German Industrial Side Chair Model Xi Legendary from Rowac, 1930

Rowac (acronym for Robert Wagner Chemnitz) was a metal processing company in Chemnitz founded by Carl Robert Wagner in 1888 that produced furniture for industrial use. Carl Robert Wagner is considered the inventor of the first industrially manufactured steel stool, which was widely used in the 1920s. The stools and chairs were built in different sizes and model variants. It is particularly worth mentioning that in 1923 the administration building of the General German Trade Union Confederation in Berlin-Mitte, built by the architects Max Taut and Franz Hoffmann, was equipped with Rowac stools and in 1926 the stools found space in teaching rooms and workshops in Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau. The design of the Rowac stool corresponds to the functionalist ideal that was represented by the Bauhaus in Germany in the interwar period, and that practicality and practicality should therefore be the focus of aesthetic interest. The fact that Walter Gropius chose the Rowac stool for the Bauhaus building is probably due to its technically sophisticated and at the same time simple construction.

Today, Rowac stools, chairs and cupboards in particular are traded as antiques and are part of international design collections such as: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Vienna Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Chemnitz Industrial Museum, chair collection of the Institute for Art History, Architecture and Urbanism at the Delft University of Technology.