Set Of 4 Dining Chairs Tan Leather S34 Cantilever Bauhaus 4 Dining Chairs By Mart Stam & Marcel Breuer Matching Set Of Four

RESERVED

A very handsome set of four Mart Stam Bauhaus dining chairs consisting of 4 x S34 carvers just in from Munich.

Constructed of high quality chromed steel with hide leather seats and backs these are heavy weight chairs and not to be confused with the plethora of cheap lightweight imitations found on line. Many chairs are not even leather let alone hide leather they are in fact reconstituted leather which are the industries equivalent of chicken nuggets or turkey twizzlers. These chairs are of premium quality and made with hide leather. If you require guidance without obligation please contact me.

HISTORY OF THE S34 & S33 chair.

These type of chairs are the first cantilever chairs in furniture history. They were used for the first time in 1927 in the Weissenhof-Siedlung in Stuttgart. Starting in 1925, Mart Stam experimented with gas pipes that he connected with flanges and developed the principle of cantilevering chairs that no longer rest on four legs. He thus created a construction principle that became an important building block in the history of modern furniture design with its formal reservation. In the beginning, Stam was not yet focused on the flexing effect of the bent tubular steel; rather, he was interested in the clear form, which perfectly fit in with the modern buildings of the time.

WHO IS MART STAM?

Mart Stam (Martinus Adrianus Stam), Dutch architect, designer and urban planner, was born in Purmerend, the Netherlands in 1899, to a progressive family. A leading figure of the Modern Movement and urban planning theories, he is one of the most important contemporary architects, a pioneer of modern furniture design.

After completing his studies in Amsterdam, he began working in architecture studies before moving to Berlin in Germany in 1922.

After working with the German architects Hans Poelzig and Max Taut, he moved to Zurich where, together with Hans Schmidt, Alfred Roth and El Lissitzky, leading exponent of the Russian Avant-garde, he founded the ABC group, which was echoed by the homonymous ABC Beitrage zum Bauen magazine that praised a rigorous functionalism and took inspiration from the Soviet proclamations of the 1920s.In Switzerland where he works in Karl Moser's studio.

In 1926 he declined the offer of Walter Gropius to join the Bauhaus school and shortly thereafter began working on the project of the Van Nelle Factory, in Rotterdam, a coffee and tea factory, a "manifest work" of a new functionalist trend in the Modern movement. Still considered among the best examples of industrial architecture of the early modernism, it has recently been renovated.

In the following years he moved back to Germany and, called by Mies van der Rohe, participated in the famous exhibition "Die Wohnung" of 1927 organized by the Deutscher Werkbund in the Weissenhof district of Stuttgart.
Once the group of architects of the Bauhaus was known, Mart Stam became a guest lecturer in the renowned Bauhaus school in Dessau, where he taught Elementary Theory of Construction and Urban Planning from 1928 to 1930.

Since 1928 Stam has been an honorary member of the Bauhaus, to which he makes a significant artistic contribution in the field of furniture design. He teaches at the Bauhaus school and is the founder of CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture, 1928-1959).

However, Stam's interest is more directed towards the design of residential buildings (famous row houses in the Weissenhof district in Stuttgart) and urban planning of cities. In this field, from 1930 to 1934, he worked in Russia, Rotterdam and for the rebuilding of Dresden after the Second World War. He returned to Amsterdam where he worked as an architect until 1948.

Stam, despite being one of the key personalities for the evolution of contemporary design, his name appears less than his colleagues in the same years as Le Curbusier, Gropius or Mies van der Rohe. Partly because of his career, less prolific from a design point of view and more focused on teaching, partly because of his grumpy character and his positions, political and aesthetic, considered extremist.

In 1939 he took over the direction of the Amsterdam School of Artistic Crafts; in 1950 he became director of the Higher Institute of Applied Arts in Berlin-Weissensee.

In 1953 he returned to Amsterdam and then, with his second wife Olga Heller, emigrated to Switzerland in 1977 where he retired from public life.

Mart Stam died in Zurich in 1986.

WHAT IS BAUHAUS?

Bauhaus is a German artistic movement which lasted from 1919-1933. Its goal was to merge all artistic mediums into one unified approach, that of combining an individual’s artistry with mass production and function. Bauhaus design is often abstract, angular, and geometric, with little ornamentation.

Condition report:

These chairs have been previously refurbished. The leather has been refinished and is all good. The frames are showing signs of use with loss of lacquer , scrapes , etc etc. In normal living room light i do not see this is an issue.