MARCEL BREUER
DESIGNO INDUSTRIALE E ARCHITETTURA
Giulio Carlo Argan, Max Huber
Giulio Carlo Argan: MARCEL BREUER: DESIGNO INDUSTRIALE E ARCHITETTURA. Milan: Görlich Editore, January 1957. First edition [Monografia ideata e realizzata dalla Rinascente per illustrare la figura di Marcel Breuer in occasione del conferimento del Gran Premio Internazionale La Rinascente's Compasso d’oro 1955]. Text in Italian and English. Square quarto. Blue cloth titled in red gilt. 123 pp. Well illustrated in black and white and 2 color plates. Book design by Max Huber. Jacket with small chip to spine crown, a short closed tear and a chip to upper edge. Orange color blocks sun dulled at edges. A fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket. Rare.
8.25 x 8.25 celebratory monograph published in conjunction with the Italian department store La Rinascente to commemorate Marcel Breuer, the recipient of the first Gran Premio Internazionale La Rinascente's Compasso d’oro in 1955. Texts in Italian and English, with translation by Michael Langley. Period appropriate design and typography by La Rinascente inhouse designer Max Huber.
". . . [Breuer's] architecture is, therefore, more than mere shelter: it is the framework not only for comfortable, but also for civilized and intelligent living. -- Peter Blake, 1949
This book offers a comprehensive study of Marcel Breuer's enormously influential designs for furniture, interiors and architecture: Wooden Furniture; Tubular-Steel Furniture; Aluminum Furniture; Interiors; Architecture in Germany, Switzerland, England and the United States; Isokon Furniture; the Museum of Modern Art Competition, and much more. An early, extraordinarily comprehensive volume.
This volume includes photographs, illustrations, and/or floor plans for the following projects: Alworth House, Duluth, Minn.; Bauhaus Masters, Bambos Row Houses; Bauhaus, Dessau; Beach Restaurants, Mar del Plata, Argentina; Berlin Building Exhibition; Binuclear House, Floor Plans; Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1939; Boroschek Apartment, Berlin; Breuer House, Calder Mobile, Lincoln, Mass.; Breuer House, Floor Plan, New Canaan, Conn.; Breuer House, Lincoln, Mass 1939; Breuer House, Living Room, Lincoln Mass.; Breuer House, New Canaan, Conn.; Budapest Spring Fair Buildings; Caesar Cottage, Lakeville, Conn.; Cantilevered House, New Canaan, Conn.; Chamberlain Cottage, Wayland, Mass.; Civic Center of the Future, 1969; Clark House, Orange, Connecticut; de Bijenkorf Store, Rotterdam; De Francesco Apartment, Berlin; Diagrams 3 Basic Tubular Steel Chairs, 1928; Dolderthal Apartments, Zurich; East River Apartments, New York; Elberfeld Hospital; Elementary and High Schools, Litchfield, Conn; Exhibition House Museum of Modern Art, 1949; Gane's Exhibition Pavilion, Bristol; Geller House, Lawrence, New York; Grieco House, Andover, Mass; Haggerty House, Cohasset, Mass.; Harnischmacher House, Wiesbaden; Haselhorts Housing, Apartments; Hillside House, Floor Pan; House at Angmering-on-Sea, Sussex, England; Isokon Chair, 1935; Kharkov Theatre Project; Kniffin House, New Canaan, Conn.; L. Moholy-Nagy House; Low Cost Housing, New Kensington, Pa.; Maerisch-Ostrau House; McIntyre Plant, Westbury, New York; Member Housing, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey; Monastery of St John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minn; Multi-lens Window, Berlin; Neumann House, Croton on Hudson, New York; Pack House, Scarsdale, New York ; Piscator Apartment; Plas-2-Point Prefabricated House, 1942; Plywood Nesting Chair, 1945; Potsdamer Platz, Berlin; Robinson House, Williamstown, Mass; Sarah Lawrence Art Center, Bronxville, New York; Serviceman's Memorial, Cambridge, Mass.; Showroom, "Scarves by Vera", New York; Ski Hotel Obergurgl, Tyrol; Smith College Dormitories, Northampton, Mass.; Stacking Isokon Chairs, 1935; Stillman House, Litchfield, Conn; Stone Table, Breuer House, New Canaan, Conn.; Stuyvesant Town, New York; Summer House, Wellfleet, Mass.; Thompson House, Ligonier, PA.; Thost House, Hamburg; Tompkins House, Hewlett Harbor, NY.; Torrington Manufacturing, Oakville, Canada; UNESCO, Paris; Vassar Cooperative House, Poughkeepsie, New York; Ventris Apartment, London; Weizenblatt House, Ashville, NC.; Werkbund Exhibition, Paris; Wheaton College Art Center, 1938; Wohnbedarf Furniture Store, Zurich; Wolfson House, Millbrook, New York and the Yankee Portable Prefabricated House, 1942.
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]
The Italian department store La Rinascente played an important part in the setting up of the Compasso d’Oro: A prize for good industrial design. Reopened after the war only in December 1950, La Rinascente was the leading department stores chain in Italy, with branches in all the major cities. La Rinascente offered a vast array of products, from toys to furniture, make-up to sport accessories. The firm thereby had a “natural” concern for the quality, functionality and aesthetics of their goods.
Being a company selling products of such great diversity, La Rinascente possessed valuable knowledge about the state of Italian industrial production, and was also an active importer. This led to another, and possibly more idealistic, motivation for their engagement; the desire for a national industry capable of making better products and of competing better with imported goods.
The prize itself—designed by Albe Steiner—was awarded the product, by assigning the golden compass to the producing company, and the silver compass, accompanied by 100000 lire, to the designer. One year later, in 1955, two additional awards were established; the Gran Premio Nazionale and the Gran Premio Internazionale. These were not intended for products, but for persons, companies or institutions that had contributed to the promotion of design in, respectively national and international context. Marcel Breuer received the first Gran Premio Internazionale La Rinascente's Compasso d’oro in 1955.
Max Huber (1919-1992) moved to Milan in order to avoid being drafted into the Swiss army. He worked for Studio Boggeri until Italy joined the war in 1941, forcing Huber to return to his home country where he collaborated with Werner Bischof and Emil Schultness on the influential art magazine 'Du.' As a member of the art group Allianz he exhibits his abstract artwork at the Kunsthaus Zurich with Max Bill, Leo Leuppi, Richard Lohse and Camille Graeser.
After the war Huber returned to Milan where he rubbed shoulders with the postwar Italian intelligentsia [Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Elio Vittorini, Franco Fortini, Ettore Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni and Albe Steiner] all who shared the belief that design had the capacity to restore the human values misplaced during the war.
From 1950 to 1954 Huber worked for the department store La Rinascente, also known as "Elle Erre", the time Albert Steiner was art director of their Advertising Office. The two also worked on the VIII Triennale di Milano. With Achille Castiglioni he designed large-scale installations for RAI, Eni and Montecatini. In 1954 Huber was awarded the prestigious Compasso dπOro and in 1958 he travels to the US as a speaker to the First International Seminar on Typography (New York Art Directors Club).
In 1965 the Nippon Design Committee organized an exhibition of Huber's work at Matsuya Design Gallery in Tokyo. This trip established close ties with Japan that culminated with his marriage to the artist and illustrator Aoi Kono. Kono was instrumental in the development of m.a.x.museo, a museum dedicated to his name and preserving his personal archive, that opened in Chiasso in 2005.