Knoll Chair Used - Vintage Wassily Chair in White

Used Knoll chair

Vintage Knoll Wassily Chair

An absolute Bauhaus classic: the Walter Knoll Wassily Chair

Condition: good (e.g. only slight, superficial damage in visible places, no cracks)

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Vintage Wassily Chair by Walter Breuer, 1925

Inspired by the frame of a bicycle and influenced by the constructivist theories of the De Stjil movement, while still an apprentice at the Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer reduced the classic club chair to its elementary lines and surfaces, thereby changing furniture design forever.

In an interview with a Knoll historian, Marcel Breuer described how he began experimenting with bent tubular steel during his time at the Bauhaus:

"I was pretty idealistic back then. I was 23 years old. I made friends with a young architect and bought my first bike. I learned to ride a bike and I spoke to this young man and told him that the bike was going to be a perfect production seems because it hasn't changed in the last twenty, thirty years. It's still the original shape of the bike. He said, "Have you ever seen how they make these parts? How they bend the handlebars? You'd be interested, because they bend these steel tubes like macaroni."

"That kind of stuck in my mind and I started thinking about tubular steel being bent into frames - probably that's the material you could use for a resilient and transparent chair. Typically, I was very concerned with the transparency of the form .

"This is how the first chair was born... I realized that the bending had to go even further. It should only be bent and have no spot welds, so that it could also be chromed in parts and assembled. That's how the first Wassily was born. Me was a little afraid of criticism myself. I didn't tell anyone that I was actually doing these experiments. [Wassily] Kandinsky, who happened to walk into my studio when the first chair was brought in, said, "What is that?" He was very interested , and then the Bauhaus was also very interested in it. A year later I furnished the entire Bauhaus with this furniture."