Marcel Breuer (born 21. May 1902 in Pécs/Hungry; died 1. July 1981 in New York City/USA) belongs to the elite group of architects and designers who helped shape 20th century thinking on form, function and aesthetic. In 1920 Marcel Breuer began studying art in Vienna, a course he quickly gave up in order to begin a carpentry apprenticeship at Bahuas in Weimar. His talents were quickly acknowledged and in 1921 Breuer began working in the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius's studio. After completing his training in 1924, Breuer was appointed Head of the Carpentry Workshop in 1925. In 1933 he fled from Nazi Germany, returning initially to his native Hungry before moving on to London and in 1937 the USA where he took up a teaching position at the Harvard university Graduate School of Design. Although initially a furniture designer, Breuer worked most of his professional life as an architect working on projects ranging from private houses over commercial properties and onto public buildings. Among Breuer's most famous works are the UNESCO Headqurters in Paris, the De Bijenkorf department store in Rotterdam and the Saint John's Abbey Church at the St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Perhaps his most ambitious project was the French ski resort of Flaine, which Breuer created in its entirety. Marcel Breuer's furniture designs are almost exclusively from his Bauhaus period, and in many ways can be considered defining pieces of the Bauhaus approach. His Model B3 Chair, popularly known as the Wassily Chair, is perhaps one of the best known and most instantly recognisable furniture pieces from the 1920s. It also counts among the most copied designs. Other important works by Marcel Breuer include his Cesca cantilever chair as well as his B55 and S 32 cantilever chairs and B 10 side table, all part of a series of tubular steel furniture created in the late 1920s.
...Wandering aimlessly through the digital Marcel Breuer Archive one afternoon, we stumbled across a letter dated July 25th 1950 from Peter M Fraser, one of Breuer's employees, to the Eames Office, enquiring about a lighting design by Charles and Ray that Breuer was interested in using in one of his architectural projects, and requesting... And brings us back to Marcel Breuer...
...Marcel Breuer Digital Archive Born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1902 Marcel Breuer was not only one of the more important and more interesting Bauhäusler, nor only one of the driving forces behind the development and dissemination of both steel tube furniture and moulded plywood furniture, but was also an important voice in 20th century architecture, for all as the positions and understandings of the inter-War years matured and developed in post-War America and post-War Europe... And a task greatly eased, and positively encouraged, by the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive...
...Prior to his aforementioned acquaintance with Mies van der Rohe's cantilever chairs, Lorenz had seen works by Marcel Breuer in the office of Breuer's associate, business partner, and fellow Hungarian, Kálmán Lengyel, and subsequently not only joined the board of Breuer and Lengyel's Standard Möbel company but undertook experiments in his own workshop to further develop the technical, material, aspects of Breuer's work, experiments which, as he describes, were intended to bring the same resilience to Breuer's designs that he had felt in Mies's... Thonet, serving between 1933 and 1935 as, and somewhat logically, Head of Industrial Property Rights, before spending the second half of the 1930s in closed contact with the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Hans Luckhardt, Heinz Rasch, Lily Reich, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer...
...The story begins in Dessau in the mid 1920s and the development of tubular steel furniture, a process in which Marcel Breuer unquestionably played a major, if not the major, role... Aware of the commercial possibilities of the genre Marcel Breuer established in late 1926/early 1927 the company Standard-Möbel in Berlin with fellow Magyar Kálmán Lengyel, the first dedicated manufacturer of tubular steel furniture...
...Although for many Gray's work will not as familiar as that of Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe one should not underestimate the contribution made by Eileen Gray to the development furniture design in the 20th century...
