Architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer (1902 Pécs, Hungary - 1981 New York City) was an influential modernist. One of the fathers of Modernism, Breuer showed a great interest in modular construction and simple forms.

Known as Lajkó, 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 carpentry shop 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.

Breuer may be best known for his design of the Wassily Chair, the first tubular bent-steel chair, designed in 1925 for Wassily Kandinsky and inspired in part by bicycle handlebars. Still in production, the chair can be assembled and disassembled most easily with bicycle tools.

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 one point Johnson called Breuer “a peasant Mannerist”.) At the same time, Breuer worked with old friend and Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius, also at Harvard, on the design of several houses in the Boston area.

Breuer dissolved his partnership with Gropius in May 1941 and established his own firm in New York. The Geller House I of 1945 is the first to employ Breuer’s concept of the ‘binuclear’ house, with separate wings for the bedrooms and for the living / dining / kitchen area, separated by an entry hall, and with the distinctive ‘butterfly’ roof (two opposing roof surfaces sloping towards the middle, centrally drained) that became part of the popular modernist style vocabulary. A demonstration house set up in the MOMA garden in 1949 caused a new flurry of interest in the architect’s work, and an appreciation written by Peter Blake.

The 1953 commission for UNESCO headquarters in Paris was a turning point for Breuer: a return to Europe, a return to larger projects after years of only residential commissions, and the beginning of Breuer’s adoption of concrete as his primary medium. He became known as one of the practitioners of Brutalism, with an increasingly curvy, sculptural, personal idiom.

Breuer is sometimes incorrectly credited, or blamed, for the former Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), perhaps the most-hated high-rise in New York City. The Pam Am was actually credited to Walter Gropius. In 1969 Breuer developed a 30-story proposed skyscraper over Grand Central Terminal, called “Grand Central Tower”, which Ada Louise Huxtable called ‘a gargantuan tower of aggressive vulgarity’, and became a cause celebre. Breuer’s reputation was damaged, but the legal fallout improved the climate for landmark building preservation in New York City and across the United States.

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