bent and twisted

we've got two amazing chairs here at Stockroom -  pair of 'Wassily Chairs' designed by Marcel Breuer - that are part of design folklore. they look relatively unassuming, in the eyes of the 21st century, but they're a remarkably important development in the history of design. they were conceived in the mid 1920s (so, two decades before the second world war, and yet they look incredibly modern, even today), the idea for them coming out of the workshops of the Bauhaus.

It is said that the handlebar of Breuer's 'Adler' bicycle inspired him to use steel tubing to build the chair. The design (and all subsequent steel tubing furniture) was technologically feasible only because the German steel manufacturer Mannesmann had recently perfected a process for making seamless steel tubing. Previously, steel tubing had a welded seam, which would collapse when the tubing was bent.

so, from this idea of bending and twisting material, the theme for this week's photo diary was born: