S553l Cantilever Chair in Red Leather for Thonet by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Modern architect and furniture designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aachen, Germany in 1886. He attended the Domschule in Aachen until 1900 and then spent two years at a local trade school, while also working on building sites for his father, a master stonemason. From 1903 to 1904, he worked as a draughtsman and designer for a local firm specializing in stucco decoration. He moved to Berlin in 1905 and became an apprentice to Art Nouveau architect and designer Bruno Paul. An independent commission to design his first house came from philosopher Alois Riehl, who sent Mies to Italy for three months for inspiration. The Riehl House was completed in 1907 in Potsdam, south of Berlin and brought Mies to the attention of designer and architect Peter Behrens, for whom he worked between 1908 and 1912. He established his own architectural and design office in 1912 in Berlin and built three houses in the city before the outbreak of World War I. From 1915 to 1918, he served in the German Army’s Engineer Corps.

During the 1920s, Mies was active in Berlin’s avant-garde circles, participating in organizations like the Novembergruppe and Zehner Ring and contributing to the magazine G. He began studying and designing skyscrapers, which, while not built, portended future designs. He also directed the Weißenhofsiedlung exhibition in Stuttgart, a model housing colony project for which he invited the era’s most accomplished European architects to participate—including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier—and 20 permanent residential buildings were built around his own steel-framed apartments, revealing a series of individual interpretations of workers’ housing. This project introduced him to Lilly Reich and the pair collaborated frequently over the next decade. His other major project of this era was the German (or Barcelona) Pavilion, built for the German section of the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, which helped establish him on an international stage. Using glass and marble interior walls that could be easily moved, he merged interior and exterior spaces, emphasizing a fluidity of space and incorporating specially designed furniture, including the iconic leather and chrome Barcelona chair. Shortly after, in 1932, his work was included in the first architectural exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, entitled Modern Architecture: An International Exhibition, which helped introduce his work to an American audience. From 1930 to 1933, he served as Director of the Bauhaus; under political pressure from the Nazis, he moved the school from Dessau to Steglitz, Berlin and ultimately closed the school in 1933.

In 1938, Mies moved to Chicago, re-established his architectural firm, and served as the Director of the Architecture Department of the Armour Institute for the next 20 years (it became the College of Architecture, Planning and Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940). In the 1940s, he designed a new campus for the school, a project that further refined his steel-and-glass aesthetic. In 1944, he was naturalized as an American citizen and went on to design a number of notable buildings in the US, including, between 1945 and 1950, the famed Farnsworth House outside of Chicago. The radically minimalist home consists of an open-plan interior space with concrete roof and floor slabs, subdivided by partitions, and completely enclosed in glass. Mies also designed multiple high-rise buildings, such as Chicago’s 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) and New York’s Seagram Building (1958), which embraced the notion that buildings should accommodate changing lifestyle requirements.

Mies van der Rohe was awarded, among other honors, the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (1959) and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963). He passed away in Chicago in 1969 and is buried in Graceland Cemetery.

Thonet—the oldest surviving furniture company in the world—began its long life in 1819, when cabinetmaker Michael Thonet (1796-1871) established a furniture workshop in Boppard, Germany. A proponent of the Biedermeier style, he specialized in chairs, tables, and storage pieces characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. By the 1830s, Thonet’s experiments in laminated and steam-bent wood furniture, like his famous Boppard Chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet’s designs achieved a combination of lightness, durability, and comfort unknown in European furniture at the time.

A great fan of his work, Prince Metternich of Austria invited Thonet to present his designs to the Viennese court in 1842. Finding so much support there, Thonet opened a new company in Vienna in 1849. In 1853, he transferred his company to his sons, and Gebrüder Thonet was established.

Through the second half of the 19th century, Gebrüder Thonet designs grew increasingly popular with the cultural vanguard, especially among progressive design thinkers and tastemakers. One design in particular, the No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), led the way to international success: the chair’s innovative bending technique was well suited to industrial production, and its rationalized, easily assembled structure allowed for efficient packing and shipping. In 1850, Anna Daum famously outfitted her fashionable Viennese café with No. 14 Chairs, and by the 1870s, Gebrüder Thonet had sales offices across Europe and the US. To date, more than 50 million No. 14 Chairs have been sold worldwide–not counting the untold pirated copies.

Iconic pieces from the traditional Gebrüder Thonet collection include Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860), No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), Adolf Loos’s Café Museum Chair (1899), No. 209 Armchair (ca. 1900), Otto Wagner’s No. 247 Postal Savings Bank Chair (1904), and Josef Hoffmann’s No. 811 (1925). In the early years of the 20th century, Gebrüder Thonet also began producing designs in bent tubular steel by Bauhaus masters like Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam.

In the aftermath of World War II, Thonet lost all of its production facilities in Eastern Europe, and the sales office at Vienna’s Stephansplatz had been destroyed. Between 1945 and 1953, Georg Thonet, the great-grandson of company founder Michael Thonet, led the rebuilding. Economic success returned quickly. In the ensuing decades, the company commissioned designs from many outstanding designers, such as Verner Panton, Pierre Paulin, Norman Foster, James Irvine, Piero Lissoni, and Stefan Diez. Classic Thonet pieces can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

In 1976 Thonet was divided into two separate German and Austrian companies, which remain independent of each other. Today, Thonet GmbH is headquartered in Frankenberg, Germany and continues to manufacture the original, bentwood and tubular steel designs alongside new pieces by contemporary, international architects and designers. Originally opened in 1861 by Thonet himself, the furniture factory TON (Továrna Ohýbaného Nábytku), which is located in what is known today as the Czech Republic, continues to manufacture Thonet designs. 

* All images courtesy of Thonet.de