Wassily Chair B3 by Marcel Breuer for Knoll International

The Hungarian-American architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and, on the recommendation of Walter Gropius, headed the carpentry workshop there, from 1925 as master at the new Bauhaus site in Dessau. He became famous with the Wassily Chair (1925/26), the first armchair with a frame of bent, chrome-plated tubular steel. In 1928 came the cantilevered Cesca chair with a tubular steel frame and a seat of Viennese cane, named after Breuer's daughter Francesca. After emigrating to the USA in 1937, Breuer taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and turned increasingly to architecture, for example with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1966).