STEEL, SHADOWS AND SILENCE
I graduated from IIT Chicago, where I spent three formative years studying inside S.R. Crown Hall, a temple of steel and glass designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. I didn’t realize it then, but spending that much time within such disciplined space — stripped to its essence — would shape how I move through the world, how I see, and how I design.
In my final semester, I joined a month-long study abroad program across Europe in 2011. One of our stops was Bauhaus Dessau, the birthplace of an ideology — the Bauhaus movement — that would ripple through time, continents, and cities like Chicago. It was there that I encountered, in person, an icon I had only known through books: the Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer.
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Seeing the Chair in Its Element
The moment was quiet.
Afternoon light slanted through the glass block wall, casting soft, diffused shadows across the concrete floor. There, against the rhythm of translucent geometry, sat the Wassily Chair — lean, self-contained, unapologetically modern.
It didn’t ask for attention. It simply was.
Its tubular steel frame, its taut leather straps — all so precise, so resolved. Designed in 1925, this chair wasn’t trying to be beautiful in a traditional sense. It was built to be logical. And in that logic, it became something profound.
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What Makes the Wassily Chair Significant?
The Wassily Chair — originally known as the Model B3 — was designed by Marcel Breuer while he was at the Bauhaus. He was inspired by the frame of a bicycle, captivated by the possibilities of tubular steel, a material not yet used in residential furniture at the time.
Its significance lies in what it represents:
• Material Innovation: Breuer took an industrial material — chromium-plated steel tubing — and introduced it to domestic interiors. This was radical. The steel was strong, light, hygienic, and modern.
• Bauhaus Principles Embodied: The chair represents everything the Bauhaus stood for — honesty in materials, the merging of art and industry, and the pursuit of pure form and function. Nothing is decorative. Everything serves a purpose.
• Transparency + Structure: Unlike the heavy upholstered furniture of the past, the Wassily Chair feels almost like a line drawing in space. It’s open, it breathes. It frames the human body instead of engulfing it.
• Timeless Relevance: A century later, the chair still feels contemporary. It doesn’t age, because it’s not rooted in fashion — it’s rooted in intention.
Breuer later said: “I thought that perhaps I could design chairs that would be built on the same principle as bicycles.” That line has stayed with me. It reframes design as engineering, poetry, and vision — all at once.
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From Dessau to Chicago, from Breuer to Mies
Standing in that room at Dessau, I was struck by the continuity. I had spent years immersed in Miesian clarity, working and sketching beneath the floating roof of Crown Hall. And here I was, at the source — surrounded by the work of Breuer, Gropius, Kandinsky — the very figures who laid the foundation that Mies would later refine and export.
The Wassily Chair felt like a kind of bridge.
It connected art to function, Europe to America, past to present, and material to idea. It reminded me that architecture doesn’t exist in isolation. It lives through objects, through spaces, through moments of stillness where design simply speaks.
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What This Moment Taught Me
Design doesn’t have to shout to be powerful.
Sometimes, the most enduring work is the most restrained — the kind that’s been reduced to only what’s essential, nothing more. The Wassily Chair is not just a chair. It’s a manifesto in steel and leather. A quiet rebellion against ornament. A declaration that beauty can be engineered.
It’s the kind of object that asks you to look closer. To notice the way materials come together. To think about how things are made — and why.
That’s why this chair, this space, and this moment are my Feature Friday.
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Photo taken at Bauhaus Dessau, Germany — 2011.
