since 1999

Hungarian-American architect, designer, and teacher, who helped establish the functionalist principles underlying the International style. Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, and studied at the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, Germany. He practiced architecture in Berlin until the rise of the Nazi Party, fleeing to England in 1933 and then to the United States in 1937. There he helped develop the influential School of Architecture at Harvard University. During the 1950s and 1960s Breuer designed a number of prominent buildings in the United States and Europe. His buildings are generally composed of severe blocks in rough, unfinished stone or concrete and wood.Perhaps the most widely-recognized of Breuer’s early designs was the first bent tubular steel chair, later known as the Wassily Chair, designed in 1925 and was inspired, in part, by the curved tubular steel handlebars on Breuer’s Adler bicycle. Breuer’s next break-through design, after the Wassily Chair, was the Cesca Chair. The B5 Chair design was meant to be “a dramatic antidote to the overstuffed seating of the Edwardian era.” In 1927, Marcel Breuer conceived the Laccio small table and Laccio large table as a companion to the Wassily chair.