BREUER, Marcel

(1902-1981)

   Born in Hungary, Marcel Breuer first trained at the famous Bauhaus School of Design in Germany and worked with the German modernist architect Walter Gropius. Known as one of the founders of modernism in both architecture and furniture design, Breuer was initially interested in creating simple, geometric forms and modular shapes, while later in life he began to experiment with a softer, more expressive form of construction. In addition, this modernism characterizes his furniture, as seen in his famous 1925 Wassily Chair made with a curved tubular steel frame. Breuer also experimented with bent and formed plywood furniture.

   Breuer left Germany in the 1930s to flee Nazi persecution and settled first in London and then in Boston, where he taught students such as Philip Johnson at Harvard University. In Boston Breuer was reunited with his colleague Gropius, and together they built a few homes in the Boston area, thereby helping to establish modernist domestic architecture in the United States. In 1941, Breuer opened his own firm in New York City. His Breuer House II in New Canaan, Connecticut, built in 1948, is very daring in that its hillside construction integrates a stark white geometric structure made of cantilevered concrete and large glass windows into a more structurally sophisticated version of Le Corbusier's villa designs. Breuer's Geller House, built in Lawrence, Long Island, in 1945, is perhaps his most important home. Here he introduced what he called a "binuclear" house, in which an entrance foyer and hallway separate the living areas from the sleeping areas, a format used in most subsequent ranch houses built in the United States. Working with the famous Italian structural architect Pier Luigi Nervi, Breuer was finally able, through his commission for the UNESCO World Headquarters built in Paris in 1953, to translate his experimental concrete designs and structural sophistication into a large-scale public monument. Despite this large-scale commission, Breuer remains best known for his modernist domestic architecture.

   See also INTERNATIONAL STYLE.