Architect, United States
Marcel Breuer was a master of scale. His designs ranged from the human anatomical
scale of the chair to the domestic scale of his modern houses, the urban street scale of the
museum, and the monumental scale of major international commissions. To observe
these varied designs, Breuer’s Bauhaus steel tubular chair (1928); his own houses in
Lincoln, Massachusetts (1939), and New Canaan, Connecticut (1947); the Whitney
Museum of American Art (1966) in New York City; and the United Nations Educational,
Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Headquarters (1958) in Paris will serve as
excellent examples selected from his long career.
Breuer’s tubular steel cantilevered chair is a primary legacy of the Bauhaus, recalled
now in both its original and its ubiquitous copied forms. Breuer had come to the Bauhaus
to follow Walter Gropius’s belief that good design for mass production through the
machine would improve living conditions for the common man. It was here, in the highly
charged, creative atmosphere of prewar Germany, that Breuer first exhibited his talent,
advancing from student to Bauhaus master of the furniture design work-shop. The
machine imagery of the Bauhaus is evident in two ways in the Breuer Bauhaus chair:
first, it is a prototype for repetitive machine production, and, second, the materials of the
tubular steel chair replicate the materials of another type of machine: the bicycle, a
modernist icon.
Breuer further experimented with furniture, especially in bent plywood, producing his
successful Isokon chair (1935) for an advanced London design firm. Isokon Furniture
Company was really a rescue mission for Bauhaus refugees such as Breuer and Gropius,
affording them employment and exit visas from Nazi Germany. Breuer was a very
fortunate man to be helped early in his career by influential people such as Gropius and
J.C. Pritchard, Isokon’s founder. Pritchard supported Bauhaus refugees while they got on
their feet, offering design commissions as well as stipends and living quarters in Isokon
Flats, Hampstead, London. In return for Pritchard’s largesse, Breuer produced some of
the finest works to come out of the Isokon design line.
Gropius further aided Breuer when, after they both emigrated from Britain to the
United States, Gropius brought Breuer to Harvard University to teach in the revamped
design school and formed a working partnership with him as well. This led to their
collaboration on an architectural compound of modern houses in rural Lincoln,
Massachusetts: the Woods End Colony. Here, émigré Breuer built his first American
house design for himself and began a major thread of his career in inventive forms of
distinctly American domestic flavor. Domestic works of textural American wood and
fieldstone, with clean lines and openness, became Breuer’s first big success, as he
increasingly moved away from Gropius’s European white cubic architecture, eventually
conceiving his signature two-wing house plan.
Breuer’s Lincoln house is transitional, employing echoes of his earlier European
white-box roots together with his new American tactileness, and relates both to his
British Ganes Pavilion (1936) in Bristol and to Gropius’s work. Breuer’s American style
was fully developed by the time he built his later house for himself in New Canaan, a
simple statement of lightweight cantilevered construction, a wooden “crate” within
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rolling landscape. It is interesting to note that the cantilever form, which would organize
this house and so much of Breuer’s later architectural work, was first used by him in
furniture design.
Breuer did not, however, confine himself to the domestic realm in which
he had become so adept. Having left Harvard, teaching, and Gropius, he
opened his own firm in New York City in 1946, winning important
commissions for urban architecture, the most significant of which was his
design for the
Whitney Museum of American Art (1966) on Madison Avenue in New York City. This
highly unusual design has remained controversial since its inception and was nearly
effaced within a planned addition of a Postmodernist pastiche during the 1980s.
With this forceful building, Breuer broke with all expectations and sense of his former
domesticity, yet he did not lose the sense of scale dictated by the urban pedestrian street.
Breuer’s vision of the Whitney is very brave new world, very Brutalist. It is a rare
modern interpretation of the beauty of the sublime, the aesthetic of beauty heightened by
awe and fear; it hangs ominously over Madison Avenue, reversing the traditional solidvoid
relationships of architecture, cantilevering its mass as a Breuer chair is structured.
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Its rock-faced hardness and aesthetic contortions speak to the hardness of the urban place
and to the socially hard times of the America of its conception, the 1960s. Breuer’s
Whitney is a tough architecture—brutal but beautiful.
Breuer had by now moved into the international realm, which few architects reach,
with such commissions as the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, here sharing the design
program with such international modern artists as Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Jean
Arp, and Pablo Picasso. For this monumental multi-use edifice, Breuer employed his
sweeping Y-shaped plan in a sculptural concrete configuration. He hearkened back to his
early unbuilt design for a concrete civic center (1936) for London, setting his massive
tripartite building on Le Corbusian stilts. Although this work at first looks very
bureaucratic, especially in its setting within the La Militaire sector of Paris, its most
creative, intriguing feature—that it actually responds to the nearby landmark Eiffel
Tower—is not readily apparent. In plan UNESCO’s tripartite shape looks very like an
Eiffel Tower laid on its side. Because this relationship, although undeniable, can be
appreciated only in plan or by observation from the deck of the Eiffel Tower itself, one
wonders whether the relationship was intentional or unconsciously created by Breuer in
response to the Parisian site. In either case, it enriches the UNESCO design.
From the Bauhaus to New York to Paris, from the 1920s to the 1960s, Breuer created
modern form. Chair to house to public monument, throughout the entire scale of the built
environment, he responded to modern life. The aesthetics of Breuer have been endlessly
influential in defining that place we call the modern world.
