Radical German design thinking in the 1920s focused on social improvement, and furniture designers experimented with designs that would suit the new compact workers' housing being built in several cities. The Bauhaus was not the only design school exploring these ideas but it was the most famous. Erich Dieckmann, who designed this chair, was a student at the Bauhaus between 1921 and 1925, and the influence of his peer, Marcel Breuer, is evident in the intersection of lines and planes in this chair. In 1925 the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau but Dieckmann remained and headed the furniture workshop at the renamed Bauhochschule. Shortly afterwards, he designed this chair as part of a modular range of furniture, intended to be manufactured using machined standard components.