It was designed for the King of Spain to sit on during the Barcelona World's Fair in 1929. When the designer, Mies Van Der Rohe, found a casual passerby sitting on one, he ordered him towards the more appropriate benches which he'd designed outside for people like him.

The elitist image has never worn off. Expensive, austere, it's as much a work of architecture in its way as Mies's influential if stark buildings. It's a chair to admire rather than settle back in. It's still very much in production, an icon with its roots in the Bauhaus and the heroic age of modern design.

Narrated by Jancis Robinson
with Penny Sparke, Richard Seymour, Dick Powell and Arthur Drexler

(Ceefax subtitles)