Bauhaus Product vs Tubular Steel Furniture
Bauhaus Product was influenced by Tubular Steel Furniture — Breuer's metal workshop produced the canonical tubular-steel chairs.
Bauhaus Product
Objects from the German Bauhaus school — lamps, tableware, and furniture reduced to elementary geometry of sphere, cylinder, and cube, designed for the machine and for mass production.
- Reduction to elementary geometric solids — sphere, cylinder, cone, cube
- Industrial materials: glass, chromed metal, tubular steel, aluminium
- Total rejection of applied ornament in favour of bare function
- Designed as standardized prototypes for machine mass production
- Primary colours and neutral tones derived from theory, not decoration
Tubular Steel Furniture
Modernist seating built from bent chromed steel tube — Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair and the cantilever chairs of Stam, Mies, and Breuer — that turned the bicycle frame into the icon of machine-age furniture.
- Frames of bent, seamless, chromed or nickel-plated steel tube
- The springy cantilever — a seat carried on two front legs, no rear legs
- Continuous looping tube replacing jointed wooden members
- Slung leather, canvas, or caned seats and backs in the open frame
- Standardized, stackable forms designed for factory production
At a glance
| Bauhaus Product | Tubular Steel Furniture | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1919–1933 | 1925–1935 |
| Discipline | Industrial Design | Industrial Design |
| Region | Germany | Germany, Netherlands, France |
| Family | Functionalism, Industrial Modernism | Functionalism, Industrial Modernism |
| Formal traits | geometric-primary, unornamented, industrial-materials, machine-made | tubular-steel, cantilevered, chromed, skeletal |
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