Already admired by teachers, students and visitors of the Dessau Bauhaus, where it stood in a few houses of the “master town”. And already in 1926, the first production year, it was honored as “masterpiece” in the exposition of the Dresden arts hall. The first steel tube lounger B 3 from Marcel Breuer – later known as “Club Lounger” or “Wassily” – soon reached recognition and was part of the interests to the Bauhaus. Finally it should cause a worldwide boom for steel tube furniture that stood for avant-gardism and the break of industrial aesthetics into privacy.
With the also new black-silver contrasts which also remind of valuable jewelry and modern machines, he created the “magic of precision”, as a French critic wrote. Breuer saw “apparatus of today’s life” in his furniture. They should be weightless, open, affordable, demountable and hygienic. B 3, which has also been available as folding furniture and which has been built by Breuer in his leisure time together with a locksmith, fulfilled these criteria. Therewith he connected to designs of Gerrit Rietveld among others.
Breuer didn’t create an everyday object with the Wassily Chair as he desired, but a new furniture type and an “abstract-real-sculpture” (Siegfried Geidion), in whose open geometry the minimalism of new form-finders is displayed. It became a real design icon, a central symbol of modern times and not for nothing, it is the first furniture piece that became a classic in the 60es.
By the way: numerous myths are told around the name of the Wassily chair. Some say that it got its name because Wassily Kandinsky was the roommate of Marcel Breuer in the Bauhaus. Others say it only has the name because the chair was a design for Wassily Kandisky’s apartment at the Bauhaus in Dessau.
According to the Bauhaus philosophy, the Knoll Wassily Canvas has a special original, pure charm. As canvas edition, the armchair is coated with a robust linen with pure appeal.