Mart Stam

Mart Stam (5 August 1899 – 21 February 1986) was a Dutch architect, urban planner, and furniture designer. Stam was extraordinarily well-connected, and his career intersects with important moments in the history of 20th-century European architecture, including the invention of the cantilever chair, teaching at the Bauhaus, contributions to the Weissenhof Estate, the Van Nelle Factory, (an important modernist landmark in Rotterdam), buildings for Ernst May's New Frankfurt housing estates, followed by work in the USSR with the idealistic May Brigade, to teaching positions in Amsterdam and post-war East Germany. Upon return to the Netherlands he contributed to postwar reconstruction and finally retired, (or rather self-isolated), in Switzerland, where he died. His design philosophy was inspired by both functionalism and scientific communism and his style of design is in line with the New Objectivity, an art movement formed during the depression in 1920s Germany, as a counter-movement and an outgrowth of expressionist architecture.