The Barcelona Chair: Modern Furniture Design by Mies van der Rohe
Even if mainly all people normally feature it to furnishings execute during the “modern age”, contemporary furniture is essentially a name designating furniture inspire by modernism. This kind in furniture first developed in the late 19th century, unhurriedly overshadoweding traditional furniture design and soon after becoming a leading style of its own. And one of the most iconic model of modern furniture is the Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe.
Believed as to be a flagship plan of the Bauhaus design movement, the Barcelona Chair was made by German designer Ludwig Mies van der ROhe in cooperation with Lilly Reich in 1929. The chair was completed by Mies van der Rohe for the Pabellón Alemán, which he alsomade, in Barcelona, Spain. The chair, as well as the Pabellón it was housed in, was Germany’s official entry to the celebrated 1929 Ibero-American Exposition and was destined to showcase Germany’s cultural resuscitation and industrial viability.
As with entire of Mies van der Rohe’s contemporary forms, the Barcelona Chair was light in construction and apply the minimal of materials. The X-shaped frame, said to be encouraged by the shape of early Egyptian folding chairs and campaign stools, was done from slim industrial-strength steel coated with chrome. The chrome, still, was then changed with stainless steel as the latter facilitated the frame to be created from into single seamless piece. The frame is topped with a pair of square cushions wraped with soft ivory-colored pigskin, but like the chrome-plated frame it too was later restored with black cow leather. Later copy of the design, though, have also been fitted with other kind of upholstery in various colors.
The Barcelona Chair was first fashioned in the 1930s in Europe and the US but was ceased in the 1950s when the patents for the design’s elements finish. Then in 1953 the rights to the Barcelona Chair was attain by Knoll, a company specializing in high-end designer furniture, and now remains the sole official manufacturer of the design.