Mies and More - Designed by Architects

When architects extend their design activities beyond the creation of buildings themselves to consumer goods such as furniture, light fittings or living accessories in general, there are normally two reasons for this: on the one hand the design principles of an architectural concept are, in the tradition of the work of art as an integral design, transferred to objects from the interior of the building such as furniture, in order to create an overall harmonic unit (Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerrit T. Rietveld, Norman Foster). The second source of motivation is the experimentation with new production techniques and materials, in which the limits of what is possible are explored on smaller objects. An example of this is the tubular steel furniture of the Bauhaus period by Mart Stam, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, or the experiments with shaped wood by Alvar Aalto.