ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

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 th...

The 20th-century architecture of Brazil became widely famous for its originality and formal freedom in contrast to more codified paradigms of modernism. Celebrated abroad as a step ahead of functionalism and rationalism, Brazilian modernism acquired international significance in the 1950s, and the effects of it can still be found in contemporary architecture. However, to grasp the full scope of Brazilian 20th-century architecture, it is necessary to understand the radical transformations in its economy and society that led to an accelerated process of urbanization. From 17 million inhabitants in 1900, 70 percent of whom were living in rural areas, Brazil closed the century with almost 170 million, with more than 60 percent living in urban areas. Brazilians entered the 20th century under the influence of positivism and sanitary engineering as two events of 1897 indicate: the planned city of Belo Horizonte was inaugurated to replace the 18th-century Ouro Preto as the capital of the state...