While Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chairs were a daring departure from traditional wood design furniture, this radical idea was sparked by Breuer's familiar bicycle handlebars. Mass production, he said, ...made me interested in polished metal, in shiny and impeccable lines in space, as new components of our interiors.

While Mart Stam and Mies van der Rohe had created cantilevered chairs using steel tubes, they were rigid and awkard in use in their first edition.

I considered such polished and curved lines not only symbolic of our modern technology but actually to be technology.

Drawing upon this image of shiny and impeccable lines in space Marcel Breuer designed his famous Wassilly Chair in 1927 for Wassilly Kandinsky while both were in residence at the Bauhaus.

Marcel Breuer subsequently designed a range of tubular metal design furniture that had singular advantages-affordability, hygiene and an inherent resilience.

Marcel Breuer's next breakthrough was his design of the cantilevered chair.

Breuer's brilliant insight was to use non-reinforced steel tubing, thereby creating a free-swinging chair that approached his de-materialist ideal of "sitting on columns of air."

The cantilevered chair was his greatest commercial success and its design continued to evolve: the frame became lighter, the seat and back more pliant, the lines softer.

In 1928 Marcel Breuer left the Bauhaus and moved to Berlin and then to England in 1935 when the Nazis made it impossible for anyone who had been a part of the Bauhaus - a "hotbed of Bolshevism" -to practice architecture.

In 1937 Marcel Breuer joined Walter Gropius in his architectural practice and also at Harvard as a professor. Breuer moved to New York in 1946 to found his own architectural firm, and like Le Corbusier, choose concrete as his medium of choice.