ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT RULES
The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard
David Masello
David Masello: ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT RULES [The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard]. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1993. First edition. Quarto. Oatmeal cloth titled in blue. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 172 pp. Illustrated case studies of 20 residences. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
9 x 10.25 hardcover book with 172 pages and many black and white and color images. This volume examines 20 houses designed by Marcel Breuer in collaboration with Herbert Beckhard. The houses are noted for such dynamics as interior spaces that flow into each other, a denial of extraneous detail, use of natural materials, and a conspicuous articulation of structure.
Internationally famous for such buildings as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (as well as for the ubiquitous "Breuer" chair), Marcel Breuer thrived on experimentation. From the 1950s through the 1970s, he and his associate Herbert Beckhard created a radical new type of American housing.
David Masello, a writer on architecture and urban design, interviewed Herbert Beckhard and many of the original clients. He introduces here twenty of Breuer and Beckhard's landmark houses, explaining how their aims are realized in the design, building materials, and use of each site.
Herbert Beckhard graduated from Penn State University in 1949 and attended Princeton University’s Graduate School of Architecture in 1950. In 1951, he joined the office of the world-renowned architect Marcel Breuer, who taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany and at Harvard University. Beckhard became an associate by 1956, and became Breuer’s partner and design collaborator in 1964.
Beckhard and Breuer collaborated on the design of many notable projects including more than thirty private residences, including the Jacques Koerfer House in Ascona, Switzerland (National A.I.A. Honor Award), the Hooper House in Baltimore, MD, the Starkey House in Duluth, MN and the Wilhelm Staehelin House in Zurich, Switzerland.
Beckhard was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a member of the eminent National Academy of Design. He was an Alumni Fellow and a Distinguished Alumnus of Penn State University and an IBM Fellow to the Aspen Design Conference.
Marcel Lajos Breuer – Lajkó to his friends – was born on 21 May 1902 in the provincial city of Pecs, Hungary. His early study and teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau in the twenties 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]