Lily Reich, Co - Designer of the Barcelona Chair

The Mies Barcelona Chair was designed by Lilly Reich and Mies.

An Icon of modern classic design, an international symbol of good taste, perhaps the classiest chair you can own.

The Barcelona Chair is all of these things and more. It is so much a part of the modern interior landscape that we might be forgiven for feeling a certain familial loyalty to it and to its designer. Mies Van Der Rohe is celebrated the world over for his designs. His insight genius and his courage have been heralded around the world... and yet... there is a dark and unpleasant omission in this glittering version of events

Mies Van Der Rohe's Barcelona Chair was not designed by Mies alone! Multiple records state conclusively that this honor should be shared by his co-designer a female architect and designer by the name of Lilly Reich 1885 - 1947.

Confined to traditionally acceptable female careers Lilly Reich began her working life as a designer of textiles and women's apparel - but in 1912 she joined the Deutsch Werkbund - an organization often credited with the first seeds of modern design - and the precursor to the Bauhaus School She worked in the studio of the famous Bauhaus designer Josef Hoffman and by 1915 she had developed a professional reputation sufficient to be given increasing levels of responsibility at the Werkbund.In 1920 She became the first female to be made director of the Deutsch Werkbund. It was also through the Werkbund that Reich met Mies. In the twelve years leading up to 1938 when Mies emigrated to the US, they were inseparable. Even after Mies left Germany Lily Reich continued to manage his personal and business affairs until her own death at age 62 in 1947. She was at least as skilled a designer as Mies, she was probably more articulate than he. Those who knew them regard her as the detail and execution person, and Mies as the broad conceptualist. Reserved Mies rarely solicited anybody's comments but was always eager to discuss design with her.

Together they designed the Barcelona Chair. But history has played a cruel trick and as forgotten Lilly Reich. Many people maintain that this was never Mies' doing, that he never denied her contribution, but his quiet nature did not make him a vocal supporter either. Born and raised in a chauvinistic society Lilly herself was disinclined to self promotion - and publicly played only a traditionally supportive female role.

Today Lilly's many fans and chroniclers like to point out that Mies' fame as a furniture designer and exhibition designer were almost entirely attributable to the works that he produced during his years with Lilly, and that after he moved to the US in 1939 (without Lilly) he produced no successful furniture designs at all.

Lilly Reich was born on the 16th of June 1885 in Berlin. Her career as a modernist designer began in textile and fashion design. This particular choice of career focus may in all likely hood have been a product of prejudicial and altogether sexist cultural norms and expectations of the time. Vocations considered to be suitable for, and within the intellectual grasp of a women were few and far between - and this was one area where women were accepted.

However her fascination with contrasting textures and innovative use of fabrics no doubt began here, and was to be highly pertinent in her later career as a furniture designer, and to her work as a teacher of interior design at the Bauhaus School some years later.

At the age of 23 she moved to Vienna where she worked in the studio of Joseph Hoffman, a renowned Mid Century modernist designer, responsible for such furniture designs as the Kubus armchair and sofa.

In 1912 she joined a government sponsored organization called the werkbund, dedicated to the promotion of German products and designs. This was to be a lasting passion and reoccurring theme in her career. She opened her own design studio two years later at the age of 29, soon developing a good professional reputation. So good in fact that 6 years later in 1920 she was made the first female director of the Werkbund. It was her responsibility to plan and curate design exhibits intended to promote German designers. Including one just before the war at the Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey.

It was also through their mutual involvement with the Werkbund that Reich met Mies Van Der Rohe, the famous architect and designer. For thirteen years between 1925 and 1938, when Mies emigrated to the USA, they were partners both personally and professionally.

Reich is credited with having co-designed some of Mies' most famous works - his Barcelona Chair, also known as the pavilion chair and the Brno chair.

Albert Pheiffer, Vice President of Design and Management at Knoll, has been researching and lecturing on Reich for some time and he points out that:

"It became more than a coincidence that Mies's involvement and success in exhibition design began at the same time as his personal relationship with Reich". and

"It is interesting to note that Mies did not fully develop any contemporary furniture successfully before or after his collaboration with Reich."

In 1930 Mies became the director of the Bauhaus School of architecture and design, and Reich joined the faculty as one of the first female teachers. She taught interior design and furniture design there until the late 1930s.

In 1939 Lilly visited Mies in the US but unfortunately did not stay, shortly after returning to Germany war broke out. In 1943 her studio was bombed. Luckily for us when the bombing started she had moved 4000 drawings including 900 of her own and 3100 of Mies' to a farmhouse outside of Berlin to protect them.

Reich was drafted into a forced labor organization from 1943 to 1945. After her release and before her untimely death in 1947 she was instrumental in reviving the Werkbund, although it did not receive full legal status, until three years after her death.