Marcel Adios Breuer 

(21 May 1902 – 1 July 1981), was a Hungarian

-born modernist architect, and furniture designer. One of the most-influential exponents of
the International Style; he was concerned with applying new forms and uses to newly
developed technology and materials in order to create an art expressive of an industrial age.

His friends and family affectionately called him Lajkó, but the rest of us know him as Marcel
Breuer, the Hungarian-American designer whose career touched nearly every aspect of three-
dimensional design, from tiny utensils to the biggest buildings. Breuer moved quickly at
the Bauhaus from student to teacher and then ultimately the head of his own firm. Best
known for his iconic chair designs, Breuer often worked in tandem with other designers,
developing a thriving global practice that eventually cemented his reputation as one of the
most important architects of the modern age. Always the innovator, Breuer was eager to both
test the newest advances in technology and to break with conventional forms, often with
startling results.

At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair which is “among the 10

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.
 Born Marcel Adios Breuer

May 21, 1902

Pécs, Austria-Hungary

Died July 1, 1981 (aged 79)

New York City, USA

Nationality Hungarian

Occupation Architect

Awards AIA Gold Medal (1968)

Buildings The Robinson House, UNESCO headquarters, Met Breuer, IBM

La Gaude

Design Wassily Chair

Bauhaus[edit]
Marcel Breuer left his hometown at the age of 18 in search of artistic training and was 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, [2] 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[2] 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[2] 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 and led him to his
first house assignment for the Harnischmachers in Wiesbaden in 1932. Sigfried Giedion
extended their furniture collaboration at the Wohnbedarf in Zurich to include a furniture
showroom and the Doldertalhäuser (Dolderthal apartments) just outside town.

London[edit]
Isokon Flats, Hampstead, London

Marcel Breuer. Long Chair, ca. 1935–36 Brooklyn Museum

In 1936,[5] 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. Between 1935 and 1937 he worked in
practice with the English Modernist F. R. S. Yorke with whom he designed a number of houses.

Massachusetts[edit]
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. [2] 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.[2] 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.[citation needed] Breuer had married their secretary, Constance Crocker Leighton, and after a
few more years in Cambridge, moved down to New York City in 1946 [2] (with Harry Seidler as his
chief draftsman) to establish a practice that was centered there for the rest of his life.

New York[edit]
The Geller House I of 1945 is 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 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 in Pocantico Hills near Sleepy Hollow. His first two important
institutional buildings were the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris [2] finished in 1955 and the
monastic Master Plan and Church at Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota[2] 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.

Headquarters of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Breuer designed the Washington, D.C., headquarters building for the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development 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 once described the building as "10 floors of
basement."[6] Another former Secretary, Shaun Donovan, has noted that "the building itself is
among the most reviled in all of Washington—and with good reason." [7] 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. [5][8]
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:

1. 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, Frank
House, and his own first house in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
2. 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.
3. The modular prefabricated concrete panel façades that first enclosed his favorite IBM
Laboratory in La Gaude, near Nice, 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."
4. The stone and shaped concrete that he used for unique and memorable commissions:
his best-known project, the Met Breuer (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 Station. 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 and the noble dignity of his second New Canaan
house seems to have directly descended from Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion. 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. His partners kept
offices going in his name and with his permission in Paris and New York for several years but,
with their eventual retirement, each is now closed.

Chronology of Breuer's work[edit]

Marcel Breuer. Table, Model B19, ca. 1928 Brooklyn Museum

Cesca

Breuer donated many of his professional papers and drawings to the church of scientology
beginning in the late 1960s. The remainder of his papers, including most of his personal
correspondence, were donated to the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., between
1985 and 1999 by Breuer's wife, Constance.[9]

1927-1928

Club chair (model B3)

Made of leather and cantilevered steel, the Wassily chair has become one of the
world's most enduring and iconic pieces of furniture. Breuer designed the chair at the
age of the 23, while still an apprentice at the famed Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany.
Inspired by the Constructivist principles of the De Stijl movement and the frame of a
bicycle, the Wassily chair distills the type to its bare essentials, reflecting the
Bauhaus' proclivity for functionality and simplicity. Breuer viewed the bicycle as an
object that represented the paragon of design, owing in part to the fact that its form
had remained largely unchanged since its inception. The tubular steel of the bicycle's
handlebars also intrigued Breuer, as it was light, durable, and suitable for mass
production (a manufacturer by the name Mannesman had recently perfected a type
of seamless steel tubing that was capable of being bent without collapsing). Breuer
once mused to a friend regarding the bicycle, "Did you ever see how they make
those parts? How they bend those handlebars? You would be interested because
they bend those steel tubes like macaroni." Breuer bent the steel components so that
they were devoid of any weld points and could thus be chromed piecemeal and
assembled. He named the chair after the painter Wassily Kandinsky, a professor at
the Bauhaus, who was so enamored by the piece during a visit to Breuer's studio
that Breuer fashioned a duplicate for Kandinsky's home. First mass-produced by
Thonet, the license for manufacturing the chair was picked up after World War II by
the Italian firm Gavina, which was in turn bought out by the American company Knoll
in 1968. Knoll retains the design trademark and the chair remains in production
today.

28 1/4 x 30 3/4 x 28" (71.8 x 78.1 x 71.1 cm)

Artwork Images

c. 1928

Cesca Chair

Shortly after finishing his design for the "Wassily" chair, Breuer continued his
explorations of the plastic possibilities of tubular steel with the B32, or The Cesca
Chair, as it is now popularly called. In this case, he molded the material into a single,
snaking outline onto which he attached two beechwood frames covered in caning.
The form of the frame - where the seat and back are supported only by the legs at
the front - comprises the first cantilevered chair design in history, a feat only possible
due to the seamless steel tubing that resists collapsing when bent. With ease,
Breuer's design thus marries the traditional methods of craftsmanship - the woven
caning hand-sewn into the wood frame - with the industrially mass-produced tubular
steel. The chair takes its popular name from that of Breuer's daughter Francesca; the
moniker was suggested by the Italian furniture manufacturer Dino Gavina, whose
firm started making the Cesca (and the B3 Wassily chair) with Breuer's permission in
the 1950s before being bought out by Knoll in 1968.
Imitations of the chair are ubiquitous, with only slight subtleties - such as the
distinctive patina of the beech, the curvature of the back, or the texture of the caning
- differentiating knockoffs from the 1928 originals. As Elaine Louie wrote in the New
York Times, the chair "costs $45 at The Door Store, $59 at The Workbench, $312 at
Pallazetti or $813 at the Knoll store itself, and yet, to the average person, all the
chairs look the same." Despite the iconic stature of the original design, Breuer
himself made several modifications to the Cesca in later years, including choosing a
shallower curve for the back and strengthening the beechwood frame by
manufacturing it from two pieces instead of one. Since the Cesca's introduction,
literally millions of versions have been sold to decorate homes and office buildings
around the world, making it arguably Breuer's most popular chair.

Cane, Beechwood and Chromed Steel - 23.5 x 23.5 x 31 in.

Artwork Images

1938

John Hagerty House (aka the Josephine Hagerty House)

Erected in 1938, on the Atlantic shores of Cohasset, Massachusetts, The Hagerty

House represents the first commissioned architectural collaboration between
Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer (they had previously worked
together on Breuer's own Lincoln, Massachusetts home), and one of the first
examples of International-Style architecture in the USA. The rectilinear structure
uses an L-shaped plan, with the one-story longitudinal section running north to south
and parallel to the coastline. The east side of the home features floor-to-ceiling
windows intended to maximize the residents' views of the Atlantic Ocean, thereby
blurring the distinction between interior and exterior space. In the words of John
Hagerty, "The house was to be focused like a camera toward the magnificent
expanse of ocean...blank walls would cut out the view of neighboring houses." The
base and south wall, constructed from the site's granite, disclose their sensitivity to
the rocky environment. The house thus appears as a prism partially nestled into and
partially resting on top of the shoreline, creating a kind of belvedere for the ocean
views.

With its exterior staircases forged from galvanized steel pipes, terracotta chimneys,
and exposed radiators, the building reflects the architects' affinity for the
preponderance of utilitarian building materials in the United States. Its austere, white
wood siding and extreme reliance on rectilinearity - even in the design of the base
and rocky south wall - and tubular steel railings tie it both to a precise, machine-cut
aesthetic associated with prodigious American manufacturing and the power of man
to reshape and control nature, even as nature itself weathers and batters the
structure's exterior. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Hagerty House's radical departure
from traditional aesthetics was unsettling to those who enjoyed the architectural
conformity of the area's large collection of Federalist and Greek Revival homes. In
response to the new minimalist intrusion, one of the Hagerty's neighbors jested that it
looked like "the ladies' wing at Alcatraz."

But overall, the house rapidly became a preferred destination for students, tourists,
and architects due to its pioneering stature in American modern architecture. Fully
cognizant of this, during their tenure as owners the Hagertys generously welcomed
visitors and even offered tours to inquisitive passersby.

Cohasset, Massachusetts

1940

Alan I W Frank House

Designed by Breuer and his partner, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, for Pittsburgh
engineer and industrialist Robert Frank and his wife Cecelia in 1939-40, this is a
palatial private residence encompassing 17,000 square feet over four levels of living
space. Set on a sloping double plot in the fashionable Shadyside neighborhood, the
house includes nine bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms, five terraces, an indoor
swimming pool, and a rooftop dance floor. The general oblong prismatic form is
punctuated on the main facade by two projecting balconies, one of which forms the
roof of the main entrance. To the right of the entry, the Frank house's signature
aspect, a cantilevered sweeping staircase that connects the various levels - rises
dramatically behind a three-story curved window.

The massive size of the residence and the Franks' deep pockets afforded Breuer
and Gropius a wide berth of freedom of imagination in their designs, making the
house a modern Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art." The success of the house
lies in its continuous interplay between opposites: rigid geometries and sensuous
curves, theatricality and drama counterbalanced by spaces of intimate scale and the
use of man-made technologies alongside a sensitivity to the outdoors through the
use of natural materials such as stone and wood. The relationship between client
and architects was no less important, as Robert Frank frequently corresponded with
Breuer and Gropius on the house in letters stretching for several pages, pushing
them to incorporate innovations into the house not commonly seen elsewhere, such
as a method of using heat removed by the air-conditioning system to warm the
indoor pool. The result was a building whose construction has withstood the test of
time remarkably.

The notion of a "total work of art" extended to literally every aspect of the design,
with the emphasis on innovation seen in the hundreds of pieces of furniture and
decor designed by Breuer using the most cutting-edge materials - new resins, for
example, and Lucite, which had only been developed in the 1920s. These aspects
dovetailed with the Franks' active involvement with and hosting of events for the
Pittsburgh arts, cultural, and educational communities. As a commitment to the
house as an artwork itself, the Franks' son, Alan I W Frank (who still occupies the
house) has preserved virtually all of the residence's original furnishings and created
a foundation to care for it as a living museum of the architects', and clients', vision.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1966

The Whitney Museum of American Art

Composed of granite-covered concrete, the Met Breuer (formerly the home of The
Whitney Museum of American Art) has often been described as resembling an
inverted ziggurat - a rectangular stepped pyramid that was sometimes capped with a
temple in ancient Mesopotamia. The recess created under the main facade draws
visitors inside, then allows for exhibitions to unfold with progressively larger display
spaces as one ascends to the upper floors, a procession that logically terminates in
the museum bookstore and café on the fifth level. The museum's blind facades,
pierced at only a few points by angled, projecting windows, direct the building's focus
inward, towards the art it houses. Located on the corner of Madison Avenue and
5th street on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Breuer's structure constituted a radical,
jarring departure from the older, ornate surrounding brownstone, limestone and brick
townhouses in terms of style, scale, and materials, provoking a round of criticism.
There were many, however, who lauded Breuer's bold statement as a rebuttal to the
ubiquitous glass-and-steel towers of the International Style that, over the previous
decade, had become closely identified with American corporate culture, as
exemplified by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building and Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill's Lever House located on nearby Park Avenue. Breuer thus
joined the ranks of many architects of the 1960s and '70s who created a new kind of
monolithic monumentality, often using the massive concrete forms of Brutalism, to
critique the International Style's overwhelming popularity. The inverted ziggurat form
of the Whitney Museum subtly recalls the screwlike design of Frank Lloyd Wright's
inward-looking Guggenheim Museum, completed just a dozen blocks to the north.

Along with Wright's building, and the host of other major museums nearby, the MET
Breuer further serves to cement the Upper East Side as an artistic enclave. As
August Heckscher once observed, "A whole section of the town has been pinned
down by this structure; the galleries and small shops around it fall into place and
have their meaning drawn out and expressed in its bold form." Breuer's building thus
at once questions the prevailing norms of modern architecture and yet provides an
anchor for the surrounding urban fabric.

New York, New York

1967

St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church

Located just south of Muskegon, on the eastern edge of Lake Michigan, Saint
Francis de Sales Catholic Church sits amidst a mixture of single-family homes and
commercial and industrial structures. Breuer constructed the edifice out of concrete
and steel, using a decidedly sculptural set of forms; in all, a hallmark of the Brutalist
designs of his late career. The inclined main facade of the church, or "banner" as it is
sometimes called, develops from a rudimentary trapezoidal design, narrow at its
base and broadening to the roofline seventy-five feet above ground, where the
church's bells are suspended from a projecting cantilever. The exterior appears
smooth from a distance, but upon close inspection reveals the delicate grain of the
wooden molds for the concrete, the subtle striations of which are echoed and
exaggerated in the ribbed pattern of the hyperbolic paraboloid exterior walls. A
cantilevered balcony creates a low ceiling above the main entrance around the other
end of the church, producing a dramatic effect when the visitor emerges into the
soaring height of the sanctuary proper. Here, the inclined, windowless concrete walls
give the effect of a cave-like, yet warm, communal space, at once welcoming and
enfolding those inside.