The Glass House and tubular metal

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O nly three years after the 1925 Paris exhibition, Pierre Chareau designed his extraordinary Maison de Verre (House
of Glass) in Paris; it was breathtakingly innovative in its use of industrial materials, including steel beams, translucent
glass bricks, perforated sheet metal and rubber flooring tiles. Commissioned by Dr Jean Dalsace, a Parisian
gynaecologist who was an influential member of the French Communist Party with an obsession with cleanliness, this
flagrantly Modernist structure was an ingenious infill building wedged between two eighteenth-century buildings and
squeezed beneath an already existing top storey. On the ground floor of this amazing steel-and-glass building was a very
progressive, clinical-looking suite of medical rooms. The building’s layout and all of its fixtures and fittings were
designed with health and hygiene in mind – with tiling that was easy to clean and long rows of windows to provide
adequate ventilation. A dramatic open-backed staircase rose to link the ground-floor workspace to the first-floor living
accommodation above. This level incorporated a lofty two-storey living room with exposed steel beams as well as other
rooms, including a solarium. There was also a retractable “ladder” to the second floor, where there were bedrooms and
bathrooms. Throughout the house there were numerous built-in features that not only saved space but also offered a
high degree of functional flexibility, such as sliding sheet-metal screens and metal closets that served as walls between
the various rooms. Yet despite its unrelentingly industrial aesthetic, this extraordinary dwelling had a surprising visual
warmth thanks to Chareau’s clever juxtaposition of the industrial materials used in its construction with dove-grey
carpeting, gleaming blonde-wood panelling and amply upholstered furniture covered in tapestries and warm-toned
velvets. It revealed a far more moderate interpretation of avant-garde design than Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit
Nouveau, and it is no wonder that Chareau’s architectural masterpiece has since become a place of pilgrimage for the
architecturally informed.

Other French designers who pioneered a more tempered form of Modernism in France during the late 1920s and 1930s
included René Herbst, Robert MalletStevens and the Irish émigré Eileen Gray. Their work can be seen as an avant-garde
interpretation of the Art Deco style – often more modernistic than truly Modern. And yet, by making Modernism chic
they also made it more palatable than the sterile utilitarianism promoted by the Dessau Bauhaus. In fact, Modernism
became such a strong and divisive force in French interwar design and architecture that in 1929 around 20 members left
the conservative Société des Artistes-Décorateurs (SAD) to form their own Modernist association, the Union des
Artistes Modernes (UAM), which promoted the idea of design over decoration. This proactive alliance tirelessly
advanced the cause of Modern design through its participation in the numerous salon exhibitions held during the
interwar years. Some of the younger members of the UAM, most notably Jean Prouvé and Jean Royère, pioneered a
slightly more utilitarian look during this period, but their work was still imbued with a sense of French modishness.

But making Modernism stylish was not just the preserve of French designers and architects. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
an architect born in Germany, memorably created the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition.
This was one of the great landmark buildings of twentieth-century architecture, harmoniously blending radically
Modern elemental forms and industrial materials such as steel and glass with materials more traditionally associated
with luxury, namely marble, red onyx and travertine. A classical temple built within the Modern idiom, its chromed
steel columns supporting a floating roof, this open-plan building was not about everyday function but rather about
creating a Modern space that conveyed a positive message about a contemporary Germany. It was built as a temporary
structure with no function other than to host the king and queen of Spain while they signed a visitors’ book at the
opening of the exhibition. It was furnished with site-specifically designed chromed-steel and buttoned leather seats –
Mies’ famous Barcelona chair – that were essentially modern-day thrones; they reinterpreted for the Modern age the
sella curulis, a type of chair used in Ancient Rome by high-ranking members of society. Free of the constraints of
everyday practicalities, the sparsely furnished pavilion was a dramatic spatial composition that gracefully confirmed
Mies’s famous dictum: less is more.6 The pavilion was a place of meditative calm with a striking de-materialist
aesthetic, complete with two reflecting pools and Georg Kolbe’s Alba (Dawn) statue; it singularly revealed that
industrial materials and modern construction methods handled deftly could produce results that exuded a strong sense of
the spiritual.
Façade of the Maison de Verre (House of Glass) in Paris designed by Pierre Chareau, 1928.

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First-floor living room of the Maison de Verre (House of Glass) in Paris designed by Pierre Chareau, 1928

L’équipement d’une habitation (equipment for the home) model apartment installation designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand for the 1929
Salon d’Automne.

The German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Interior of the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – showing Barcelona chairs designed site-
specifically for this project.

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At one stroke, Mies had elevated Modern design and architecture to a whole new aesthetic plane and released it from
associations with utilitarian worthiness.

A similar transformation was underway in furniture design. As we have already seen, the First World War had
concentrated the minds of both designers and manufacturers on design’s role in society, and there had been a feeling
amongst designers associated with the Bauhaus that a radical “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) was urgently
needed, both in society as a whole and more specifically within art and design. This new, reforming zeitgeist was
powerfully realized in three-dimensional form when Marcel Breuer designed his famous B3 “Wassily” armchair in
1925. Although it was not specifically designed for the artist, Wassily Kandinsky admired the design and used it in his
house at the Bauhaus in Dessau. The production of seamless tubular metal was pioneered in Germany, where Max and
Reinhard Mannesmann had patented processes for its mass production in 1885. One of the material’s first successful
applications had been in the construction of bicycles. It was reputedly the handlebars of Breuer’s recently purchased
Adler bicycle that inspired him to make furniture with this modern industrial material. Apart from its high-tensile
strength, tubular steel had the added bonus of being a very hygienic material that was easily wiped clean. Even before
the First World War there had been huge interest in the advancement of public health, as reflected in the staging of the
1911 international hygiene exhibition held in Dresden, but in the 1920s it became an even more pressing issue.

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In this climate of heightened medical concern, tubularmetal furniture seemed to be a healthful solution, being less likely
to harbour infectious germs and infestations of pests and parasites when compared to traditional upholstery. Tubular
steel was also a low-cost material when produced on an industrial scale, which meant that in theory it could be used to
mass-manufacture inexpensive furniture for the multitudes. Breuer’s Wassily chair was a truly revolutionary design,
being the first to employ a supporting frame of tubular steel. Thanks to the material’s springy resilience, the design
provided comfort without the need for traditional padded upholstery – instead it employed slings of leather, which gave
it a strong spatial quality rather like Rietveld’s earlier Red/Blue chair. Around the time of its design Margaretha
Reichardt developed, in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, a hard-wearing fabric made from heavy-duty woven cotton
treated with paraffin wax and reinforced with metal thread. It was known as Eisengarn (iron yarn) and it proved to be
the perfect durable material for sling seats; it was subsequently used by Marcel Breuer as well as other designers in their
tubular-metal seating designs.7

In 1926, the year after Breuer designed his revolutionary Wassily chair, there was a meeting of architects participating
in the design of the Weissenhof housing estate – the centrepiece of the Deutscher Werkbund’s Die Wohnung exhibition
the following year. At this meeting the Dutch architect Mart Stam discussed with his peers a radical new chair design
with an innovative cantilevered construction, which he had recently made from iron gas pipes welded together. He also
made a sketch of his ground-breaking design, which controversially inspired Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe to develop their own more refined versions of Stam’s cantilevered chair – the B 64 Cesca chair (1928) and the
Model No. MR10 Weissenhof chair (1927) respectively – but instead of rigid pipes they both used tubular steel in the
construction of their designs. In comparison to a traditional four-legged layout, the cantilever shape provided a marked
increase in springiness, as did marrying the inherent resilience of tubular metal with the intrinsic flexibility of woven
rattan or Eisengarn canvas. This proved the perfect formal and material combination to achieve the maximum comfort
with the minimum of means.8

Speculating on large-scale industrial production, these new tubular-metal seating designs marked a watershed in the
story of design and introduced a new and unequivocally Modern style to the furnishing of interiors. By the late 1920s
and early 1930s tubular steel had become the material of choice among most Modernist designers – Le Corbusier, along
with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and his colleague Charlotte Perriand, created a number of landmark tubularmetal
furniture designs, including the well-known B 306 chaise longue of 1928. This was regarded by Le Corbusier as a
machine de repos (a machine for resting) and was shown as part of the trio’s L’équipement d’une habitation (equipment
for the home) model apartment installation at the 1929 Salon d’Automne. René Herbst also used tubular metal in his
furniture designs, which – like the work of Le Corbusier, Jeanneret and Perriand – were de luxe Art Deco interpretations
of Modernism. Herbst used elasticated straps known as sandows for the seats of some of his chairs, which gave them a
distinctive industrial chic. The tubular-metal furniture created by French designers had a Parisian modishness that was
totally removed from the socially conscious utilitarianism of German design of the time. By giving Modernism a touch
of Parisian glamour these French designers made it more attractive to consumers and contributed to a greater acceptance
of the machine aesthetic during the 1930s, when the Depression made the implementation of Modern design and
architecture ever more politically pressing.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the influence of Modernism was not just confined to architecture and product design, but
acted as a powerful stimulus on graphic design, too.

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This was made evident, as we have already seen, in the Bauhaus’s introduction of New Typography at its landmark
exhibition held in 1923; after the closure of the school in 1931, the Modernist baton was taken up by a number of Swiss
graphic designers working in Zurich and Basel. This coterie of designers, which became known as the Swiss School and
included Ernst Keller, Theo Ballmer and Max Bill, was influenced by the typographic theories and asymmetrical
layouts of the Bauhaus, and also by the Russian Constructivists’ use of photomontage and De Stijl’s spatial principles.
Bringing these elements together in their own work, the designers of the Swiss School pioneered a distinctive and direct
language of graphic communication. Espousing a Reductivist aesthetic, Swiss School graphic design was typified by the
use of sans-serif typography, white space and “objective photography”, meaning realistic imagery. Direct, precise and
clinical, such work was intended to be easily deciphered: a universal language of modern visual communication.

Exhibited at the Swiss national exhibition in 1939, the Swiss School’s brand of uncompromising Modernism went on to
become the International Typographic Style; to this day it influences practising graphic designers, many of whom either
admire its message-carrying clarity or despise what they see as its formulaic blandness.

Model No.MR20 Weissenhof chair designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1927 – an armed version of the Model MR.10 chair

Neues Bauen (New Building) poster for Deutsche Werkbund Exhibition at the Kunstgewerbe Museum, Zürich designed by Theo Ballmer, 1928.

Travel poster for the Swiss Tourist Board designed by Herbert Matter, 1925 – a masterwork of Swiss School graphic design.

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