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Marcel Breuer Papers Marcel Breuer Papers An inventory of his papers at Syracuse University Finding aid created by: MBD Date: 22 Mar 2012 Revision history: 10 Jan 2013 minor revisions and additional project inventories added (MBD) 27 Aug 2013 Gatje slides added (MRC) 19 Jan 2016 updated interview location (MRC) 22 Mar 2016 updated content of oversize 13, 23, 26, 30 (SM) Overview of the Collection Creator: Breuer, Marcel, 1902-1981. Title: Marcel Breuer Papers Dates: 1921-2001 Quantity: 684 linear feet Abstract: NOTE: THIS FINDING AID IS VERY LARGE. If your browser has difficulty loading it, return to this page and go to http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/b/breuer_m.pdf to open a PDF version. Papers of the Modernist architect and designer, includes architectural drawings, photographs and slides, project files, writings, correspondence and other materials related to every phase of Marcel Breuer's career. Language: Majority in English, some items in French, German, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese Repository: Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries 222 Waverly Avenue Syracuse, NY 13244-2010 http://scrc.syr.edu Biographical History Marcel Lajos Breuer (1902-1981) was a Hungarian-born American Modernist architect and designer. Marcel Breuer was born on May 21, 1902 in the southwestern Hungarian city of Pécs. His family home at 4 Irgalmasok Boulevard near Szechenyi square may have afforded a view of the nearby Pasha Qasim mosque (built from the ruins of a Gothic church), or the four landmark towers of the nearby Pécs Cathedral. Noted historically for its diverse ethnic population, Pécs had long been a regional cultural center and a university town (home of the 5th oldest university in Europe), as well as an important religious center. Breuer's father Jakab Breuer was a dental technician from Gyor, Hungary. Breuer's mother, Franciska Kann (sometimes given as "Kan") came originally from Budapest. Breuer had two older siblings, Alexander and Hermina Maria. Always reticent about the facts of his early life, Breuer's formative years must have been marked by the profound political conflicts that defined the era. He would have been just twelve years old when Hungary entered World War I as part of the Austro-Hungarian/German alliance (incidentally, Breuer's subsequent architectural mentor and partner, Walter Gropius, was severely wounded in 1914 while serving as a German reservist on the Western Front). From 1918-1920, the Baranyi region surrounding Breuer's home town was heavily occupied by Serbian forces who, on the basis of ethnic nationalism, had made significant territorial claims there (tentatively resolved by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920). Against this backdrop, Breuer attended secondary school at Pécsi Allami Forealiskola where he excelled at art and mathematics, graduating summa cum laude and earning a scholarship to the Akademie der bildenden Kunst in Vienna. Breuer arrived in Vienna in the late summer of 1920, but he quickly abandoned the academy, instead taking up an apprenticeship in the shop of a local cabinetmaker by the name of Bolek. It was during this brief respite that Breuer learned about an innovative new school in Weimar from a fellow Hungarian, the Pécs born architect Alfred Forbat. Within a few weeks, Breuer had assumed a place as one of the 143 students enrolled at the Bauhaus in only the second year of its formative existence. While there is some uncertainty as to exactly when Breuer began his studies at the Bauhaus during the fall of 1920, it is very likely that he arrived about six weeks into the term and began in the Vorkurs, or Preliminary Course, then taught by Johannes Itten. Later that year, he would have done work in the carpentry workshop under Walter Gropius, the Master of Form for the shop at that time, and Josef Zachmann, the shop's first Master of Craft. While many of the personal relationships forged during these years were crucial for Breuer's artistic development, perhaps none more so than his career-defining linkage with Walter Gropius, it was quite possibly the painter Paul Klee who exerted the most formative influence (later in life, Breuer recollected that Klee had been one of the two most important teachers in his life, the other being his high school geometry teacher). As Franciscono contends, in his history of the school, his [Klee's] lessons were conceived in terms closely analogous to those of architecture…painting itself was understood as a construction built up or put together from repeatable, more or less geometric -- in effect modular -- units in ways generally comparable to the way architecture is put together (quoted in Hyman, p.61, n.73). Breuer's architectural training at the Bauhaus came largely through apprentice work done in Walter Gropius' active practice, as the school offered no formalized program in architecture during those early years. As such, Breuer gained much hands-on experience on a number of projects -- contributing furniture and interior designs to the collaborative Sommerfeld House project (1921), the Haus am Horn exhibition house (1923), and the Bauhaussiedlung housing project (planned 1922, but not built). After completing his apprentice work at the Bauhaus, Breuer headed to Paris, eventually landing a position in the office of Pierre Chareau in September of 1924. By the following year though, he was back in Weimar to accept a position as instructor and head of the furniture and carpentry shop at the Bauhaus, just prior to its official relocation to Dessau. In additional to involvement in furniture and interior design work for the new Bauhaus buildings in Dessau -- contributing to the design and furnishing of the canteen, theatre and several of the Master's Houses -- Breuer also developed innovative architectural schemes for a series of houses for junior faculty members, known as the BAMBOS houses (1927). It was during this second period at the Bauhaus (1925-1928) that Breuer began to make the innovative experiments with bent tubular steel furniture for which he became so famous. The first version of his iconic "B3" club chair was developed around 1925, and many experiments with cantilevered steel constructions rapidly followed. In 1926, Breuer established the Standard Möbel company and began marketing a full line of steel furniture. Later that year, Breuer married fellow Bauhaus graduate Marta Erps, a talented artist who had studied in the weaving workshop and collaborated with Breuer on the Haus am Horm interiors. Their marriage seems to have been short lived, as Erps left Germany sometime around 1928-1929 for Brazil, where she later had a successful career as a biologist and illustrator at the University of São Paolo. Breuer and Erps were officially divorced in 1934. As internal politics at the Bauhaus grew increasingly volatile in the late 1920s, Breuer joined a major exodus from the school, following Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer and others out of Dessau. Breuer made his way to Berlin, officially joining the Bund Deutscher Architekten and setting up an architectural practice with a former student, Gustav Hassenpflug as his assistant. His commissions were small, primarily apartment and commercial interiors, but he also completed a number of formalized designs for competitions and was represented at many important exhibitions of the period, including the Weissenhof estate exhibition (1928), the Paris exposition of 1930 and the Berlin Building exhibition of 1931. In 1932, Breuer secured his first independent architectural commission to build a modern house in Wiesbaden for Paul and Marianne Harnischmacher. During this period, Breuer also maintained a partnership in Budapest with Farkas Molnár and József Fischer and traveled extensively through southern Europe and North Africa. In 1935, with the assistance of Gropius, Breuer secured papers to relocate to London where he practiced for a short time in partnership with British architect F.R.S. Yorke, while independently developing a line of bent plywood furniture that was marketed through Jack Pritchard's Isokon Control Ltd. Frustrated by the limited building prospects in England and always concerned about the possibility of political deportation, in 1937 Breuer was again on the move. The efforts of Gropius were once more instrumental, as he was able to help secure for Breuer a faculty position at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Aesthetically, Breuer was well suited to his new environment, sharing with his fellow Bauhaus émigrés a strong appreciation for the structural transparency and efficient design of American industrial buildings. The strong appeal of the traditional New England domestic architecture, though, with its reliance on native stone and balloon-frame construction proved an unexpected source of inspiration for many of the European Modernists, Breuer included. He spent roughly the next decade making his mark with a series of iconic modern houses spread across Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York (for more on the influence of American domestic architecture on Breuer's mid-century work, see Bergdall, Encountering America: Marcel Breuer and the Discourses of the Vernacular from Budapest to Boston, in Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture). Initially, Breuer practiced in the U.S. in partnership with his long-time mentor under the official designation, "Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Architects." The partnership was relatively fruitful during lean economic years, producing a series of now canonical houses, including the Frank House in Pittsburgh (1939), the Hagerty House in Cohasset (1938) and, the Ford (1939), Gropius (1938) and Breuer (1939) houses at the Woods End colony in Lincoln, Massachusetts. In 1940, Breuer married his second wife, Constance Crocker Leighton. Connie, a native New Englander, had grown up in Salem, Massachusetts and attended the Brimmer School. Originally a secretary for Gropius and Breuer, she played an important role in the formative years of Breuer's Cambridge practice (for a brief period, her father, O.S.
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