Marcel Lajos Breuer ( ; May 21, 1902 – July 1, 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.

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.

Life, work and inventions

thumb|[[Wassily Chair]]

Commonly known to his friends and associates as Lajkó ( ; the diminutive of his middle name), Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary(at the time part of Austria-Hungery), to a Jewish family. He was forced to renounce his faith in order to marry Marta Erps due to anti-Semitism in Germany at the time.

Bauhaus

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,

London

thumb|right|[[Isokon Flats, Hampstead, London]]

thumbnail|right|Marcel Breuer. Long Chair, ca. 1935–36 [[Brooklyn Museum]]

In 1935, at Gropius's suggestion, Breuer relocated to London. Breuer built two houses for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut: one from 1947 to 1948, and the other from 1951 to 1952. House in the Museum Garden, 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, Kykuit, in Pocantico Hills, New York. In 1948, Ariston Club, Breuer's only work in Latin America, was built in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

His first two important institutional buildings were the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris,

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. Another former Secretary, Shaun Donovan, 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.

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'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 St. Francis de Sales and St. John's Abbey churches, the Atlanta Central 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 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. 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, Washington, D.C., between 1985 and 1999 by Breuer's wife, Constance.

Legacy

The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., held an exhibition in 2007–2008 dedicated to the work of Marcel Breuer titled Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture.

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.

Breuer was a partial inspiration for the character of László Tóth in Brady Corbet's film The Brutalist. Several of Tóth's furniture designs in the film are highly reminiscent of Breuer's work, including the Cesca Chair and Long Chair.

References

Further reading

  • Marcel Breuer Digital Archive at Syracuse University