Biography
Architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 (d.1981) in Pecs, Hungary. Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920's, stressing the combination of art and technology, and eventually became the head of the furniture workshop there. He later practiced in Berlin, designing houses and commercial spaces, as well as a number of tubular metal furniture pieces, replicas of which are still in production today. In the 1930's, due to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Breuer relocated to London and eventually ended up in the United States. Breuer taught at Harvard's architecture school, working with students such as Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph who later became well-known U.S. architects. At the same time, Breuer worked with old friend Walter Gropius, also a Harvard professor, on the design of several houses in the Boston area. Breuer established his own firm in New York in the 1940's. It was at this time that he began to work on larger institutional buildings. One of the fathers of the Modernism, Breuer showed a great interest in modular construction and simple forms. Breuer died in 1981.
Works
Breuer may be best know for his design of the Wassily Chair, designed in 1925 for Wassily Kandinsky and inspired in part by bicycle handlebars.
Breuer designed a number of residential buildings in the United States:
- Breuer House I, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1939.
- J. Ford House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1939.
- Chamberlain Cottage, Wayland, Massachusetts, 1940.
- Geller House, Lawrence, Long Island, New York, 1945.
- Breuer House II, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1948.
- Dexter Ferry Cooperative House of Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1951
- Starkey House, Duluth, Minnesota, 1955.
His larger building designs include:
- The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
- UNESCO headquarters, Paris (with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss).
- Australian Embassy, Paris, France.
- HUD office building, Washington, D.C.
- Litchfield High School, Litchfield, Connecticut.
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