Everyone at the Bauhaus Sat Here

The Bauhaus is usually remembered through its famous objects: the tubular steel chair, the glass curtain wall, the typefaces without capitals. Look at the photographs of the people who actually worked there, though, and something else keeps appearing at the edge of the frame. Students in work coats, teachers in suits, the school band with its instruments, and beneath many of them the same plain three legged stool. It was not designed at the school and it carried no famous name. It came from a hardware factory in Chemnitz.

This year the timing is hard to ignore. The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and the building Walter Gropius designed for it there was inaugurated on 4 December 1926. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has been marking the centenary since September 2025 under the motto To the Core, a programme that runs until December 2026. A hundred years on, the stool that furnished those rooms is in production again.

Its maker was Karl Robert Wagner, a trained locksmith who grew up poor and travelled through Europe as a journeyman before returning to Chemnitz. In the late nineteenth century the city was known as the Manchester of Saxony, a centre of textiles and mechanical engineering. In 1888, with 400 marks he had saved, Wagner bought tools and a lathe and set up his own hardware factory. The name was a contraction of his own: Robert Wagner Chemnitz, Rowac. The first products were window latches and openers, then fittings, crates for breweries and dairies, tool cabinets and, increasingly, furniture for the factory floor.

The stool that made the name arrived in 1909. Shown at the Leipzig trade fair that year, the Model I is described by the company as the world's first seat made of riveted steel plate. Its construction rewards a close look. Each leg is a strip of cold rolled steel bent into a U profile that widens towards the top, so that the material is strongest where the load arrives. Horizontal struts of angled steel brace the legs near the floor, the feet are folded from the same strip rather than added on, and the round wooden seat is screwed to an embossed steel plate. In 1920 Rowac patented a way of fixing the legs with screws, which meant the stools could travel flat and be assembled on site. The finished Model I weighs 3.8 kilograms. Rowac's own advertising put the philosophy plainly: work that can be done just as well sitting down should never be done standing up.

By the 1920s the stool was in workshops and factories across Germany, and architects had begun to specify it by name. In 1923 Max Taut chose Rowac stools for the Berlin headquarters of the German trade union federation. At the Bauhaus in Weimar they were already part of the classrooms and workshops, and when Gropius planned the new building in Dessau, he included them in the furnishing. According to Rowac, Wassily Kandinsky used the stool as a subject in his lessons in analytical drawing, and outside the classroom it served at the school's parties and with the Bauhaus band. An advertisement in a Bauhaus Dessau brochure from around 1927 states that the tried and tested Rowac stools were in use in every room of the Bauhaus.

The contrast with the furniture the school is known for is instructive. In 1925 and 1926, while he led the cabinet making workshop in Dessau, Marcel Breuer built his first chair from tubular steel after admiring the frame of a new bicycle, an experiment that set the direction of his later work, collected in Phaidon's monograph Breuer. Breuer's chair announced an idea. The Rowac stool had no need to announce anything; it was simply the most sensible seat available, bought from a catalogue and used until it wore out. It fits the Bauhaus ideal of industrial form so naturally that it is easy to forget it predates the school by a decade.

The Rowac stool had no need to announce anything; it was simply the most sensible seat available.

The company's own story ends abruptly. The Second World War brought a ban on making steel furniture, and Rowac redesigned parts of its range in wood to keep working. In 1946 the factory was expropriated in the Soviet occupation zone and turned into a state owned enterprise. The stools themselves stayed where they were, in factories and schools, for decades. Many ended on scrap heaps as plants were closed or modernised; the ones that survived were repaired, collected and eventually shown in museums.

Production resumed after more than seventy years, when Alide and Dieter Amick revived the brand. Their brief is fidelity rather than reinterpretation: the parts are made by craftsmen in the Ore Mountains, all within about 40 kilometres of Chemnitz, and the details Wagner refined are kept as they were. The Rowac Schemel Model I is offered in the finish Gropius chose for the Bauhaus, glossy black steel with a beech seat, alongside other woods and coatings.

For the centenary Rowac has gone a step further and removed the wood altogether. The Bauhaus Dessau 100 Edition is made entirely of cold rolled steel with a zinc nickel finish that protects the surface while leaving it raw in appearance. The first hundred pieces carry an engraving under the seat with the words Bauhaus Dessau 100, the year and a production number, and come with a print of a 1928 photograph of Bauhaus students on a break. The same all steel construction continues in the Model 1S, and the rest of the range is gathered in the Rowac collection.

There is something fitting about a centenary object that was never meant to be looked at. The Bauhaus building in Dessau will be a hundred years old on 4 December, and much will be written about its glass and its ideas. Look closely at the old photographs that will accompany it, and the stools are there too, as they were in 1926, holding up whoever happened to be sitting down.

Images: Courtesy of Rowac, including photography by Iona Dutz and historical images from the Rowac archive.