Marcel Breuer, the Wassily chair and the ‘frozen’ Bauhaus modernism after 1945

Abstract

Donatella Cacciola teaches design history, theories of design, and in the Masters programme in Museum Studies at the University of Bonn. She studied World Heritage Studies in Parma and received her PhD from the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture. Methodologically, she focuses her work strongly on archival sources (inter alia she worked and researched for several months in the archive of Dino Gavina, Bologna). In her publications (since 2003) she has identified and reconstructed several pieces of furniture (1926, 1961/1962) designed by Marcel Breuer. Other topics are the scientific relevance of re-issued furniture designs; medial reflection of design history in illustrated magazines and in advertising. She has also been a book reviewer for Domus, and has been participating in international conferences since 2004. Her most recent publications as a co-author include: Atlas of Furniture Design (edited by Vitra Design Museum, 2019) as well as contributions (all published in 2021) on the hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus (full paper at XIV. Bauhaus-Kolloquium, Weimar; full proceedings of the conference ‘Bauhaus-Paradigmen’, University of Siegen) about the domesticity of so-called ‘modern classic’ furniture design in illustrated printed media from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century (full paper of the conference Wohnseiten, University of Bremen). She is currently working on the idea of DIY and on David Carson’s œuvre (recent and retrospective).