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Exhibit Looks at Breuer’s Modern Designs, From Furniture to Buildings
The new exhibition at the National Building Museum, “Marcel Breuer – Design and Architecture,” offers the rare opportunity to view Marcel Breuer’s innovative furniture designs, such as the well-known tubular steel Wassily chair or the cantilever chairs, alongside his equally important contributions in the field of architecture and to examine recurrent motifs, like the cantilever or horizontal rectangle, in both fields. Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) was born and raised in Hungary. He was accepted to study at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. The Bauhaus, which was founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, revolutionized art education by creating a collaboration between artists, craftspeople, and industry and by training students in multiple fields of art, architecture, and design. Marcel Breuer completed his studies in cabinet making and architecture. After his apprenticeship in architecture, he served as the head of the cabinet making workshop at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he first began experimenting with his tubular steel designs. This exhibition chronicles Breuer’s use of varied materials—solid wood, steel, aluminum, and plywood—through different phases in his modular furniture design and contains more than 50 original pieces.
Teaching and practicing After Walter Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928, Breuer left to open an architectural practice in Berlin. Just a few years later, however, he left for Switzerland, and when the Nazi party came into power in 1933, Breuer joined Gropius and other Bauhaus colleagues in London before eventually emigrating to the United States. In 1937, he secured a position on the architecture faculty at Harvard University, teaching alongside Gropius. The two architects worked as partners designing single-family homes until 1941.
In 1946, Breuer gave up his teaching position and moved to New York City, where he began designing single-family houses in four different styles: the single box, the binuclear house, the long house, and the villa type house. The Breuer House II, for example, is a “single box” type house with a two-story living room around which the other rooms are centered, and the Robinson House is a “binuclear” type, meaning that its living and sleeping quarters are separated into two distinct areas. The Robinson House also has a cantilever exterior, or a horizontal exterior that extends beyond it’s vertical structure. Breuer’s best-known cantilever building is the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Breuer also became known for the sculptural use of concrete in his buildings. This is especially visible in the interiors of the civic, public, and religious buildings he designed, which often feature interior walls made of folded concrete, as seen in the assembly hall of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. This important commission, which was won by Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Bernard Zehrfuss, helped establish Breuer’s international reputation as an architect. The National Building Museum is offering a tour of Breuer’s buildings in Washington, DC, including the Department of Health and Human Services building and the Department of Housing and Urban Development Building, on December 15. Please see the museum’s website for more details. The exhibition was organized by the Vitra Design Museum and is on view at the National Building Museum through February 17, 2008. November 14, 2007 Links
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