His use of strip steel was uncommon, but its relatively heavy weight enabled him here to engineer the chair’s striking scissors-shaped base. Although his furniture was at first produced only in limited editions, it inaugurated a new style, as did the glass-topped table with the visible cross- frame and the chaise longue with its row of parallel bulges. The importance of his furniture is underlined by the many knock-off products, by the originals’ successful re-marketing and the continuation of his ideas by prominent designers like Franco Albini or Poul Kjaerholm, and even the anti-designers from Archizoom. Mies von der Rohe is usually named in connection with the Bauhaus, but he had already developed all the essentials before he became its last director in 1930. Efforts at coming to an arrangement with the Nazi dictatorship failed. In the late 1930s, he emigrated to the USA, where he headed up the architecture department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was a much sought-after architect worldwide up until the day he died and is regarded, along with Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, as one of the grand masters of the “ International Style”.