Marcel Breuer

(click to enlarge)
Marcel Breuer, 1969 (credit: Tamas Breuer)

(born May 21, 1902, Pécs, Hung. — died July 1, 1981, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Hungarian-U.S. architect and furniture designer. He studied and then taught at the Bauhaus (1920 – 28), where in 1925 he invented the famous tubular steel chair. He moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1937 to teach at Harvard University and practice with Walter Gropius. Their synthesis of Bauhaus internationalism with New England regional wood-frame building greatly influenced domestic architecture throughout the U.S. He was one of the most influential exponents of the International Style. His major architectural commissions include UNESCO's Paris headquarters (1953 – 58) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1966).

For more information on Marcel Lajos Breuer, visit Britannica.com.

(b P?cs, 21 May 1902; d New York, 1 July 1981). American furniture designer and architect of Hungarian birth. In 1920 he took up a scholarship at the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste, Vienna, but he left almost immediately to find a job in an architect's office. A few weeks later he enrolled at the Bauhaus at Weimar on the recommendation of the Hungarian architect Fred Forbat (1897-1972). Breuer soon became an outstanding student in the carpentry workshop, which he led in its endeavours to find radically innovative forms for modern furniture. In practice, this meant rejecting traditional forms, which were considered symbolic of bourgeois life. The results of these experiments were initially as idiosyncratic as those of other workshops at Weimar, including the adoption of non-Western forms, for example the African chair (1921; see Rowland, 1990, p. 66) and an aggressively castellated style inspired by Constructivism.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The Hungarian-born American architect Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) was among the most influential architects and teachers of the 20th century. From his early furniture design to his later massive concrete building forms, Breuer remained a bold innovator.

Marcel Breuer, born in Pécs, Hungary, on May 21, 1902, moved to Vienna when he was 18 years old. He enrolled at the Art Academy with the intention of becoming a painter, but his stay lasted less than six months, during which time he became thoroughly disillusioned with the eclectic approach, which stressed combination of various historical styles. Breuer decided instead to learn a craft, and he enrolled in the recently established school of design, building, and craftsmanship called the Bauhaus, in Weimar.

Within four years, inspired and influenced by the school's director, Walter Gropius, Breuer had become head of the furniture department. His deep interest in inexpensive, standardized, modular-unit furniture led to the design, in 1925, of the first chromium-plated, bent, steel-tube furniture. That same year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, where Breuer was commissioned to design all the furniture for the newly built Gropius buildings. A product of Breuer's experimental designs of this period was the S-shaped cantilevered chair of 1928, which became one of the most widely used commercial chairs in the world.

Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928 to set up his own practice as an architect and interior designer in Berlin. There he built a number of radically designed houses while working on several theoretical concepts. Among these latter was a plan for a hospital which proposed a multi-storied structure of reinforced concrete in a series of cantilevered steps.

When forced to flee Germany in 1933, Breuer went to London and entered a partnership with F. R. S. Yorke. But in 1937, at the invitation of Gropius, Breuer went to the United States. Gropius was by this time chairman of the architecture department at Harvard University, and he asked Breuer to join him on the faculty. The two former Bauhaus colleagues also formed an architectural partnership in Cambridge, MA. Thus did Breuer influence a generation of young designers, both as a teacher, training such men as Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, and John Johansen, and as a successful practicing architect.

In collaboration with Gropius, Breuer designed a small vacation house for Henry C. Chamberain (1940) in Wayland, MA. Here the austere planar shapes of the Bauhaus style were modified by the use of a wood-frame exterior, a variation in keeping with native New England building traditions. Another interesting feature of Breuer's houses of the 1940s was the "butterfly roof" silhouette, visible in the Geller House (1945), Lawrence, NY. Breuer also continued to introduce local-regional touches into his designs, and he worked extensively with wooden siding and native stone.

After World War II Breuer moved to New York City and reestablished himself in private practice. During this period he designed several domestic buildings, including his own home in New Canaan, CT (1947), which is characterized by a wooden frame exterior hovering over a recessed basement. In 1953 Breuer, along with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss, was chosen to design the new headquarters for UNESCO in Paris. The resulting Y-shaped, eight-storied Secretariat building is constructed of reinforced concrete; its curved facade is one way in which the building is successfully adapted to a difficult site.

Breuer received commissions for a number of American university buildings, including a dormitory at Vassar College (1951), Poughkeepsie, NY, and an auditorium for Sarah Lawrence College (1954), Bronxville, NY. In both buildings he combined the precision of the International Style with informal use of native materials. He also designed a church for St. John's Benedictine Abbey (1953-1961), Collegeville, MN, whose most striking feature is a monumental, detached concrete belfry set up on piers.

During the 1960s Breuer's buildings became more expressive, principally through the more daring use of concrete. In his Research Center for IBM-France (1960-1962) at the Gaude Var, Breuer employed a double-Y-shaped plan using massive concrete forms to impart a sculptural quality. His dramatically cantilevered Lecture Hall (1961) on New York University's Bronx campus makes similar use of roughly textured concrete, as does his design for the Whitney Museum of American Art (1966) in New York City. Breuer also designed the headquarters of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in Washington, D.C.

Breuer retired from active practice in 1976 and died five years later, in late 1981.

Further Reading

Marcel Breuer: New Buildings and Projects (1970) by Tician Papachristou discusses Breuer's late work and has selections from his writings and opinions. An early work on Breuer is Peter Blake, Marcel Breuer, Architect and Designer (1949). A more useful work is a collection of Breuer's designs and projects, Marcel Breuer: Buildings and Projects, 1921-1961, edited by Cranston Jones (1962). An impressive collection of his work is David Masello Architecture Without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard, W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. Breuer is showcased in Ezra Stoller, "The Architectural Landscape, " ART news, November 1987, 160-166.

A noted Modernist designer and architect closely associated with the German Bauhaus, Breuer was a pioneer in the field of tubular steel furniture design in the 1920s and 1930s, following on from a period in which he concentrated on innovative and experimental wooden furniture. Subsequently, his architectural and design work became widely influential in Europe and the United States and was widely promoted through manufacture, publication, and exhibition.

Originally from Hungary, after a brief period at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna Breuer enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. There he encountered many avant-garde ideas, particularly those relating to Constructivism and De Stijl with their characteristic Modernist manipulation of abstract forms. The structural characteristics of his wooden furniture of the early 1920s showed the influence of Dutch designers Gerrit Rietveld and Theo van Doesburg. Breuer was employed as a head of the furniture workshops at the Bauhaus from 1925 to 1928, a period in which he also began designing tubular steel furniture, influenced—it is maintained—by bicycle design. He was responsible for the design of much of the furniture for the new Bauhaus buildings when the academy moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. An early example of his tubular steel design was his Model B3 chair of 1925 (later known as the Wassily chair, after his Bauhaus colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky). With its clearly articulated planes of stretched black fabric for seat, back rest, and arms, set within a light standard-strength tubular steel frame, it almost resembled a piece of Constructivist sculpture. Nonetheless, through its use of new materials and contemporary forms, it was in fact a striking Modernist metaphor for the traditional club armchair. Also using tubular steel he designed modular storage systems and, from 1927 onwards, the Standard Möbel firm of Berlin manufactured a number of his furniture designs. In 1928 he moved to Berlin to practise as an architect but worked principally on interiors and furniture and it was not until 1932 that he realized his first architectural work, the Harnischmacher House in Wiesbaden. From 1932 to 1934 he was mainly based in Switzerland, where he produced a number of furniture designs for Wöhnbedarf in Zurich. With the help of his former Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius in 1935 he moved to Britain, where he made contact with Jack Pritchard, a founder of the Isokon Furniture Company which was committed to the production of Modernist architecture and design. Amongst his five designs for Isokon was the Long Chair of 1935-6, made from plywood and based on one of his earlier aluminium chair designs. There was also a discernible influence from the organic plywood designs of Alvar Aalto, whose work was becoming more widely known at the time. He also worked in an architectural partnership with the committed British Modernist F. R. S. Yorke. After a brief spell as Isokon's Controller of Design in 1937, he emigrated to the United States, renewing his association with Walter Gropius on the architectural staff at Harvard University and the establishment of a joint architectural practice in Cambridge, Massachussets (which lasted until 1941). During these years he also continued to design plywood furniture, including commissions for Bryn Mawr College (1938) and the Pennsylvania Pavilion at the New York World's Fair of 1939, and the International Competition for Low Cost Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1948. During the 1950s his architectural practice flourished, leading to the formation of Marcel Breuer Associates in 1957, which won a number of important commissions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1963-6).

American (from 1944) Modernist architect and designer, born in Pécs, Hungary. He became Director of the furniture department at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1924, and invented a series of furniture-designs using structural frames of bent-steel tubes finished in chrome: these were realized as furniture in the Dessau Bauhaus. In 1928 he set up an architectural practice in Berlin, producing the Harnischmacher House at Wiesbaden, and (with the Roth brothers) the elegant Doldertal Apartments, Zürich (1935–6), for Giedion. In 1935 he moved to London and a partnership with F. R. S. Yorke, but crossed the Atlantic to Harvard in 1937, where he became Gropius's partner (1937–40), and also worked as associate professor with Gropius, numbering among his students Philip Johnson, and Paul Rudolph. After setting up an office in Cambridge, MA (1941), in 1946 he moved to NYC. His career as an independent architect only really began after 1945, when he designed several private houses in New England (including his own at New Canaan, CT (1947)), in which rubble and timber played no small part. With Nervi and Zehrfuss he worked on the designs of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1952–8) and, with Abraham Elzas (1907–95), on the De Bijenkorf Store, Rotterdam (1953–7). Stylistically his work became less International Modernist from this time, e.g St John's Abbey and University, Collegeville, MN. (1953–70, with Hamilton P. Smith (1925– ) ), and the lecture-hall, New York University, University Heights, Bronx (1956–61). Later works included the IBM Research Centre, La Gaude, Var, France (1961 with Robert F. Gatje (1927– ) ), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (with H. Smith, 1963–6). He published a prolix and self-regarding book in 1955.

Bibliography

• Argan (1957)
• Blake (1949)
• Breuer (1955)
• C. Y. Jones (ed.) (1962)
• Masello (1993)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Papachristou (1970)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Marcel Lajos Breuer
Personal information
Name	Marcel Lajos Breuer
Nationality	Hungarian
Birth date	May 21, 1902(1902-05-21)
Birth place	Pécs, Hungary
Date of death	July 1, 1981 (aged 79)
Place of death	New York City, USA
Work
Significant buildings	The Geller House I, UNESCO headquarters, Ameritrust Tower Breuer's only skyscraper project
Significant projects	Wassily Chair

Marcel Lajos Breuer (21 May 1902 Pécs, Hungary – 1 July 1981 New York City), architect and furniture designer, was an influential Hungarian-born modernist of Jewish descent. One of the masters of Modernism, Breuer displayed interest in modular construction and simple forms.

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Works (partial list) 2.1 Private residential buildings (U.S.) 2.2 Public / commercial buildings 2.3 Furniture 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Life and work

Known to his friends and associates as Lajkó, Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. The Bauhaus curriculum stressed the simultaneous education of its students in elements of visual art, craft and the technology of industrial production. Breuer was eventually appointed to a teaching position as head of the school's carpentry workshop. He later practiced in Berlin, designing houses and commercial spaces. In the 1920s and 1930s, Breuer pioneered the design of tubular steel furniture. Later in his career he would also turn his attention to the creation of innovative and experimental wooden furniture.

Perhaps the most widely-recognized of Breuer's early designs was the first bent tubular steel chair, later known as the Wassily Chair, designed in 1925 and was inspired, in part, by the curved tubular steel handlebars on Breuer's Adler bicycle. Despite the widespread popular belief that the chair was designed for painter Wassily Kandinsky, Breuer's colleague on the Bauhaus faculty, it was not; Kandinsky admired Breuer's finished chair design, and only then did Breuer make an additional copy for Kandinsky's use in his home. When the chair was re-released in the 1960s, it was designated "Wassily" by its Italian manufacturer, who had learned that Kandinsky had been the recipient of one of the earliest post-prototype units.

In the 1930s, due to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Breuer relocated to London. While in London, Breuer was employed by Jack Pritchard at the Isokon company; one of the earliest introducers of modern design to the United Kingdom. Breuer designed his Long Chair as well as experimenting with bent and formed plywood. Breuer eventually ended up in the United States. He taught at Harvard's architecture school, working with students such as Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph who later became well-known U.S. architects. (At one point Johnson called Breuer "a peasant mannerist".^[1]) At the same time, Breuer worked with old friend and Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius, also at Harvard, on the design of several houses in the Boston area.

University of Massachusetts campus center (right), Amherst, 1965-1969

Breuer dissolved his partnership with Gropius in May 1941 and established his own firm in New York. The Geller House I of 1945 is the first to employ Breuer's concept of the 'binuclear' house, with separate wings for the bedrooms and for the living / dining / kitchen area, separated by an entry hall, and with the distinctive 'butterfly' roof (two opposing roof surfaces sloping towards the middle, centrally drained) that became part of the popular modernist style vocabulary. A demonstration house set up in the MOMA garden in 1949 caused a new flurry of interest in the architect's work, and an appreciation written by Peter Blake. When the show was over, the "House in the Garden" was dismantled and barged up the Hudson River for reassembly on the Rockefeller property in Pocantico Hills near Sleepy Hollow.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

The 1953 commission for UNESCO headquarters in Paris was a turning point for Breuer: a return to Europe, a return to larger projects after years of only residential commissions, and the beginning of Breuer's adoption of concrete as his primary medium. He became known as one of the leading practitioners of Brutalism, with an increasingly curvy, sculptural, personal idiom. Windows were often set in soft, pillowy depressions rather than sharp, angular recesses. Many architects remarked at his ability to make concrete appear "soft".

Between 1963 and 1964, Breuer began work on what is perhaps his best-known project, the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City. He also established a Parisian office with the name "Marcel Breuer Architecte," from which he could better orchestrate his European projects. Also during this time, Herbert Beckhard, Murray Emslie, Hamilton Smith, and Robert F. Gatje became partners in Marcel Breuer and Associates. When Murray Emslie left a year later, he was replaced by Tician Papachristou, who had been recommended by Breuer's former student, I. M. Pei.^[2]

Breuer is sometimes incorrectly credited, or blamed, for the former Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), an unpopular high-rise in New York City. The Pan Am was actually designed by Emery Roth & Sons with the assistance of Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi. Breuer's name was associated with the site because in 1969 Breuer developed a 30-story proposed skyscraper over Grand Central Terminal, called "Grand Central Tower", which Ada Louise Huxtable called "a gargantuan tower of aggressive vulgarity,"^[3] and which became a cause celebre. Breuer's reputation was damaged, but the legal fallout improved the climate for landmark building preservation in New York City and across the United States.

Breuer's Grand Central Tower set the foundations for his skyscraper idea. In 1966, the Cleveland Museum of Art needed to expand, one of its trustees was Brock Weir of Cleveland Trust Bank. Weir visited New York City scouting bank headquarter designs for a new Cleveland Trust Tower. Weir saw the proposed the Grand Central Tower idea and got Breuer to design the Cleveland Trust Tower. In 1968, the Cleveland Trust Tower plan was revealed. It was to have two twin towers flanking the bank's 1908 rotunda. Construction began in 1969 and was completed in 1971. The second tower was to begin construction in 1971 but due to plans at Cleveland Trust, the second tower was not erected, but the tower is ready for expansion if needed. The Tower was renamed the AT Tower or the Ameritrust Tower after Cleveland Trust's name change in 1980.

The Ameritrust has been vacant since the 1992 merger of Ameritrust and Society Bank. In 2005, Cuyahoga County commissioners bought the building for $22,000,000 with plans to use the site for a new county administration center. The commissioners decided in 2007 to demolish the Ameritrust Tower; however, many preservation groups strongly opposed demolition. In October 2007, the commissioners voted to sell the tower and site to a developer. On April 17, 2008, the K&D Group purchased the site with plans to preserve the tower as part of a $133 million hotel/condo complex.

Works (partial list)

His collection of papers and works were donated to the Archives of American Art in 1985-1999, by Constance Breuer, wife of Breuer.

Private residential buildings (U.S.)

• Hagerty House, Cohasset, MA. 1937–1938
• Breuer House I, Lincoln, MA. 1938–1939
• J. Ford House, Lincoln, MA. 1939
• Chamberlain Cottage, Wayland, MA. 1940
• Geller House, Lawrence, Long Island, NY. 1945
• Robinson House, Williamstown, MA. 1946–1948
• Breuer House II, New Canaan, CT. 1947–1948
• Marshad House, Croton-on-Hudson, NY 1949
• Cape Cod Cottages
  • Breuer Cottage, Wellfleet, MA. 1945–1949–1961
  • Kepes Cottage, Wellfleet, MA. 1948–1949
  • Edgar Stillman Cottage, Wellfleet, MA. 1953–1954
  • Wise Cottage, Wellfleet, MA. 1963
• Stillman I, Litchfield, CT. 1950
• Exhibition House in the MoMA Garden, Pocantico Hills, Tarrytown, NY. 1948–1949
• Clark House, Orange, CT. 1949–1951
• Pack House, Scarsdale, NY. 1950–1951
• Dexter Ferry Cooperative House of Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. 1951
• Gagarin House 1, Litchfield, CT 1955
• Grieco House, Andover, MA. 1954–1955
• Starkey House, Duluth, MN, 1954–1955
• Hooper House II, Baltimore County, MD. 1956–1959
• Stillman II, Litchfield, CT. 1966
• Stillman III, Litchfield, CT. 1973–74
• Gagarin House II, Litchfield CT 1974
• Stillman Roman Cottage, Litchfield, CT. 1974 (Breuer Wellfleet Cottage plans; Built by Rufus Stillman)

Public / commercial buildings

• Gane Pavilion, Bristol, 1936
• Pennsylvania Pavilion, 1939 New York World's Fair, 1939
• Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania. 1942–1944
• Ariston Club, Mar del Plata, Argentina with Eduardo Catalano, and Francisco Coire. 1948.^[4]

European UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, 1953

St. John's Abbey Church, 1961

• UNESCO headquarters, Paris, France. 1953 (with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss).
• De Bijenkorf department store, Rotterdam, Netherlands 1955-1957.
• various buildings at the St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota:
  • Saint Thomas Hall. 1959
  • Saint John's Abbey Church. 1961
  • Alcuin Library. 1964
  • Peter Engel Science Center. 1965
  • Saints Bernard, Patrick, and Boniface Halls. 1967
  • Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. 1968
  • Bush Center for the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library. 1975
• United States Embassy, The Hague, Netherlands. 1958
• various buildings at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota
• City University of New York, Herbert H. Lehman College, Fine Arts Building
• various buildings at New York University (now Bronx Community College) University Heights Campus, Bronx, New York:
  • Begrisch (Lecture) Hall. 1964
  • Gould Hall of Technology (now Polowczek Hall). 1964
  • Colston (Residence) Hall
  • Tech I & II (now Meister Hall)
• Campus Center and Garage, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 1965/69
• The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. 1966
• Armstrong Rubber/Pirelli Tire Building, Long Wharf, New Haven, CT. 1969
• Flaine, France. (the entire ski resort town, population 6000), completed 1969
• Becton Engineering and Applied Science Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT. 1970
• AT Tower, Cleveland, Ohio, 1971
• Cleveland Museum of Art North Building expansion, Cleveland, Ohio, 1971
• Bryn Mawr School Lower School complex, Baltimore, MD. 1972
• Australian Embassy in Paris (consulting architect). 1973
• American Press Institute, Reston, Va., 1974
• The Central Library of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System in Atlanta, Georgia, 1980.
• Robert C. Weaver Federal Building (US Department of Housing and Urban Development), Washington, D.C.
• Hubert H. Humphrey Building (US Department of Health and Human Services), Washington, D.C.
• Litchfield High School, Litchfield, Conn.
• IBM Campus in Boca Raton, Florida.
• IBM laboratory in La Gaude, France
• St. Francis de Sales Parish - Muskegon, MI[1]
• Grosse Pointe Public Library, Central Branch, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI
• Clarksburg-Harrison County Public Library, Clarksburg, WV
• Wohnbedarf Furniture Store, Zurich.
• Doldertal Houses (apartment blocks), Zurich.

Furniture

Wassily Chair

• African chair, Collaboration with the Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stölzl
• Sun Lounge Chair, Model No. 301
• Dressing Table & Bureau. 1922, 1925
• Slatted chairs (wood). 1922–24
• Wassily Chair No.B3. 1925
• Laccio Tables, small & large. 1927
• Wassily chair, folding. 1927
• Cesca Chair & Armchair. 1928
• Thornet Typist’s Desk. 1928
• Coffee Table. 1928
• Tubular steel furniture. 1928–29
• F 41 lounge chair on wheels. 1928–30
• Broom Cupboard. 1930
• Bookcase. 1931
• Armchair, Model No.301. 1932–34
• Aluminium chair. 1933
• Isokon chairs. 1935
• Aluminium chaise longue. 1935–36
• Plywood furniture (five pieces). 1936–37

See also

• Cape Cod Modern House Trust

References

1. ^ Franz Schulze. Philip Johnson: Life and Work. University of Chicago Press. 1996. Page 270. ISBN 0226740587
2. ^ Fitzgerald, Jean, A Finding Aid to the Marcel Breuer Papers, 1920-1986, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
3. ^ Ada Louise Huxtable. On the Right Track. The New York Times. November 28, 1994.
4. ^ Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Marcel Breuer: A Centennial Celebration Exhibition. April 6, 2002. Accessed 12 December 2007.

• VV.AA., "4 Centenarios. Luis Barragán, Marcel Breuer, Arne Jacobsen, José Luis Sert", Valladolid, España, 2002, Universidad de Valladolid, ISBN 84-8448-199-9

External links

• From the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution:
  • The Marcel Breuer Papers Online consist of digitized primary source documents, including biographical material, correspondence, business and financial records, interviews, notes, writings, sketches, project files, exhibition files, photographs, and printed material
• Yankee Portables by Marcel Breuer - an overview with slideshow.
  • A Finding Aid to the Marcel Breuer Papers, by archivist Jean Fitzgerald, contains an excellent and extensive biography and chronology based on the primary source collection
  • Marcel Breuer: A Centennial Celebration is the online version of a 2002 exhibition.
• Marcel Breuer, Saint John's Abbey and University
• Marcel Breuer at Saint John's: The architect used Gothic inspiration to create a Modernist campus from the Chronicle of Higher Education
• Newspaper articles and archival images from the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University Digital Image Library "Vivarium"
• Current works of former Breuer collaborators and associates Michele Michahelles and Mario Jossa
• Plas-2-Point House by Marcel Breuer - an overview with slideshow

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