Breuer, Marcel Lajos

Breuer, Marcel Lajos (1902-1981), Hungarian-American architect, designer, and teacher, who helped establish the functionalist principles underlying the International Style.

Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, May 21, 1902. He studied at the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, Germany, where the architect Walter Gropius and others were developing the functionalist balance of aesthetics, purpose, and modern technology. As director of the Bauhaus furniture department, Breuer designed the first contemporary chairs suitable for mass production, made of plywood on tubular metal modular frames. From 1928 he travelled to Berlin and practised architecture, designing the modular steel-frame and concrete Harnischmacher house (Wiesbaden, 1932).

After the rise of the Nazi party, Breuer fled to England in 1933 and to the United States in 1937. There, under Gropius, he helped develop the influential School of Architecture at Harvard University. He also designed houses, such as his own home in Lincoln, Massachusetts (1939), using local materials. In 1946 Breuer maintained a practice in New York. With Pier Luigi Nervi, an Italian, and Bernard Zehrfuss, a Frenchman, he designed the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1958). His other major works include De Bijenkorf (Beehive) department store in Rotterdam (1961); the IBM Research Center in La Gaude, France (1962); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1966); and St John's Abbey Church, Collegeville, Minnesota (1967). His buildings are generally composed of severe blocks constructed of rough, unfinished stone or concrete and wood.