Marcel Breuer

MARCEL BREUER

BAUHAUS MATERIALITY

Bauhaus 1919-2023

Radical innovations in design education

Marcel Breuer Bauhaus Materiality

James Volks and Susan Harrison

Bauhaus Archive Berlin Museum of Design

Foreword

My group was allocated the topic Bauhaus Materiality. Within that, I chose to do my monograph on the esteemed Marcel Breuer. Truth be told, I was a stranger to this Hungarian-American architect and furniture designer four weeks ago. However, I have grown to have a real admiration for his work and philosophy.

His decision to focus on functionality ahead of aesthetics is indicative of the Bauhaus movement. It is something we are often told today – “form follows function”. Yet, seeing how Breuer put that into motion has really clarified the idea for me. He aimed to created products with form and mass, without the use of excessive material. Breuer wanted his furniture to be

high quality and available to the ordinary person. While he kept his designs simple, they were far from basic. Their classic design and his fine attention to detail has led them to withstand the test of time, with many still being mass-produced by manufacturers such as the Knoll Group today.

In this monograph, you will come to learn about the life and the most famous works of Breuer. It will look at his early life and career, his most well-known pieces of furniture and some of the most impressive buildings he has designed. In todays age, there is often a focus on mass producing trendy items of a lesser quality. I think there is a lot to take away from Breuers work in rhis regard, as his philosophy is the opposite of this.

“I am as much interested in the smallest detail as in the whole structure”

Production and teaching in the workshops

When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in March/ April 1925, it first had to make do with provisional premises in on old deportment store in the Mauerstrasse. Only a proportion of pupils - albeit many of the most talented - followed the school from its idyllic setting in Weimar to the dirty, industrial city of Dessau. And although Lyonel Feininger, the previous head of the graphic printing workshop, moved to Dessau with the Bauhaus, it was no longer as on active

member of the Bauhaus teaching staff.

The commercially ineffective workshops of the Weimar Bauhaus were now abandoned (glass, wood, and stone). The graphic printing workshop was also left behind since, although lucrative, it was only capable of reproduction work. In its place a printing workshop was set up in which creative work was also possible. The woodcarving and stonesculpture workshops were effectively modernized under the single

heading of ‘sculpture’ workshop. Both financial and pedagogical arguments were thus respected.

The most far-reaching changes were to be felt in two workshops in particular: the printing workshop under Herbert Bayer, with its entirely new orientation, and the weaving workshop. The weaving workshop hod been fully re-equipped from the technical point of view; It also become the earliest workshop to offer a proper training course, designed

and implemented by Gunta Stölzl. In both workshops young people were being trained for professions which had effectively never existed before. These Bauhaus years saw not only the production of new industrial designs for furniture, metal, textiles, and modern printed materials but, at the same time, the formulation of new training courses and the preparation of new professions which would operate at the interface of design and technology in the widest possible sense.

Fig 1.2: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

The Life of Marcel Breuer

Childhood and Education

Marcel Breuer was born on May 21, 1902, in Pécs, Hungary, a small town near the Danube River. After graduating from high school at the Magyar Királyi Föreáliskola in Pecs, Breuer enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to study painting, where he had been offered a scholarship. He almost immediately disliked the program, however, and within weeks of joining, he left to begin an apprenticeship with a Viennese architect. Breuer was eager to work with his hands and joined the cabinetmaking studio of the architect’s brother. At age

18, in 1921, he moved to Weimar, Germany, to enroll at a new school called the Bauhaus, founded in 1919 with a mission to marry functional design with the principles of fine art. Its head, the architect Walter Gropius, immediately recognized Breuer’s talent and promoted him within a year to the head of the carpentry shop. At the Bauhaus, Breuer produced the furniture for Gropius’ Sommerfeld House in Berlin as well as his acclaimed series of “African” and “Slatted” chairs. But he also became acquainted with many of the most important artists of this

era, who likewise worked and taught at the Bauhaus, including Wassily Kandinsky, László MoholyNagy, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers. Breuer later reflected that Klee served as one of his two greatest teachers in life, along with his high school geometry instructor. In 1924, he finished his studies at the Bauhaus and briefly relocated to Paris before returning to the Bauhaus after it moved to Dessau in 1925. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Breuer supported himself largely from fees garnered from his furniture designs, most notably the widely

reproduced “Wassily” chair, as his architectural commissions were few and far between at this stage in his career. In 1926, Breuer married fellow Bauhaus graduate Marta Erps. While his parents were both Jewish, Breuer was forced to officially renounce his faith in order to marry Erps, due to the anti-Semitic hostilities in Germany at the time.

Mature Work

In 1928, Breuer moved to Berlin, to begin his own architectural practice; in 1934. Breuer moved to London in 1936, at the behest of Walter Gropius, who was concerned for his safety during the Nazi occupation. Here, he found work with Jack Pritchard of the Isokon Company, one of the earliest champions of modern design in Britain, where he designed the “Long” chair predominantly from plywood. The following year, Breuer left Europe permanently to join Gropius in teaching architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of their

students would themselves go on to become legends in the field, such as I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, and Philip Johnson. From 1938 to 1941 Breuer and Gropius collaborated on various architectural projects throughout the northeastern United States, including each of the architects’ own houses as well as the Pennsylvania state exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

Breuer finally moved to New York City in 1946, where he would work for the remainder of his life, and continued the collaborative

efforts that had marked much of his career, mostly with Hamilton Smith. Over the next thirty-five years his practice expanded considerably; although he had worked mostly on small-scale domestic structures before the war, Breuer increasingly took on larger and more diverse institutional projects. He sought and regularly received internationally-renowned commissions, including the Sarah Lawrence College Theatre in Bronxville, New York (1952); St. John’s Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minnesota (195361); the De Bijenkorf department

store, Rotterdam (1955-57); the headquarters for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Washington, D.C. (1963-68); and the Atlanta Central Library (1969-80). He retired in 1976, the same year that he was awarded the Grande Medaille d’Or by the French Academie of Architecture.

Fig 2.1: The Long Chair

Furniture

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.

The

Wassily Chair

Fig 3.1: the Wasasily Chair

The 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 massproduced 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.

Fig 3.2: The Cesca Chair

When the great Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) received the prestigious commission to build a new museum of American art in New York in 1963, it was the beginning of one of the defining decades of the century. All over Manhattan, dizzying monuments to consumerism, television, and commerce were constructed in glass and steel.

Acclaimed for his mastery of stone and concrete with institutional buildings and private homes across Europe, the Hungarianborn émigré crafted the Whitney Museum of American Art at the peak of his career (constructed 1963–66), a living monument in contrast against the transient, disposable trends of its time. Convinced that the sandy, genteel apartment buildings of the Upper East Side would soon be replaced with a new skyline of gleaming office towers, and equally convinced of the importance of longevity in architecture, Breuer

The Whitney Museum of American Art

conceived the museum as a solid, permanent sanctuary for the art within and all that it represented.

In this contained, self-confident building, on the corner of 75th Street and Madison Avenue, Breuer created a personal and intimate museum experience. Described by The New York Times in 1966 as “harsh, but handsome,” its crisp granite facade— sometimes dark grey, often pinkish—steps up and forward over the entrance, peppered with distinctive asymmetrical windows that reveal almost nothing of the interior activity.

The street level, on the other hand, is wide open, as Breuer wanted to acclimatize the visitor from the hustle of Madison Avenue to a profound engagement with art. The entrance experience is a slow procession that begins with a walk under a low concrete canopy and over a sunken garden, which reveals great glass walls

into the lower ground spaces, before entering the grand, iconic lobby with its rows upon rows of moonlike shades. Only then could visitors either move down towards the sculpture court or upwards and into the galleries.

The Breuer building has proved its status as a singular museum experience unlike any other, and remains one of the most

recognizable modern icons in New York and one of the world’s landmark arts buildings. The building has been named as The Met Breuer by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in honor of this influential architect.

Fig 4.1: The Whitney Museum of American Art

One of Breuer’s most prominent architectural commissions was the headquarters for UNESCO, which he designed in collaboration with Bernard Zehrfuss and Pier Luigi Nervi. The selection of the three was not without controversy, as Le Corbusier coveted the job for himself, but ultimately agreed to serve as part of a five-member consulting team that also included Walter Gropius, Sven Markelius, Ernesto Rogers, and Lucio Costa. The property, still owned by the French state, occupies a prestigious location in the seventh arrondissement of Paris adjacent

to the École Militaire. Breuer and his collaborators’ design for the structure consists of a Y-shaped plan (often called a “three-pointed star”), mounted on seventy-two massive reinforced concrete piloti, and facades distinguished by their staggered levels of elongated uniform windows. Offset slightly from the center of the Y on the main facade is a concrete hood that welcomes visitors into the service core like a giant half-funnel. Today, the site contains several other significant auxiliary structures (some designed by Zehrfuss alone), but Breuer, Zehrfuss

and Nervi’s edifice remains the linchpin of the complex.

The UNESCO headquarters’ piloti, construction in steel, concrete, and glass - especially its window-filled facades - firmly establish it within the clutches of the International Style. But this association is tempered by the dramatic concave sweep of the building’s three wings (or three facades), which, in forming the three-pointed star, provide a sculptural counterpoint to the rigidity of modernism. The sweep of the wings themselves in different directions suggests the ways in which UNESCO reaches to and seeks to bring cultural understanding and education to the far-flung corners of the globe. The choice of Breuer - a Hungarian-born designer who had

lived and worked in Germany and (by this time) the USA - as one of an international group of three architects is significant precisely because of his own preference for collaboration (and shared credit) with others in the design process. This, in combination with UNESCO’s decision to commission several high-profile international artists - Alexander Calder, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, among others - to adorn the building and grounds with their own site-specific works underscores the institution’s commitment to worldwide cooperation and physically marks the site as an important center for research, promotion of cultural events, and the funding of educational programs and projects.

Fig 4.2: the UNESCO main building

Fig 5.1: Wassily Chair Plan

Fig 5.2: Cesca Chair Plan

Fig 5.3: Whitney Museum floor plan

Fig 5.4: UNESCO Main Building plan

END MATTER

Bibliography

Books

Droste, M. (2012) Bauhaus: 19191933. Köln etc.: Taschen.

Image credits

Homer Page

Helen Mellor

Websites and articles

Marcel Breuer Architecture, bio, ideas. The Art Story (Accessed: February 16, 2023).

About Marcel Breuer & the Breuer Building (2016) About Marcel Breuer & The Breuer Building - The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Accessed: February 16, 2023).

Joe Kramm Knoll Knoll

Ajay Suresh

Peter Miller

Marcel Breuer Digital Archive

Published in 2023

Edited by Bronagh O’Neill

For the Bauhaus Archive Berlin Museum of Design for the German Museum of Technology, Trebbiner Str. 9, 10963 Berlin, Germany, Phone: +49 30 902540

Email: info@ technikmuseum.berlin\

Copyright © 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced to be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Text & cover design: Bronagh O’Neill

Bauhaus Archive Berlin Museum of Design