SM05 Wire Dining Chair

Postwar Dutch living rooms were small. Construction materials were scarce. Steel wire — cheap, strong, and nearly weightless as a visual presence — offered a way out of both problems at once. Cees Braakman, who had grown up in the Pastoe factory and become its head designer by 1948, designed the SM05 in 1958. One of the first chairs built entirely from steel wire, it read as rebellious novelty then. It reads as resolved Dutch modernism now.