Stam was a honorary member of the Bauhaus in 1928, and was director of the Amsterdam Institute of Applied Art from 1939 to 1948, of the Dresden Akademie der Bildenden Kunste from 1948 to 1950, and of the Kunstakademie Berlin-Weissensee from 1950 to 1953. Stam shot to fame as a chair designer almost exclusively as the result of one design, his - S 33 – which was the first \" cantilever chair\" made of tubular steel. The original ideal being based on a chair that he built for his wife, made of gas piping sections and “L” shaped fittings, which he described at the preliminary conference of the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung in November 1926.