I mean there are thousands of beautiful and esthetically pleasing chair designs, so why is this one considered so iconic?And the knoll's price of $4000+ for a chair?? RIDICULOUS!
You have to look at the chair in its original context. Look at other furniture from 1929 and you won't see anything else like the Barcelona chair. Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich were pioneers for designing this chair from heir choice of materials, minimal lines, construction (stainless steel had just been developed). When properly built to original specs, it takes a lot of high quality materials and skilled labor to produce -- around 28 hours of labor is involved. $3900 is not much for 28 hours of labor considering all the sales people, craftsmen, managers, suppliers, delivery people, laborers needed to build and move one chair. Plus all those people require work buildings, offices, insurance, cars/trucks, phones... etc. $3900 only gets you the cheaper model, there is one made of higher grade materials at $6,000. When the chair was originally designed, it did not sell for that dollar amount, the price has been adjusted for inflation, but it still was not cheap back then, it is and will always be an exclusive item. Surely, the chair can be mass-produced by machine now and sold for cheap at Target, but then it wouldn't be an exclusive item anymore. BMW and Lexus could cheapen their products for everyone to have, but then, why bother? There are Corollas and Ford Focus for the ones who don't want to/can't spend the money. By the way, it's not a simple chair at all, it's very complex, it just looks simple because in the past 7 decades, other chair designers were inspired by that iconic design. It;s iconic because it was ground-breaking, an original thought at the time. To say it is simple is to say paper is simple... yes it sort of is, but it took humans millions of years to get around to inventing it.
