The bent tubular steel has been heralded as the symbol of modernity in furniture design ever since the radical innovations designed by Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer in the 1920s. The industiral technique completely innovated house-hold design, and matured to an undisputed iconic element of design vocabulary. The Straw Chair pays hommage to the classic Cantilever Chair by visually and physically challenging tradition and implementing a contro-versial detail into the canon of the design: The kinked tube. Relying for support on the properties of the material from which it is made, non-reinforced tubular steel, the „Straw“ series exposes a visual fragility using the kinked tubes.
The kink, being the most immediate way to deform a tube, revolutionises the esthetic appearance of tubular steel furniture. The disciplined character of the Bauhaus classic idiom is contradicted, the objects seem spontaneous as if folded by hand.
