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 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, , 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 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 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. Then from the Bauhaus with the emblem ‘Return of faculty Breuer found when he arrived at the school. felt the spirit of the song … We went into the he had them add to this scheme after the model, the Craftsman’ and with a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger.”5 Besides Gropius, the faculty then included the painter studio next door, a vast room. Along one wall sometimes telling them to copy a single figure. Knowing nothing more about this new school than Lyonel Feininger, the ceramicist Gerhard Marcks, were supports holding experiments in the use Again and again he walked up and down what was written in the four-page brochure, Breuer and the painter Johannes Itten. As if the diversity of of materials. They looked like the bastardized the steps of the room, inspecting, criticizing.8 decided to go to Weimar and enroll in the Bauhaus. viewpoints represented by the rapidly growing Bau- offspring of couplings between the art of savag- When Breuer, then age nineteen, arrived in Weimar haus faculty was not enough, Theo van Doesburg, the es and children’s toys. Along the other three Klee’s description is paralleled by Breuer’s later to join the Bauhaus, the school was only a year old, founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement, had also walls were tables at which the apprentices sat recollections that Itten’s class involved “doing rhythmic having been founded the previous year by , arrived in Weimar that same year with the express purpose on three-legged piano stools … Everyone had movements, designing in rhyme, reinterpreting the the architect of the Fagus Factory (1911) and the adminis- of setting up a competing “school,” giving lectures a huge piece of charcoal in his hand and a pad Old Masters of art, studying the textures of materials, tration building of the exhibit every evening to the Bauhaus students, who attended of cheap paper on a drawing board in front and expressing our different feelings in a direct man- of 1914, both of which have been recognized as early in large numbers. The sculptor Oskar Schlemmer, of him … After he’d walked up and down once ner.”9 While Itten would leave the Bauhaus in 1923, before landmarks of modernism. The Werkbund had been who joined the Bauhaus faculty at this time, wrote how or twice he moved toward an easel and a pad Breuer had completed his studies, his influence would founded to develop close relationships between art and van Doesburg was “drawing the Bauhaus students of paper. He grasped a stick of charcoal, gath- remain in the teaching of the Preliminary Course, the one industry in Germany, and one of its founders, the Belgian under his spell—especially those interested chiefly in ered his body together as though charging common class in which all Bauhaus students were architect Henry van de Velde, had stepped down as architecture, who deplore the Bauhaus’s deficiency himself with energy and then suddenly made required to enroll. After Itten’s departure, the Hungarian director of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in in this area … He rejects craftsmanship (the focus of the two movements, one after the other. We saw a Constructivist painter, photographer, and graphic 1915, and subsequently urged that Gropius be appointed Bauhaus) in favor of the most modern tool: the ma- shape formed by two energetic strokes, vertical designer László Moholy-Nagy took over the teaching to replace him. In 1919, Gropius established the Staatli- chine. [He argues for] exclusive and consistent use of and parallel, on the topmost sheet of paper. The of the Preliminary Course. Josef Albers, another student ches Bauhaus Weimar as a combination of the Academy only the horizontal and the vertical in art and students were instructed to copy it. The Master who entered the Bauhaus at the same time as Breuer, of Art and the School of Arts and Crafts, “in conjunction architecture . . .”7 criticized the work, had one student demon- would later join what was by that time a team of teachers with a newly affiliated department of architecture,” as The summer of 1920, when Breuer arrived, coincided strate, controlling the attitude of his body. Then for the Preliminary Course. Albers’s teaching at the declared in the four-page brochure Breuer was given. More with the first time Bauhaus students were taught the he demanded that it be done while beating time; Bauhaus, at Black Mountain College, and at Yale University, than anything else, it was Gropius’s “emblematic” vision Preliminary Course, or “Vorkurs,” involving six months then he had the same exercise performed with which included the training of the body to draw with for the school as a place where the artist and craftsman of instruction imparting the fundamentals and principles everyone standing. It seems that what’s intended feeling (inspired in many ways by Itten’s teaching of the were one and the same, as stated in the 1919 brochure, of form, material, and design process, later known as is a kind of body massage in order to train the Preliminary Course), would have the most profoundly that had drawn Breuer and other students to Weimar: “basic design.” One of the most important contributions machine to function with feeling. Similarly new formative affect on generations of artists and architects.10 to art and architecture education to emerge from elementary forms … were created and copied … Klee’s class notes from the period when Breuer was The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete the Bauhaus, the Preliminary Course was initially taught with several explanations about why and about a new student at the Bauhaus, wherein Klee endeavored building! … Today the arts exist in isolation, by Itten, who encouraged individual intuitive develop- the kind of expression. Then he said something to teach students “how to see” and how to shape move- from which they can be rescued only through the ment (including allowing students to propose their own about the wind, had some of the students stand ment through space, are documented in The Thinking conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen… color palettes), while also engaging the spiritual. Itten’s up and express the feelings inspired by the Eye and The Nature of Nature, which are among the most Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must personal beliefs about the fundamentally mystical and wind and storm. Afterward he gave the exercise: important books on modern design education.11 Breuer return to the crafts! For art is not a “profession.” subjective nature of artistic creation led him to oppose the representation of the storm. For that he considered Klee to be one of the two most influential There is no essential difference between the the close relationship of art education and industrial allowed about ten minutes and then inspected teachers he ever had, and he recalled how, during a artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted production that Gropius advocated. Later that autumn, the results. With that he criticized. After the lecture at the blackboard, Klee “drew an arrow pointing craftsman … But proficiency in a craft is essential the painter Paul Klee was asked to join the faculty of criticism work resumed. One sheet of paper to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of the Bauhaus as a Master, and he described attending Itten’s after another was torn up and fell to the ground. 8 Paul Klee, letter to his wife, 16 January 1921; Whitford, op. cit., 54–5. This letter is also quoted in Giulio Carlo Argan’s Preface for Klee’s The Thinking Eye (see note 11 below). creative imagination. Let us then create a new Preliminary Course class, giving a detailed account Several worked with great energy so that several 9 Breuer interview, quoted in William Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in guild of craftsmen …6 of the students’ typical experiences in the early Bauhaus, sheets of paper were used up at the same time. America: Gropius, Mies and Breuer,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and in a letter to his wife Lily in January 1921: After they had all grown rather tired he let America, 1930–1960, D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 506; also quoted in Hyman, op. cit., 41. the members of the Preliminary Course take the 5 Breuer quotations are from Hyman, op. cit., 39–41. Barry Bergdoll notes that Forbàt, 10 Albers’s post-Bauhaus teaching is documented in Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at who was trained in Budapest and Munich, moved to Weimar at the same time Yesterday I devoted myself entirely to the Bauhaus exercise home with them for further practice. Black Mountain College (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); and Frederick Horowitz and as Breuer, in 1920, working as a Bauhaus architect with Walter Gropius: “Bauhaus Barbara Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006). Multiplied,” in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops and had myself shown over the place for the first In the evening at five o’clock “Analysis” was held for Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 43. 11 Paul Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund in a large room built like an amphitheatre … Humphries, 1961; originally published in German in 1956); Paul Klee Notebooks 6 Hans Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge: MIT Press, 7 Oskar Schlemmer, letter to Otto Meyer-Amden, March 1922; in The Bauhaus: Masters Once again the Master walked up and down by Volume 2: The Nature of Nature (London: Lund Humphries, 1973; originally published 1969), 31–2. and Students by Themselves, Frank Whitford, ed. (London: Conran Octopus, 1992), 127. in German in 1970).

22 AT THE BEGINNING OF MODERNISM 23 ti 1a wood slat chair, 1922

Armchair with plywood, 1922

Plywood children’s chair, Woman’s bedroom, axonometric, ti 3a, and table, 1922 , 1923

Dressing table and chair, Haus am Horn, 1923 34 FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS 35 Bauwelt apartment building competition, 1923; model

B3 Wassily tubular steel armchair, designed 1925; Gavina version, 1962

Apartment building, B3 Wassily armchair, 1925 Bent chromed steel tube frame Weimar, 1923; elevation for B3 Wassily armchair

36 FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS 37 B18 table, tubular steel B21 typing table, steel and glass, 1927–8 and plywood, 1928

B9 stools and wood dining tables, Bauhaus canteen, 1927

B9 tubular steel nesting tables B11 armchair, steel, and stools, 1925-6 wood, and fabric, 1928

38 FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS 39 B33 cantilevered tubular steel chair, 1927

Cantilevered steel tube chair frame experiment, welded by plumber, c. 1926

Ise and Walter Gropius in their Bauhaus apartment, 1927; with B3 Wassily chairs

B32 Cesca chair, cane seat and back, 1928; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, photography, and Herbert Bayer, graphic design

B64 Cesca armchair

B35 lounge chair, steel, wood, and fabric, 40 FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS 1928–9 41 detail, between the minute great form and the great small particle.”3 Of equal importance was Breuer’s parallel engagement of the rapidly developing pre- 5 cast-concrete industry during the 1950s, which began employing steam-curing, vibration, and steel forms in factory settings, producing high-quality surface Clarifying the Themes fin-ishes. While Kahn aggressively employed the abil- Public Buildings, 1960–70 ity of the precasting industry to fabricate prestressed and post-stressed concrete structural components, Breuer was more interested in engaging the possibil- In the religious, institutional, and commercial build- ities of making building skins from prefabricated, ings that were built to his designs in the 1960s, Breuer repetitive, sculpted precast-concrete elements. evolved his characteristic emphases on the expression Based on his critique of the glass curtain wall skin of structure, and on surface depth and modulation of modern architecture, which had become ubiquitous of the building skin. Breuer held that clarity was by the 1950s, Breuer evolved a highly plastic sculptural an essential quality of architecture, and that it was interpretation of precast-concrete construction, used inextricably linked to the expression of structure and as facade and structural cladding, to create strong function. In 1964, he stated: “To us clarity means shadow patterns and sun shielding. In 1966, Breuer the definite expression of the purpose of a building described his reasoning for employing precast-concrete and a sincere expression of its structure. One can for facades, noting how the building structure, insula- regard this sincerity as a sort of moral duty, but I feel tion and sun shading, and mechanical heating-cooling that for the designer it is above all a trial of strength components of contemporary construction were al- that sets the seal of success on his achievement; and most impossible to incorporate into the iconic modern the sense of achievement is a very basic instinct.” glass exterior wall: While the structure had been at least partially clad, and sometimes completely hidden in a number of his The glass wall—as an expression of modern earlier works, by the time he made this statement in technology—seems to conflict with technology 1964, it is clear that Breuer shared with his contem- itself. The search for an exterior which would porary Louis Kahn the belief in the moral imperative integrate the demands of an enclosure goes to express structure. Like Kahn, Breuer also embraced parallel with a new approach to the technique structure as a fundamental component of the design and aesthetic of precast-concrete. Both lead us of a building: “I like to see structure, to emphasize it, to architectural solutions which can be called and to develop it—not just as a means to a solution. “molded,” and which have the characteristics of It is also a principle and a passion.”1 a facade unattainable in any other familiar mod- The emergence of visible structure, and its “sin- ern material. The large prefabricated panels can cere expression” in Breuer’s work, was paralleled be designed for a variety of technical require- and made possible by his engagement, beginning in ments: they may be load-bearing and structur- the 1950s, of reinforced cast-in-place structural al; they may offer chases and hollows for pipes, and finish concrete as his building material of choice. ducts and heating-cooling equipment; they may In this way, as Breuer said: “The structure itself form projections for sun protection; they may became art.”2 With the buildings completed in the be solid or may contain large openings; they 1960s, Breuer established himself as the American may combine all of these. What about aesthet- master of reinforced concrete—extending Le Corbusi- ics? A new depth of facade is emerging; a three- er’s efforts in developing an aesthetic of board-formed dimensionality with a resulting greatly expand- béton brut. Regarding reinforced concrete, Breuer ed vocabulary of architectural expression.4 believed “no other material has the potential of such complete and convincing fusion between structure, enclosure, and surface—between architecture and

1 Breuer, 1964 interview in Paul Heyer, Architects on Architecture (New York: Walker and Co., 1966), 265, 271. 3 Breuer, Architectural Record, December 1963; Tician Papachristou, Marcel Breuer: New Buildings and Projects (New York: Praeger, 1970), 22. 2 Breuer, notes from lectures, Marcel Breuer: Buildings and Projects, 1921–1961 (New York: Praeger, 1962), 258. 4 Breuer, Architectural Record, April 1966; Papachristou, op. cit., 13.

259 Armstrong Rubber Company; view of complex from north 396 ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1965–70 397 Armstrong Rubber Company; view of front facade with concrete sign

Armstrong Rubber Company; floor plans of lower building (above) and tower (below)

Armstrong Rubber Company; Armstrong Rubber Company; south elevation recent view from northwest 398 ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1965-70 399 New York University Technology II; view of classroom wing from street

New York University Technology II; floor plans, typical upper floor (above) and ground floor (below)

New York University Technology II; view of court above library, laboratory facade

Armstrong Rubber Company; recent view of detail of sign 400 ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1965–70 and building beyond NEW YORK UNIVERSITY TECHNOLOGY II, BRONX, NEW YORK, 1964–70 401