DESIGN QUARTERLY 53
Marcel Breuer: The Buildings at St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, MN
Meg Torbert [Editor], Rob Roy Kelly [Designer]
Meg Torbert [Editor], Rob Roy Kelly [Designer]: DESIGN QUARTERLY NO. 53: MARCEL BREUER [The Buildings at St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota]. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1961. Original edition. Slim quarto. Saddle stitched thick printed wrappers. 32 pp. 30 black and white illustrations. Wrappers lightly soiled, but a nearly fine copy.
8.5 x 11 staple-bound softcover book with 32 pages devoted to the Walker Art Center exhibition of Marcel Breuer’s Buildings at St. John’s Abbey. Introduction by Martin Friedman, a statement by Marcel Breuer, and analysis by Hamilton Smith. “Built between May of 1958 and August of 1961, the church of Saint John’s Abbey—at the campus of Saint John’s University—is one of just two ever created on American soil by designer and architect Marcel Breuer.
“The church’s front, north-facing wall is entirely made of stained glass overlaid with concrete latticework in a hexagonal structure. The pattern of the stained glass itself was designed by the college’s art professor, Bronislaw Bak, who conceived the blooming color gradients as a reflection of evolutions in the Church’s liturgical year. At the time, this wall of color formed the single largest stained glass piece in the world. Inside, the ceiling folds like a great fan above two areas of seating for the congregation: a hovering loft whose back presses against the bright honeycombed north wall, and an expansive lower level of seating that surrounds the altar in a semi-circle, inviting all 1,500 worshippers closer. With such flowing and pleated grace, it’s mind-boggling when one remembers everything at Saint John’s is made of concrete poured on-site by the monks themselves, supervised by Breuer’s hand-selected architectural team.
“But how did this epic, brutalist masterpiece from one of 20th century design’s biggest stars end up on a sleepy Midwestern college campus? The answer lies in the forward-thinking taste of a rogue abbot by the name of Baldwin Dworschak.
“Newly elected in 1950, the sixth abbot of Saint John’s envisioned a monumental embodiment of faith itself in the form of a new church, built to channel the ideals of the Benedictines, whose tradition, “at its best challenges us to think boldly and to cast our ideals in forms which will be valid for centuries to come.”
“An exhaustive, worldwide search of candidates fit to make this holy task an earthly reality ensued. No small task, the process of narrowing down the 12 candidates proved laborious. Ultimately, a frontrunner emerged after more than a year of deliberation. The monks decided that, when dealing with the futuristic, who better to execute this vision than the Hungarian-born industrial designer-cum-architect Marcel Breuer?” [Atlas Obscura]
Marcel Lajos Breuer (Hungary, 1902 – 1981) studied and taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau in the twenties and was introduced the wunderkind to the older giants of the era of whom three – Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius – were to have life-long influence upon his professional life.
By the time he left Germany in 1935 to join Gropius in London, Breuer was one of the best-known designers in Europe. His reputation was based upon his invention of tubular steel furniture, one big residence, two apartment houses, some shop interiors and several competition entries.
Two years later, Gropius asked him to join Harvard’s architecture faculty and, during WWII their partnership revolutionized American house design while teaching a whole generation of soon-to-be famous architects.
On his own in New York in 1946, Breuer saw a practice that had been essentially residential finally expand into institutional buildings with the UNESCO Headquarters commission in Paris in 1952 and the first of many buildings for Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, MN two years later.
His New York-based firm moved through three ever-larger offices, with a branch in his beloved Paris to handle work in seven European countries; he gathered five young partners in the process.
By 1968, when he won the AIA’s Gold Medal, he could look back on such world-famous monuments as New York’s Whitney Museum (probably the best known), IBM’s La Gaude Laboratory (his personal favorite), the headquarters of the Departments of HUD and HEW in Washington DC (he finally felt American), and Flaine (an entire ski-town in the French Alps). In that same year, he won the first Jefferson Foundation Medal that cited him “among all the living architects of the world as excelling all others in the quality of his work.”
He retired in 1976 and died on the 1st of July 1981 after a long illness. [Robert F. Gatje FAIA]
The noted design educator, collector, and historian Rob Roy Kelly (1925–2004) collected wood type from local printers for use by his students at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. He began gathering the types in the late 1950s and continued adding to the collection over the next decade. He started researching the history, manufacture, and use of the growing collection partly in response to questions that arose from working with his students. His research was first published in the 1963 issue of Design Quarterly (No. 56), and was followed in 1964 by a limited-edition folio of specimen sheets from the collection, entitled American Wood Types 1828–1900, Volume One. Kelly’s research would culminate with the publishing in 1969 of the seminal American Wood Type, 1828–1900: Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period. American Wood Type was later reprinted as a paperback in 1977. This text was one of the first, and remains one of the most comprehensive, histories of American vernacular printing types of the period. During the 1970s, the publication of Kelly’s American Wood Type helped fuel a revival of interest in nineteenth-century American printing types, and in doing so, helped save a valuable facet of American history.
Design Quarterly began as Everyday Art Quarterly, published by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis starting in 1946. The editorial focus aimed to bring modern design to the masses through thoughtful examination of household objects and their designers. Everyday Art Quarterly was a vocal proponent of the Good Design movement (as represented by MoMA and Chicago's Merchandise Mart) and spotlighted the best in industrial and handcrafted design. When the magazine became Design Quarterly in 1958, the editors assumed a more international flair in their selection of material to spotlight.