Tubulär Steel Variations with Molded Plywood Seats 
ln his continuous work on new Solutions for 
tubulär Steel chairs, Marcel Breuer tried, in the 
late 1920s, to exploit the elasticity and flexi- 
bility of the material and to further develop 
Mart Stam's concept of cantilever chairs into 
resilient cantilever chairs. From the point of 
view of the optimal use of materials, models 
emerged whose elastic constructions made 
upholstery obsolete, such as the B 34 can 
tilever armchair, which consisted of two inter- 
locking bent tubulär Steel frames-one for the 
front legs and the armrests, and one for the 
seat and backrest. For the resilient effect of 
the furniture, however, only the supporting 
tubulär steel loop was necessary, which, with- 
out functional limitations, could be equipped 
with other seat structures-for example, often 
with opulent upholstery, which was haptically 
more pleasant, but gave the slender tubulär 
steel furniture a completely different character 
and rendered the efforts of the architectural 
avant-garde to achieve transparency and ele- 
gance virtually useless. 1 On the other hand, 
the use of two-dimensionally molded plywood 
panels seemed more appropriate for the in- 
tention of the chairs: As with the cantilever 
model No. 1810, which was designed by 
Hana Kucerovä-Zäveskä and manufactured 
by Hynek Gottwald in the mid-1930s, the 
seat and backrest could be made from one 
single sheet of material without a large vol- 
ume. The designer Konstantin Grcic also used 
such a plywood seating surface for his can 
tilever chair designed for the “Muji Manufac 
tured by Thonet” collection in 2009. 
1 Cf. Otakar Mädel, 2100 Metal Tubulär Chairs: A typology, 
Rotterdam 2006. 
* 
Freischwinger Cantilever Chair „MUJI“ 
Entwurf Design: Konstantin Grcic, München Munich, 2009 
Ausführung Execution: Thonet Frankenberg für for MUJI, ab as of 2012; Stahlrohr, Sperrholz 
Tubulär steel, plywood; MAK H 3746/2013; Schenkung Donation Thonet Frankenberg 
235