Marcel Breuer

Few people have had such an impact on modernist design, from tiny objects to huge buildings, as Marcel Breuer. A student and teacher at the Bauhaus, then the head of his own firm, he was a chief proponent of the International Style, proliferating its rectilinear forms, light planes, open interiors and sense of weightlessness across Europe and the United States. His later love of concrete also made him a pioneer of Brutalism, which despite causing outrage for its sense of massiveness, he handled delicately and modestly.

Although Breuer contributed to the design of many monumental public structures, including the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and The Met Breuer in New York, his most celebrated creation was the Wassily chair. Invented in 1925, when Breuer was just 23, this iconic piece of furniture reimagined the Constructivist principles of the De Stijl movement and the tubular-steel frames of bicycles to form a lightweight, durable seat stripped down to its bare essentials. Being so reflective of the Bauhaus’s predilection for functionality and simplicity, Breuer’s tutor Wassily Kandinsky was impressed enough to request a duplicate for his home — eventually affording the design its name.

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1902, Breuer briefly studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna before enrolling at the Bauhaus school in 1920, a year after its opening. There he befriended other influential artists including Josef Albers, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and the school’s founder Walter Gropius.

In 1928, Breuer opened his own practice in Berlin, before fleeing the Nazi’s rise to power — first to England in 1935, then America in 1937. In Massachusetts he joined Gropius as a lecturer at Harvard, teaching architecture to future luminaries Philip Johnson, John Johansen, Paul Rudolph and I.M. Pei. In 1946 he moved to New York, where his studio collaborated on architectural projects including St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, Atlanta Central Library and the headquarters for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. He died in 1981, aged 79.