Rattan Seat Black Beech Wood Ash Wishbone Chair 54cm Width

Thonet No.30 Bentwood Chair-Black

The B9 Bentwood Chair, designed by August Thonet, became popular as part of a 1920s bentwood revival as architects Le Corbusier and Mart Stam used it in their buildings and environments.

The simple and unadorned bentwood design appealed to them, as did the "industrial" nature of the chair. Modernist designers saw it as a product of rigorous functionalism. Le Corbusier used the B9 bentwood chairs in his commissions as dining or desk seating as early as 1922, as well as in his Pavilion at the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts.

Concerning his choice of the bentwood chair, Corbusier wrote, "We have introduced the humble Thonet chair of steamed wood, certainly the most common of chairs.

We believe this chair, whose millions of representatives are used on the Continent and in the two Americas, possesses nobility." It is also notable that in the 1927 Deutsche Werkbund exhibition (an exhibition of 33 housing units, directed by Mies Van der Rohe, and the first gathering of architects working in the new International Style), half of the 16 architects used Michael Thonet's designed bentwood chairs.