Marcel Breuer

1902-1981 

Champion of the modern movement, Marcel Breuer is equally celebrated for his achievements in architecture and furniture. Breuer became a Bauhaus student in 1920. At very young age, he was chosen by the director, Walter Gropius, to manage the school’s furniture workshop. This gave him the opportunity to experience the beginning of the era in which the very concept of “modern furniture” took shape.

His entire body of work, both in architecture and furniture, embodies the driving Bauhaus objective to reconcile art and industry. While at the Bauhaus, Breuer revolutionized the modern interior with his tubular-steel furniture collection, inspired by bicycle construction and fabricated using the techniques of local plumbers. His first designs, including the Club chair (model B3)/Wassily chair – named after Wassily Kandinsky and recognizable for its leather-strap seating supports, remain among the most identifiable icons of the modern furniture movement.

Breuer viewed his inspiration – the bicycle as an object that represented the paragon of design, owing in part to the fact that its form had remained largely unchanged since its inception. The tubular steel of the bicycle’s handlebars also intrigued Breuer, as it was light, durable, and suitable for mass production, an idea that Breuer wanted to transfer to furniture design.

Shortly after finishing his design for the Wassily chair, Breuer continued his explorations of the plastic possibilities of tubular steel with the B32, or the Cesca Chair, as it is now popularly called after Breuer’s daughter, Francesca. The frame’s form, where the seat and back are supported only by the legs at the front, comprises the first cantilevered chair design in history.

Breuer’s attention eventually moved towards architecture. After practicing privately, he worked as a professor at Harvard’s School of Design under Walter Gropius. Breuer was honored as the first architect to have a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1963, Breuer began work on perhaps his best-known architectural project — the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Always the innovator, Breuer was eager to both test the newest advances in technology and break with conventional forms, often with startling results that eventually cemented his reputation as one of the most important designers and architects of the modern age.