Exhibition
Chairs without legs
Bauhaus Archive / Museum for Design, Design, Berlin, Germany
Wednesday March 21, 2012 - Sunday June 10, 2012 - Event ended.
The International Design Museum Munich is showing a special exhibition on a guest basis at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. The world’s oldest and largest design collection from Munich is presenting “chairs without legs” in the tradition of the cantilever chair, with exhibits specially selected from its own holdings
. As early as the 1920s, renowned Bauhaus figures such as Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were designing cantilever chairs made of steel tubing, which transferred the concept of lightness and transparency from architecture into the field of furniture-making. The exhibition is an installation of 25 different types of seating and offers an impression of the ways in which chairs without legs have developed since their beginnings, through the use of high-technology production methods and new types of material, with influences from free art and as a result of social and political changes. In parallel with this, seating furniture designed at the Bauhaus by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe can also be viewed in the permanent exhibition in the Bauhaus Archive, “The Bauhaus Collection. Classic Modern Originals.” The special exhibition is accompanied by an extensive supporting programme including evenings with panel discussions on current design issues, a city tour of Berlin as a city of design, and a wide-ranging programme of guided tours.
The exhibition presents chairs by Alexander Begge, Marcel Breuer, Henrik Frederiksen, Frank O. Gehry, Konstantin Grcic, Jindrich Halabala, Stefan Heiliger, Poul Henningsen, Rudolf Horn, Antonin Kybal, Cesare Leonardi, Ross Lovegrove, Vico Magistretti, Sven Markelius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ernst Moeckl, Steen Ostergaard, Verner Panton, Bernard Rancillac, Mart Stam, Winfred Stäb, Franca Stagi, Stiletto Studios (Frank Schreiner) and Ladislav Zak.
“The Bauhaus was a laboratory for art, an innovative space in which creative experiments led to the development of products which were based on people’s needs and which represented their own functionally oriented formal language. These unusually inventive objects are today regarded as design classics. The creative openness to new pathways that was the order of the day in the Bauhaus is reflected in many of the further developments of the cantilever chair which ‘Die Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich’ is presenting at this exhibition with us in the Bauhaus Archive,” said Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, Director of the Bauhaus Archive during the press conference yesterday.
“The Bauhaus is a tremendous historical legacy, but one that is alive, is being continued and changed – away from functional to expressive and emotional elements, or towards a critical view of the Bauhaus hype. In short, the Bauhaus and its influence – I think it’s very fitting both for a design museum such as the Neue Sammlung Munich and also for the Bauhaus Archive to present this type of exhibition,” noted Prof. Florian Hufnagl, Director of Die Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich.
event venue
Editor choice (SD)