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Saturday, March 10, 2007

Posted by erwan.safrinal7 at 5:35 AM

Marcel Lajos Breuer (May 21, 1902 Pécs, Hungary – July 1, 1981 New York City), architect and furniture designer, was an influential modernist. One of the fathers of Modernism, Breuer showed a great interest in modular construction and simple forms. Known as Lajkó, Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, stressing the combination of art and technology, and eventually became the head of the carpentry shop there. He later practiced in Berlin, designing houses and commercial spaces, as well as a number of tubular metal furniture pieces, replicas of which are still in production today. Breuer may be best known for his design of the Wassily Chair, the first tubular bent-steel chair, designed in 1925 for Wassily Kandinsky and inspired in part by bicycle handlebars. Still in production, the chair can be assembled and disassembled most easily with bicycle tools. In the 1930's, due to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Breuer relocated to London. The 1953 commission for UNESCO headquarters in Paris was a turning point for Breuer: a return to Europe, a return to larger projects after years of only residential commissions, and the beginning of Breuer's adoption of concrete as his primary medium. He became known as one of the leading practitioners of Brutalism, with an increasingly curvy, sculptural, personal idiom.Breuer is sometimes incorrectly credited, or blamed, for the former Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), a high-rise in New York City considered to be unpopular. The Pan Am was actually credited to Walter Gropius. In 1969 Breuer developed a 30-story proposed skyscraper over Grand Central Terminal, called "Grand Central Tower", which Ada Louise Huxtable called 'a gargantuan tower of aggressive vulgarity', and became a cause celebre. Breuer's reputation was damaged, but the legal fall out improved the climate for landmark building preservation in New York City and across the USA.