Your One Stop Shop For The Barcelona Collection
You’ve probably seen various movables on our site with the name “Barcelona” preceding the piece of furniture. This name does not signify our brand per se, it entails a larger body of work by Ludwig van der Rohe, a German-American designer who had produced these pieces after a critical event in the history of modern furniture design and city architecture: the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain.
This exposition was held for new urban development plans and architectural designs to herald in the modernism movement that quickly overtook the latter half of the 20th century. Both the furniture and architectural modernism designs that spanned from this exposition remain relevant today. This popularity largely involves designer van der Rohe’s contribution to this exposition. Firstly, not only did he design the signature Barcelona chair that was featured, but he designed the actual building that featured the exhibition itself.
Ludwig van der Rohe was a German-American architect who designed the Barcelona Pavilion, a building that showcased Germany’s designs in the 1929 International Exposition. Thus, this building is also dubbed as the German Pavilion. This building helped bring the modernist creation of a simple construction made of an extravagant material to the forefront. The German Pavilion thereby inspired other important buildings such as the Capel Manor House in Kent, Britain which is regarded as one of Britain’s first pieces of implemented modernist architecture.
Getting back to furniture, the German Pavilion premiered van der Rohe’s preeminent Barcelona chair. This chair is most responsible for giving rise to van der Rohe’s international fame and status as the founding father of modernism. After the success of the Barcelona Chair, Mies van der Rohe went on to create a line of Barcelona products, such as the Barcelona Daybed, the Barcelona Ottoman, and the Barcelona Table, all of which we supply excellent reproductions of here at Barcelona Designs. Check out more about each product here:
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