Marcel Breuer
Early Life and Education
Marcel Lajos Breuer was born on May 21, 1902, in Pécs, Hungary. He was of Jewish descent. As a young man, he showed a talent for art and, after graduating from high school, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the school’s traditional, academic curriculum and left after just a few weeks.
In 1920, at the age of 18, he moved to Weimar, Germany, and enrolled in the newly founded Bauhaus, one of the most experimental and progressive art schools in the world. He was one of the youngest and most talented students in the school’s first class. He studied under the school’s founder, Walter Gropius, and the artist Johannes Itten.
Breuer excelled in the Bauhaus’s preliminary course and then went on to study in the carpentry workshop. He was a brilliant and inventive student, and he quickly became a leading figure in the school’s design community. In 1924, after a brief period working in an architect’s office in Paris, he returned to the Bauhaus, which had now moved to Dessau, and was appointed by Gropius to be the head of the carpentry workshop. He was just 23 years old.
It was during his time at the Bauhaus, both as a student and as a master, that Breuer made his most famous and lasting contribution to the world of design: his revolutionary tubular steel furniture. Inspired by the lightweight and strong frame of his new Adler bicycle, he began to experiment with using bent tubular steel to create furniture. In 1925, he designed the Model B3 chair, which would later become known as the “Wassily” chair, after his friend and fellow Bauhaus master, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. The chair, with its simple, elegant frame of polished steel and its seat and back of canvas, was a radical departure from the heavy, upholstered furniture of the past, and it became an icon of the machine age.
Architectural Philosophy and Career
Marcel Breuer’s architectural philosophy was a synthesis of the rationalism and social idealism of the Bauhaus and a more personal and expressive approach to form and material. He was a pioneer of modernism who was also a master of creating buildings that were rich in texture, color, and human warmth.
His career can be divided into two main periods: his early career in Europe, which was focused on furniture design and small-scale residential projects, and his later career in the United States, where he became a major figure in the post-war modernist movement and a prolific designer of large-scale institutional and public buildings.
After leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, Breuer established his own architectural practice in Berlin. He designed a number of innovative houses and apartment buildings, as well as a series of influential furniture designs. However, with the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s, he was forced to leave Germany. He moved to London in 1935 and worked in partnership with the British architect F.R.S. Yorke.
In 1937, at the invitation of his former mentor, Walter Gropius, Breuer emigrated to the United States to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His partnership with Gropius at Harvard was a major force in the dissemination of modernist ideas in America. The two men also had a brief architectural partnership, and they designed a number of influential houses in the New England area, including their own homes in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
In 1946, Breuer moved his practice to New York City. This marked the beginning of the second and most productive phase of his career. He began to receive larger and more complex commissions, and his work evolved from the lightweight transparency of his early houses to a more solid and sculptural style that has been described as “Brutalist.”
He became a master of using heavy, expressive materials like concrete and stone, and he was interested in creating buildings that had a sense of weight, permanence, and monumentality. However, he never lost the Bauhaus’s concern for functional clarity and social purpose. His large-scale buildings are always carefully organized and are designed to be humane and welcoming spaces.
He was a versatile and pragmatic architect, and he was able to adapt his style to a wide range of building types and contexts. He was a modernist who was not afraid of history, and his later work often incorporates allusions to vernacular and classical forms.
Notable and Famous Works
Marcel Breuer’s portfolio includes a wide range of projects, from iconic furniture designs to major public buildings.
The Wassily Chair (Model B3) (1925) is his most famous design and a landmark of 20th-century furniture. Its use of tubular steel was revolutionary, and its simple, elegant form has made it a timeless classic.
The Whitney Museum of American Art (1966) in New York City (now the Met Breuer) is his most famous and controversial building. The museum is a massive, top-heavy, Brutalist structure of granite and concrete that is a powerful and uncompromising statement of modernist principles. The building’s inverted ziggurat form and its dramatic, cantilevered entrance have made it a beloved, if often misunderstood, landmark of post-war New York.
The UNESCO Headquarters (1958) in Paris, which he designed with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss, is one of his most important international commissions. The Y-shaped building is a graceful and elegant work of mid-century modernism, and it is a powerful symbol of the post-war spirit of international cooperation.
Saint John’s Abbey Church (1961) in Collegeville, Minnesota, is one of his most powerful and expressive works. The church is a monumental, sculptural building of raw concrete, and its most distinctive feature is a massive, 112-foot-high bell tower that acts as a kind of giant banner of faith.
The IBM Research Center (1962) in La Gaude, France, is a key example of his later, more sculptural style. The building is a long, double-Y-shaped structure that is raised on pilotis, and its facade is a complex, three-dimensional grid of precast concrete sunshades.
The Robert C. Weaver Federal Building (Department of Housing and Urban Development) (1968) in Washington, D.C., is another of his major Brutalist works. The massive, curvilinear building is a powerful and sculptural presence in the city’s monumental core.
Awards, Honors, and Legacy
Marcel Breuer received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the AIA Gold Medal in 1968 and the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture in 1976.
His legacy is that of a true giant of the 20th century, a man who made fundamental contributions to the fields of both furniture design and architecture. He was a key figure in the Bauhaus, and his tubular steel furniture helped to define the aesthetic of the machine age.
As an architect, he was a master of both the lightweight, transparent modernism of his early houses and the heavy, sculptural Brutalism of his later public buildings. He was a versatile and inventive designer who was able to create buildings that were both formally powerful and humanly scaled.
He was a modernist who was also a humanist, and his work is a testament to his belief that architecture should be a source of both aesthetic pleasure and social progress. He was one of the last surviving members of the heroic generation of Bauhaus modernists, and his work has had a profound and lasting impact on the built environment of the 20th century. Marcel Breuer died on July 1, 1981.