THE HOUSE IN THE MUSEUM GARDEN
The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Volume XVI, No. 1, 1949
Marcel Breuer [Architect]
[Marcel Breuer] Museum of Modern Art: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART BULLETIN. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949. First edition [MoMA Bulletin, Volume XVI, No. 1]. Printed stapled wrappers. 16 pp. Seven photographs and 3 black and white illustrations. Wrappers lightly soiled and handled, but a very good copy.
7.25 x 9.25 softcover book with 16 pages devoted to the demonstration house designed and built by marcel Breuer in the Garden at the Museum of Modern Art in the Spring of 1949.
In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art initiated a series of model post-war houses by well-known architects exhibited in the museum's garden. Breuer's house was the inaugural design and was open to the public between April 14 and October 30, 1949. The rectangular volume of the house was clad in vertical cypress boards and topped by a butterfly roof. The children's and guest bedroom, along with a playroom and attached play yard, were located at one end of the house. The living-dining room and garage could be found at the other end. The master bedroom was located above the garage in the space created by the upward incline of the butterfly roof and was accessible by interior and exterior staircases. Outdoor spaces like the patio and play yard were defined by low, stone walls.
Breuer furnished the interior with modern furniture, including numerous pieces of his own design. The interior color scheme was based on the colors and textures of natural stone and wood with blue accent walls. Large crowds visited the house and expressed enthusiasm for the house and its contents, though some critics disliked the separation of children's and parents' spaces. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased the house after the exhibition and moved it to the family estate in Pocantico Hills. Breuer built numerous other versions of the house for clients inspired by their visit to the museum garden. [The Marcel Breuer Archives, Syracuse University]
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]