Marcel Breuer

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Marcel Breuer, 1957

Marcel Lajos ("Lajkó") Breuer (born May 21, 1902 in Pécs , Hungary , Austria-Hungary ; † July 1, 1981 in New York City ) was a German-American architect and designer of Hungarian-Jewish origin who was the inventor of the modern tubular steel furniture applies.

After an apprenticeship as a carpenter at the Bauhaus Weimar , Breuer worked for several years in Walter Gropius' office and then went into business for himself. In 1933 he fled Nazi Germany due to his Jewish origins and emigrated to the USA via Hungary and London . There he built the architecture faculty at Harvard University together with Gropius .

Life

education

Marcel Breuer began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1920 , which he broke off after a few weeks, and began training as a carpenter in the furniture workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar . At first he was still engaged in painting . In June 1923 his journeyman's piece, the lady's dressing table , was created for the “experimental house of the Bauhaus”, the model house Am Horn in Weimar. He passed his journeyman's examination in 1924. At the age of 22 he had already designed and manufactured a large number of avant-garde wooden furniture, including the sensational constructivist slatted chair ti 1a from 1922. Breuer's early conception of the design can already be seen in this design: Objects are made of objects that are as similar as possible, only slightly varied individual parts put together. This additive joining is not concealed, but deliberately emphasized - in his tubular steel furniture, for example. B. by visible screw connections. This principle becomes particularly clear in his B 3 club armchair (later: Wassily chair ), which was designed around 1925 and was screwed together from various individual parts - not welded together . Since 1921 at the latest, Breuer has been working on house designs in Walter Gropius ' architecture office; he worked on the interior design of the Expressionist House Sommerfeld and on the designs of other series houses. He stayed for several months in Paris to study architecture. Classical architecture training was not planned at the Weimar Bauhaus; Nevertheless, Breuer saw himself primarily as an architect.

The club armchair B 3 only became known when it was reissued by Gavina in 1964 as the "Wassily Chair"

Activity in Germany

In 1925 he was appointed junior master and head of the furniture workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau. In the same year, in cooperation with the Dessau-based Junkers aircraft factory, he designed a series of tubular steel furniture, for example the tubular steel chair B5 and a series of stools and (side) tables (B 9) . The most famous piece of furniture from this second design phase is the steel club chair B 3 , which was only given the nickname Wassily in the 1960s . Breuer is considered to be the inventor of modern tubular steel furniture. Breuer covered the armchairs preferably with iron thread fabric . He initially had his designs produced in his company Standard Möbel Lengyel & Co , which he founded with the Hungarian architect Kalman Lengyel , before Thonet took over the production rights in 1929. The Bauhaus in Dessau, built in 1925/1926, and the associated Masters' Houses were largely equipped with Breuer's tubular steel furniture - this shows the Dessau Bauhaus's turn towards a factual, industrial conception of design in contrast to the expressionistic, handcrafted approach of the Weimar Bauhaus. Since Breuer did not want to transfer the income from the furniture he made while working at the Bauhaus to the university, which was under constant financial pressure, conflicts arose with the institution.

In 1928, Breuer designed the so-called Bambos floor plans for the expansion of the Meistersiedlung which was not carried out, which were based on the small house typologies developed in 1925. His designs for an apartment building with an arcade are also known. A little later, he quit the junior master's position at the Bauhaus and dissolved his company Standard-Möbel on June 30, 1928; The Thonet company took over the rights to the furniture designs. For these, he designed the cantilever chairs B32 and B64 (later named Cesca ), among many other models , whose cantilever principle without rear legs took up the ideas of the Dutch architect Mart Stam . The cantilever chairs are still produced by Thonet almost unchanged and are often plagiarized; the question of artistic copyright on steel furniture has resulted in ongoing legal copyright disputes to this day. Although Breuer opened an architecture office in Berlin in 1929, he was refused admission to the BDA . From 1931 he advised the Frankfurt entrepreneur Harry Fuld u. a. in the construction of some commercial buildings and the design of products. Beyond that, he received no major building contract until 1932 and, in addition to furniture designs, only carried out a few modifications, for example for the writer Grete de Francesco . His outstanding, but in terms of factual sobriety, the furnishing of the apartment of the Berlin theater director Erwin Piscator attracted a lot of attention as a controversial example of modern living. He took a prominent position at the Paris Werkbund exhibition in 1930 and at the much-noticed German building exhibition in Berlin in 1931 a. a. part with the house for a sportsman . In March 1931, Breuer was finally accepted into the BDA through the advocacy of Walter Gropius . In 1932 he received the building contract for the Harnischmacher house in Wiesbaden, a consistently airy, modern, upper-class villa. The building was destroyed by a bomb during the war. In 1954, he built a second house for Paul Harnischmacher on the same property, which was moved into again in 2014 after careful modernization and renovation.

In Hungary, England and the USA

Marcel Breuer left Germany in 1933 because of his Jewish origin and moved to Hungary temporarily. In 1935 he moved to London and signed a partnership agreement with Francis Reginald Stevens Yorke. In 1937 Breuer emigrated to the United States. He worked first as a lecturer, then as a professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University . With Walter Gropius, he built up the architecture faculty and founded a joint architecture office. After its dissolution in 1941, he opened his own architecture office.

In 1946, Breuer gave up teaching at Harvard University. He then devoted himself almost exclusively to construction and produced a remarkable oeuvre . In his luxurious residential buildings in particular, he freed his designs from the strictly rationalistic, universal architecture concept of the “white modern” by attempting to combine regional conditions with a modern design language. On the other hand, he carried out numerous large orders, such as the design of an entire winter sports resort in the French Alps ( Flaine , from 1960). In 1952, together with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss, he was commissioned to build the UNESCO building in Paris. From 1953 to 1957 he designed the De Bijenkorf department store in Rotterdam together with Abraham Elzas . In 1965 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1966 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In the 1960s, the Italian Dino Gavina became aware of Breuer's forgotten furniture designs, he acquired the license for the Wassily Chair and brought it back onto the market. This company was only moderately successful and he sold the production.

Shortly after he retired, Breuer died at the age of 79.

Whitney Museum of American Art in New York
University of Massachusetts Amherst Campus Center (right) (1965/1969)
Flaine ski resort designed by Breuer in the Haute-Savoie department (France)

Work (selection)

Public buildings / commercial buildings

Gründisch (Lecture) Hall (1964), Gould Hall of Technology (1964; today: Polowczek Hall), Colston (Residence) Hall, Tech I & II (today: Meister Hall)
Saint Thomas Hall (1959), St. John's Abbey Church (1961), Alcuin Library (1964), Peter Engel Science Center (1965), Saints Bernard Hall, Patrick Hall and Boniface Hall (1967), Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research ( 1968), Bush Center for the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (1975)

Private homes in the USA

  • Hagerty House (1937/1938), Cohasset (Massachusetts)
  • Breuer House I (1938/1939), Lincoln (Massachusetts)
  • J. Ford House (1939), Lincoln (Massachusetts)
  • Chamberlain Cottage (1940), Wayland, Massachusetts
  • Geller House, Lawrence (1945), Long Island (New York)
  • Robinson House (1946–1948), Williamstown (Massachusetts)
  • Breuer House II (1947/1948), New Canaan (Connecticut)
  • Cape Cod Cottages, Wellfleet (Massachusetts):
Breuer Cottage (1945–1949, 1961), Kepes Cottage (1948/1949), Edgar Stillman Cottage (1953/1954), Wise Cottage (1963)

Urban planning

  • Flaine , France, design of the entire ski station with 6,000 beds at the time (1960–1981)
  • District Hauts de Bayonne , Bayonne , France (1963-1974)

Private houses in Europe

  • 1932: Harnischmacher House in Wiesbaden, Schöne Aussicht 55 (destroyed)
  • 1953–1955: Harnischmacher II house in Wiesbaden, Schöne Aussicht 53
  • 1958: House Willi and Marina Stähelin - Peyer in Feldmeilen / Lake Zurich / Switzerland
  • 1967: Jacques Koerfer House in Moscia, Ascona Tessin (with Herbert Beckhard and Roland Weber )

Furnishings

Cantilever chair B 55
Office furniture with tubular steel furniture in the police service school (Berlin-Köpenick) , approx. 1931
“Design in Germany” stamp pad with a motif of Marcel Breuer's armchair
  • African chair
  • Sun Lounge Chair , Model No. 301
  • Dressing table and dresser (1922, 1925)
  • Slatted chairs, made of wood (1922–1924)
  • Wassily chair no.B 3 (1925)
  • Canteen stool B 9
  • Laccio tables small and large (1927)
  • Wassily chair, folding chair version (1927)
  • Cesca chair and armchair (1928)
  • Thonet typist 's desk (1928)
  • Coffee table (1928)
  • Tubular steel furniture (1928/1929)
  • F 41 club chair on castors (1928–1930)
  • Broom cupboard (1930)
  • Bookcase (1931)
  • Armchair, model no. 301 (1932–1934)
  • Aluminum chair (1933)
  • Isokon chair (1935)
  • Aluminum chaise longue (1935/1936)
  • Plywood furniture, in five parts (1936/1937)
  • Swivel chair B 7

literature

  • Breuer, Marcel , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 , Vol II, 1. Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , pp. 153 f.
  • Marcel Breuer, Cranson Jones, translation from English by Christine Hereth: Marcel Breuer. 1921-1962. Hatje, Stuttgart 1963.
  • Arnt Cobbers: Marcel Breuer . Taschen, Cologne 2009, ISBN 3-8228-4884-0 .
  • Joachim Driller: Marcel Breuer. The houses 1923–1973. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-421-03141-X .
  • Magdalena Droste, Manfred Ludewig: Marcel Breuer Design. In German, English and French. Taschen, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-8228-5779-3 .
  • Peter Fierz, Manuela Perz: Being Marcel Breuer - His houses . University Institute for Building Design, Karlsruhe 2007, ISBN 3-9805818-6-1 .
  • Robert F. Gatje: Marcel Breuer - A Memoir . Monacelli, New York 2000, ISBN 1-58093-029-8 .
  • Tician Papachristou: New Buildings and Projects . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 1970, 1994, ISBN 3-7757-0005-6 .
  • Alexander von Vegesack, Mathias Remmele: Marcel Breuer. Design and Architecture - Design and Architecture . Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein 2003, ISBN 3-931936-46-5 .
  • Barry Bergdoll, Jonathan Massey: Marcel Breuer Building Global Institutions , Lars Müller Publishers 2017, ISBN 978-3-03778-519-5 .
Exhibition catalog
  • The Muralist and the Modern Architect. Marcel Breuer and Hans Hofmann , Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, New York City 1950.

Web links

Commons : Marcel Breuer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/bauhaus-dessau-h-fuld-co-telephone-phone-works
  2. ↑ House wanted, icon found. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , June 11, 2017, page 63.
  3. ↑ Members: Marcel Breuer. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 18, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes: Station de sports d´hiver de Flaine , French, accessed April 4, 2020
  5. ↑ http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/koerfer-house-moscia-tessin-switzerland-marcel-breuer-and-herbert-beckhard-architects-1011
personal data
SURNAME Breuer, Marcel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Breuer, Marcel Lajos (full name); Breuer, Lajkó (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American architect and designer of Hungarian origin
DATE OF BIRTH May 21, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Pécs
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1981
Place of death New York City