Marcel Breuer Biography
Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 in Pécs, Hungary.
At just 18 he entered the Bauhaus as a student. Very soon he became a teacher at the school, remaining there from 1922 to 1928. The founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, appointed him manager of the furniture laboratory in which he worked, combining art, applied arts and industrial production in a new design approach that extended to all scales, from urban planning to everyday useful objects.
In Breuer's laboratory, in 1926, the tubular metal structure for chairs and tables reached its maturity. The first large piece produced is the "model B3 armchair" which becomes iconic in Breuer's production. Then follows the first "Cantilever chair" in 1928 and the "Cesca" chair which is its evolution. In the 1920s all models were produced by Thonet and after the war they passed to the Italian Gavina, finally acquired by Knoll at the end of the 1960s. In 1936, Breuer went to London to avoid Nazi Germany and worked for the Isokon Company where he developed research on the use of bent plywood, which is brought to expression in his "Long Chair" of 1936.
In 1937 he went to live in the United States to follow Gropius to the Harvard Graduate School of Design where the founder of the Bauhaus became dean. Breuer and Gropius, in fact, shared their professional practice until 1941. Breuer then moved to New York in 1946, where he worked as an architect and remained his operational headquarters until his death in 1981.
