Marcel Breuer

Lifetime

1902–1981

Country

Hungary / USA

Manufacturers

Thonet, Gavina

Marcel Breuer was born on 21 May 1902 in Pécs, Hungary, and died on 1 July 1981 in New York. After a brief period at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he studied at the Bauhaus from 1920, where in 1925 he became head of the carpentry workshop as a “young master”. In 1927 he co-founded Standard-Möbel, taken over by Thonet in 1929, and from 1928 he ran his own practice in Berlin.

The B3 club armchair, later known as “Wassily”, dates from the Bauhaus period – the name was only given to it years later. Breuer designed the first version of the armchair in 1925 in Dessau; the example in the MoMA collection is dated 1927–1928 and attributed to Standard-Möbel. From 1962, the armchair was produced by the Italian company Gavina, and later by Knoll. In 1928, Breuer introduced the B32 chair, known as “Cesca”.

In the 1930s, he worked, among other places, in Zurich, Budapest and London (Isokon, 1935–1937). From 1937 he taught at Harvard, ran a practice with Walter Gropius from 1938 to 1941, and from 1946 operated an office in New York, retiring in 1976. He co-designed the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1953–1958, with Nervi and Zehrfuss) and designed the Whitney Museum building in New York (1966) and St John’s Abbey in Minnesota (1953–1961). In 1968, he received the AIA Gold Medal.