Marcel Breuer

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.

BRAZIL

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 of Minas
Gerais, and Canudos, a fast-growing spontaneous settlement guided by messianic leader
Antonio Conselheiro in Bahia, was destroyed by the Brazilian army. Both the plan of
Belo Horizonte by engineer Aarão Reis and the Canudos war campaign reveal positivist
views of sanitation and circulation in vogue at that time.
Following that direction, the 1900s would be marked in Rio by the urban reformations
of Pereira Passos, with avenues being opened and slums being displaced while civic
buildings in French neoclassical style took its place (for example, in Teatro Nacional,
1906). In 1927 another plan by the French urbanist Alfred Agache would be the structure
for Rio’s main transformations of the first half of the century. Meanwhile, São Paulo
experimented an exhilarating growth brought about by the coffee-based economy that
provided new developments based on garden city ideas for the emergent middle class.
Around 1905 Victor Dubugras was designing railroad stations in the Art Nouveau style,
initiating what would be São Paulo’s cosmopolitan modernity.
Later, in the second decade of the century, a debate would arise regarding issues of
local identity versus international images with the arrival of Art Deco on the one hand
and the development of neo-Colonial styles on the other. The Deco tradition was manifest
in many of Brazil’s landmarks, such as the Cristo Redentor statue over Rio, the City Hall
in Belo Horizonte, and multiple buildings and viaducts in São Paulo. On the other hand,
the neo-Colonial movement, led by José Mariano Filho, would battle against the
modernist avant-garde ideas during the whole of the 1920s and 1930s but would also be
fundamental to give Brazilian modernism its character by valuing the forms of 18thcentury
baroque.
Until the 1920s, modernism had an impact only on some isolated painters and writers
who were influential within architectural developments. The event that marks the starting
point of Brazilian avant-garde is the Semana de Arte Moderna, a week of exhibitions,
lectures, and poetry declamation organized in São Paulo in 1922. From this period, we
can highlight the works of Oswald de Andrade on texts such as Manifes to Antropófago and the young female
painters Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral. They attempted to resolve the apparently
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opposing forces of abstract internationalism and the representation of local identities.
After the polemical introduction at the Semana, Brazilian avant-garde artists gradually
turned to the issue of adapting the avant-garde to Brazilian reality and “Brazilianess.” As
early as 1925, articles appeared in São Paulo’s newspapers by Rino Levi and Gregory
Warchavchik, who were the first exponents of what contemporary historiography calls
“modern architecture in Brazil” (primarily derived from European traditions) to
differentiate it from “Brazilian modern architecture” (exemplified by Brazilian-derived
ideas and formal vocabularies). Rino Levi (Art Palacio Movie Theater, 1936) became an
exemplar of Brazilian modernism, whereas Warchavchik (House at Rua Itápolis, 1928)
would play an important role as Costa’s partner for a while and also as the first Latin
American delegate to the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne).
In 1930, in what would be one of the key moments of Brazilian architecture, Lúcio
Costa was named director of ENBA (National School of Beaux-Arts). As soon as he was
named, Costa began a radical reformation of the art and architecture curriculum based on
the Bauhaus pedagogy and Le Corbusier’s ideas in architecture. The strong reaction
against the changes led to Costa’s replacement 11 months later, but the ideas that he
installed flourished with a generation of students at that time: Oscar Niemeyer, Roberto
Burle Marx, Affonso Raidy, Carlos Moreira, Milton Roberto, Luis Nunes, and Henrique
Mindlin, among others. Until 1930 the ENBA still adopted the 19th-century academic
approach to architectural teaching, with a strong emphasis on classical figurative
drawing. This was changed in the 1930 curricular reformation, and this early generation
of Brazilian modern architects took advantage of both the strong domain of classical
drawing and the new architectural freedom of avant-garde techniques. After leaving the
ENBA, Costa went to work for the Ministry of Education and Culture on the organization
of SPHAN, the Brazilian Office for Conservation of Historic Monuments.
With the task of cataloging, protecting, and publicizing Brazilian historic and artistic
heritage, the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico (SPHAN) was created in 1937.
Costa’s acumen played a major role in the articulation of Brazilian modern architecture,
stitching together the past and the future into a very effective concept of architecture.
Standing in defense of the 18th-century baroque, not yet valued by modern critique and
diminished by the Beaux-Arts academia, Costa sought transitions and continuations
rather than ruptures and breaks; he thus conceived of modern architecture as a natural
continuation of the baroque style.
In 1936 Le Corbusier was invited as a supportive consultant for the team of architects
commissioned to design the new building for the Brazilian Ministry of Education and
Health (MES). The invitation of Le Corbusier served as a support for canceling the
previous competition, as the winning design was considered by the government to be
incompatible with the modern image that it was trying to establish. The MES building,
one of the first high-rises of the world following Le Corbusier’s five points, would
catalyze a whole generation of young architects and artists, with the murals by Candido
Portinari, sculptures by Bruno Giorgi, and gardens by Burle Marx, around the
architecture developed by Costa, Carlos Leão, Jorge Moreira, and mainly Oscar
Niemeyer, inspired by Le Corbusier.
The years before and during World War II would also witness the spread
of modernist architects all around the country and the battles between
modernists and traditionalists in Rio. In Recife, Luis Nunes would direct the municipal building office and collaborate with
structural Joaquim Cardoso (Water Tower, 1937) and Saturnino N.Brito (Anatomical
Laboratory, 1940), and Burle Marx was redesigning the city’s public gardens. In São
Paulo, Rino Levi designed the Sedis Sapientiae building (1942), and Alvaro Vital Brasil
designed the Esther Building (1937). However, Rio de Janeiro was still the country’s
capital, and there, in addition to the Roberto Brothers ABI (1936) and Santos Dumont
Airport (1944), Atílio Correa Lima designed the Seaplane station (1940), and Niemeyer
designed a nursery (Obra do Berço, 1937) and his own house (1939) at Lagoa.
Meanwhile, a vigorous debate around architecture and national identity would turn
into many battles fought through competitions and commissions. The federal government
maintained a twofold take on architecture all the way through the 1930s, alternating
commissions between modernists and traditionalists. In 1939 a commission was done for
a hotel in the city of Ouro Preto, home of the most important baroque buildings in Brazil,
with SPHAN responsible for the project. Niemeyer’s modernist scheme modified by
Costa’s advice (adding a ceramic roof like the rest of the city and wooden trellises instead
of steel bris es -soleil) was accepted and built. With the Grande Hotel de Ouro Preto (1942), a
modernist design in the heart of the main historical city of Minas Gerais, the modernist
group demonstrated the possibility of blending modernity with tradition.
The decade would end with the first international exposure of Brazilian modernism
with the design for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The
combination of Le Corbusian volumes with sensual curves caught the attention of the
architectural media, and just four years later the Museum of Modern Art in New York
mounted the “Brazil Builds” exhibition. The accompanying catalogue by Philip Goodwin
became the first text on Brazilian modern architecture to be published in English.
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Goodwin’s marriage of modernity and Brazilian heritage was further advanced by Costa
and would be the conceptual basis for many of the most successful Brazilian buildings
after the 1940s.
In 1941 Niemeyer was commissioned by the city’s mayor, Jucelino Kubitschek (who
would be the president who built Brasilia 15 years later) to design a series of buildings
around Pampulha’s artificial lake, in Belo Horizonte. Niemeyer’s designs of Capela da
Pampulha, Casa do Baile, Casino, and late Clube became the model for Brazilian
architectural modernism for decades. The Capela was revolutionary for breaking with the
Le Corbusian paradigm, with its walls and ceiling that were not “free” (or flexible) but
inseparable. Ceramic tiles (pas tilhas ) cover its parabolic vaults, and a ceramic panel (azulejo) decorates the
rear wall. The Casino presents a free-form canopy supported by thin steel columns and
the continuous glass wall on the facade. Inside the cubic main volume, the ramp
dominates functionally, and the round concrete columns punctuate the rhythm of the
interior space. The impact of the Pampulha buildings was considerable, initially in Brazil
just after its completion in 1942 and then abroad. The international debate of the
following decade would embrace Brazilian architecture in its core, with Nikolaus Pevsner
labeling Pampulha as subversive work, Reyner Banham claiming it as the first national
style in modern architecture, and Gino Dorfles describing Niemeyer’s work as
neobaroque.
The architecture of the 1950s is still considered the golden years of Brazilian
modernism. Starting with Rino Levi designing the headquarters of the Brazilian Institute
of Architects (1949) in São Paulo and Affonso Raidy designing the Museum of Modern
Art (1952) in Rio, the 1950s would also witness innumerable fascinating buildings by
Sergio Bernardes (House for Lota M. Soares and Elizabeth Bishop, 1952), Francisco
Bolonha (Maternity Hospital, 1951, in Cataguases and Kindergarten, 1952, in Vitória),
Alvaro Vital Brasil (Banco da Lavoura, 1951, in Belo Horizonte), and Niemeyer
(Ibirapuera Pavilions, 1954), as well as the Burle Marx gardens. In a time of accelerating
industrialization and urbanization, the issue of housing was at the core of the 1950s
practice. The Pedregulho complex (1950) by Raidy, the Bristol apartments (1950) by
Costa, and the Kubitschek complex (1953) by Niemeyer in Belo Horizonte are the most
well known, but other, still little-known architects were laboring to improve housing
quality and quantity in government offices, such as Carmem Portinho at the PDF (Rio’s
office for public building). In the 1950s, a second generation of modernist architects
would emerge from the Rio-São Paulo axis including Acacio Gil Borsoi in Recife, Edgar
Graeff in Porto Alegre, and Eduardo Guimarães and Sylvio de Vasconcelos in Belo
Horizonte, effectively extending the achievements of modern architecture to new
frontiers. However, the most important group, formed around the late 1950s, might be the
later-called Escola Paulista (São Paulo School). The group, formed around João Batista
Villanova Artigas, would advocate for an open architecture in terms of content while
developing a unique aesthetic of exposed concrete, generous slabs, and rigorous
geometry. Among many extraordinary buildings are the School of Architecture (1967) at
the University of São Paulo and Morumbi Stadium (1969) by Artigas and the Brazilian
Pavilion (1970) at Osaka and the Junqueira House (1976) by Paulo Mendes da Rocha,
who would be of the major Brazilian architects of the late decades of the 20th century
with his designs for the Museu da Escultura (Sculpture Museum, 1986) and Pinacoteca
renovation (1995), both in São Paulo.
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The golden years of Brazilian modernism led to the construction of Brasilia (1955–
60). During the presidential term of Juscelino Kubitschek, the idea of building a new
capital in the heartland was put forward, and the planning competition was won by Costa
in 1956, with major buildings by Niemeyer (Congress, Cathedral, Foreign Ministry, and
Presidential residence [Alvorada] and offices [Planalto], among many others). The new
capital was opened on 21 April 1960. The international reaction to Brasilia is well known
and ranges from the Alvorada columns being copied worldwide to a severe social
criticism of the city’s flaws. However, its construction would change fundamentally the
panorama of Brazilian modernism after that. In the geopolitical realm, the inland capital
induced a vector of penetration toward the backlands. On the symbolic level, the
buildings by Niemeyer (especially the Congress with its twin towers and inverted
spherical capes) would become the icons of Brazilian institutions. In terms of
architecture, Brasilia marks the climax of the modernist paradigm and the beginning of its
critique and revision that followed.
While Brasilia was under construction, Lina Bò Bardi (an Italian immigrant living in
Brazil since 1947) was completing her Museum of Modern Art (1957) in São Paulo. In
the early 1960s, Bardi worked in Salvador, where she renovated 17th-century buildings
and worked with popular art exhibitions in preparation for the construction of the
Museum of Art at that city. However, the military coup of 1964 aborted her plans and
those of many other architects. Without ever actually leaving the architectural scene, she
came back with the SESC-Pompéia (1987), a sports/cultural facility in São Paulo.
The 1970s, known in Brazil as the “economic miracle” years, experienced huge
housing projects financed by the National Housing Bank in which the control was with
the construction firms, marginalizing most architects to a secondary role. The military
regime was also responsible for the exile of exponent architects, such as Niemeyer,
Artigas, and Vasconcellos, repressing architecture schools that were a focus of cultural
and political discussion on the 1960s. Although the construction industry was busy with
megahousing projects, the more talented architects were revising the modernist dogmas
and receiving the early Postmodern ideas from Europe and the United States. The critique
of modernism carried out in Brazil during the 1970s is also associated with a demand for
regional solutions, a reaction against the hegemony of the Rio and São Paulo Schools.
Deep in the Amazon, Severiano Porto was experimenting with climatic and formal
solutions (Architect’s house, 1971; Silves hostel, 1979; Balbina’s environmental center,
1984), whereas in Salvador, João Filgueiras Lima (State Administrative Center, 1973,
and several Sarah hospitals since the 1970s) and Francisco Assis Reis (Chesf building,
1978) were advancing the ideas of late modernism. Also under a late-modernist approach
were the buildings by Carlos E.Comas, Carlos Fayet in Porto Alegre (Centre de
Abastecimento, 1972), Luis Paulo Conde in Rio (Ewerton house, 1968, and UERJ [State
University] Complex, 1968), and Humberto Serpa and Marcus Vinicius Meyer in Belo
Horizonte (BDMG building, 1969).
Beyond the late modernism of the 1970s, a generation of young architects in Belo
Horizonte took Postmodernist ideas further away. Gravitating around Pampulha magazine (a direct
reference to Niemeyer’s buildings at that same city), founded in 1979, the “Mineiros”
catalyzed the Postmodern/regionalist tendencies of the 1980s in Brazil. The Touristic
Support Center building (1982; called Rainha da Sucata) by Eolo Maia and Sylvio
Podestá in Belo Horizonte epitomizes their movement with its bright colors, rusted metal
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surfaces, and plenty of formal quotations from the surroundings. The 1980s would then
have pluralism and regionalism as its axis, with an intense debate between proponents of
a continuation of late-modernist ideas and the defendants of Postmodern rupture. In 1991,
in a competition for the Brazilian Pavilion at the Sevilla Expo, this debate would reach its
peak. The first prize (never built) was awarded for a group of Paulistas (Angelo Bucci
and others); the runners-up were Eolo Maia and Joel Campolina, and a special award
(Paulo Leander) was given to the Mineiros. In São Paulo, now the financial center of the
new Brazilian economy, Rui Othake designed several high-rise apartment buildings while
Gian F.Gasperini and Roberto Aflalo changed the face of Paulista Avenue with their
design for the Citibank building.
The last decade of the 20th century also saw the rise of a very talented generation of
architects in Recife galvanized by Fernando Montezuma (Camelódromo [street vendors
pavilion], 1994) and in Porto Alegre with Edson Mahfuz. In Rio de Janeiro, an extensive
project of urban design, public facilities, and renovation was put forward by Luis Paulo
Conde, first as the Municipal Secretary of Urbanism (1992–96) and then as mayor (1996–
2000). Rio Cidade (urban design of downtown areas) and Favela-bairro (improvements
and infrastructure at the shanty hills) are among the successful cases of good architecture
serving the public at the end of the century.
As the 20th century came to an end, Brazil showed a dynamic internal architectural
scene with almost 100 schools in 20 states, despite not participating much on the
international scene. That started to change in the late 1990s with the renewed interest in
Brazilian modernism being exhibited and discussed worldwide, and this should project its
20th-century accomplishments well into the third millennium.