Knoll - Cesca chair Beech and Vienna straw

Marcel Breuer has married traditional craftsmanship with industrial methods and materials to help make tubular steel furniture an international sensation and a modern institution. The cantilever shape exploits the unique possibilities of the material and gives the chair greater flexibility and comfort.

Marcel Breuer

A defender of the modern and protected movement of the founder of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer is equally celebrated for his achievements in architecture and furniture. Breuer was a student and later a master carpenter at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s. His entire corpus of works, both architecture and furniture, embodies the Bauhaus’s guiding goal of reconciling art and industry. Although Breuer never worked directly for Knoll, He is, however, an influential figure in the company’s history. He was one of Florence Knoll’s first mentors during his time in Walter Gropius' office in the 1930s. It was also Breuer who suggested to Hans Knoll that he hire Eszter Haraszty, the director of Knoll Textiles responsible for many of the Knoll Planning Unit’s most memorable colour combinations.

Knoll

Knoll uses modern design to connect people to their work, to their lives, to their world. Since 1938, it has been internationally recognized for creating furniture for work and residential environments.
 For more than 80 years Knoll has remained true to the Bauhaus design philosophy that modern furniture should complement the architectural space. At Knoll, modern design has been the guiding principle and this passion has been shared by customers and design professionals around the world. The founders, Hans and Florence Knoll, embraced the creative genius of the time.  Supported schools were Bauhaus School and Cranbrook Academy of Art to create new types of furniture and workplace environments. Their approach, where craftsmanship joins technology through the use of design, sets the perspective and shapes the values that live today. 80 years of historical collaborations, with pioneering modernists and daring contemporary designers, define not only the past but the future through active, recent and future collaborations with Antenna Design, Don Chadwick, Formway Design, Jehs & Laub, Joseph D'Urso , David Adjaye and OMA.