house on a whim after seeing it in a brochure. “I’m really glad I came by.”

But like the 15,000 others who visit this 1930 masterpiece by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe every year, Ms. Cremers couldn’t help but notice that it is in dire need of restoration.

The house, a World Heritage site, was “fundamental to the development of Modern architecture,” according to Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. But it is also growing increasingly dilapidated, or “wasting away,” as The Prague Post put it in a recent article.

The house’s condition has sparked a battle over who will control its future and ensure its survival: the city of Brno, which now owns it, or the heirs of the original owners, Jews who fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. The city says it recognizes the family’s moral right to the home, and the family says it wants to keep it open for the people of the city, but neither side seems to trust the other’s ability to manage the restoration work and maintenance that will be necessary.

On March 20, the Brno city council, citing various legal technicalities, voted not to return the house to the family, although the conflict is likely to continue.

The house embodies some of Mies’s most influential ideas, which went on to become hallmarks of Modernism: free-flowing, open living space; a connection to the outside through transparent walls; the use of a grid of columns instead of load-bearing walls. It was also a project for which Mies designed every detail, from the doorknobs and light fixtures to the Tugendhat and Brno chairs, now classics of 20th-century design produced and sold by Knoll.

Mr. Bergdoll sneaked into the house as a student in the late 1970s, just before a poorly executed restoration by the Communist government, and featured it prominently in a major show on Mies that he was a co-curator of at MoMA in 2001. “There is not an architecture student alive that has not studied that building,” he said.

Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, the youngest daughter of the original owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, is well aware of the house’s significance. An art history professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she has spent much of her life trying to make sure that it is properly cared for.

Sitting in the living room of her Vienna apartment one evening in March, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat, 60, turned the pages of a book about the house that she edited in 2000. Her fingers trailed across a black and white image of her siblings when they were children, standing around a Christmas tree with toys strewn at their feet — a rare image of childhood disarray in the iconic Modernist living area.

“I don’t know of any modern space that feels like that house,” Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said. “I can stay in that room for hours; it’s like meditation. It’s not just a nice house, it does something to you.”

Though she never lived in the house — she was born in Venezuela after the war — it has become her obsession. For decades, she and her husband, Ivo Hammer, a professor of conservation at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim, Germany, and a restorer of murals, petitioned the Communist and then post-Communist governments to have it opened to the public and then to have it properly restored.

FROM the outside, the Tugendhat House doesn’t look like one of the most important residential buildings of the 20th century: it’s just two white stucco cubes separated by an opening through which a few spiky treetops protrude. But as a tour guide led a group of 10 through this modern home in the Czech Republic’s second-largest city in early March, it was clear that there was much more to the house, the bulk of which is built on the steep hillside that drops away from the street.

Massive terraces wrap around the upper story. Below, a vast living space is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass walls that look out on the garden below, so that even on a rainy day it is bright, almost cheerful. The space is divided only by a semicircular wood wall that creates a dining nook and a free-standing wall of solid onyx that separates the main seating area from a study, and that glows in the afternoon light. Two of the exterior walls even roll down like car windows, letting in the sound of chirping birds.

“The whole living area is really overwhelming,” said Anita Cremers, a tourist from Utrecht, the Netherlands, who visited the house on a whim after seeing it in a brochure. “I’m really glad I came by.”

But like the 15,000 others who visit this 1930 masterpiece by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe every year, Ms. Cremers couldn’t help but notice that it is in dire need of restoration.

The house, a World Heritage site, was “fundamental to the development of Modern architecture,” according to Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. But it is also growing increasingly dilapidated, or “wasting away,” as The Prague Post put it in a recent article.

The house’s condition has sparked a battle over who will control its future and ensure its survival: the city of Brno, which now owns it, or the heirs of the original owners, Jews who fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. The city says it recognizes the family’s moral right to the home, and the family says it wants to keep it open for the people of the city, but neither side seems to trust the other’s ability to manage the restoration work and maintenance that will be necessary.

On March 20, the Brno city council, citing various legal technicalities, voted not to return the house to the family, although the conflict is likely to continue.

The house embodies some of Mies’s most influential ideas, which went on to become hallmarks of Modernism: free-flowing, open living space; a connection to the outside through transparent walls; the use of a grid of columns instead of load-bearing walls. It was also a project for which Mies designed every detail, from the doorknobs and light fixtures to the Tugendhat and Brno chairs, now classics of 20th-century design produced and sold by Knoll.

Mr. Bergdoll sneaked into the house as a student in the late 1970s, just before a poorly executed restoration by the Communist government, and featured it prominently in a major show on Mies that he was a co-curator of at MoMA in 2001. “There is not an architecture student alive that has not studied that building,” he said.

Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, the youngest daughter of the original owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, is well aware of the house’s significance. An art history professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she has spent much of her life trying to make sure that it is properly cared for.

Sitting in the living room of her Vienna apartment one evening in March, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat, 60, turned the pages of a book about the house that she edited in 2000. Her fingers trailed across a black and white image of her siblings when they were children, standing around a Christmas tree with toys strewn at their feet — a rare image of childhood disarray in the iconic Modernist living area.

“I don’t know of any modern space that feels like that house,” Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said. “I can stay in that room for hours; it’s like meditation. It’s not just a nice house, it does something to you.”

Though she never lived in the house — she was born in Venezuela after the war — it has become her obsession. For decades, she and her husband, Ivo Hammer, a professor of conservation at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim, Germany, and a restorer of murals, petitioned the Communist and then post-Communist governments to have it opened to the public and then to have it properly restored.

A restoration project was finally in the works last year, but after a dispute arose over a contract, the search for builders was halted in December — a final delay in a long string of them, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said, and the last straw for her.

She asked the city to return the house to her family, believing that they could make the restoration happen, even if the city could not. Because laws allowing the return of real estate appropriated during the war expired in 1995, her lawyer, Marc Richter, argued that the house should be returned under laws governing stolen artwork.

The city seemed inclined to oblige until early February, when the family sold a Wilhelm Lehmbruck statue, “Torso of a Walking Woman,” that had once stood in the house and that had been returned to them by the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second largest museum, the summer before.

The statue was sold to a private collector for more than $2 million at Sotheby’s in London, and after the auction, attitudes in Brno changed, said Mayor Roman Onderka. “The only thing I can say about the situation is disappointment,” Mr. Onderka said through a translator. He felt the statue, which was a prominent feature of the living space in the 1930s — and which has been replaced there by a replica in recent years — should have been returned to the house.

Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said she was “furious” about such criticism. “I think it’s strange for me to be criticized over selling a piece of art that belongs to me.” She said that her mother first asked for the statue in 1969, and that the Moravian Gallery had for decades claimed it was lost. “The gallery never even exhibited the statue,” she said.

The museum also has four pieces of furniture originally made for the house that Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat has agreed to display in the home when it’s renovated. “No one talks about that,” she said.

But Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat’s argument does not seem to resonate in Brno. Mayor Onderka, who sees the house as a treasured piece of Brno’s cultural identity and a potential catalyst for tourism, wants the city to handle its restoration — not only, he suggests, because of the distrust engendered in Brno by the sale of the statue, but because he has doubts about whether the family can afford the restoration.

Restoring the house may cost as much as $7.5 million, according to one published estimate, and Mr. Onderka said he has already put aside $1.9 million in this year’s city budget toward the cause. But Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said that she plans to create a foundation that would own the home and raise funds for its restoration while providing the family with some level of control.

Certainly, whoever controls the house will have a lot to contend with. Mark Weber, the technical director at the World Monuments Fund, which has provided financing and expertise to assess the state of the house, said that a portion of the hillside may be unstable, causing foundation problems.

Several of the exterior walls have significant cracks. Not a single cabinet is left in the empty kitchen. And then there is the Communist-era restoration. New fixtures, reminiscent of an ’80s hotel, were added in the bathroom. Many of the glass walls were replaced with thinner, smaller sheets of glass, leaving seams where none should be.

Mr. Hammer, who has researched the surfaces of the home extensively, said there are as many as eight layers of paint on walls that were originally bare plaster. The semicircular wood-veneer wall that demarcates the dining space is a poor replica.

A few weeks before the city council’s vote on March 20, standing in her late 19th-century Vienna apartment, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat pulled open the drawers of a sideboard by Mies’s collaborator Lilly Reich, which still slide effortlessly 75 years after the piece was made for the house. (It is one of a few furnishings that the family took with them in 1938.)

She pointed to several color photographs on her living room wall that her father took in the 1930s. One shows a vase of flowers next to the onyx wall, another the cross-shaped column from the home’s main room. In these pictures the house takes a background role to the family, a reminder that it was once a cherished home as well as a living piece of architectural history.

“Perhaps all this controversy is good, in a way,” Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said. “At least now people are talking about it; it’s getting attention.”

After the city council vote, however, she was less sanguine. “Perhaps there is still a solution which will be good for the house and the city, I don’t know,” she said. “It does not look good.”

The mayor, on the other hand, seemed to be galvanized into action, saying that he would instruct his deputy mayor to begin preparing for the renovation of the house the next morning. “We have one single purpose and that is to renovate the villa as soon, as quickly and as best as is possible,” he said through the translator.

Asked about why, in his view, the city council would vote to deny the family’s petition, he said that all the many legal issues were taken into consideration, but added, “in my personal opinion, the sale of the statue might have influenced some people.” Still, he said, “cooperation with the family is a long-term thing. Now we want to stress that even more.”

Source: NYTimes

About Knoll

Since 1938, Knoll has been recognized internationally for creating workplace and residential furnishings that inspire, evolve and endure. Today, our commitment to modern design, our understanding of the workplace and our dedication to sustainable design has yielded a unique portfolio of products that respond and adapt to changing needs. In June 2009 the Generation by Knoll work chair won a Gold award in the Best of NeoCon® competition of contract furnishing products. Knoll is aligned with the U.S. Green Building Council and the Canadian Green Building Council and can help companies achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) workplace certification. Knoll is the contract furniture industry’s first member of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX®) and is the founding sponsor of the World Monuments Fund Modernism at Risk program.

Contact:

David E. Bright
Knoll, Inc.
212 343-4135
dbright@knoll.com

Source: Knoll News

The 54th floor is almost entirely 1960s-original and a tribute to Mies van der Rohe design philosophy. The details he labored over five decades ago have been painstakingly maintained.

Cracks in the Italian travertine floor, visible since its installation, have never been filled in—a detail Mies wanted preserved. Among the 1960-originals are black leather and chrome Brno chairs and brown Barcelona chairs, manufactured by Knoll, as well as credenzas by Florence Knoll that add to the timelessness of the space.

Source:  Knoll News

Barcelona Chair and Ottoman

The Barcelona chair was exclusively designed for the German Pavilion, that country’s entry for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, which was hosted by Barcelona, Spain. The design resulted from collaboration between the famous Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his longtime partner and companion, architect and designer Lilly Reich, whose contributions have only recently been acknowledged. An icon of modernism, the chair’s design was inspired by the campaign and folding chairs of ancient times.

Lilly Reich began working for the Deutscher Werkbund in 1912, an organization whose raison d’etre was to focus specifically on the German design industry, its quality, evolution and promotion. Reich was responsible for designing and organizing many of the Werkbund’s international exhibitions, and in 1921 became the organization’s first female member.

Reich and van der Rohe met in the mid-1920s and collaborated on many of these exhibition design projects until he departed for the United States in 1938. While Reich always deferred to van der Rohe in public, the reverse was said to have been the case in private. While it is naturally difficult to apportion the contributions that each made to a particular design, it is interesting and poignant to note that van der Rohe never again produced any furniture designs after their partnership ended, nor had he designed any furniture beforehand. His first patent on a furniture design was issued in 1927 and his last in 1937.

Reich’s affiliation with the Deutscher Werkbund and her architectural work with van der Rohe on their exhibition design and furniture design made them the natural choice for the Commission to design the German Pavilion in Barcelona.

Materials Used in Barcelona Chair

The Barcelona Chair frame was initially designed to be bolted together, but was redesigned in 1950 using stainless steel, which allowed the frame to be formed by a seamless piece of metal, giving it a smoother appearance. Bovine leather replaced the ivory-colored pigskin which was used for the original pieces.

The functional design and elements of it that were patented by Mies in Germany, Spain and the United States in the 1930s have since expired. The Barcelona chair was manufactured in the US and Europe in limited production from the 1930s to the 1950s. In 1953, six years after Reich’s death, van der Rohe ceded his rights and his name on the design to Knoll, knowing that his design patents were expired. This collaboration then renewed popularity in the design.

Knoll claims to be the current licensed manufacturer and holder of all trademark rights to the design. In 1965, Knoll purchased the trademark rights to the Barcelona word from Drexel. In 2004, Knoll received trade dress rights to the design from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Despite these trademarks, a large replica market continues. Gordon International New York has continued to manufacture the designs since the 1970s, even after a court battle against Knoll in 2005. In 2008, another court battle erupted between Knoll and Alphaville Design California; the outcome is pending Summary Judgment in Federal District court.