The architect and designer Robert Mallet-Stevens was one of the first French artists to recognise that the traditional French virtues of high quality craftsmanship and artistic taste could no longer compete with the “modern” qualities of Austrian and German design, introduced to France through the exhibition by a group of Munich artists at the Salon d'Automne in 1910. By 1913, in his salon de musique exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, he had introduced a style based on clear lines and geometrical forms which was to be the basis of his Parisian houses and department stores of the 1920s and 1930s. His work for the Paris exhibition of 1925 - a winter garden for the Habitation Moderne, the entrance hall of the Ambassade Francaise and the Pavillon de Tourisme, with its simple, cubic form and reinforced concrete tower - showed the functional simplicity which was to characterise French avant-garde architecture of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1930 Mallet-Stevens became the first president of the Union des Artistes Modernes, a group of architects and designers united in their opposition to the rejection of new materials and reliance on expensive, band-made furniture of the Société Des Artistes Décorateurs. Like his fellow members, Mallet-Stevens believed that the Interior of the future should be suited to the needs of contemporary life, with functional simplicity as its major criterion. His chair designs are usually in tubular steel, sometimes upholstered in fabrics of cubist inspiration, and are characterised by simple lines and sombre colours. Although made originally for his own architectural commissions, they were designed with the possibility of economical mass-production in mind.