Mart Stam

Mart Stam (1899–1986), born in Purmerend, Holland, trained as a carpenter and drawing teacher. He then worked in various architectural offices, including Max Taut and Hans Poelzig, in the Netherlands and later in Berlin and Switzerland. In 1924, he founded the Swiss avant-garde magazine "ABC" with the architect Hans Schmidt. Stam felt committed to rational building and design. Simplicity was not an end in itself for him. Visionary architectural studies that he published made him internationally famous. In 1925, he experimented with gas pipes, using them to build a new type of chair without back legs - the basic idea of the cantilever chair that Thonet has produced to this day under various model numbers was born. In 1926, he was invited by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to take part in the Werkbund exhibition "The Apartment" in Stuttgart. Stam built a terraced house with three residential units, two of which he furnished himself and the third by Marcel Breuer. Mart Stam presented his cantilever chair without hind legs for the first time, the model for countless cantilever chairs. In 1928 he moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he tried out the standardization of inexpensive living space. In the winter semester of 1928/29 he was a guest lecturer in urban planning at the Bauhaus Dessau. In 1930 he went to the Soviet Union with Ernst May ("Brigade May") and his then wife Lotte Stam-Beese to plan cities. After refusing to plan a city in a particularly inhospitable environment in 1934, he was forced to leave the USSR. In 1939 he took over the directorship of the Institute for Arts and Crafts Education in Amsterdam. After 1945 he was unable to build on his earlier successes. In 1948 he moved to eastern Germany, where he became director first of the Dresden Art Academy and from 1950 of the University of Applied Arts in Berlin-Weißensee. During the Cold War, the inventor of the cantilever chair without hind legs was caught between two stools: in the GDR, Stam was considered a formalist close to the Bauhaus, in the Netherlands, where he returned in 1953, he was considered a left-wing reformer. From 1977 onwards, he lived a secluded life in Switzerland. Stam received the artistic copyright for the cantilever chair, which is now held by Thonet.