On June 1, 1932, the highest court in Germany ruled that a chair was a work of art.

The man it handed the copyright to had filed no patent, registered no design, and wasn’t even a party to the lawsuit. His entire stake was one percent of future revenue. He had also spent years arguing that good design should never come from an individual artist’s inspiration, and the court granted him a monopoly on exactly the individuality he’d spent his career denying.

The cantilever chair is a chair with no back legs. It started with a sketch on the back of a wedding announcement at a Stuttgart hotel in 1926, ran through the Bauhaus furniture workshop, Mies van der Rohe’s patent, and a Berlin businessman who worked out that owning a design was worth more than making one.

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