Bauhaus Design 3

Marcel Breuer chair, one of the very first tubular steel chairs, designed in 1925. Bauhaus archives.

I once read a story about the original tubing that was used for those first chairs. Money was in extremely short supply at the Bauhaus and the school put out a call to local industries to please contribute any materials that they could for the students to work and learn from, so one day a tubing company truck dumped a load of steel tubing on the Bauhaus lawn and drove off. Thankful to get anything to design and work with, Marcel Breuer and his students took the tubing into the Cabinet Workshop and brainstormed for a solution and this is what Marcel came up with, the very first tubular chair. I don't know if it's a true story or not but I like to think that it is. I can just see those students lugging in a truckload of pipe and sitting down to figure out some solution for using it, in of all places, the Cabinet Workshop.

"Let's see, what mask shall I wear today?"