The cantilever chair: tubular steel without back legs

A cantilever chair has no back legs. It stands on a single bent tube or bent sheet that runs from the floor forwards, up beneath the seat and on to the back, so that the seat is carried out like a balcony and gives a little when you sit down. The first were made in tubular steel in 1926–1928 by Mart Stam, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, and the type became a hallmark of Modernism. Later it has been made in wood, plywood and plastic.

Facts

Steel tube becomes furniture

In the mid-1920s designers at the Bauhaus and around the new architecture began to see steel tube as a furniture material. It was light, strong, industrially produced and could be bent. Marcel Breuer was a young teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau when in 1925 he began bending steel tube, inspired by the handlebars of his bicycle, and the result was the Wassily Chair.

The Wassily Chair still has a frame with four points of support, but it showed the way. Everything is construction, you can see straight through the chair, and the fabric carries the body while the tubes carry the fabric. The next step was to remove the back legs altogether.

Stam, Mies and Breuer

The Dutch architect Mart Stam is usually counted as the first. In 1926 he built a prototype from straight gas pipes and pipe fittings, a chair without back legs. The following year cantilever chairs were shown at the Weissenhof exhibition in Stuttgart, where the leading modernist architects of the day each built a house, and the idea spread rapidly.

In 1927 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made a cantilever chair with a large, curved bow at the front, which gives more than Stam’s straight form. In 1928 Breuer designed his chair with seat and back of woven cane in wooden frames, which later received the name Cesca after his daughter. Who had really made the first cantilever chair became a matter for the courts, and the German court granted Stam the rights to the basic form itself.

Why it gives

In an ordinary chair the seat is carried by four legs. In the cantilever chair it is carried only from behind, by the tube that bends up from the floor. When you sit down the tube flexes a little, and the chair gives. That requires a material that is both stiff and elastic, and the drawn steel tube was therefore decisive: a wooden tube of the same dimensions would have broken.

The springing gave a new comfort without upholstery, and the chair became a symbol of the new age. The diagram The parts of a chair below shows the cantilever chair from the side, where the steel-tube frame replaces legs, seat rail and back posts alike.

In wood, plywood and plastic

Other designers wanted to do the same in warmer materials. In the early 1930s Alvar Aalto made cantilever chairs in bent birch and plywood, and Gerrit Rietveld made the Zig-Zag Chair from four straight wooden boards, which carry the seat without back legs.

Verner Panton went even further. The Panton Chair, which went into series production in 1967, is moulded in a single piece of plastic: back, seat and base in one curved surface, without screws and without legs. The cantilevered seat rests on the curved base, exactly as on the steel-tube chairs forty years earlier.

How to recognise it

Look from the side. A cantilever chair has no back legs: the tube runs from the floor to the front edge, turns up beneath the seat and continues to the back. Chairs from the 1920s and 30s have chromed or nickel-plated tubes, and seat and back of fabric, leather, cane or moulded wood. The maker’s label or stamp is often beneath the seat.

Many of the classic models have been produced without interruption ever since, and copies are common. An older chair is told apart from a new one by the wear on the chrome, the dimensions of the tube, the screws and the label. Read more about the school behind the chairs in the guide What is the Bauhaus? and about the architect in the guide to Mies van der Rohe.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What distinguishes a cantilever chair from an ordinary chair?