Marcel Breuer Overview

This Hungarian-born architect championed the International Style, a movement that stressed new technologies and "true" use of materials. He studied art in Vienna and then at the Bauhaus, where he later became a teacher. After fleeing Nazi Germany, Breuer emigrated first... [more]

This Hungarian-born architect championed the International Style, a movement that stressed new technologies and "true" use of materials. He studied art in Vienna and then at the Bauhaus, where he later became a teacher. After fleeing Nazi Germany, Breuer emigrated first to Britain and then to the United States. In America, he was a key figure in the shaping of the Harvard School of Architecture. Breuer received both criticism and accolades for a style that vacillated between feather-light and rock-solid. He was concerned with both the visual and the physical stability of his designs, and he utilized every opportunity to play with form and space. The strength and light weight of his bicycle inspired him to experiment with tubular steel in furniture design. One of his best-known works is the "Wassily" chair (named after Wassily Kandinsky, the Bauhaus master for whose home the chair was originally designed). The tubular-steel chair, designed for residential use, was the first of its kind. Functional, linear, and solid in space, the "Wassily" chair was inspired by bicycle handlebars. It achieves a state of equipoise by using a minimum amount of materials. Its design incorporates the influences of various artistic movements -- the starkness of Bauhaus, the intersecting planes of De Stijl, and the exposed framework of the Constructivists. Breuer's subsequent works involved a vigorous search for atypical forms, and he often exaggerated the functional and the structural characteristics of his designs. In designing private homes, public buildings, churches, and museums, Breuer often applied a three-dimensional "molded architectural form" to their facades in order to create a unique sense of depth. This technique sometimes produced overly articulated or ponderously shaped buildings (for example, Minnesota's Saint John's Abbey Church and France's IBM Research Center) in lieu of proportional sensitivity. Breuer's architecture has thus become known for sculptural monumentality at the expense of human scale. [show less]