1899 – 1986
Mart Stam was one of the key figures of Classical Modernism. Born on August 5, 1899, in Purmerend, the Netherlands, he developed an early and consistently modern understanding of design: industrial, serially producible, and always positioned at the intersection of function, construction, and social responsibility. His thinking extended from furniture and lighting to architecture and urban planning.
Stam gained international recognition with his terraced house design for the Weißenhof Estate in Stuttgart (1927), where he set new standards for modern housing. Even more iconic, however, was one of his furniture designs: the cantilever chair, first presented in 1926. Developed through experiments with gas pipes, the chair dispensed with rear legs and thus broke new ground not only in formal terms but also in its structural concept. The cantilever chair became a symbol of the rational, forward-looking language of Modernism.
Stam’s path into the avant-garde was anything but conventional. After completing his training as a draughtsman in an architectural office, he refused military service in 1920 and—according to the practice in the Netherlands at the time—was imprisoned for the duration of the service period. Following his release, he left the country and moved to Berlin, where he quickly connected with the international avant-garde.
In Berlin, Stam established close relationships with Bauhaus figures such as Marcel Breuer and El Lissitzky and later became a teacher at the Bauhaus himself. During this period, his design principles crystallized: clarity of construction, the rejection of superfluous ornament, and the use of new materials such as tubular steel as an expression of a rational, future-oriented approach to design. Against the backdrop of the social upheavals following the First World War, Stam understood design as a response to the need for order, functionality, and social renewal.
His lighting designs—such as the MSW 27 wall light produced by TECNOLUMEN—reflect this philosophy in exemplary fashion: reduced, structurally precise, and at the same time atmospheric. For Mart Stam, design was never a question of style, but a cultural responsibility—an ambition that continues to resonate today.
