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5 Introduction 5 Clarifying the Themes 17 The Experience of Space 259 Public Buildings, 1960–70 260 St. John’s Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1953–68 1 At the Beginning of Modernism 266 Annunciation Priory of the Sisters of St. Benedict and University of Mary, Bismarck, North Dakota, 1954–63 21 Furniture and First Architectural Works, 1920–37 268 New York University, University Heights, Bronx, New York, 1956–61 24 Furniture Designs at the Bauhaus 270 IBM Research Center, La Gaude, France, 1960–70 31 Interior and Furniture Designs in Berlin 272 Resort Town of Flaine, Haute-Savoie, France, 1960–9 53 Harnischmacher House, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1932 314 St. Francis de Sales Church, Muskegon, Michigan, 1961–6 55 Doldertal Apartment Houses, Zurich, Switzerland, 1933–6 317 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, 1963–6 57 Architecture and Furniture Designs in London 58 Gane’s Pavilion, Bristol, England, 1936 6 Transforming the Types 2 Making a Modern Tradition 339 Houses, 1960–76 340 McMullen Beach House, Mantoloking, New Jersey, 1960 75 Houses, 1937–50 341 Koerfer House, Ascona, Ticino, Switzerland, 1963–7 76 Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1937–8 345 Stillman House II, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1965–6 77 Hagerty House, Cohasset, Massachusetts, 1937–8 346 Geller House II, Lawrence, Long Island, New York, 1967–9 79 Breuer House Lincoln, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1938–9 348 Sayer House, Glanville, Calvados, France, 1972–3 82 Frank House, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1938–40 83 Chamberlain Cottage, Wayland, Massachusetts, 1940–1 7 Variations on Selected Themes 105 Geller House I, Lawrence, Long Island, New York, 1944–6 107 Robinson House, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1946–8 381 Public Buildings, 1970–80 109 Breuer House New Canaan I, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1947–8 382 Armstrong Rubber Company, New Haven, Connecticut, 1965–70 112 MoMA Exhibition House, New York, New York, 1948–9 385 University of Massachusetts Campus Center, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1965–70 387 IBM Offices, Laboratories and Manufacturing, Boca Raton, Florida, 1967–72 3 Constructing with Elemental Forms 389 Convent of the Sisters of Divine Providence, Baldegg, Switzerland, 1967–72 391 Atlanta Central Public Library, Atlanta, Georgia, 1971–80 149 Public Buildings, 1950–60 152 UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France, 1952–8 157 De Bijenkorf Department Store, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1953–7 Conclusion 159 United States Embassy, The Hague, the Netherlands, 1954–8 429 Last of the First Moderns/First of the Last Moderns 160 Van Leer Office Building, Amstelveen, the Netherlands, 1957–8 162 Hunter College Buildings, Bronx, New York, 1955–9 434 Complete Architectural Works 4 Perfecting the Types 203 Houses, 1950–60 438 Selected Bibliography 205 Breuer House New Canaan II, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1951 206 Caesar Cottage, Lakeville, Connecticut, 1952 208 Starkey House, Duluth, Minnesota, 1954–5 400 Index 211 Members’ Housing, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey, 1955–6 212 Gagarin House I, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1955–7 229 Hooper House II, Baltimore, Maryland, 1956–9 447 Acknowledgements 230 Staehelin House, Zurich, Switzerland, 1956–9 edge of modern art.”3 However, due to his early and ongoing exposure to international journals such as The Studio, Breuer could not have been entirely unaware 1 of the dramatic changes happening in the arts and archi- tecture at that time. In spring 1920, at the age of eighteen, Breuer received At the Beginning of Modernism a scholarship to attend the Akademie der bildenden Furniture and First Architectural Works, 1920–1937 Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna, one of the greatest cultural centers of the world. In the years before World War I, Vienna had been the context for many of the most Marcel Lajos Breuer (called Lajkó by all who knew him) profound developments in early modernism. Before was born on 22 May 1902 in the Hungarian town of Pécs, the turn of the century, the painter Gustav Klimt had at that time a regional center with a population of broken away from the classical Imperial Academy 42,000, located near the west banks of the Danube River and established the “Seccession,” which soon included in the western portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. a number of architects such as Joseph Maria Olbrich With its mining, industry, and the oldest university in and Josef Hoffmann. The Secessionist school of Hungary, the city of Pécs was the most important economic architecture, as well as its critics, were both inspired and cultural center in western Hungary during the by the work of Otto Wagner, architect of many of eighteen years that Breuer lived there. In 1919, at the the Vienna city transit stations and bridges, as well as end of World War I, Pécs became one of five primary masterpieces of early modern architecture such as provincial centers of the newly established Hungarian the Post Office Savings Bank and the Am Steinhof Church. Republic, and the Hungarian border with Yugoslavia Hoffmann’s establishment of the Wiener Werkstätte, was located just to the south of Pécs, which is 100 miles and the relation of many of the Secessionist architects’ (160 km) to the south of Budapest, and almost the works to Art Nouveau, along with their employment same distance to the east of Zagreb, Croatia, and to the of newly invented ornament, was severely criticized by northwest of Belgrade, Serbia. the architect Adolf Loos and the cultural critic Karl Breuer’s father was a dental technician, allowing Kraus, whose scathing denunciations of what they saw the family to live comfortably and to engage in the as cultural degeneracy appeared in issues of Loos’s progressive, intellectual culture of Pécs. Breuer grew up journal, Das Andere (The Other). Loos’s own architecture, speaking Hungarian, as well as some German, and which had restrained exteriors with complexly inter- while his parents were Jewish, Breuer later decided, at locking interior spaces, was closely related to the Arts age twenty-four, to renounce all religion.1 Breuer’s and Crafts movement, as documented in The Studio. father and mother were interested in having their three Among parallel cultural developments in Vienna before children engage in the arts and culture, and they sub- World War I, there was Arnold Schönberg in music, scribed to several art periodicals, including The Studio, Sigmund Freud in psychology, Robert Musil in literature, an English publication presenting recent international Ernst Mach in science, and Ludwig Wittgenstein developments in fine arts, applied arts, and architecture, in philosophy, to name only the most well known.4 which was widely read throughout Europe and the Despite his high expectations, Breuer was deeply dis- United States.2 Steeped in this context, Breuer decided appointed when he arrived at the Academy of Fine as a youth that he would become an artist—either Arts, finding the students uninterested and the teachers a painter or a sculptor. At home, he painted, sketched, uninspiring, everyone being occupied with discussions and modeled, and at secondary school he enjoyed of aesthetic theory and not with the actual making of art. mechanical drawing. An oil painting by Breuer, depicting He walked out of the Academy the same day, abandon- the roofscapes of Pécs and the surrounding hillsides, ing his scholarship and seeking out a position as a remains from 1917. At the end of World War I, from 1918 designer with an architect and cabinetmaker in Vienna, to 1920, Breuer remembers Pécs being occupied by where he stayed for two months. As Breuer recalled, the Serbs and Yugoslavs, stating that he and his family there were many Hungarians in Vienna in 1920, includ- felt “completely isolated. Consequently I had no knowl- ing a number of exiles from the failed Hungarian Communist revolution of the year before. During his 1 Christopher Wilk, Marcel Breuer: Furniture and Interiors (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 15; in a footnote based on materials in the Breuer Collection, Box 10, Wilks notes that in 1926, Breuer filed papers with the Official Provincial Rabbinate 3 Isabelle Hyman, Marcel Breuer Architect (New York: Abrams, 2001), 40. in Dessau declaring that he did not wish to be considered Jewish. 4 This rich and complex period has been succinctly summarized in Allan Janik and 2 Wilk, op. cit., 15. Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973). 21 brief time in Vienna, Breuer “studied with great interest Yet Gropius’s definition of the school as including time. In the morning Itten was working with the way of preparation and charging his batteries. art journals in the cafés,” and he recalls experiencing architectural education, stated in the 1919 brochure, Preliminary Course class … Wearing a wine-red Then he presented the formal elements that firsthand some of the city’s important modern buildings. would not become a reality until 1927. In addition, suit, the Master was standing with a group of he wished to discuss in the picture by Matisse, However, he would later characterize these two months his medieval, guild-based conception of education, girls and boys and asking them to show him work. La Danse, which was later projected [on the as the unhappiest time of his life, almost despairing until moving from apprenticeship to journeyman to “young He gave one group a writing exercise based on screen at the front of the room]. He then had one day his friend from Pécs, Fred Forbàt, a recent ar- master,” and involving the engagement of art with the text “Little Mary Sat on a Stone.” They were the students draw the compositional scheme chitecture school graduate, gave Breuer “a little brochure industry, was being engaged only partially by the Bauhaus only allowed to begin writing when they clearly of this picture, once even in the dark.