Four Seasons Barstool

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe  1958

In the mid-1950s the Bronfman family, owners of the Joseph E. Seagram and Sons Corporation, decided to commemorate the company’s centennial by building a modern office tower on Park Avenue in New York. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was selected as architect for the Seagram Building and Philip Johnson was named as his cooperating local partner.

Johnson’s most memorable contribution to the project was the design of the interiors of The Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor of the building. Johnson, a disciple of Mies, faithfully specified the modern master’s furniture throughout the interior. A Barcelona table and chairs were used in the lobby, and the flat-bar Brno chair was developed for use in the two large dining rooms.

In the bar room, Johnson specified a stool of Miesian style and proportion. No prior drawings by Mies exist for this design and it is thought that it was most likely a collaborative effort by Johnson and Mies. The restaurant opened in November of 1959. In 2004, Carl Magnusson developed the stool for production in Italy; it was introduced in 2006.

Regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s ‘less-is-more’ approach to design was the gold standard for many generations of modern architecture. His legendary career started humbly at his father’s stonemasonry business, giving him an early appreciation of material and structure. From there he apprenticed with furniture designer Bruno Paul in Berlin before joining the office of Peter Behrens, an architect and painter at the forefront of the modern movement.

In 1912, Mies established his own office in Berlin. Through furniture, residential projects and extraordinary, yet unrealized concepts for skyscrapers, he gained recognition as a leader of the German modern movement. As such, he was selected to design the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona.

Mies served as Vice President of the Deutsher Werkbund and Director of the Bauhaus from 1930 until it closed in 1933. He immigrated to the United States in 1938 to become the director of architecture at the Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology). From his Chicago-based practice, Mies designed a portfolio of buildings that changed the face of American institutional architecture ― the most notable examples being the IIT campus and the Seagram Building in New York.