The Dutch architect and designer Mart Stam trained at the Rijksnormaalschool voor Tekenonderwijs in Amsterdam, and then spent the years between 1919 and 1925 working in a succession of architectural practices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Zuerich and Thun. From 1925 until 1928 he was a member of the Opbouw group of architects in Holland, and he also collaborated with Emil Roth and Hans Schmidt in the publication of the architectural magazine ABC in Zuerich. Stam's architectural interest was in town planning and housing rather than individual masterpieces, and he worked in this field in Russia from 1930 to 1934, in Rotterdam from 1941 and on the rebuilding of Dresden in 1949. He was a guest lecturer at the Bauhaus in 1928, and director of the Amsterdam Institute of Applied Art from 1939 until 1948, of the Dresden Academe der Bildenden Kuenste from 1948 to1950 and of the Kunstakademie Berlin-Weissensee from 1950 to 1953. Stam's reputation as a chair designer rests almost exclusively on one design - the S33 -which was the first tubular steel cantilever chair. The idea originated from a chair made for his wife from straight lengths of tube and gas-titters' “L” joints, which he described to his fellow collaborators in the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition at a preliminary conference in November 1926. Excited by the interest which the idea aroused, both Stam and Mies van der Rohe went away and produced cantilever chair designs within weeks of each other, although it was Mies who managed to get the patent for the principle of the resilient cantilever structure. Stam believed that “it would be wrong to design our chair larger or heavier than they need be, or for reasons of display. All they do is meet our requirements, that is to say, they should be light and mobile”. The S 33, with its economical use of materials and reductive simplicity, is both functional and elegant and a perfect expression of these principles