“The static architecture of the Egyptian pyramids has been overcome: our architecture rolls, swims, flies. It will sway and float in the air. I want to help to invent and form this new reality.”

Anyone who enters the grounds of the firm which was shaped by the english architecture couple Alison and Peter Smithson will find themselves in a sculpture park. In front the manufactory, then the delicate Wewerka Pavilion, across three museum halls looking like glass combs: A steel work, painted white on the inside and a fiery red on the outside, with uniquely high support and chairs positioned at their tips. “The Ten Chairs of Lauenförde” is the name of the installation that corresponds with a red lattice tower, the entrance to the “Tecta Landscape”.

Daniela Drescher opens up the museums halls this morning. Here lies the collection compiled by Axel Bruchhäuser all about the cantilever chair that is today carefully continued by his nephew Christian Drescher and his wife Daniela Drescher. “Master forms of the modern era” stand beside “Anonymous Aristocrats” – almost 100 years of design history that have a connection to the firm Tecta are being told.

“This is a bit like a free flight hall for seating furniture,” explains Daniela Drescher in the first hall, “colourful and slightly chaotic at first glance. But when considered more closely one quickly determines that there are many similarities,” says the museum director, “and hence Peter Smithson’s thought of the ‘families of chairs’ comes to fruition. The collection resembles a large family get-together, where each chair has its own story and is connected to the others in a special way.” In this way, new products join the historical exhibition pieces. Here, the universe of the firm Tecta presents itself in a colourful and timely interplay.

The cantilever chair collection documents the development of the “backless chair” from the rigid cantilever construction to the springy cantilever chair. The Jean Prouvé archive illustrates the design principles of the French engineer and architect with over 100 originals. The collection of original models of modernism includes original chairs ranging from Schinkel’s cast-iron chairs to Wewerka’s designs from the 1980s. The Anonymous Aristocrats collection contains finds by unknown designers that are in no way inferior to those of their famous contemporaries. The Alison and Peter Smithson Archive and the Wewerka Studio contain numerous designs, prototypes and series products.

A piece of furniture that went down in history: the cantilever chair. A technical revolution and a symbol for the new era. The setting out and the floating that animated artists and architects of the 20’s the same.

For decades Axel Bruchhäuser, founder of the cantilever collection, compiled the development of the cantilever chair: “For me it was the instinctive search for the master form of the steel tube chair,” he says. “I was interested to find out the idea out of which the cantilever chair arose.” The name “cantilever chair” was substantiated by Heinz Rasch, one of the idea givers, with the architectural construction of timbered houses that stretch beyond the top floor to carry a gazebo. This is how the name for a piece of furniture that makes do and appears completely weightless with merely two instead of four legs came to be.

Alvar Aalto, Aagaard Andersen, Alfred Arndt, Marcel Breuer, Ray und Charles Eames, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, El Lissitzky, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Heinz Rasch, Gerrit Rietveld, Alison & Peter Smithson, Mart Stam, Vladimir Tatlin, Guiseppe Terragni, Stefan Wewerka, Sergius Ruegenberg.