Barcelona Chair Leather Lounge Accent Chair Bauhaus Statement

A fine and handsome Barcelona chair in brown aniline leather just in from Rome and being one of two just listed. Dated to the 1990s.

This is a good quality seat that exudes its quality visually and indeed physically when you are seated. If you have ever sat on a cheap imitation Barcelona chair you will perhaps wonder what all the fuss is about. The difference in comfort between a premium Barcelona chair and one of the aforementioned replicas is like that of night and day. This chair is high quality and a joy to sit on.

The combination of this chairs first class condition, sheer quality and its super warm and gentle use patina make this a “hard to find example” that will not be around for long.

HISTORY OF BARCELONA CHAIR

The Barcelona Chair is one of the most recognisable and iconic designs of the last century. Still frequently used in interiors, the chair epitomises elegance and embodies its creator Mies van der Rohe’s famous maxim “less is more”

This distinctive chair was designed by modernist titan Mies in 1929 in collaboration with fellow German architect and designer Lilly Reich, a long-time colleague and felow modernist.
It was originally created for Mies’s German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona Exposition, which has become known as the Barcelona Pavilion. Mies sought to create an object that complimented his pavilion’s radical open design and free-standing walls. He pointedly designed a lounge chair with no arms and a wide seat. The resulting chair was deliberately unornamental in look, yet was highly sophisticated and luxurious.

Unlike many of his Bauhaus contemporaries, who were focused on pared-down design for the everyman, Mies designed the Barcelona Chair with royalty in mind. He knew that the king and queen of Spain would be visiting the pavilion, and thus he endeavoured to make a seat fit for a monarch.

The design was inspired by ancient Egyptians and Roman folding stools – known as a curule chairs – and by neoclassical seating from the nineteenth century.
In profile, two chrome-plated steel curves cross in a distinguished X under the seat. The back rest and front legs in a single arch crossing the s-shaped curve of the back legs and seat. The seat itself is artfully cantilevered. Only two chairs were created for the Barcelona Pavilion and the chair only went into mass production in the late 1940s.

Mies’s early, hand-made prototypes found their first permanent homes within Villa Tugendhat, a private residence designed by Mies that echoed many of the elements of the Barcelona Pavilion. The Villa featured two fully glazed facades and a free-flowing open-plan interior. The chair, which many agree symbolises Mies’s particular aesthetic and attention to detail, remains one of the most recognisable design objects from the twentieth century.

HISTORY OF MIES

“[I]t is logical for architecture to
change as the way we live also changes.”
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

One of the leading lights of modernist architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created a body of work—ranging from tubular steel furniture to iconic office buildings—that influenced generations of architects worldwide. From domestic spaces like the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech Republic to large, elaborate office towers like New York’s Seagram Building, he imbued his buildings with a fluid spatial harmony reflective of his oft-quoted aphorism, “less is more.” While this quote may seem to reflect an overriding interest in achieving minimalist perfection, his passion for rich materials, surfaces, and texture reveals a creative mind equally preoccupied with the minutiae of architectural space, or, as in another quote attributed to him: “God is in the details”.

Mies’s career took off in the fertile atmosphere of Berlin after the First World War, where leading artists and intellectuals were forming a community that would draw the brightest talents from across Europe. His visionary submission for the 1921 Friedrichstrasse skyscraper competition, while not a winner, was an unprecedented embrace of the new materials of steel and glass that later defined modernist architecture. As the decade progressed, he received larger and more prominent commissions, culminating in the offer to design the German pavilion for the 1929 World’s Fair in Barcelona. The small structure he built, with its flowing spaces, rich marble walls, and custom-designed furniture was an enormous success. It was around this time that Mies formed a highly fruitful partnership with the architect-designer Lilly Reich, with whom he collaborated on numerous projects. Their partnership lasted until his emigration to the United States in 1938.

Nearly as important as the legacy of his buildings is Mies’s impact as a teacher of architecture. In Germany, he served as the final director of the influential Bauhaus school until its closing under pressure from the Nazis in 1933. Shortly after his arrival in the United States, he was offered the directorship of the Armour Institute in Chicago (later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology), where he shaped a curriculum that influenced a generation of American architects.

America afforded Mies opportunities to work on a far larger scale than he had in Germany, as evidenced by the collection of sleek, glass-skinned office and apartment towers that populate cities across North America. Though in the period after his death many architects rejected his strict formalism in favor of the more eclectic language of postmodernism, his legacy continues to inform the teaching and practice of architecture today.

Condition report:

Refurbishment included -

Full frame polish using power tools to remove scratches.
Leather nourished and sealed.
All belts intact.
No rips.
No tears.
No bits missing.
A1