Knoll International Wassily

In an interview with a Knoll historian, Marcel Breuer described how he began experimenting with bent tubular steel while at the Bauhaus: "I was quite idealistic at the time, 23 years old. I made friends with a young architect and bought my first bicycle. I learned to ride a bicycle and talked with this young man. I told him that the bicycle seemed to be a perfect production, because it hadn't changed in the last twenty or thirty years. It still has the original bicycle shape. He said: 'Have you ever seen how they make these parts? How they bend these handlebars? You would be interested, because they bend these steel tubes like macaroni.'" "That somehow stuck in my mind, and I began to think about steel tubes bent into frames — probably that is the material you could use for an elastic and transparent chair. Typically, I was very concerned with the transparency of form." "That is how the first chair was made... I realised that the bending had to continue. It should be bent only, without welding points, so that it could also be chromed and assembled. That is how the first Wassily was born. I myself was a little afraid of criticism. In fact, I didn't tell anyone that I was doing these experiments. [Wassily] Kandinsky, who happened to come into my studio when the first chair was brought in, said: 'What is that?' He was very interested, and then the Bauhaus became very interested in it. A year later, I had furnished the entire Bauhaus with this furniture."