Las Ninas: Mart Stam

Biography

Mart Stam (August 5, 1899, Purmerend - February 21, 1986, Zürich) was a Dutch architect, urban planner, and furniture designer. Stam was extraordinarily well-connected, and his career intersects with important moments in the history of 20th century European architecture, including chair design at the Bauhaus, the Weissenhof Estate, the "Van Nelle Factory", an important modernist landmark building in Rotterdam, buildings for Ernst May's Weimar Frankfurt housing project then to Russia with the idealistic May Brigade, to postwar reconstruction in Germany.

- Stam studied at the Royal School for Advanced Studies in Amsterdam,

- He worked as a draftsman in an architectural practice through the year 1922

- In Zurich in 1923 he co-founded the magazine 'ABC Beitrage zum Bauen' (Contributions on Building) with architect Hans Schmidt, future Bauhaus director the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, and El Lissitzky

- Stam is also credited for at least part of the design of the Van Nelle Fabriek in Rotterdam, built from 1926 through 1930 (dates vary). This coffee and tea factory is still a powerful example of early modernist industrial architecture, recently rehabilitated into offices. An embarrassing dispute over the authorship of this design caused Stam to leave the office of Leen Van der Vlugt, the credited designer

- In 1927 he became a founding member, with Gerrit Rietveld and Hendrik Petrus Berlage, of the Congrès Internationaux d`Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

- In 1930 Stam became one of the 20 architects and urban planners organized by Frankfurt city planner Ernst May who traveled together to the Soviet Union to create a string of new Stalinist cities, including Magnitogorsk.

- Stam was later named director of the Institute of Industrial Art in the Netherlands. From 1948 to 1952 he moved to postwar Germany, with its major reconstruction projects. In 1948 he took a professorship at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Dresden and began advocating a modern, strict structure for the heavily destroyed urban landscape, a plan which most of the citizens rejected as an "all-out attack on the identity of the city", and which would have obliterated most of the remaining landmarks

- In 1950 Stam became director of the Advanced Institute of Art in Berlin. Returning to Amsterdam in 1953, beginning in about 1966 Stam and his wife moved to Switzerland and withdrew from public view.

He is mentioned on page 186 of our books, where Sudjic writes that Mart Stam forms part of Modern Movement's key figures, alongside Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. He wanted to, according to th ebook, to use familiar domestic objects to make a point about the modern world.

The Modern Movement - http://www.thonet.de/en/a-masterpiece-from-1926-the-s-33-and-s-34-by-mart-stam.html

The Cantilever Armchair S34
(Designed in 1926)

Qualitative

Medium

The Mart Stam Chair S34 with armrest is one of the best known furniture designs of the Bauhaus era. These chair is the first cantilever chair in furniture history.

The Armchair has a clear form and it is made of a frame chrome-plated tubular steel, stretched butt leather or plastic mesh and it exists in different colors (white, havana, silver, red...). The chair is very stable and it is the result of Stam's experiments starting from 1925 with gas pipes that he connected with flanges and developed the principle of cantilevering chairs that no longer rest on four legs.

Style

Expression

Quantitative

Value

The price of the armchair varies a little bit depending on where it is bought. But it cost more or less: 326$....284 Euros or 200 Pounds

The Armchair has been classified as a piece of art and symbol of progress and thus its price remains fairly high. It has to be said that the price will as well change depending on the colour in which the armchair is ordered.

Check the different prices in Here or Here

Originality