Wassily chair

[vah-suh-lee, vas-uh-]

noun

1. a chair designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925, having a chromium-plated tubular steel frame over which strips of canvas or leather of varying widths are stretched to form the seat, back, and arms.

Word History and Origins

Origin of Wassily chair¹

After Wassily Kandinsky, for whose house on the Bauhaus campus at Dessau the chair was designed

Example Sentences

Nearly a century ago, tubular steel inspired both Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair and new, lighter wheelchairs.

Read more on New York Times

For his Model B3 chair—also called the Wassily chair, in honor of Kandinsky, who expressed admiration for its prototype—Breuer took inspiration from the elegant handlebars of a milkman’s bicycle, made of seamless tubular steel, a new material.

Read more on The New Yorker

If you valued lumbar support above clean design, you would likely opt for another chair; but, as a piece of sculpture that you could plop down on, the Wassily chair’s equipoise has never been surpassed.

Read more on The New Yorker

It is easy to call to mind the iconic Wassily chair, a tubular steel frame that looks like an oversized paper clip; or the Barcelona coffee table, a glass square whose lethal corners seem designed to dent an ankle or a toddler’s forehead.

Read more on The New Yorker

But beyond the popularity of individual designs – from Breuer’s Wassily chair to Le Corbusier’s lounger – the Bauhaus had a huge influence on how we think about the home.

Read more on The Guardian