AROUND HOME : Wassily Chair

ONE DAY IN 1925 Marcel Breuer, the precocious, 24-year-old head of the furniture workshop at the Bauhaus design school in Dessau, Germany, was riding his Adler bicycle. An idea came to him, Eureka-like: If tubular steel was strong and light enough to support him while pedaling, it should also do for making furniture. So he immediately telegraphed the Adler factory to propose a joint venture. Predictably rebuffed, he hired a plumber adept at welding pipe ends together and made a prototype of what is now the oldest tubular chair in production.

Breuer probably was also inspired by painter Wassily Kandinsky--for whom the chair was named and for whose on-campus house the chair was designed. At the time, Kandinsky was teaching analytical drawing to first-semester students, who abstracted objects into lines indicating “tension components” and “energy relationships.” Which--in his radical rethinking of the notion of a chair--was like what Breuer had done by separating the rigid metal support frame from the soft, yielding back, seat and armrests (originally made of fabric, now available also in leather).

Arcane Teutonic aesthetics aside, interior designers cherish the Wassily for its see-through lightness. It is the perfect chair to place in front of a window where a conventional armchair would block the view, or in a small room where a solid chair might produce claustrophobic feelings. Children approve, too: They love to slide down the smooth leather incline of the seat and then yell for help when they get stuck below the back support.

Yet, in a sense the Wassily chair was a failure. Though Breuer had intended it for the masses--a production-line chair counterpart to the Model T Ford--it remained an obstinately handcrafted luxury item. Still, that irony pales beside the legacy of the Bauhaus itself, wherein Bauhaus-designed Weimar Republic workers’ housing--welfare-state housing projects--crossed the Atlantic to become the modernist glass-box idiom of rich corporate America.

Available from Knoll International, the Wassily chair comes in gray, white, black, dark- and light-brown leather, $999. Wheat- or white-colored canvas, $877. Prices include shipping and installation. KnollSource dealers include Office Matrix in Santa Fe Springs; Office Furniture Specialists in Long Beach and San Diego, and Entouch in Rancho Cucamonga.

Reproductions are available at Palazzetti in Los Angeles. Leather chairs are priced at $950 (available in six different colors.