Mart Stam was an influential Dutch architect who worked with many of the great figures of early 20th Century architecture. In furniture design, he is widely credited with creating the first cantilever chair in metal tubing. His 1924 prototype was made from straight tube sections connected by metal elbows, but his S33 Chair exhibited in 1927 appeared as single-piece construction without visible joints. Both Marcel Breuer and Mies Van der Rohe introduced similar designs in 1928, which led to various lawsuits that culminated in Stam's being credited for the original designs, although Bruer's chairs ultimately saw far more commercial success. Stam's central career as an architect took him from Holland to the German Werkbund, where his colleagues included Walter Gropius, Peter Behrens, and Le Corbusier. In the early 1930s his belief in the power of technology and design to reshape society led him to work in the Soviet Union, but by 1934 he had returned to the Netherlands. He continued to work and teach in Dresden, Berlin and Amsterdam before eventually retiring to Switzerland.