Mart Stam Furnitures

Mart Stam

The Dutch architect and urban planner Mart Stam was born in Purmered just before the turn of the century.
In his early years, he studied drawing at the Royal School for Advanced Studies in Amsterdam. Securing employment with the famed J. J. P. Oud, he became a strong contributor to the firm of Grandre Moliere Verhagen & Kok, and to its Functionalist leanings.
In the mid twenties Stam traveled and worked in both Germany and Switzerland, and in 1927 he landed in Dessau, where he studied urban planning at the Bauhaus. But prior to this period at the Bauhaus, Mart Stam produced one of the great cornerstones of 20th Century seating design. In 1924, he developed a chair for his wife made from lengths of straight tube and gas fitter’s joints. He struggled with this design concept for two years, and in 1926 announced it to his peers at the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung Exhibition. This marked the birth of the tubular steel cantilevered chair, prompted Mies Van der Rohe to develop his famed cantilevered chairs, and inspired Marcel Breuer to develop perhaps the most well known cantilevered chair design in the world today.
Stam stayed on at the Bauhaus as a guest lecturer, and in 1939 he became the Director of Applied Art at the Amsterdam Institute of Art.
In 1950 he was appointed the Directorship of the Advanced Institute of Art in Berlin.
Throughout his career, Mart Stam produced a range of substantial architectural projects. The Theosophical Church in Amsterdam, the Van Nelle Tobacco Factory in Rotterdam, and the famed “Cloud Pillar” project are among his most well known. But, it was for one cantilevered chair design produced early in his career that Mart Stam will best be remembered.