Marcel Breuer

“I am as much interested in the smallest details as in the whole structure.”

Marcel Breuer was born in Pécs in 1902 and died in New York in 1981. He was a Hungarian architect and designer who is considered one of the most important exponents of the modern movement and the Bauhaus. At the age of 18 in the early 1920s, he began to study art at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in Vienna but moved after only a few weeks to the brand-new Bauhaus school in Weimar. After a few years he became a teacher and then director of the carpentry and furniture department.

His career, which began precociously, focused on Bauhaus ideas and thinking, but his was a vision which placed greater emphasis on the technology to be applied to architecture and construction in general. Around 1926 in his workshop, he reached a level of maturity in design and thinking that allowed him to experiment with tubular steel, using it as a frame for tables and chairs. HIs first achievement with this material, which later became the most important and best-known, was the Wassily chair featuring an innovative combination of materials uniting tubular steel with leather straps.

In 1928 he left the Bauhaus and headed to Berlin where he opened his own architectural studio. Other creations followed in succession here, as was the case of the famous Cesca chair in which cantilevered tubular steel was combined with woven cane panels becoming one of the absolute icons of 20th century design. He continued to gain experience around Europe and then moved in 1937 to the United States where he settled permanently in New York in 1946. There he devoted himself to important architectural projects, living and working until the day of his death on July 1, 1981.

Roberto Gabetti said of him: "Breuer was one of the first to understand that the mission of architects and designers is to shape current objects, drawn from current technological implications." With this phrase we can understand how Marcel Breuer saw the objects he designed, the result of a series of constraints connected to the manufacturing world and the technologies that were available then. He left us with a profound vision of modern thinking and iconic objects that are still sold and exhibited in the most important permanent museums in the world.