Knoll - Marcel Breuer - Dining room chair (3) - S33 Spoleto - Chrome plating, Leather

The S33 is among the first cantilever seating models in the history of furniture. They were used for the first time in 1927 in the Weissenhof district of Stuttgart. In 1925 Mart Stam had experimented with the assembly of gas pipes connected by flanges, developing the concept of "cantilever" chairs that no longer rest on all four legs. Thus was born the construction principle which, in the sobriety of its forms, would later become a fundamental stage in the history of modern furniture. Initially Marcel Breuer did not he had focused his research on the elastic effect of curved tubular steel, but rather on the study of a linear shape that fit well with the modern architecture of the time.

The lot presented in this auction consists of 3 chairs made by Knoll in the 1980s.
The chairs are in good used condition.
The structures are solid and robust with chrome in good condition.
The leather, original from the time, is black in color and is still robust and solid with slight signs of use.
The chairs have been thoroughly cleaned, the steel polished and the leather treated with specific products.

Dimensions in cm: 84x46. 5x54

Our company "Orvett" includes transport insurance for Italy/Europe in the shipping costs indicated.

MART STAM,
A leading personality of the Modern Movement, Stam contributed to shaping architecture by representing the social, aesthetic and technological changes of his era
Mart Stam was an architect, designer and urban planner, but also creator of the famous cantilever chair (the modern cantilever chair in tubular metal) , teacher at the Bauhaus school and founder of CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (1928-1959) . Stam achieved fame in the architectural field at just 21 years old and his projects were part of the manifesto of the Neues Bauen movement, or Modern Movement, which took shape during the German depression of the 1920s and which made architecture a utilitarian value and functional. Despite having been one of the key personalities for the evolution of contemporary design, his name appears less frequently than colleagues of the same years such 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 political (and aesthetic) positions considered extremist.
Martinus Adrianus Stam, aka Mart Stam, was born in Purmerend, Holland, in 1899 into a progressive family. His mother was a member of the Social Democratic Party and an activist for universal suffrage, and from a young age Stam displayed a prickly temper. While still a teenager, together with two friends, he published his first magazine Levensverdieping, which in Italian we could translate as Life Plan, and in 1919 he spent six months in prison as a conscientious objector, emerging as a militant communist.
Once he moved to Berlin, in 1922, he joined the Opbouw design group in Rotterdam, where he began to talk about the purity of design and its industrial production. 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, a leading exponent of the Russian avant-garde, he founded the ABC group, which was echoed by the namesake ABC magazine Beitrage zum Bauen which praised a rigorous functionalism and took inspiration from the Soviet proclamations of the 1920s.
Stam was already recognized as a rising star, albeit one lacking in patience. In 1923, in his first article written for ABC, he harshly criticized the traditionalism of Granpré Molière, who in the past had also been his employer in Rotterdam, and the modernism of the German architect Jan Duiker. According to Stam, the best designs were those "notable only for their unpretentious justice", pointing the finger at the ancient fake and the modern ugly.
In 1926 he declined Walter Gropius's offer to join the Bauhaus school and shortly after he began working on the project of the Van nelle Factory in Rotterdam, a coffee and tea factory, a work manifesto of a new functionalist trend in Modern Movement. Even today it is considered among the best examples of early modernist industrial architecture and has recently been renovated.
In the following years he moved back to Germany and, called by Mies van der Rohe, participated in the famous Die Wohnung exhibition of 1927 organized by the Deutscher Werkbund in the Weissenhof district of Stuttgart. On this occasion he created the prototype for the cantilever chair in tubular steel. Once he met the Bauhaus group of architects, Mart Stam became a guest lecturer at the renowned Dessau school, where he taught Elementary Theory of Construction and Urban Planning from 1928 to 1930.
Subsequently Stam left with the May Brigade: a group of architects led by Ernst May who decided to work in the USSR to participate in the development of a new communist world and contribute to the urban planning of the new Soviet cities. Stam remained in the Soviet Union, where he met his wife Lotte Beese (also an architect and urban planner) , until 1934, the year in which he returned to Holland to dedicate himself more to teaching.
In 1939 he assumed the position of director of the Institute of Industrial Art in the Netherlands, and in 1950 he was appointed rector of the University of Applied Arts Berlin-Weißensee. In 1953 he returned to Amsterdam and with his second wife, Olga Heller, emigrated to Switzerland in 1977 where he retired from public life. Mart Stam died in 1986 in Zurich.
Mart Stam is the youngest architect to participate in the Die Wohnung exhibition in Stuttgart. The master plan of the neighborhood is the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also takes on the artistic direction of the exhibition. Stam's project involves the construction of a terraced house with three residential units. According to what was told by Heinz Rasch, a young architect who reported the news on the pages of the Stuttgart newspaper, in November 1926 Stam, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier met in a hotel in the city for a preparatory conversation. As the story goes, Stam grabs Willi Baumeister's wedding invitation, which was on the table, and draws on the back a piece of furniture he had recently built for his wife. It was a chair, made with ten gas pipes all of the same length, connected to each other by means of elbow pieces, while for the seat he had used a wooden top.
Having said that, the history of Mart Stam's cantilever chair, also called cantilever chair, is linked above all to the name of Marcel Breuer: both were called to testify in the German courts because they were convinced that they were the first to invent the innovative system of the famous zigzag chairs. The patent war ended with Stam's victory and even many of Breuer's designs were erroneously attributed to him.

Knoll is an American company that is a world leader in the field of industrial design. Founded in 1938 by Hans and Florence Knoll, it produces furnishing items extremely appreciated for their modern, refined and refined style.
The brand continues to be faithful to the philosophy of the Bauhaus movement, which conceived modern design as an essential principle to connect people to their lives, their work, their world.
According to this idea, therefore, the furnishing accessories had to be aesthetically important but at the same time practical and functional and did not have to compete with the surrounding space, but merge with it as integral parts of a single large environment.
The company creates furnishing objects for homes and offices; It is precisely thanks to its founder that the professional figure of the interior designer and the concept of the modern office were traced. The international success of the brand is dictated by a constant dedication to design and a curious interest in technological developments, with particular attention to the needs of modern man.
Many of his cult pieces are exhibited in the main international design museums.