This satirical print appeared in Robinson’s book How to Live in a Flat.
The cantilever chair is the iconic piece of furniture of modernism. The Germans speak of the ‘Freischwinger’.
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In 1926 architect Mart Stam screwed together a chair for his pregnant wife Lotte with 10 pieces of gas pipe and 10 elbow joints. It was demountable and intended for camping. Pieces of canvas provided the seat and the backrest. The chair is not very stable: because of the pressure on the fabric of the seat the bent pieces at the knees will move towards each other.
On 22 November 1926 a preparatory meeting was held in the Hotel Marquartstein in Stuttgart for the Weissenhof exhibition. Mart Stam sketched on the back of the wedding announcement of the painter Willi Baumeister his cantilever chair of gas pipes. Several architects, among them Mies van der Rohe, were inspired by the design. At the exhibition itself, in 1927, Stam presented several pieces of furniture, made by the firm L. & C. Arnold, among them the cantilever chair. It was made of steel tubes with a diameter of 22 mm. Stam had more concern for the safety than for the springing character of the chair and had solid round profiles fitted inside the tubes. To counteract the moving together of the tubes a straight tube was welded at the front. At the backrest the tube construction was bent backwards.
Mies van der Rohe’s chair ‘MR’, at the same exhibition, is more refined than Stam’s model. Mies made all his furniture in tubes of 24 mm diameter and externalised the springing property by bending the tubes at the front into a half circle. As a result the ‘legs’ at the front are in the way when you want to sit down or get up. The connecting rod which in Stam’s chair was visible at the front, Mies replaced by two almost invisible curved bars under the seat. In Mies’ chair the backrest stands a little lower than in Stam’s, which may be more aesthetic but less comfortable. It was originally made by Jo. Muller and by Thonet.
Marcel Breuer worked around the same time, and independently of Stam, on a similar design of a cantilever chair. He suffered some delay because he did not have at his disposal tubes with a diameter of 25 mm. He had calculated that this diameter was necessary to give the chair enough strength and enough springing. Breuer’s version of the cantilever chair has roughly the advantages of the two previous chairs: two connecting rods under the seat, straight front legs, a slanting backrest, and it is springing.
In 1927 Anton Lorenz became manager of the firm Standard-Möbel, which a few months earlier had been founded by Marcel Breuer and Kalman Lengyel. At the beginning of 1928 Breuer, in exchange for royalties, granted the rights of his furniture to the firm Standard-Möbel. Breuer, however, did not grant rights for the many designs, among them the B32 which he was working on at that time. Because of the worrying financial situation of the firm they could produce only a limited number of chairs of Breuer. The production of new models was not even considered.
In July 1928 Breuer reached an agreement with the more stable firm Thonet to manufacture all his furniture. In 1929 Thonet even published a catalogue of furniture in metal tubes, devoted entirely to Breuer’s models, among them the B33. In the last months of 1928 and the first months of 1929 both Thonet and Standard-Möbel produced furniture by Breuer. To put an end to this unbalanced situation, Thonet took over the firm Standard-Möbel in April 1929. They thought they had also taken over the rights of Breuer’s furniture and offered Breuer a new contract. But the matter was not thereby decided.
Lorenz thought that the production of cantilever chairs was a goldmine. In September 1929 he founded a new firm of his own, Desta (Deutsche Stahlmöbel). He had, however, missed the contract with Breuer. Therefore he sought in the second instance contact, in vain, with Mies van der Rohe, who had also designed a cantilever chair. Only Mart Stam remained. Stam departed for Russia and on 18 June 1929 transferred the rights of his Weissenhof chair to Lorenz. The chair which Desta sold was an improved model of the Weissenhof chair, without the disfiguring tube at the front and with an approximately straight backrest.
In July 1929 Lorenz took the firm Thonet to court over the copyright of the cantilever chair: the model B33 would have been copied from Stam’s chair. The court sought the earliest material proof of the concept. This was the drawing of Mart Stam, which he had shown at the meeting for the Weissenhof. Desta won the case. All copyrights for cantilever chairs had to be transferred to Desta. From then on Thonet also no longer mentioned Breuer as designer of the B33.
Breuer, who in fact had nothing to do with this case, missed out on the royalties of his cantilever chairs. He was left with a bitter taste from it all and stopped designing furniture in steel. Lorenz conducted many more cases against other manufacturers of the cantilever chair. In 1933 his firm Desta was liquidated and the rights transferred to Thonet.
Many architects developed their own version of the cantilever chair, among them Gaston Eysselinck’s TZS 1.
