To understand and fully appreciate Knoll 's  Wassily chair, it is essential to know its history. Sober and rigorous, this chair may indeed appear cold, but the reality is that it is a project full of creativity and energy. Who designed it, in 1925, was Marcel Breuer, pupil of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school where Breuer was a student and then professor and director of the furniture laboratory. In those laboratories, under his direction, they began to experiment with the use of steel tubing for the realization of the furnishings but also the creation of new materials, first of all the eidengarn, a cotton treated with wax and paraffin and calendered, ie treated between two rollers.

Wassily by Knoll

In this context of laboratory experimentation, in 1925, Breuer also designed this chair, which was originally called B3. The structure is in fact made of metal rod, to which Breuer has arrived after having designed a bicycle for the German company Adler. The bicycle frame is indeed the source of inspiration for this innovative seat, together, probably at the inclination of the backrest typical of the "red and blue chair", designed about ten years ago by the Dutch Gerrit Rietveld. And it is interesting to note that in the same year Le Corbusier had presented at the exhibition of decorative arts in Paris, a staircase "designed as a bicycle frame".

If the structure is in metal rod, the seat and backrest are made up of strips of eidengarn fabric, supported but comfortable and with a completely new and unusual visual appearance.

Wassily by Marcel Breuer for Knoll

The rationalist style that identifies Breuer and the Bauhaus is clearly evident in the seat, which represents the entrance of the metal rod in the production of furniture and in the definition of an entirely new, clean and rigorous aesthetic, which will definitively establish itself over the years 60.

Designed and put into production in the 1920s by the German company Standard Möbel, the chair owes much of its success to an Italian: Dino Gavina (founder along with Cesare Cassina di Flos), who in 1962, after meeting Breuer in the United States, where he had moved when Nazism was rampant in Europe, had persuaded him to re-edit the B3 for his company, the Gavina Spa. And after discovering that the painter Wassily Kandiskj had asked to buy the first specimen that had been produced, for his home in Dassau, he decided to propose to Breuer to rename it Wassily chair, abandoning the typical german nomenclature of letters and numbers. In 1968, Knoll purchased Gavina Spa and with it the license to produce the chair that is still one of the most prestigious and identifying products of the American company whose roots, after all, were strongly influenced by the Bauhaus.

Wassily chair by Knoll

In its most famous version, the chair has a steel frame and black textile components. The version with the cream colored textile elements is very interesting and quite different. For a more lively and less austere effect, you can opt for the versions in red or lemon yellow. For a refined interior with something extra, there is a pony covering.

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This year, to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the Bauhaus school, Knoll has created a limited edition of the Wassily chair, characterized by a gritty black steel tube. Only 500 were produced and based on each, in addition to the Knoll logo and Marcel Breuer's signature, the progressive serial number is engraved.