img(height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=2939831959404383&ev=PageView&noscript=1")

From Bauhaus to greenhouse

Words:
Jan-Carlos Kucharek

True to the ethos that ‘nothing is so good it can’t be better’, furniture company Thonet has released its classic designs for Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs and tables in, yes, seven colours. But before you join SOB (Save Our Breuers), buy them and get them re-chromed, consider that the firm looked to Bauhaus master Johannes Itten’s colour circle ‘as orientation’. Quite what the Mazdaznan-cult-worshipping vegetarian Expressionist would have made of this we’ll never know, but his resistance to Gropius’ aesthetics of mass-production prompted his resignation. Perhaps knowing that Breuer’s chrome is now being dipped in his ‘chocolate brown’, revenge is indeed sweet?

 

Latest

A combined waste collection centre and skatepark raises the bar on materials reuse by using structural timbers saved from demolition elsewhere. Architect 51N4E speaks to Stephen Cousins about how the frame was moved and repurposed

Waste collection centre and skatepark repurposes structural timber frame

Design a flexible exhibition space, deliver transformational change as part of an energy-efficiency framework, restore the farmstead of a Scottish poet - some of the latest architecture contracts and competitions from across the industry

Latest: London gallery redesign

An inspiring collection of 12 projects make up this year’s MacEwen Award shortlist, ranging from a floating events venue to a woodland retreat centred around a repurposed military parachute, but all embodying the concept of architecture for the common good

Twelve impressive and varied schemes make up the contenders for the top award

Join RIBAJ and Hilti at the 'Designing and Specifying for Fire Safety' seminar and ensure your practice is at the forefront of compliance and innovation.

Join RIBAJ and Hilti at the 'Designing and Specifying for Fire Safety' seminar in Manchester.

Even in the depths of winter, views of the sky can raise our spirits. Do architects always make the most of it, wonders Eleanor Young

How architects shape the sky