Set Of 4 Four Mies Van Der Rohe Mr 20 Chair Chairs Dinning Club Lounge Occasional Bauhaus Mid Century

A “hard to find” set of Mies van de Rohe MR20 chairs.

Just in from Rome following their whole life within a private library/gallery room since purchase in 1974.

A1 condition.

No rips.

No rust.

No missing bits.

Chair Design.

The origins of the bent-steel cantilevered chair are somewhat murky, but generally three names come up in the discussion. Marcel Breuer is widely credited with pioneering the exploration of the material, Mart Stam seems to be the first to conceive a “chair without back legs”, and Mies van der Rohe is remembered as the one who made it beautiful.

It is believed that Mart Stam described his idea—a continuous loop of steel (he used a thinner gauge gas pipe in the earliest versions) with a cantilevered seat—at a meeting of the Werkbund in 1926. In attendance were Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, both of whom were inspired to design cantilever chairs of their own in the coming months. Mies replaced the right angles on the front legs with a graceful curve which had the advantage of increasing elasticity while preventing material fatigue. Mies first showed the MR 10 and MR20 at the Stuttgart Weissenhof Estate — a seminal Werkbund exhibition, which first brought modernist works to the public, with buildings designed by Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and others.

Over the next five years, Mies would develop an entire series of tubular steel designs.

Mies van de Rohe

Who is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe?

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a pioneering architect whose works – alongside Le Corbusier’s and Walter Gropius’ – defined a separate strain of modern architecture known as International Style. He was a true modernist pioneer and an iconic figure of 20th-century architecture and design. Sustained by his famous trenchant statements like ‘less is more’ and ‘God is in the details’, the textures of his Barcelona Pavilion (1929/1986), the steel-and-glass aesthetic of the Seagram Building (1956-1958) and his paradigmatic examples of domestic architecture like the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1945-1951), have become some of the world’s most emblematic and widely-recognized architectural elements and structures built in the last century.

Biography of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Born in Germany as Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, the young Ludwig acquired an interest in architecture thanks to his stonemason father. After seconday school, he moved to Berlin where he was able to receive several apprenticeships without ever receiving any formal architectural training. Only after a couple of years working alongside furniture designer Bruno Paul, Mies received his first indepented commission to design a house in the suburbs. His exceptional style and perfect execution impressed prominent architect Peter Behrens, who invited him to join his studio and work alongside figures who later became pioneering artists themselves such as Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius. Even though the democratic Weimar Republic inspired my artists and creative ideas to flourish after World War I, the most important works of Mies from this period remained on paper.

Preoccupied with the necessity of a new architectural vision encapsulating the spirit of modern times, he developed avant-garde ideas that reformed the man-made environment: simplicity of forms; industrial materials such as industrial steel and plate glass; clean, unadorned interiors would become the main elements of his style. In the 1920s and early 1930s, van der Rohe’s reputation took off and he briefly served as the Bauhaus’s third and final director until 1933, when the school closed down due to political pressure. In 1937, he relocated to Chicago, where he continued to design, build and educate. He took up a role as the head of the College of Architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago, a position that would leave a lasting legacy on both his curriculum and the campus.
The abundent commissions he received after the turmoil of World War II gave van der Rohe an opportunity to execute his first large-scale projects including his pioneering skysrapers of steel covered by large surface areas of glass windows. The Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1949–51) in Chicago and the Seagram Building (1956–58) in New York City are among his major commissions that follow this concept. In the 1960s, van der Rohe continued to design and create public centres like The Neue Nationalgalerie (1968) in Berlin, urban-renewal projects such as Detroit’s Lafayette Park (1959), libraries and offices across the Americas, Mexico and Europe. Despite his stellar reputation, van der Rohe continued to live alone in his spacious Chicago apartment by Lake Michigan until his death in 1969.

Together with designer Lilly Reich, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was commisioned to design the German pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition in 1929. This building later became known as the Barcelona Pavilion. The use of different kinds of marble from all over the world, the combination of glass and stee made the stucture stand out from the the exhibition program. The pavilion also held an official reception of the King of Spain at the time. The Barcelona Pavilion also showcased Mies’s iconic Barcelona chair and served as an introduction of new architectural trends to the world. The building was dismantled after the exposition and its element were sent back to Germany to be reused for other buildings. Fifty years later, realising the architectural importance of van der Rohe’s pavilion, the Barcelona City Council urged to reconstruct it. The city ensured that materials for the reconstrucion would be sourced from the same locations as the original building, with different marbles coming from Rome, Greece and the Atlas Mountains. Construction was completed in 1986.

The Exposition brought critical acclaim to Rohe, as the wealthy of Europe started showing great interest and fascination towards spacious modern homes and villas, like the Tugendhat House designed by Mies in 1930, built in Brno. Clients of the project were elite newlyweds Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, who had met Mies in Berlin in 1927 and were already impressed by his simple and spacious design for the Zehlendorf House of Edward Fuchs (1928).

What is Bauhaus

Bauhaus was an influential art and design movement that began in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. The movement encouraged teachers and students to pursue their crafts together in design studios and workshops. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 and then to Berlin in 1932, after which Bauhaus—under constant harassment by the Nazis—finally closed. The Bauhaus movement championed a geometric, abstract style featuring little sentiment or emotion and no historical nods, and its aesthetic continues to influence architects, designers and artists.

Condition report:

A1 , save for some minor usage signs and a few chips. No nasties.