Bauhaus design armchair D51

fabricleatherwooden

Gropius’ D51 chair from 1922/23, with its backward-jutting armrests and straight back, looks pretty austere. “Straighten up,” it seems to whisper to the sitter. Its four wooden legs are arranged at an offset. The rear legs support the backrest, the front legs sweep freely into the room together with the protruding armrests. This is a small piece of architecture created by Walter Gropius, linear and constructive. The chair and the D51-2 and D51-3 furniture series it gave rise to are a perfect match for the minimal architecture of the Fagus factory with its typical unsupported corner. This factory was a cradle of modernism. When Walter Gropius was commissioned to design the Fagus factory in the small town of Alfeld an der Leine in Lower Saxony in 1911, nobody would have imagined that he would make history. But the architect did and simultaneously revolutionised the world of construction. Instead of choosing a historistic façade, he surrounded the production hall with a light curtain wall. The walls dissolved into large glass surfaces. Daylight, sun and air, the triad of modernity, are the driving forces towards a liberated architecture that seeks its rules solely in the necessities of the building project. As it happened, over the course of time, this story was interwoven with Tecta’s story. Axel Bruchhäuser, partner of the company since 1972 and an important witness of the Bauhaus generation, recalls: “We sat in the foyer on chairs by Walter Gropius, of which the owners knew nothing at all.