MARCEL BREUER: FURNITURE AND INTERIORS
Christopher Wilk
Christopher Wilk: MARCEL BREUER: FURNITURE AND INTERIORS. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981. First edition. Quarto. Black cloth stamped in gray. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 192 pp. 199 black and white photo illustrations. Jacket lightly shelfworn. The cloth edition is considerably more scarce than the simultaneously-issued PB edition. Out-of-print. A fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8 x 10.25 hardcover book with 192 pages; 199 finely-printed black and white photo illustrations. Introduction by J. Stewart Johnson. Also included are appendices: Tubular-steel designs misattributed to Breuer; notes; bibliography. Cover illustration for this catalogue is Marcel Breuer's first tabular steel chair (1925) as illustrated of the cover of a Standar-Möbel sales catalog (1927) designed by Herbert Bayer.
From the book: "This book offers the first comprehensive study of Marcel Breuer's enormously influential designs for furniture and interiors. Trained at the Bauhaus, with its emphasis on knowledge of materials, the young Breuer brought to his work a vital originality of conception and freedom of mind. His invention of tubular-steel furniture, uniquely suited to the modern interior and to modern methods of mass production, was revolutionary, setting off a tremendous burst of creativity in the world of design. "
Based on research in archives and collections in Europe and the United States and on interviews with Breuer himself and with colleagues and manufacturers, this book offers a remarkably detailed account of the Breuer contribution in furniture and interiors."
Contents:
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Youth and Early Work, 1902-25
- Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus Weimar
- Wooden Furniture (I)
- The Question of De Stijl Influence
- Wooden Furniture (II)
- The Bauhaus Exhibition 1923
- Wooden Furniture (III)
- Bauhaus Dessau 1925-28
- First Tubular-Steel Furniture
- Furniture in the School Buildings
- Bauhaus Masters' Houses
- Tubular-Steel Furniture and Standard-Mobel
- Interiors 1926-28
- Tubular Steel and the New Interior
- The Tubular-Steel Cantilevered Chair
- Breuer's First Cantilevered Designs
- Anton Lorenz and the Business of Tubular Steel
- Table Designs 1928
- Furniture Designs 1928-29
- Architectural Practice in Berlin 1928-31
- Interiors
- Furniture
- Travels and Design Work 1931-34
- Harnismacher House
- Switzerland
- Wohnbedarf Furniture
- Aluminum Furniture 1932-34
- The Chair Designs
- England and Isokon 1935-37
- Isokon, For Ease, For Ever
- The Reclining Chairs
- Other Isokon Furniture Designs
- Heal's Seven Architects Exhibition 1936
- Breuer & Yorke, Architectural Commissions
- The United States 1937-67
- Bryn Mawr Dormitory Furniture
- Frank House
- Cutout-Plywood Furniture
- Independent Practice
- Geller House
- Geller Furniture and the Museum of Modern Art Competition
- Later Work
- Conclusion
- Appendixes: 1) Tubular-Steel Designs Misattributed to Breuer
2) The House Interior -- by Marcel Breuer
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Photographic Credits
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]