Willem Hendrik Gispen (1890-1981)
So if Mart Stam had such an illustrious career and created one of the great cornerstones of twentieth century seating design, why is it that you may have never heard of him?
The answer is that the history of the tubular steel cantilever chair is a storied one. According to legend, on November 22, 1926, Stam attended a meeting of architects held in Stuttgart to discuss the organization of the Weissenhof Exhibition. At a dinner party in the Stuttgart hotel Marquart, it is said that Stam showed a sketch in blue pen of the chair on the back side of the wedding announcement of the German painter Willy Baumeister. German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Dutch industrial designer Willem Hendrik Gispen were also at the dinner that night.
Shortly after, Gispen, best known for his Giso lamps, unveiled a new cantilevered chair made of tubular steel, the 101 Chair. Stam, of course, was stunned and some say that it was at this time that he began working in secret workshop to prevent any more ‘plagiarism’ of his work. In 1931, the case went to court and the judge found in Gispen’s favour, stating that the 101 Chair was sufficiently different to be considered a distinct design. Unfortunately, because Thonet, the manufacturer of Stam’s design, had not filed a patent request, the case was closed, and Gispen was allowed to continue production of ‘his’ chair.
The following year, Mies, who was also attendance at that fateful dinner, exhibited a beautiful rendition of a ‘free-floating’ chair in one of the houses he designed for the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition Die Wohnung (The Home) in the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, while Stam was still working on his prototype.
Meanwhile, Hungarian architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer claimed that Stam had stolen the idea from him. The producers of the furniture designed by both Stam and Breuer fought a legal battle from 1929 to 1932 to decide which had invented the cantilever chair. Eventually, the courts decided in Stam’s favour, awarding him the European patent for the cantilever chair. While the chair’s provenance remains unclear, the court did prove the importance of legal expertise in design.
New research indicates that Stam was inspired by a cantilever tubular steel seat seen installed in a 1926 Tatra T12 two-door saloon car.