Marcel Lajos Breuer (1902 –1981) was a Hungarian-American modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944.
When designer and architect Marcel Breuer left Europe in the 1930s to teach architecture at Harvard and start his own practice, it served as a catalyst for the spread of Modernist design, a bend in the road as fortuitous and influential as the curved steel joints in his famous tubular steel furniture. In the coming decades, his work with students and future luminaries such as Philip Johnson and Paul Randolph, as well as his own series of private residences and monumental public commissions, helped many appreciate and understand a new way of designing.
At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair, which The New York Times 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 style, including the former IBM Research and Development facility which was the birthplace of the first personal computer. He is regarded as one of the great innovators of modern furniture design and one of the most-influential exponents of the International Style.
Marcel Breuer left his workplace 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 – 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 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. He was known to such giants as Le Corbusier 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.
In 1935, at Gropius's suggestion, Breuer relocated to London. While in London, Breuer was employed by Jack Pritchard at the Isokon 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. Between 1935 and 1937, he worked in practice with the English Modernist F. R. S. Yorke, 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.
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, John Johansen, and Philip Johnson. One of the most intact examples of Breuer's furniture and interior design work during this period is the Alan I W 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.
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. 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.
In 1966, Breuer completed the Whitney Museum of American Art at 945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The Whitney collection maintained its home in the Breuer-designed building from 1966 to 2014, before moving to a new building designed by Renzo Piano at 99 Gansevoort Street in the West Village/Meatpacking District neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan.
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’s work has largely been credited properly, though the critics and public rightly recognized a "Breuer Building" when they saw one.
Breuer was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects at their 100th annual convention in 1968 at Portland, Oregon.
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| Marcel Breuer |
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| Armchair, c. 1922 |
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| Nesting Tables,model B9, c. 1925–26 |
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| Wassily Chair, c. 1925-26 |
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| Faltsessel, Chair D4, c. 1927 |
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| Table, model B10, c. 1927 |
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| Chair, model B33, c. 1927–28 |
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| Table, Model B19, c. 1928 |
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| Tea Cart, Model B54, c. 1928 |
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| Armchair, Model B35, c. 1928–29 |
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| Lounge Chair, model B25, c. 1928–29 |
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| Couch, c. 1930–31 |
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| Room Divider / Bookshelf, c. 1932–35 |
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| Mehrfamilienhäuser, 1933-36 Doldertal, Zürich |
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| Long Chair, c. 1935 |
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| Sea Lane House, c. 1936 |
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| Sea Lane House, c. 1936 |
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| Sea Lane House, c. 1936 |
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| Ariston Club, c. 1948 Mar del Plata, Argentina |
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| Rufus Stillman House I, c. 1950 Litchfield, Connecticut |
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| New building Bijenkorf store, c. 1957 Rotterdam |
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| eymour Krieger House, c. 1958 Bethesda, Maryland |
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| UNESCO Headquarters, 1958 Paris, France |
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| Mary College, c. 1960 University of Mary |
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| St. John's Abbey Church , c. 1961, Campus of Saint John's University |
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| B64 chairs, c. 1962, for Gavina, italy |
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| IBM Laboratory, c. 1962 La Gaude, France |
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| St. Francis De Sales Catholic Church, c. 1966 Muskegon, Michigan |
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| Whitney Museum of American Art, c. 1966 New York City |
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| Flaine Ski Resort, c. 1969 Haute-Savoie, France |
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| Atlanta Central Library, c. 1980 |
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