Marcel Breuer was one of the first and youngest students to be accepted into Bauhaus, the radical arts and crafts school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany.

There, while still in his early 20s, the Hungarian-German architect was inspired by the first bicycle he purchased due to the lightness of its tubular steel frames, which propelled him to experiment on the bendable material in furniture design.

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His experiments resulted in the Wassily chair, a minimised iteration of the classic club chair. Pulled taut as straps for its seat, armrest and backrest on the light steel frame was a sturdy and shiny fabric made from waxed cotton threads called Eisengarn (iron yarn), invented in the 19th century.

While the rare original version went out of production during WWII, various versions have cropped up over the decades, including one in leopard print as part of the collaboration between Knoll and Supreme in 2019.

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From Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who coined the term “less is more,” and started the stonefall for minimalism in interior designing, was the Barcelona chair.

It was designed with long-time collaborator Lilly Reich, when they were commissioned by the German Republic to design the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain.

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With the idea to provide the King and Queen of Spain a resting place while visiting the Pavilion, the chair design was said to take after the Curule seat from Ancient Rome, in the German-American architect’s attempt to “harmonise the old and new.” It featured the signature X-frame, designed initially to be bolted together, with upholstered straps at the backrest, holding up the seat made of ivory-coloured pigskin.

While the Barcelona chair was redesigned in the 1950s—with the use of stainless steel for a seamless and smooth appearance and bovine leather for the upholstery, it remained one of the must-haves in many mid-century themed rooms of today.

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In 1928, riding on the high of his career as an architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—better known as Le Corbusier—decided to look into furniture designing as well. 

Together with his cousin, Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret, and French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, they created a classic furniture line dubbed Le Corbusier’s Furniture for the annual art exhibition Salon d‘Autumne in Paris.

Based on Corbusier’s principles to design a chair that was a “machine for sitting,” Perriand came up with three, each accommodating different sitting positions for different leisure activities, and one of them was the modernist reflection of the traditional club chair: the LC3 Grand Confort.

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Available in two versions—the smaller LC2 model, and the wider and lower-riding LC3 model, the Grand Confort was shaped like a cube, with tubular chromium-plated steel frames bracketing the leather cushions.

The prominent design has been adapted into different furniture styles over the decades, from two-seater sofas to upholstery and frames of modernised palettes, as well as featured in beloved movies and series like The Big Lebowski, the BBC series Sherlock, and the Japanese manga series Spy × Family.

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Besides the ingenious design applied to the Model 60 stacking stool, Alvar Alto had also created the Paimio armchair prior, and in a way, steered modern furniture design back to using the more organic wood material, at a time when steel was criticised for its saturation in furniture designs.

The Finnish architect had experimented with various architectural styles since the start of his career ranging from Nordic classicism to monumentalism. Whereas for his furniture designs, they were more focused on Scandinavian modern with the simplified use of organic materials, especially plywood.

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Together with his wife, Aino, Aalto moved away from the “cold,” functional for his designs for Paimio Sanatorium, a tuberculosis treatment centre in southwest Finland. The Paimio chair was moulded out of bent laminated birch wood and bent plywood, angled in such a way that it allowed the patients to breathe more easily while spending long hours each day seated. 

The masterly wood scrolls tested the technical limits of the material at that time, and the cantilever principle of the design, as well as the use of plywood, would go on to influence mid-century furniture designs to come.

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One of the modernist architects inspired by Aalto was Eero Saarinen. Unlike his father, Eliel Saarinen, an architect famed for his Art Nouveau buildings, Saarinen the younger prided himself on more structural and futuristic designs for his architecture, which included the imposing St Louis Gateway Arch.

Designed initially to match the Saarinen Dining Table, the Tulip chair gained traction in the mid-1950s due to its futuristic design and artificial materials that were considered “Space Age,” despite drawing inspiration from nature.

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For a seamless, modernist look, Saarinen experimented with cast aluminium of a rilsan-coated finish for the base of the chair to “clear up the slum of legs” and “make the chair all one thing again,” as the Finnish-American architect mentioned in passing.

This complemented the upper shell, which was shaped like a tulip petal and moulded from fibreglass with bolstered plastic bonded finishing. The chair was topped with removable upholstered foam cushioning with Velcro fastening.

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A name that is synonymous with modern design, Charles and Ray Eames were most recognised and celebrated for their multidisciplinary designs, including the distinguished Eames lounge chair and ottoman, introduced in 1956.

Inspired by the traditional English club chair and visualised by Charles as a “well-used [baseball] mitt,” the American architect and designer duo adapted Aalto’s use of moulded plywood with leather for the Modernist icon.

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Consisting of three curved plywood shells that made up the headrest, the backrest and the seat, the shells also featured Brazilian rosewood veneer, which the Eameses experimented on while making leg splints for wounded soldiers during the Second World War. These layers were glued together and shaped under heat and pressure, with two of the curved forms interlocking to form a solid mass.

Various changes were applied to the chair and ottoman over the decades, such as the switch to cherry, walnut, palisander rosewood veneer finishing when the original Brazilian rosewood was discontinued in the 1990s.

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Recognised for his attention to proportions, Arne Jacobsen had contributed much of his functionalist architectures in Scandinavian countries and internationally, seen in the likes of the Radisson Collection Hotel, Royal Copenhagen in Denmark, St Catherine’s College in Oxford, and the Royal Danish Embassy in London.

The first property in particular also housed some of the Danish architect’s substantial collection of well-designed minimalist chairs, such as the Egg chair.

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Borrowing some traits from Saarinen’s Womb chair, the Egg chair was a typical Jacobsen-styled design that used state-of-the-art material for its steel frame and cow-hide leather cover. The latter was a design flaw that revealed visible stitching in the middle of the chair but was resolved easily when transitioned to fabric upholstery.

Besides the Egg Chair, modernist fans would also recognise Jacobsen’s other chair designs: the Swan with a lower backrest, the Ant made of veneer and plastic, and the three-legged Dot stool with chrome-plated tubular steel.

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