Marcel Lajos Breuer Biography
Marcel Breuer (Pécs, 22 May 1902 – New York, 1 July 1981) was a Hungarian architect and designer. He was an important exponent of the Bauhaus and the modern movement. In the early twenties he studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in Vienna and at the Bauhaus school in Weimar (carpentry course). At the age of 19, in 1921 he designed and created the African chair or romantic chair in hand-carved wood and designed fabrics. The shape of this chair is fundamental to understand the origins deriving from local cultures (popular Hungarian in this case) and from artisanal productions. This chair, like most of the known Bauhaus prototypes, is handcrafted in the workshops. After a period of professional training at an architectural firm in Paris, he returned to the Bauhaus school in 1925 as a teacher and directed the furniture workshop until 1928. And under his direction from 1926 the laboratories began to produce chairs and tables in tubular steel, he began the design of modern furniture in tubular metal, including his famous chairs both in wood with fabric backrest and in tubular iron with straw backrest through which he searches for new expressive solutions. New materials are also created such as eisengarn which will be used for the first time by Breuer in the Wassily Chair. In 1927 the patented industrial production of this furniture (including many designed by him) was in full swing. He designed the interiors of the Bauhaus in Dessau (1925/26) and for the home of the theater director Erwin Piscator in Berlin in 1927. In 1928, after the resignation of Walter Gropius, Breuer, together with László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, also left the Bauhaus and together with Gropius opened an architecture studio in Berlin. At the end of September 1932 the Bauhaus ceased its activities and after the advent of Nazism in 1933, many architects were forced to retire from the profession, in 1934 Breuer together with Gropius hastily emigrated to England. From 1935 to 1937 he worked in London, at the FRS Yorke studio, for which he designed aluminum furniture. In 1937 he moved to Harvard University, where he taught architecture. From 1938 to 1941 he was in the studio with Walter Gropius. From this moment he pursued solutions that were not always rigorous such as the bell tower of Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota. In 1932 his buildings for residential use built in Germany, in those in Zurich in 1934 and in those in Sussex in 1936 showed his tendency towards order and to a certain rigor inserted within the rationalist current. In 1952 he collaborated with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernhard Zerfhuss on the design of the UNESCO Palace in Paris, standing out for the structure of the building. In 1956 he opened the studio Marcel Breuer and Associates. The UNESCO project is taken up and expanded for the IBM Research Center. In 1972 he built a house for the Saier spouses in Glanville consisting of two residential units connected only by a wall under an imposing roof supported by three pillars interspersed with fully glazed external walls, creating a totally innovative expressive building. Inside there are zinc panels and engravings by the sculptor Nero Ceccarelli.
