WASSILY CHAIR
MARCEL BREUER, 1925
Okay, quick inventory. Cushions? Nope. Padding? Nope. Wood? Nope. A few bent steel tubes, some straps of black cloth, and you can see straight through the whole thing. And somehow you still know exactly what it is. A club chair. Built for cigars and long afternoons. He kept the idea and basically threw out the chair. Marcel Breuer is twenty-three when he designs this, and his actual job at the Bauhaus is running the woodshop. So he's the guy in charge of the trees! Then he buys a bicycle and can't stop staring at the handlebars. Steel tube. Light, strong, bent by a machine, every one identical. He's thinking: If steel can hold a man at full speed on cobblestones, a living room should be easy. So this is an armchair drawn in air. Look where you actually sit. Not on the steel. On cloth, pulled tight, hanging in the middle of it. The metal never touches you. He bragged about it the only way he knew how. Called it his most extreme work, "the least artistic, the most logical, the least cozy, the most mechanical." A man in love, talking like a parts catalog. The name came later, and not from him. Kandinsky taught down the hall, loved it, got a copy made for his place. Forty years later an Italian company hears that story and starts calling it the Wassily. The painter didn't design a bolt of it. A year later Breuer prints a little film strip in the Bauhaus magazine. His chairs, year by year, less material every time. The last frame is a woman sitting on nothing at all. Eventually, he says, we'll sit on columns of air. So even Breuer didn't think this was the future. Just one more frame. The plan was for the chair to keep disappearing, and this is as far as it got.