The Cantilever Chair

If one were to draw a chair, the likelihood is that it would have a seat, a back and four legs at each corner. This has been the typology of a chair since time immemorial when our earliest ancestors first bound sticks together to create a comfortable sitting position. The ancient Egyptians combined sticks and leather in an X shape to produce a folding stool (inspiring Ole Wanscher's OW2000 Egyptian Stool), but with this exception, the essential nature of the chair did not really change for millennia.

Until 1926.

What happened then is the source of considerable conjecture and controversy, but it was undoubtedly the birth of a new form of seat: the cantilever chair. The story centres around the Weissenhof Seidlung housing estate in Stuttgart, created for the Die Wohnung (the Residence) exhibition. German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was president of the organising association, the Deutscher Werkbund, and was supervisor of the project. The Werkbund was an association of artists, architects, designers and industrialists formed in 1907 which was an important element in the development of modern architecture and industrial design, paving the way for the establishment of the Bauhaus - the revolutionary school of design set up by Walter Gropius in 1919.

Teaching at the Bauhaus in 1925 was Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer and he was commissioned by Gropius to design the interiors of Gropius' buildings at the Weissenhof. He had bought an Adler bicycle to get around Desau and was impressed by the light weight of its frame. This led him to experiment with seamless tubular steel for furniture designs and one of the first results was his famous Wassily chair.

Also experimenting with tubular steel in 1925, this time standard gas piping, was 26-year-old Dutchman Mart Stam. He was one of the sixteen architects chosen by Mies van der Rohe for the Weissenhof project, and it is likely that Breuer and Stam discussed their work including the concept of the cantilever chair.

Mies van der Rohe arranged a planning meeting and dinner for the Weissenhof project at the Hotel Marquardt in Stuttgart in November 1926. According to historians, Stam drew his design in blue pencil on the back of a wedding invitation at the dinner and then presented the finished chair to the public when the exhibition opened in June 1927. Manufactured by Thonet, it has recently been updated as the S33V Soft cantilever chair.

Marcel Breuer did not present his version of the chair - the Cesca chair, nicknamed for his adopted daughter Francesca - until 1928.

In the meantime, Mies van der Rohe returned to his office after the dinner. His assistant Sergius Ruegenberg recalled in 1985 'Mies came back from Stuttgart in November 1926 and told us about Mart Stam's idea for a chair. We had a drawing board on the wall and Mies drew the Stam chair on it, right-angled, beginning from the top. He even added the fittings and then said: "Ugly, those fittings are really ugly. If only he'd rounded them off – there, that looks better," and he drew a curve. A simple curve by his hand over the Stam sketch had made a new chair out of it!' Thus the MR chair was born, produced in late 1927 and later developed into the Brno chair in 1930.

These three similar designs resulted in lawsuits that lasted until 1932, the outcome of which was that Mart Stam was granted the artistic copyright as the 'inventor' of the cantilever chair because he was first to present his design publicly at the Weissenhof exhibition. License to manufacture these chairs remained with Thonet but rights to Breuer's and Mies' designs were also granted to Italian manufacturer Gavina after World War II. Gavina was bought by Knoll in 1968 and therefore both Knoll and Thonet now make the chairs: S32 by Thonet and Cesca by Knoll; S533 chair by Mies van der Rohe from Thonet and the MR chair by Knoll.

The concept of the cantilever chair has been embraced by many eminent designers throughout the 20th century. The natural spring in the materials chosen provides an extra level of comfort sometimes described as like 'sitting on air'.

Gerrit Rietveld designed the Zig Zag chair for his Rietveld Schroder House in Utrecht in 1934, utilising four plain planks of wood. It is an example of Rietveld's de Stijl and Modernist design principles. The visual simplicity disguises its complex construction of dovetail joints. This was the first time the concept had been produced in wood and was initially manufactured by G. A. van de Groenekan, De Bilt, Netherlands. It has been made by Cassina in Italy since 1971.

The designs of Alvar Aalto, made by Artek, are renowned for their use of Finnish birch - the blonde wood that has come to symbolise Scandinavian design. Artek's development of birch lamella allowed Aalto to produce the cantilevered 42 lounge chair when designing the Paimio Sanitorium in 1932 and again in the late 1930s for the 43 lounge chair and 406 lounge chair.

In the 1950s, Danish designer Verner Panton dreamt of creating a stacking cantilevered chair from plastic in one single piece, supposedly inspired by a neat stack of plastic buckets! Having met Willi Fehlbaum of Vitra in 1960, the pair worked together to produce a cold-pressed model of fiberglass-strengthened polyester. Serial production began in 1968 using high-resilience polyurethane foam. Subsequently in 1999 Vitra began producing the Panton Chair in less expensive batch-dyed, recyclable polypropylene. Seen as 'Space Age' in the 1960s, the sculptural chair became a symbol of Pop Art and the Panton Chair's S-shaped design continues to be popular today.

As technological advances are made, plastic now equals the strength and stability of tubular steel, even fully recycled plastics. There's no doubt that new designs for the cantilever chair will continue to be produced.