Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture 

As a designer and architect, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) can be regarded as one of the most influential and important designers of the 20 th century. As a young student at the Bauhaus Weimar, Breuer, who was Hungarian by birth, caught the eye with various furniture designs inspired by the Dutch De Stijl group. In 1925, in other words at the tender age of only 23, he "invented" tubular steel furniture, a quite revolutionary development and considered his core contribution to the history of design. Breuer’s tubular steel designs, such as the famous Wassily armchair, the Bauhaus stool or his various cantilever chairs are representative for the design of an entire epoch, and thus comparable only with Wagenfeld’s legendary table luminaire. In the shape of millions of copies they have long since taken a firm place among the great classics of Modernism.

Yet it was not only tubular steel furniture that helped Breuer make an international splash. He was likewise a design history trailblazer with his aluminum and bent laminated wood furniture designs produced in the 1930s, inspiring subsequent generations of designers. From today’s viewpoint, his legendary interior designs seem no less important. One need think only of his creations for Walter Gropius’ "Master Hosue" in Dessau (1925/26), for the apartment of famous theater director Erwin Piscator in Berlin (1927), or the interiors designed at a later date in England and America that so strongly influenced 20 th century living rooms.

Breuer's wish to be an architect in the first instance 

Now, Breuer may have in the space of only a few years progressed from Bauhaus student to become a furniture and interior designer held in high esteem by the entire European avant-garde, but he himself wished first and foremost to be an architect. At the latest as of the mid-1920s he construed building as the real goal of his work. Following a sluggish start in Europe and (as of 1937) in the United States, primarily owing to the Great Depression and World War II, his career as an architect took off as of the mid-1940s. His New York-based studio at first made a name for itself with detached houses. As of the early 1950s, Breuer also realized numerous prestigious large-scale projects, among others creating various buildings that were at the forefront of international debates, such as the Unesco Headquarters in Paris (1952-8; together with Nervi and Zehrfuss) or the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1964-6). His trademark was to be the sculptural use of concrete - which he preferred predominantly as it could be molded and possessed such massiveness. He exploited the structural opportunities afforded by concrete in a quite congenial manner for his extraordinary spatial creations, whereby in particular his church buildings are worthy of note. He also made use of concrete to give his facade lattices a 3D and highly varied look, and in the process decisively expanded and refined the formal vocabulary of Modernist architecture. Until 1976, when illness forced him to abandon an active career, Breuer, who by then had won countless major awards, was one of the most prominent figures in Western architecture.

The exhibition 

The Marcel Breuer retrospective conceived and organized by Vitra Design Museum is the very first exhibition that also appropriately presents all the different fields in which he was active - and treats them as equal aspects of his oeuvre. While the thematically structured show displays almost all Breuer's major items of furniture design, his very wide-ranging architectural work is essentially presented in the form of 12 exemplary buildings. In its section entitled "Materials", the exhibition documents Breuer's design work chronologically. It takes its cue from the fact that in his furniture designs he used four different materials, one after the other: solid wood, tubular steel, aluminum and plywood. In particular, in the field of tubular steel furniture many original exhibits illustrate just how swiftly Breuer discerned the structural/design opportunities the material afforded and in the space of a few years almost systematically explored them. The outstanding feature of Breuer's work with aluminum, a material hitherto hardly used at all in furniture production, we his transfer of the cantilever principle from tubular steel onto aluminum. Another masterpiece was his literal translation of the aluminum recliner into plywood - this marked the beginning of a highly intensive focus on the latter material. Drawings, furniture catalogs and a multiplicity of contemporary photographs of Breuer's interior designs give an idea of just how varied his work as a designer was over and above the furniture classics he created.

Focus on 12 models produced specially for the exhibition

As regards the presentation of Breuer’s architectural oeuvre, the exhibition hinges on different display forms. The focus is on 12 models produced specially for the exhibition. They are ordered by theme: "Houses", "Spaces" and "Volumes", and supplemented und are supplemented by sketches, drawn plans as well as numerous photographs - offering a vivid picture of Breuer’s architecture. Each model not only documents a major work (including, for example, the Breuer I and II Houses, the Whitney Museum and the spectacular church buildings) but is also representative of a particular solution - be it for a specific layout, or of a structural/formal nature - that Breuer then used in countless other buildings. In this way, the exhibition provides a concentrated overview of the diversity and range of Breuer’s architectural achievements. In the "Motifs" section, the retrospective closes by presenting central elements of Breuer’s design vocabulary - they can be construed as forming the overall frame for the different fields in which he was active. For example, the motif of protrusion is already to be found in his early furniture designs, and was subsequently reinterpreted in repeatedly new ways in many of his buildings in the decades that followed. The same applies to the horizontal bands and reclining rectangles - striking design elements that give many of his furniture items, interiors, and buildings their characteristic appearance. Breuer’s manifest interest in textures can likewise be read as a bridge between design and architecture, whereas the almost Cubist sense to the crystalline formal idiom so characteristic of many of his concrete buildings did not emerge until the 1950s. Since that time, it can be considered the trademark of his personal approach to this material, so central to 20 th century architecture.