The Contentious History of the Cantilever Chair?
This issue we were going to do a pretty straight forward overview of the life and works of Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe beginning with how he got his start as an apprentice stonemason at his father’s business, then furniture design with Bruno Paul in Berlin before working for Peter Behrens as an architect where his co-workers included Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. After establishing his own office in Berlin and having the winning design for the German Pavilion at Barcelona Industrial Exposition, we were going to trace his successes and designs through his time at the Bauhaus and ultimately how his work literally changed the landscape of the United States with his minimalist skyscrapers and experimental homes – from Seagram building in New York to Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. We were going to feature his chair designs, mention the typeface he created and then conclude that he is considered one of the pioneers of modern architecture and his furniture designs are iconic.
However, as we started researching more and more about his chair designs we uncovered some far more interesting material. It turns out the history of the cantilever chair is a little murky and the dynamics of collaboration, fraught. So as best we can we will provide a brief history of events that includes Mies’ MR chairs.
What is fascinating is that almost 100 years later these chairs are still being produced, still highly sought after and still resonate with people today.
Let’s start with Mart Stam and the scribbled design on the back of a wedding invitation given to him by Will Baumesiter. As the story goes, there was a dinner at Hotel Marquardt in Stuttgart on 22nd November 1926 between organizers of the Die Wohnung exhibition and the Neues Bauen architects to discuss the design of Weissenhof Housing Estate in Stuttgart. It was an exhibition supervised by the then vice president of Deutscher Werkbund, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built in 1927. Sixteen architects were invited to submit original designs to furnish the proposed homes. At this dinner Mart Stam sketched out a design for a metal tubular cantilever chair in blue pencil that he intended to create for his pregnant wife. According to fellow architect Ferdinand Kramer, Stam’s idea came from the cantilever flat steel-framed folding seat found in the 1926 Tatra T12 two-door saloon car. Mies was at that dinner. And here is where the stories diverge.
One version of events states that Mies mentioned Stam’s chair design to Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus which led them both to immediately create variations of Stam’s design. Breuer claims instead that he and Stam had an in-depth, one on one discussion on a train from Frankfurt to Stuttgart. Breuer claims to have been naive and shared everything about his chair designs. The outcome being that Stam stole Breuer’s ideas which were inspired by the Thonet bentwood chairs and the handlebars of his Adler bicycle he rode to the Bauhaus. Through two subsequent court cases it was uncovered that in 1923/1924 Gerhard Stuttgen, a Cologne metal worker, exhibited a metal chair frame without back legs. With the addition of a wooden board, one could sit on it but no one including Stuttgen valued the invention and the tube frame was discarded in 1926.
Art Historians who, in 1975, were challenged by the lack of attribution for the cantilever chairs, turned to these court case documents for clarity.
Breuer and Stam Chairs

Mies Van der Rohe

Judicial and historical accounts differ and we will likely never know what really happened. Historians tend to support Stam as the inventor of the cantilever chair. What is fascinating is that almost 100 years later these chairs are still being produced, still highly sought after and still resonate with people today. Perhaps their enduring popularity is the real resilience and art and craft of these chairs.