01 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.

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 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.

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