The Cross Check Chair is named after a hockey infraction in which a player holds their stick vertically and blocks another player, illegally checking them. The name is also a reference to the seat of this chair, which is made out of interwoven maple plywood strips, creating a check pattern, and a double meaning of...

The Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer is perhaps best known for his tubular steel B3 (‘Wassily’) and B32 (‘Cesca’) chairs, which he designed while leading the carpentry workshop at the Bauhaus, after it moved from Weimar to Dessau, Germany, in 1925.  Legend has it his experiments with tubular steel were inspired by his bicycle. Breuer, who was...