100 years of Bauhaus Dessau

Modern lines set in steel: 
how Bauhaus influenced furniture design

100 years of Bauhaus Dessau | 100 years of the B 9 by Thonet
 

It was exactly 100 years ago that the Bauhaus art school moved from Weimar to Dessau. This was also the time when designers like Marcel Breuer and Mart Stam, who each had stints teaching at the Bauhaus, were experimenting with tubular steel. Up until this point, tubular steel had only found its way into functional furniture for hospitals and the transport sector. Marcel Breuer was the first to use it to create furniture for the home. Today, when we think of tubular steel, we have an almost automatic association with the cantilever chair. It all began, however, with the B 9 H stool, which is still part of the Thonet portfolio today, 100 years later. Originally designed for the Bauhaus canteen in Dessau, the stool soon evolved into the B 9 nesting table. Thonet’s B 9 collection embodies the company’s aesthetic and historical connection to the Bauhaus like no other. The minimalist shape of the tables and the stool, each consisting of one continuous piece of tubular steel and a panel, ensures an uninterrupted line of sight through the room. To save space, the B 9 nesting tables can be pushed into each other. The original designs live on today in contemporary models and reinterpretations from Thonet, such as the S 243 by Frank Rettenbacher or Jil Sander’s personal redesign of this classic Bauhaus piece in her JS . THONET line.

Starting in September 2025, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation will be marking its 100th anniversary with artistic events, exhibitions, conferences and celebrations. These will showcase the materials used in Bauhaus design both during the Modernism movement and in the current day.

Bauhaus Dessau: an ever-changing orientation

Founded in 1919, the Bauhaus reinvented its strategic and aesthetic orientation many times during the interwar period. During the 1920s, it was heavily influenced by expressionism as well as the Dutch De Stijl movement. Many practical examples of the Neues Bauen movement emerged in German cities in the form of new housing estates. The simple architectural design used in these estates demanded equally simple furnishings. In 1925, Walter Gropius came up with the design for the Bauhaus building in Dessau, which took shape over the following year. Today, the Bauhaus building, together with the Masters’ Houses in Dessau, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Bauhaus Dessau is therefore a key point of reference, but it is not actually the place where the new tubular steel furniture was created. Breuer first came up with the tubular steel designs in a test workshop at the Junkers aircraft plant in Dessau. At the 1927 “Die Wohnung” exhibition put on by the Deutscher Werkbund (an association of artists, architects, businesses and specialists) in Stuttgart and prominently featuring the Weissenhof Estate, the first cantilever chairs as well as other tubular steel models were officially unveiled to the public. In 1929, Thonet published its first catalogue featuring tubular steel furniture. This contrasted starkly with the wooden furniture of the earlier “Gründerzeit” decades in Germany, promising something completely new.

The first tubular steel furniture

Legend has it that Marcel Breuer’s eureka moment came while gazing down at his bicycle’s handlebars. And with that, the idea to create furniture out of tubular steel was born. The relocation to Dessau resulted in links being forged between the Bauhaus and the local Junkers aircraft plant. Breuer worked together with a master metalworker at the Junkers test workshop to build the first tubular steel furniture, including the B 9 model. Originally designed as a stool – the B 9 H – the B 9 was also used in the student apartments and Masters’ Houses in Dessau, in the space-saving nesting table version. 

Tubular steel as a material, however, was nothing new. The Mannesmann brothers had already taken out a patent for seamless rolled tubular steel in 1885. In the 1890s, they used their “Mannesmann process” to produce cold-drawn tubes on an industrial scale. Up until this point, however, tubular steel had been seen as too hard and cold to use in the manufacture of furniture for the home. This contrast, though, had a lot of aesthetic potential. As a brand new material in home furnishings, free from the ties of history and tradition, tubular steel paved the way for entirely new forms of living and interior design. During the exhibition in the Weissenhof Estate in 1927, the new tubular steel furniture was unveiled to the general public. Throughout Europe, designers such as Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, Gerrit Rietveld, Hans Luckhardt, Erich Mendelsohn and Alvar Aalto were all creating new types of furniture. Tubular steel furniture was smaller and lighter than its solid-wood counterparts and thus lent an entirely new perspective to interior furnishings. As Marcel Breuer wrote himself: “furniture, even the walls of a room, is no longer bulky, monumental, […] rather it is airy and open , […] as if it were drawn into the room, it obscures neither movement nor the view of the room.” 

Tubular steel furniture – a natural fit for Thonet

The designers were not, however, completely free of ties to the past. Tubular steel’s appeal was not only due to its aesthetics but also its plasticity. And, in his time, Michael Thonet’s experiments with bentwood had already shown the world a malleability that had not previously been thought possible. In 1928, Thonet signed a contract with Marcel Breuer and took over his company, Standard Möbel, in 1929. One year later, Thonet set up a “steel department” in its Frankenberg production facility. Here, many of Marcel Breuer’s designs – the B 9 as well as the S 32/S 64 cantilever chair – were and are still manufactured. In the 1930s, Thonet acquired the licensing rights to some of the designs of Mart Stam and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Thonet also developed some of its own tubular steel designs including the S 411, an upholstered armchair version of the cantilever chair; the B 97 nesting tables, a contemporary version of Marcel Breuer’s B 9 tables; as well as the B 285 – a desk with a frame made from a single piece of continuous tubular steel. During the 1930s, Thonet’s success made it the largest manufacturer of tubular steel furniture in the world – a success story that was brought to a temporary halt by the Nazis and World War II. Post-war, it took until the 1960s for tubular steel to come back into fashion. 

Living Bauhaus heritage: JS . THONET and the S 243

Thonet has produced some of the most important furniture designs of our time. Thanks to their airiness and materiality, they fit seamlessly into contemporary design concepts. At the same time, Thonet continues to reinvent the ideas and designs of the Bauhaus era. For her collaboration with Thonet – JS . THONET – fashion designer Jil Sander put her stamp on the Bauhaus classics S 64 and B 97 (a redesign of the B 9 nesting tables) in her modern NORDIC and SERIOUS lines. The striking tubular steel was used by Sander in a matt nickel silver and a glossy titanium finish. Born in Hamburg, Sander grew up in the post-war period and was influenced by the Bauhaus ideals, which were omnipresent during the era of reconstruction.

Thonet’s new, contemporary designs also echo the minimalist shapes associated with tubular steel. The four-legged S 243 by Frank Rettenbacher combines tubular steel legs of various thicknesses with stained or varnished moulded plywood pieces to create a colourful, simple, affordable chair – the epitome of Bauhaus style.