One of the most iconic pieces of modern furniture design, the Knoll Studio Barcelona Chair and Footstool - Relax Version, offers a newly refined take on the formidable lounge chair, with this version seeing a softer pad used for additional comfort. A piece that truly holds universal appeal, the Barcelona Chair is prevalent in many a gleaming New York ad agency office and European architects studio, and features in the living spaces of design aficionados across the globe.
A true masterpiece of modernist design, the chair was inducted into the permanent collection of the New York Museum Of Modern Art in 1977. Part of the Barcelona series.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, more commonly referred to simply as “Mies” stands alongside the likes of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright as one of the godfathers of modernist architecture. Growing up in Aachen, and following a brief tenure in his father’s stone carving shop Mies worked his way through the local design firms and found himself in Berlin, where he joined the office of interior designer Bruno Paul, before taking an apprenticeship at the studio of famed architect Peter Behrens. Whilst there Mies worked alongside Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, the latter of which with whom he would go on to found the Bauhaus in the years that followed.
In the wake of the rise of the Third Reich, Mies, alongside many of his contemporaries in design, the arts and cinema, left Germany for the US, where he would further solidify his reputation as one of the great architects and designers of the 20th Century. His aphorism "less is more" serves as a mantra and a rallying cry for a major contingency of the design world.
