Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was a German-American architect, the last director of the Bauhaus, and the author of two phrases that outlived most of the buildings: less is more, and God is in the details. He designed comparatively little furniture. One piece of it is on more mood boards than the rest of his career put together.
He was born in Aachen, the son of a stonemason, and had no formal architectural training. He learned the trade in offices — including Peter Behrens’s, where Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius also passed through. He ran the Bauhaus from 1930 until the Nazi government forced it to close in 1933, emigrated to the United States in 1938, and spent the rest of his career in Chicago, where he headed the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology and built the Seagram Building and 860–880 Lake Shore Drive.
A chair for a building that lasted six months
The German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona was a temporary structure. Marble, onyx, chrome, a reflecting pool, and almost nothing in it. Mies and Lilly Reich — his collaborator, and for years the uncredited half of this design — needed seating for the King and Queen of Spain at the opening ceremony. What they produced was a chair with no back legs in the ordinary sense: two crossing curves of steel, each one carrying both a leg and a support, with a leather-panelled seat and back slung between them.
The pavilion was dismantled at the end of the exposition. The chair was not. It has been in continuous production, in one form or another, ever since, and a replica of the pavilion was built on the original site in the 1980s.
What changed in 1950
The 1929 chairs were made from chrome-plated flat steel bar, bolted together where the curves cross, because nobody could weld a joint that would survive the stress and still look clean. In 1950, working with Knoll in the United States, Mies revised the frame into a single continuous piece of stainless steel, hand-ground and mirror-polished. That is the version almost everyone now recognises, and it is the construction our chairs follow.
The other half of the design is the upholstery. The seat and back are not a single cushion: they are individually cut leather panels, welted and hand-tufted with buttons, so the pattern reads as a grid of squares. The tufting is not decoration. It holds the panels flat under load on a sling that has no rigid frame beneath it.
How it behaves in a room
Two things about this chair are worth knowing before you buy one, and neither is obvious from a photograph:
- It does not recline. The seat is upright and firm. That makes it a chair for conversation, reading upright, and formal corners — not one for sinking into. Add the ottoman and the posture changes completely, which is why we list the chair-and-ottoman sets separately from the chair on its own.
- It reads far smaller than it measures. The footprint is W79 × D79cm, which on paper is a large armchair. But the frame is open and the seat floats above the floor, so it suits small rooms, hallways and landings where an upholstered armchair of the same size would dominate. Because it does not recline, 20cm of clearance behind it is enough — against roughly 110cm for an Eames-style lounge chair.
The polished steel is the loudest thing in the design. It is bright and reflective, and it will fight with brass or matte black fittings in the same room. Check that before you check the leather colour.
Everything we make in this family sits under Barcelona style chairs and ottomans, within the wider lounge chair range.
A note on what we sell
Habitat Furnishes is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by Knoll or the estate of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Our chairs are described as “Barcelona style” or “Mies van der Rohe style” because they are our own reproduction of the design, built to the specification published on each product page.