Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona Chair

This design is called "Barcelona Chair" today, because Mies van der Rohe created it for the "Deutscher Werkbund" Pavilion at the Barcelona World Exposition of 1929. The original version was covered with white pig leather.

Two of these chairs and matching ottomans were meant to be used by the King and Queen of Spain on occasion of their official visit to the exposition. It never happened, the cerimony was too brief and the Majesties rushed off after a few minutes.

Reproductions of the first Barcelona Chairs in the reconstructed German Pavillion.	Barcelona Chairs in Philip Johnsons Glass House. Philip Johnson was an architect and the first director of the MoMA in New York

Despite its "machine made" appearance, the Barcelona Chair is almost 100% hand made. The frames are made of solid, mirror polished and chrome plated suspension steel and achieving the seamless weldingsrequires extreme craftsmanship. The leather upholstery is made of individually cut, stitched and piped leather pieces.

Polishing of a metal frame before electroplating.	Barcelona Chair Frames in the final chrome bath
Each piece of the upholstery is hand cut. The pipings are made of nylon strings wrapped in leather.	And even each of the 24 buttons is made of a circular piece of matching leather and aluminium.

Such extensive labour demands its price. When the Barcelona Chair was first manufactured by "Metallgewerbe Joseph Müller" in Berlin it cost 520 Reichsmark. As a comparison, Mies van der Rohe as director of the Bauhaus was earning 5.000 Reichsmark per year at the same time.

Compared to this, the price at steelform.com in our days seems incredibly cheap, doesn't it?