Bauhaus vs Tubular Steel Furniture
Tubular Steel Furniture is the cross-discipline counterpart of Bauhaus — developed in Breuer's Bauhaus metal workshop at Dessau.
Bauhaus
The German school that fused art, craft, and industry into a functional modernism — clean geometry, flat roofs, and 'form follows function' applied to the whole designed world.
- Rejection of applied ornament; function expressed as form
- Clean rectilinear geometry and flat roofs
- Glass curtain walls and ribbon windows
- Honest, industrial materials
- Unity of art, craft, and mass production
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 | Tubular Steel Furniture | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1919–1933 | 1925–1935 |
| Discipline | Architecture | Industrial Design |
| Region | Germany | Germany, Netherlands, France |
| Family | Modernism | Functionalism, Industrial Modernism |
| Formal traits | geometric, minimal, functional, unornamented | tubular-steel, cantilevered, chromed, skeletal |
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