Chaise Longue

After creating groundbreaking tubular steel furniture at the Bauhaus design school in Germany, Marcel Breuer moved to London and began a brief yet highly productive association with Jack Pritchard, an architect and promoter of modern design in Great Britain. Recognizing that metal furniture was likely too stark for British taste, Prichard’s company Isokon Furniture developed furniture in bent plywood that was inspired by pioneering work in this material by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. Breuer’s lounge chair design for Isokon capitalized on the flexibility of plywood to replace legs and arms with a dynamic network of narrow wood ribbons for the chair’s arm rests, back, and sleigh-like base.