Marcel Lajos Breuer ( ; 21 May 1902 – 1 July 1981), was a Hungarian-born
modernist
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
architect and furniture designer.
At the
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 20 ...
he designed the
Wassily Chair and the
Cesca Chair, which ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' have called some of the most important chairs of the 20th century.
Breuer extended the sculpture vocabulary he had developed in the carpentry shop at the Bauhaus into a personal architecture that made him one of the world's most popular architects at the peak of 20th-century design. His work includes art museums, libraries, college buildings, office buildings, and residences. Many are in a
Brutalist architecture
Brutalist architecture is an architectural style that emerged during the 1950s in the United Kingdom, among the reconstruction projects of the post-war era. Brutalist buildings are characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the ...
style, including the former IBM Research and Development facility which was the birthplace of the first
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or te ...
. He is regarded as one of the great innovators of
modern furniture design and one of the most-influential exponents of the
International Style.
Life, work and inventions
Commonly known to his friends and associates as Lajkó ( ; the diminutive of his middle name),
Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, to a Jewish family.
He was forced to renounce his faith in order to marry Martha Erps due to anti-Semitism in Germany at the time.
Bauhaus
Marcel Breuer left his hometown at the age of 18 in search of artistic training and, after a short period spent at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, became one of the first and youngest students at the
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 20 ...
– a radical arts and crafts school that
Walter Gropius had founded in Weimar just after the First World War.
He was recognized by Gropius as a significant talent and was quickly put at the head of the Bauhaus carpentry shop. Gropius was to remain a lifelong mentor for a man who was 19 years his junior.
After the school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Breuer returned from a brief sojourn in Paris to join older faculty members such as
Josef Albers,
Wassily Kandinsky, and
Paul Klee
Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented ...
as a Master, eventually teaching in its newly established department of architecture.
Recognized for his invention of bicycle-handlebar-inspired tubular steel furniture,
Breuer lived off his design fees at a time in the late 1920s and early 1930s when the architectural commissions he was looking for were few and far-between. The structural characteristics of his wooden furniture showed the influence of Dutch designers
Gerrit Rietveld and
Theo van Doesburg.
He was known to such giants as
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...
and
Mies van der Rohe, whose architectural vocabulary he was later to adapt as part of his own, but hardly considered an equal by them who were his senior by 15 and 16 years.
Despite the widespread popular belief that one of the most famous of Breuer's tubular steel chairs, the
Wassily Chair was designed for Breuer's friend
Wassily Kandinsky, 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 named "Wassily" by its Italian manufacturer, who had learned that Kandinsky had been the recipient of one of the earliest post-prototype units.
It was Gropius who assigned Breuer interiors at the 1927
Weissenhof Estate
The Weissenhof Estate (German: Weißenhofsiedlung) is a housing estate built for the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany. It was an international showcase of modern architecture's aspiration to provide cheap, simple, effici ...
. In 1928 he opened a practice in Berlin, devoted himself to interior design and furniture design and in 1932 he built his first house, the Harnischmacher in Wiesbaden. The house was white, with two floors and a flat roof; part of it and the terraces rose freely on supports.
London
In 1935, at Gropius's suggestion, Breuer relocated to London.
While in London, Breuer was employed by
Jack Pritchard at the
Isokon
The London-based Isokon firm was founded in 1929 by the English entrepreneur Jack Pritchard and the Canadian architect Wells Coates to design and construct modernist houses and flats, and furniture and fittings for them. Originally called We ...
company; one of the earliest proponents of modern design in the United Kingdom. Breuer designed his
Long Chair as well as experimenting with bent and formed plywood, inspired by designs by Finnish architect
Alvar Aalto
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (; 3 February 1898 – 11 May 1976) was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware, as well as sculptures and paintings. He never regarded himself as an artist, s ...
.
Between 1935 and 1937 he worked in practice with the English Modernist
F. R. S. Yorke
Francis Reginald Stevens Yorke (3 December 1906 – 10 June 1962), known professionally as F. R. S. Yorke and informally as Kay or K, was an English architect and author.
One of the first native British architects to design in a modernist style, h ...
with whom he designed a number of houses. After a brief time as the Isokon's head of design in 1937, he emigrated to the United States.
Massachusetts
In 1937, Gropius accepted the appointment as chairman of Harvard's Graduate School of Design and again Breuer followed his mentor to join the faculty in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The two men formed a partnership that was to greatly influence the establishment of an American way of designing modern houses – spread by their great collection of wartime students including
Paul Rudolph,
Eliot Noyes,
I. M. Pei,
Ulrich Franzen
Ulrich Joseph Franzen (January 15, 1921 – October 6, 2012) was a German-born American architect known for his "fortresslike" buildings and Brutalist style.Vitello, Paul (14 October 2012)Ulrich Franzen, Designer of Brutalist Buildings, Dies at 91 ...
,
John Johansen, and
Philip Johnson.
One of the most intact examples of Breuer's furniture and interior design work during this period is the Frank House in Pittsburgh, designed with Gropius as a
Gesamtkunstwerk.
Breuer broke with his father-figure, Walter Gropius, in 1941 over a very minor issue but the major reason may have been to get himself out from under the better-known name that dominated their practice.
Breuer had married their secretary, Constance Crocker Leighton, and after a few more years in Cambridge, moved down to New York City in 1946
(with
Harry Seidler as his chief draftsman) to establish a practice that was centered there for the rest of his life.
New York City
The
Geller House I of 1945 (demolished in 2022) was one of 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. Breuer built two houses for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut: one from 1947 to 1948, and the other from 1951 to 1952. A demonstration house set up in the
MoMA
Moma may refer to:
People
* Moma Clarke (1869–1958), British journalist
* Moma Marković (1912–1992), Serbian politician
* Momčilo Rajin (born 1954), Serbian art and music critic, theorist and historian, artist and publisher
Places
; ...
garden in 1949 caused a 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,
Kykuit, in
Pocantico Hills, New York
Pocantico Hills is a hamlet in the Westchester County town of Mount Pleasant, New York, United States.
The Rockefeller family estate, anchored by Kykuit, the family seat built by John D. Rockefeller Sr., is located in Pocantico Hills, as is the ...
. In 1948,
Ariston Club, Breuer's only work in Latin America, was built in
Mar del Plata
Mar del Plata is a city on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. It is the seat of General Pueyrredón district. Mar del Plata is the second largest city in Buenos Aires Province. The name "Mar del Plata" is a sh ...
, Argentina.
His first two important institutional buildings were the
UNESCO Headquarters in Paris
finished in 1955 and the monastic Master Plan and Church at
Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota
in 1954 (again, in part, on the recommendation of Gropius, a "competitor" for the job, who told the monks they needed a younger man who could finish the job.) These commissions were a turning point in Breuer's career: a move to larger projects after years of residential commissions and the beginning of Breuer's adoption of concrete as his primary medium.
Breuer was a supporter of the Council for the Advancement of the Negro in Architecture (CANA) and employed
Beverly Lorraine Greene
Beverly Lorraine Greene (October 4, 1915 – August 22, 1957), was an American architect. According to architectural editor Dreck Spurlock Wilson, she was "believed to have been the first African-American female licensed as an architect in the Un ...
, the first African-American woman to be licensed as an architect in the United States. She is credited as draftsperson on a number of projects Breuer worked on in the 1950s including the Grosse Pointe Public Library.
In 1966 Breuer completed the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
at
945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan's
Upper East Side
The Upper East Side, sometimes abbreviated UES, is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 96th Street to the north, the East River to the east, 59th Street to the south, and Central Park/Fifth Avenue to the we ...
. The Whitney was in the building that Breuer designed between 1966 and 2014 before moving to a new building designed by
Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano (; born 14 September 1937) is an Italian architect. His notable buildings include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (with Richard Rogers, 1977), The Shard in London (2012), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (2 ...
at 99
Gansevoort Street Gansevoort may refer to any one of the following:
__NOTOC__ People
*Guert Gansevoort (1812–1868), US Navy officer
* Harmen Harmense Gansevoort (ca. 1634–1709), early American settler, landowner and beer brewer
* Leonard Gansevoort (1751–1810) ...
in the
West Village/
Meatpacking District neighborhoods of
Lower Manhattan
Lower Manhattan (also known as Downtown Manhattan or Downtown New York) is the southernmost part of Manhattan, the central borough for business, culture, and government in New York City, which is the most populated city in the United States with ...
.
Breuer designed the Washington, D.C., headquarters building for the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It administers federal housing and urban development laws. It is headed by the Secretary of Housing and Ur ...
which was completed in 1968. While the building received some initial praise, in recent decades it has received widespread criticism. Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Jack Kemp
Jack French Kemp (July 13, 1935 – May 2, 2009) was an American politician and a professional football player. A member of the Republican Party from New York, he served as Housing Secretary in the administration of President George H. W. B ...
once described the building as "10 floors of basement."
[Connelly, "As Suburbs Reach Limit, People Are Moving Back to the Cities", ''Seattle Post-Intelligencer'', February 4, 2010.] Another former Secretary,
Shaun Donovan
Shaun Lawrence Sarda Donovan (born January 24, 1966) is an American government official and housing specialist who served as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2014, and Director of the US Office of Management ...
, has noted that "the building itself is among the most reviled in all of Washington—and with good reason." Many critics have argued that Breuer's design is unoriginal, and essentially mimics the UNESCO Headquarters and IBM Research Center which he designed several years earlier.
[Goldberger, Paul (July 2, 1981).]
Marcel Breuer, 79, Dies
. ''New York Times''.
Throughout the almost 30 years and nearly 100 buildings that followed, Breuer worked with a number of partners and associates with whom he openly and insistently shared design credit:
Pier Luigi Nervi at UNESCO; Herbert Beckhard,
Robert Gatje, Hamilton Smith and Tician Papachristou in New York, Mario Jossa and
Harry Seidler in Paris. Their contribution to his life work has largely been credited properly, though the critics and public rightly recognized a "Breuer Building" when they saw one.
Breuer's architectural vocabulary moved through at least four recognizable phases:
#The white box and glass school of the International style that he adapted for his early houses in Europe and the USA: the Harnischmacher House,
Gropius House
The Gropius House is a historic house museum owned by Historic New England located at 68 Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln, Massachusetts, United States. , Frank House, and his own first house in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
#The punctured wooden walls that characterized his famous 1948 "House in the Garden" for MoMA and a series of relatively modest houses for knowledgeable university faculty families in the 50s. This included the first of his houses in New Canaan, Connecticut, with its balcony hung off a cantilever.
#The modular prefabricated concrete panel façades that first enclosed his favorite
IBM Laboratory in La Gaude, near
Nice
Nice ( , ; Niçard: , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; it, Nizza ; lij, Nissa; grc, Νίκαια; la, Nicaea) is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative ...
, France, and went on to be used in many of his institutional buildings plus the whole town at
Flaine. Some critics spoke of repetitiveness but Breuer quoted a professional friend: "I can’t design a whole new system every Monday morning."
#The stone and shaped concrete that he used for unique and memorable commissions: his best-known project, the
Met Breuer
The Met Breuer ( ) was a museum of modern and contemporary art at Madison Avenue and East 75th Street in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. It served as a branch museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (known as the Met) from 20 ...
(formerly the Whitney Museum of American Art), the Muskegon and St John's Abbey Churches, the Atlanta-Fulton Central Public Library, and his second house in New Canaan.
Breuer was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects at their 100th annual convention in 1968 at Portland, Oregon. In an ironic timing of events, it coincided with general criticism of one of America's favorite architects for his willingness to design a multi-story office building on top of Grand Central Terminal. The project was never built. It cost him many friends and supporters although its defeat by the US Supreme Court established the right of New York and other cities to protect their landmarks. During his lifetime, Breuer rarely acknowledged the influence of other architects’ work upon his own but he had certainly picked up the use of rough board-formed concrete from
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...
and the noble dignity of his second New Canaan house seems to have directly descended from
Mies’
Barcelona Pavilion
The Barcelona Pavilion ( ca, Pavelló alemany; es, Pabellón alemán; "German Pavilion"), designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. This building ...
. Shortly before his death, he told an interviewer that he considered his principal contribution to have been the adaptation of the work of older architects to the needs of modern society. He died in his apartment in Manhattan in 1981, leaving his wife Connie (died 2002) and his son Tamas. With his permission, his partners kept offices going in his name in Paris and New York for several years but, with their eventual retirement, both are now closed.
Breuer's work
Breuer donated his professional papers and drawings to Syracuse University library beginning in the late 1960s. The remainder of his papers, including most of his personal correspondence, were donated to the
Archives of American Art
The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washing ...
, Washington, D.C., between 1985 and 1999 by Breuer's wife, Constance.
Legacy
The
National Building Museum
The National Building Museum is located at 401 F Street NW in Washington, D.C. It is a museum of "architecture, design, engineering, construction, and urban planning". It was created by an act of Congress in 1980, and is a private non-profit i ...
in Washington, D.C., held an exhibition in 2007–2008 dedicated to the work of Marcel Breuer titled ''Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture''.
''Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture (November 3, 2007 - February 17, 2008)''
Filmmaker James Crump has directed ''Breuer's Bohemia'', a feature documentary film that examines Breuer's experimental house designs in New England following the Second World War.
References
External links
Marcel Breuer Digital Archive at Syracuse University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Breuer, Marcel
1902 births
1981 deaths
People from Pécs
Modernist architects
International style architects
Brutalist architects
Hungarian architects
Hungarian Jews
Jewish architects
American furniture designers
Hungarian furniture designers
Bauhaus teachers
Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty
Hungarian expatriates in Germany
Hungarian emigrants to Germany
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Architects of Roman Catholic churches
20th-century American architects
German expatriates in the United Kingdom
German emigrants to the United States
Hungarian designers
Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal
Compasso d'Oro Award recipients
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters