Marcel Breuer
Pioneer of tubular steel furniture.
Marcel Breuer designed the Wassily Chair in 1925, inspired by a bicycle, and later became an architect in the United States.
Marcel Breuer was born in 1902 in Pécs in Hungary. He began studying art in Vienna but soon moved to the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he became a student in 1920. In the carpentry workshop he made early furniture in wood, including a chair with a woven seat in collaboration with the textile artist Gunta Stölzl.
When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925 he became head of the furniture workshop. That same year he designed an armchair of bent tubular steel and stretched fabric, inspired by the handlebars of a bicycle. It later became known as the Wassily Chair, after Wassily Kandinsky, who had one in his home, but the name was only added in the 1960s. He also designed furniture for the Bauhaus building and, in 1928, the cantilevered Cesca chair without back legs, which is still produced.
Tubular steel was an industrial material that made furniture light, hygienic and suitable for mass production. Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928 and worked in Berlin and then in London, where he designed moulded plywood furniture for the firm Isokon. In 1937 he followed Walter Gropius to the United States and taught at Harvard, where he and Gropius also ran a joint architectural practice.
From 1946 Breuer had his own office in New York and became a leading architect. He designed private houses but also large buildings in raw concrete, among them the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, designed together with others and opened in 1958, and the Whitney Museum in New York of 1966, with its stepped façade. He also designed the abbey church of Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota.
Breuer died in 1981. He is counted among the most important furniture designers of the 20th century and as one of the architects who brought European modernism to the United States. His tubular steel chairs are found today in offices, homes and schools all over the world.