If your internet overlaps even a little bit with mine, you’ve seen a Cesca chair (also known as a B32). The cantilevered cane-and-chrome chair is all over the place: in trendy homes, in movies and on TV shows, even tattooed on people’s bodies. But Instagram’s favorite chair is not exactly new.
It was designed nearly 100 years ago by an architect named Marcel Breuer, while he was a student at the Bauhaus, the famed German art school. This somewhat unassuming two-legged chair is the realization of a manifesto’s worth of utopian ideals about design and functionality. So maybe it’s no surprise it has somehow remained in fashion for decades: It’s a design icon. And just a really, really nice-looking chair.
This video is part of our By Design series, all about the intersection of design and technology. You can watch more of this series here.
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