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Barcelona Chair HistoryMies was commissioned by the German Government to design the German Pavilion at the Barcelona World Arts Fair to be held at Montjuic in Spain in 1929. The building itself shockingly modern even by todays standards - it must have looked posititvely futuristic to the fair's visitors of the day. Built of glass, steel and three types of marble, its linear simplicity is characterized by great flowing expanses, utilizing unbroken planes of each material, juxtaposed with one another. Having completed the design for the building, Mies and Lilly began work on the furniture for its interior. In an interview the year following the fair Mies said the following regarding chair design: "The chair is a very difficult object. Everyone who has ever tried to make one knows that. There are endless possibilities and many problems - the chair has to be light, it has to be strong, it has to be comfortable It is almost easier to build a skyscraper than a chair" Mies 1930. The exhibition was an occasion of international importance, attended by the Spanish Royal family as well as many goverment officials from around Europe. Mies was well aware of this significance and of the challenges that faced him when he set about designing the chair for the Pavilion, he commented at the time that this was to be "an important chair, a very elegant chair and costly. It had to be monumental. You couldn't just use a kitchen chair" Mies 1929. The chair that he designed for the Pavilion is said to have been inspired by both the folding chairs of the Pharoahs and the X shaped footstools of the Romans. This regal and formal lineage was quite fitting and was no doubt intentional, affording this modern design an intellectual and cultural weight that would have been all the more obvious in such a futuristic environment. The outsized proportions and elegant form rendered the Barcelona Chairs more as sculptural objects in the gallery-like Pavilion. The clear articulation of the structural frame and the seat cushions as separate components, and the use of both traditional and modern materials where appropriate to their functional purpose, presage Mies' personal vision of International Style architecture in the United States. The Barcelona chairs became thrones when the Spanish Royals visited the German Pavilion and sat in them for a time, (they were the only chairs in the whole building).
Materials and ManufactureThe originals pre dated stainless steel and seemless (ground) welds so the legs had to be bolted together. The leather used in those first examples was pig skin, and the color of the chairs in the Pavilion was ivory. But todays Barcelona chair is not so very different. Mies re-designed the chair in 1950 three years after the death of Lilly Reich, making use of the newly developed material - stainless steel. This allowed the frame to be formed from a single piece of metal, and so it was that the bolts of the original were replaced by the smooth lines that we are framiliar with today.
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