subsequently emulated by many other Modernist architects, from Mies
van der Rohe to Charles Eames.
Over the next few years Breuer designed many other tubular steel
furniture items for the numerous interior spaces he created. His tubular
steel club armchair appeared in the living area of Walter Gropius’s house
in Dessau of 1925 – 6 , for example, while a dressing niche in a guest room
in the same house featured a little tubular steel stool and a multi-shelf
dressing table. The living room in Moholy-Nagy’s house of the same years
contained a number of Breuer’s tubular steel pieces, as did an interior he
created in Berlin in 1926 for Erwin Piscator, and the Harnischmacher
house of three years later (both pictured overleaf ).
Breuer’s interest in tubular steel was soon emulated by many other
architects and designers. At the Weissenhof SiedlungMies van der Rohe,
Mart Stam, J.J.P. Oud, S. van Ravesteyn, Heinz and Bodo Rasch and
Arthur Korn were among the architects who displayed tubular steel fur-
niture pieces in the interiors of the buildings they created for that event.
A little later the Italian Rationalist architects, Giuseppe Terragni and
Gabrielle Mucchi, among others, created furniture pieces in the same
material. In the 1930 s the British company peldevoted itself to the mass
manufacture of tubular steel furniture, while at the same time in the us
Wolfgang Hoffmann, Josef Hoffmann’s son, designed a range of items for
the Howell Company that were produced in considerable numbers. Only
in the usdid tubular steel find a place in the popular modern residential
interior in the years before 1939 , however. In Europe, with the exception
of the handful of patrons of Modernist architecture, it was more usually
found in church halls, canteens and school classrooms.
By the mid 1930 s, as several publications of the time demonstrated,
few Modernist interiors were complete without their items of tubular
steel furniture. Paul Frankl’s New Dimensions: The Decorative Arts of Today
in Words and Pictures( 1928 ); Dorothy Todd and Raymond Mortimer’s The
New Interior Decoration( 1929 ); Hans Hoffmann’sModern Interiors in
Europe and America( 1930 ); and Hans Eckstein’s Die Schöne Wohnung
( 1931 ), among others, all depicted numerous examples of interior spaces
containing items made of tubular steel.^13 Retail spaces were especially well
represented, as were cafés and bars, all of them purveyors of the modern
lifestyle. Examples included a Parisian bar designed by Robert Block of
Studio Athelia; bars in Helsingfors and Kyoto by Birger Jarl Carlstadt and
Isaburo Ueno respectively; a seaside restaurant in San Sebastian by the
Spanish architect, Labayen-Aizpurúa; a music shop in Vienna by Ernst 155