Marcel Breuer

Biography

In 1925 Breuer, who had just turned twenty-three, devised a chair with a frame of bent steel tubing. By his own account, the idea came from a bicycle handlebar. The chair was later called the “Wassily”, and many people still believe it was made for Kandinsky. It was not: Kandinsky admired the finished model, and only then did Breuer make a separate copy for him. The name dates from the 1960s, when an Italian manufacturer was producing the chair.

Marcel Lajos Breuer was born in Pécs into a Jewish family; sources give his birth date as either 21 or 22 May 1902, with 21 May the more common. His father was a dental technician. He went to school in his home town, and in 1920 enrolled in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but after one term he left and went to Weimar, where Walter Gropius had founded the Bauhaus, the school of art, craft and design. Breuer was among its first and youngest students. Gropius quickly noticed his talent and put him in charge of the carpentry workshop. He was nineteen years older than Breuer and remained his mentor for life.

Until 1924 Breuer trained as a carpenter and passed his apprentice examination, then spent a short time in Paris. When the school moved to Dessau he came back and from April 1925 taught there as a master: first he ran the furniture workshop, later he taught in the new department of architecture. He designed interiors for the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, and in 1927, at Gropius’s assignment, he furnished interiors at the Weissenhof Estate, the housing exhibition in Stuttgart. He said himself that he had more ideas than commissions for buildings, and he lived on his fees for furniture. His wooden pieces, to my eye, show the influence of the Dutch designers Gerrit Rietveld and Theo van Doesburg.

In 1928 Breuer opened an office in Berlin. He built his first house, the Harnischmacher House in Wiesbaden, in 1932: white, two storeys, with a flat roof and terraces raised on supports. Then came the Doldertal housing complex in Zurich (1934–1936), built with the Roth brothers, and a brief return to Budapest. The Chamber of Engineers there refused to admit him because of his Jewish origin, and in 1935 he went to England. In London he worked for the firm Isokon and designed furniture in bent plywood, among it the Long Chair. For two years he practised together with the English architect Yorke.

In 1937 Gropius became chairman of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and Breuer followed him to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Together they built private houses, joining the ideas of the Bauhaus to the tradition of New England timber-frame building. Their students included Paul Rudolph, Eliot Noyes, I. M. Pei and Philip Johnson. In 1939 Breuer built a house for himself in Lincoln. In 1941 he and Gropius parted ways, reportedly over a minor matter; perhaps Breuer simply wanted to step out of the shadow of the better-known name. He became a United States citizen in 1944.

In 1946 Breuer moved to New York and set up an office that worked until the end of his life. The Geller House (1945) was one of the first “binuclear” houses, with separate wings for the bedrooms and for the living room and kitchen, and with a “butterfly roof”. In 1949 he put up a demonstration “House in the Garden” in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art; after the exhibition it was taken up the Hudson on a barge to the Rockefeller estate. He built two houses for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut. His first large public commissions were the monastic master plan and church of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, on which he worked with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss. After many years of houses he moved to large buildings, and concrete became his main material. In 1966 the Whitney Museum of American Art opened on Madison Avenue; the museum occupied the building until 2014. In 1968 the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was completed in Washington. It was first praised and then criticised for decades, and critics found in it a repetition of UNESCO and the IBM research centre.

In almost thirty years Breuer completed about a hundred buildings, and he always stressed the contribution of his partners: Herbert Beckhard, Robert Gatje, Hamilton Smith and Tician Papachristou, and in Paris Mario Jossa and Harry Seidler.

In 1968 he was made an honorary doctor of the Budapest University of Technology. He died in New York on 1 July 1981.