A MODEL STUDENT I MARCEL BREUER AND THE AMERICAN HOME

It was 1960 when Marcel Breuer received an invitation from James Marston
Smith inviting him to a round-table discussion at Columbia University
regarding the Bauhaus. The letter read “you, like a number of Gropius’
pupils,” Breuer was outraged by his lasting association with Gropius and
responded in a letter, irritable in tone, that “I never considered myself a
‘Gropius pupil’ with all my sympathy for his personality and aims.”1
This was a typical response from Breuer whom, arriving late in his career to
architecture was keen to move on from his Bauhaus and Gropius
associations and yet was ever respectful and grateful for it.

The Bauhaus was founded and directed by an architect who believed that
‘the ultimate aim off all creative activity is the building’2 and yet it was not Marcel Breuer Portrait taken at
the Bauhaus. He raises his hands;
until 1927, eight years since the Bauhaus had opened, that Gropius gave the tools of his trade.
into mounting pressure from students and opened an architectural
department to be run by Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Gropius’ earlier
theory that students would only be ready to approach architectural
problems only after a thorough grounding in theory, craft and design skills
faced much criticism from both students and staff. As early as 1921
Schlemmer criticised the school and Gropius for this deficiency. Without
architecture he claimed, the Bauhaus was not distinguishable from an
applied arts school. His diary entry reads:

At the Bauhaus there are no classes in architecture and no student can hope to
become an architect, rather he cannot from his background. The Bauhaus is
nevertheless believed to represent architectural leadership. This naturally becomes
the fault of Gropius; he is the only architect at the Bauhaus and he has no time to
3
give instruction.

It remained Gropius’ belief that “on-site work with actual building materials
and structures” took precedence over classroom instruction in architectural
techniques and design. It was his conviction that “only an architects office
could provide the necessary practical experience for a qualified journeyman
(the term used for a student whom had completed relevant workshop
experience)”. He believed, too, that architecture should not be emphasised
at early stages of education, but should be “the pinnacle of design
development.”4 It was soon apparent to Gropius along with other tutors that
Marcel Breuer was one of his most competent and inventive students
working at the school. Oskar Schlemmer, a profitable and renowned artist
himself, made note in his diary with some disdain that Breuer had chosen
the sawdust and chisels of the carpentry workshop over the easel. In 1938
Henry- Russell Hitchcock, reviewing an exhibition at Harvard of Breuer’s
work, observed that a non-architectural abstract watercolour, executed in
1922 was “probably finer than the earliest furniture projects and room
designs”5. Breuer’s early paintings and posters he executed in a
Constructivist fashion in 1923 and 1926 reveal a painter completely
assured in colour and composition. When suggested by an acquaintance
that he could have become one of the great painters of the twentieth
century Breuer remarked:

But it isn’t so. To be a painter you have to be a genius or you are nothing. Take
Picasso, for example. He processes everything into art. That takes enormous self-
confidence and Picasso has plenty of that. I like to do something more normal. A Cabinet-making workshop This
painter does something and sells it; an architect sells it first and then does it. This is where Breuer would spend
sets up pressures. Picasso manages everything without such pressures. He has most of his time at the Bauhaus.
Experimenting in tubular steel
an incredibly rich process, which rests on itself. While I think I am also furniture, influenced by the handle
6
experimental, I am so only when somebody puts pressure on me. bars on his Adler bicycle.
Breuer’s simultaneous disregard and respect for fine art is a credit to the
persistence of Gropius’ intention. Breuer was handed a flyer with the
emblem ‘Return of the Craftsman’ and with a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger
while in Vienna in 1920. He had been handed a copy of Programm des
Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar (1919). Breuer at the time, studying at
the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, wanted to be a sculptor or painter.
Frustrated by the Beaux Arts training he was receiving he was determined
to find a revolution in art and had finally found it. The eighteen year old
would have undoubtedly read from the manifesto:

If a young man who feels inclined towards creative activity begins his career by
learning a trade, as in the past, then the unproductive “artist” is no longer
condemned to exercise his art incompletely, for his talents are now preserved for
7
the trade in which he might achieve excellence.

The normality that Breuer speaks of must be in the making of things, African Chair Primitivistic
conception, 1921
something Breuer would be doing right up until his death. Frank Whitford, in
his book Bauhaus, makes note:

Students whom the school suited, like Josef Albers, Joost Smidt, Marcel Breuer,
Theo Bogler and Gunta Stolz, were successful from the moment when they first
entered, and soon availed themselves of the opportunities of earning money by
making things for sale. What distinguished them from the malcontents was above
8
all the willingness to acquire craft skills and to collaborate with others.

Perhaps we can speculate that with a more rigid architectural education

Breuer might have become a very different designer. Gropius may have
been onto something with his stubborn refusal of a department for
architecture. Within weeks of arrival, Breuer was fully engaged with the
Bauhaus process and became richly productive, his creative power had
finally been set free, “sponge like he soaked up everything current”9. Sommerfield Chair 1921
Intuitively Breuer immediately enrolled himself in the carpentry workshop
because he considered himself manually clumsy and wished to improve his
dexterity and because he simply wanted to learn how to build things. This
crucial move in his design education consequently brought him in close
contact with Gropius allowing their relationship to blossom, even though
Gropius was nineteen years his senior. Soon enough Gropius was drawing
on Breuer’s talent, commissioning several pieces of furniture for the
milestone Sommerfield House. Gropius’ faith in Breuer’s ability must have
given the nineteen-year-old designer much confidence. Breuer recalled fifty
years on from Bauhaus that Gropius “had a great interest in young people;
it was one of his most profound traits… and another of his characteristics
was the recognition of quality in others.”10
However frustrated Breuer must have been with the lack of a full
architectural education, the range of experiences and contact with
production processes would play an invaluable role in his future career.
Speaking of Bauhaus students, Whitford says “They could paint, take
photographs, design furniture, turn pots and sculpt. Herbert Bayer and Wood Slat Chair 1922
Marcel Breuer could design buildings as well.”11

Apprenticing in carpentry and learning how to construct things, as Breuer did in

Weimar, was the way craftsmen became architects in the centuries before
architecture evolved into a distinct profession with schools, guilds, and
12
apprenticeships within the practice.

Breuer while describing his Rietveldian chair of 1922 uses the language of
architecture: “One simple cross section is used in an elementary simple
way for the whole structure. Cantilevered parts.”13 His attention to detail at
every scale manifests itself within his early experimentation in furniture,
from the analysis of component production to the human scale of their
design. We can trace Breuer’s rapid development in both his craft and Wassily Chair 1925
design philosophy when we look at the history of his Bauhaus chairs. From
the primitivistic ‘African’ chair inspired by his early Itten teachings to his De
Stijl inspired slatted wooden chair which he designed and made only a year
later. The ‘Wassily’ chair commissioned for Kandinsky’s Bauhaus
apartment marks Breuer’s first work to enter the history of modern design.
His refinement of the product took him three years, making each
component more efficient and capable of mass production than the last.

In 1928 following months of frustration over Bauhaus politics Breuer left for
good. The official reason for Breuer’s, as reported in the Frankfurter
Zeitung of March 17, 1928, was that “in order for his work to get ahead he
must be able to experiment on a large scale. He hopes to find a better
chance for close connections with industry when he is working as a
freelancer.”14

I see myself as a man who developed everything by doing it and not by books or
theories. My attention was always directed towards doing things, observing and
15
asking questions, towards human experience, discussions, facts.

House in the Museum Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1948-49

I have great respect for the local builders in this country, and have as a whole had
a very good experience with them. I also try to make the work easier for them with
16
exhaustive and very exact drawings.

By the late 1940’s, it was clear that Breuer had found the connections in the
building industry that he had sought after leaving the Bauhaus. With a fistful
of refined modernist houses to his name Breuer was now ready to build and
was on the brink of his most prolific period of work to date.
Garden façade to the left we see
Appearing at a peak of the post-war housing shortage, Breuer’s exhibition access via external stair to master
bedroom.
house (1948-49) in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art corresponded
to a moment of high public interest in houses and in museum exhibitions
regarding houses. Its curators, members of the Rockefeller and Goodyear
families along with Philip Johnson, were aiming to produce a house that
was to be an example of Modernist architecture and interior design with the
intent to enlighten the public. The slogan for the exhibition was:
’Demonstrating how much good living and good design can be purchased
for how many dollars’17. The emphasis however was certainly on ‘good
living’ and Breuer would certainly been aware of the potential of the project
due to government investment into single-family house as a result of the
New Deal.

On 14 April 1949 the ‘House in the Museum Garden’ was opened to the
public by its curators. At that time the museum garden could be reached
either through the main building or via the back entrance to the museum on
Fifty-fourth Street, where visitors paid at a booth, itself designed by Marcel
Breuer. Typology of Breuer’s American
houses sketched by the architect.

When viewed from an angle, the structure is long and narrow with a
prominent butterfly roof. One of Breuer’s favoured housing types, the
‘Binuclear’ house allowed for effective zoning of activities within the living
quarters. It is worth noting the dramatic departure from the flat roofed de-
humanised villas of the international Style that had been exhibited at MoMA
in 1932. Breuer commented, “Modern Architects don’t like severity in a
house” Breuer said in an interview about the exhibition house, “Perhaps we
did once, but we don’t anymore.”18 Breuer had always sought humanity in
his architecture, especially at the domestic scale of which he was so well Sketch design House in the
rehearsed. Even with his first built work, Harnischmacher House I, 1932, MoMA garden.
Breuer softens the pristine white cube with humanistic red and white striped
awnings and use of curtains, both abided by early die-hard International
Style modernists.

The house is divided into four sections, the westernmost containing a

garage and master bedroom contained within the high-pitched volume. The
bedroom, designed for the parents of the family house, looked
simultaneously out onto a balcony to the south and onto the primary living
space, a double height open planned living-dining room. This large, south
facing room is impaled from the south by a three-quarter height wall which
negotiates both the entrance hall, recessed terrace and exterior courtyard
within the program. This section is followed by a unit consisting a kitchen,
laundry room, bathroom and children’s play-niche which sit snugly beneath
the hip of the roof. The easternmost section, marked externally by a rising
roofline, accommodates a children’s room and guest room. The two
sections both accommodate courtyards, defined by Breuer’s signature low
Harnischmacher House I 1932
level walls and terraces, projecting from the house like tendons creating Breuer’s first built work shows an
continuation of the interior divisions. For example, the laundry room is attempt to break down the scale of
International Style modernity.
reflected by the exterior drying area, while the play corner has a patio to the
south with sandpit. We see a similar method of inside-outside breakdown
with the rusticated masonry walls of the (Breuer and Yorke) Gane Pavilion,
Bristol 1936. In line with the family orientated brief the museum’s published
comments emphasised the fact that both play areas can be observed from
the kitchen. However Breuer received many scathing reviews referring to
the inadequacies of the plan, Frederick Gutheim in the New York Herald
Tribune critised the zoning of the house suggesting that it did not suit
generic family life. The separation of the parents from their children at night,
sleeping at opposite poles of the structure seemed ludicrous to many. ‘ This
house has one thing that will be seen in few other exhibition houses- good
taste. It is a work of art. But also a house, and it has been called for a
house for family living.’19
It is unknown how Breuer responded to this kind of criticism. Breuer was
fully aware of the nature of the design proposal. Gutheim is short sighted to
imagine the brief as just that of the family house. MoMA were asking for
much more. They were looking for a new approach to the American
domestic vernacular. One that was clean, new, challenging and
simultaneously readable by the general public. He achieved this with the
buildings warm familiar “American” wood siding, rich natural material
palette and its expressive silhouette. Breuer viewed the house as a
laboratory for experimentation, developing his theories in architecture,
construction and composition. Plan See appendix for enlargement

Today… we change our lives more rapidly than in the past. It is natural that our
environments must undergo corresponding changes. This leads us to installations,
rooms, buildings, all or most of whose components can be converted, moved and
recombined. The furnishings, and even the walls of the rooms, are no longer
massive, monumental, apparently rooted to the spot, or literally bricked in. Rather
they are airily perforated and, as it were, outlined in space; they obstruct neither
20
movement nor the view across the room.

It would have been a startling achievement if Breuer had managed to marry

the depth of experimentation with the pure generic ideal of the American
family home. It is the same kind of playfulness we saw with his furniture at
the Bauhaus. Pushing materials to their limits to achieve new and
adventurous forms. This experimentation is carried through every vein of
the built form. The structure demonstrates an aptitude towards refined
timber framed construction; a draughtsman working with Breuer in England MoMA Exhibition House View
from the staircase towards the
in the 1930’s recalled Breuer as “a beautiful and economic detailer, living/ding area and kitchen
particularly in timber.”21 Constructed primarily using the balloon frame beyond
timber panels that Breuer had used with so much confidence at his own
house in New Canaan. According to Adam Clem:

The double layer of boards running in opposite diagonals is based on he very

same construction principle governing the engineering of laminated Isokon
furniture; constant in both idioms is that the form as structure flows from the inner
22
logic of materials and construction, materially and logically contiguous…’

It is clear that Breuer’s extensive work with furniture had affected the way in
which he fabricates and details his buildings. This often worked against
Breuer’s reputation as architect, discrepancies between his unorthodox Gane Pavilion 1936 Small pavilion
construction methods and the demanding act of making buildings designed for Bristol Royal
Agricultural Show, one of Breuer’s
sometimes were not in line with one another. Breuer’s work was critised as proudest achievements
less architectural and more pictorial, an example of his Bauhaus-based
small-scale antimonumetality, as put by Vincent Scully.

However, it was Breuer’s appreciation for every scale of the built form that
had appealed to MoMA for his exhibition house commission. They no
longer sought the austere perfection of the modernist box associated with
the International Style. Blake and Johnson, for their part, used the
exhibition to stress the architect’s sole responsibility to the question of
design, just as no one could prescribe which colours Picasso might use in a
mural. We can note Breuer’s execution of expressive composition within
the main living space. The granite fireplace with a freestanding brick
chimney to which a rope was attached, held in tension with wire from the
cypress clad ceiling, forming the handrail to the master bedroom. We can
here read the great influence his creative teachings of the Bauhaus had
taken on Breuer’s work. We find strong reference to the work of Paul Klee,
Breuer’s favourite tutor at the Bauhaus, in his attention to geometry and
form.

Inevitably, much of the furniture and home accessories were of Breuer’s Breuer House II 1948 Breuer’s
own design. Visitors were fascinated by the modern house wares, linens, experimentation with balloon
timber framing came close to
and window shades as they were by the architecture. Breuer even insisted disaster on his second house. The
on designing a popular radio-television-phonograph. He wrote to a steel cables were put in place at a
later date to prevent the cantilever
manufacturer: “I have given these television matters a good deal of study from failing.
because I feel that this is a new field which needs design consideration…
television must be considered in the planning and furnishing of a house.” 23
With this attention to detail and level of respect for residential architecture,
Breuer is really playing to his American audience. It was inevitable that
every visitor to the house would find something truly modern and that the
house would become a huge success winning Breuer acclaim and many
future commissions elevating him to the heights of Mies and Corbusier. The
Exhibition House won him the contract for the UNESCO head quarters
building in Paris where the immense jump in scale would lead him to
experiment with concrete with the help of masterful concrete engineer,
Nervi. Together they would play with concrete as if it were a sheet of paper
from Josef Alber’s lessons at he Bauhaus. Breuer on the subject of such a
dramatic sequence of change in scale commented:

“A house presents so many problems that a man that can design one successfully
24
can build anything.”

Breuer, in fact, due to his Bauhaus education had moved through to the
monolithic concrete buildings of his later career from chair to house to
public built form. He would spend his whole life juggling his talents under
the universal title of designer. A mightily talented creative rebel within the
design world gained him the nick names “the youngest of the Bauhaus Staged scene in the exhibition
house promoting its family
rebels” and more profoundly “the last modernist”. orientated specification.
Cynically, one could mark Breuer’s exhibition house merely as the launch
pad of his long and lucrative career as an architect, but many believe that
the project had an undisputable impact on the history of modern
architecture. Robert Gatje, Breuer’s future associate and partner, was one
of them; years later, he claimed that “it just stunned me”25. Herbert
Beckhard, who would also join Breuer and Associates in New York,
recalled that the sight of the house “made me redirect my thinking about my
own career and about architecture.” 26The house in the MoMA garden
Folded Paper Sculpture 1924
spoke to the hunger of the American public for consumer goods denied Produced by one of Albers
during the war years. It educated a generation of American architects about students at the Bauhaus.
a “humanistic” modernism through the impact of Breuer’s post war houses.
Breuer crucially did not theorise his work but instead practiced it. As the
eternal student, who although denies it has a lot to thank to Walter Gropius
for his achievements. Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1938, reviewing the
Harvard (where Breuer had taught alongside Gropius) commented:

Projects are the proper activity of youth; and when modern architecture was young
and its exponents were young as well, projects properly played a part in its
27
development,

Perhaps it is hard to be critical of Breuer’s work in a purely academic

sense. Undoubtedly Breuer was fully aware of the ambition and
consequence of design but similarly was more distracted with the
communication of his work with industry, something that had been UNESCO Building Paris 1955-58.
imbedded in the brains of all Bauhaus students. In his efforts to do Breuer’s first major commission for
a public building. Note Breuer’s
something more “normal” he had stumbled across something very modern playful use of folded concrete,
and daring. As a twentieth century ‘Form Giver’ (a title bestowed to Breuer reminiscent of Alber’s
Time, July 1956), Marcel Breuer remarks: experimentation.

Modern architecture is not a style, it is an attitude. The designer frees himself from
precedent and starts fresh. He analyses the functional and structural needs of a
building, and considers the social implications of the assignment. The result is
28
simple in line, striking in effect.”
PLAN House in the Museum Garden, MoMA, New York, 1948-49 (not to scale)

view from northeast view from southwest

1
Breuer to James Marston Fitch, December 30,1960, Correspondence, AAA. Hyman,
Marcel Breuer, Architect, 111
2
Extract from Bauhaus Manifesto 1919, 50 Years Bauhaus, 1968 Catalogue, 13
3
Oskar Schlemmer, diary entry, June 23, 1921. Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect,
48
4
Quoted in Isaacs, Gropius, 57. Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 48
5
Henry-Russell Hitchcock ,’Marcel Breuer and the American Tradition in Archiecture,6.
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 44
6
Quoted in Winthrop Sargeant “Profile of Marcel Breuer”, New Yorker, 1971-72.
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 60
7
Extract from Bauhaus Manifesto 1919, 50 Years Bauhaus, 1968 Catalogue, 13
8
Whitford, Bauhaus, 69
9
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 43
10
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 45
11
Whitford, Bauhaus, 70

12
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 49
13
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 49
14
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 57
15
Quoted in Sargeant, Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 49
16
Marcel Breuer to a client, February 4, 1949. Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 121
17
Driller, Breuer Houses, 181
18
Quoted in “American Gift”, New Yorke, March 5, 1949,26. Hyman, Marcel Breuer,
Architect, 146
19
Driller, Breuer Houses, 184
20
Marcel Breuer, “Metallmobel und moderne Raumlichkeit”. Hyman, Marcel Breuer,
Architect, 55
21
Quoted in Mills, “F. R. S. Yorke”,18
22
Adam Clem, “The City in Miniature: From Chair to Building in the Work of Marcel
Breuer.”
23
Breuer to product-design manager, Philco, 1949. Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect,
296
24
Quoted in Time, October 22, in an article on the Starkey House, Hyman, Marcel
Breuer, Architect, 16
25
Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 127
26
Herbert Berkhard, conversation with author, Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 127
27
Hitchcock, “Marcel Breuer and the American Tradition”, Hyman, Marcel Breuer,
Architect, 51

28
Breuer, lecture at the Walker Art Center, June 1959, Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect,
BIBLIOGRAPHY

> Bauhaus, Frank Whitford, Thames and Hudson, 1984

> Paris Construit, I. Schein, Editions Vincent Freal et Co, 1970

> Architecture Without Rules: The House of Marcel Breuer and Herbert
Beckhard, David Masello, W.W. Norton & Company, 1993

> 50 Years Bauhaus, 1968 Catalogue, Herbert Bayer and Peter Wehr

> Breuer Houses, Joachim Driller, Phaidon, 2000

> GA 43, Marcel Breuer: Various Houses, EDITA, 1977

> Blueprints For Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses,
Elizabeth A. T. Smith, 1989

>Modern Architecture Since 1900, William J. R Curtis, Phaidon 1982

>Marcel Breuer: Architect, Isabelle Hyman, Abrams, 2001

> www.desigmuseum.org