Marcel Breuer - Classicfactory24

Marcel Breuer was born on 21.05.1902 in Pécs, Hungary. Marcel Lajos Breuer was a German-American architect and designer, of Hungarian-Jewish origin. Breuer was considered the inventor of modern tubular steel furniture.

Marcel Breuer began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1920, but dropped out after a few weeks. He then began training as a cabinetmaker in the furniture workshops of the Bauhaus in Weimar. 22 years young, Breuer had already designed and produced a large number of avant-garde wooden furniture. Among them the sensational slatted chair Ti 1a created in 1922.

Breuer's early initial conception can already be seen in this design. Objects are assembled from formally similar, only slightly varied individual parts. This additive assembling is not concealed but deliberately emphasized. In his tubular steel furniture, for example, through visible screw connections.

This principle is particularly evident in his B3 armchair, designed in 1925, which is screwed together from various individual parts and not welded together (it later also achieved world fame as the Wassily armchair). In 1925 Marcel Breuer was appointed jury leader and head of the furniture workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau. In the same year, he designed a series of tubular steel furniture in cooperation with the Dessau-based Junkers aircraft factory.

He initially had his designs manufactured by Standard Möbel Lenggal & Co, a company he founded with the Hungarian architect Kalman Lenggal. Before the Thonet company took over the production rights in 1929.

The Bauhaus in Dessau, built in 1925/26, as well as the master houses belonging to it, were largely furnished with Marcel Breuer's tubular steel furniture. On June 30, 1928, he dissolved his company "Standard Möbel".

The rights to the furniture designs were taken over by the Thonet company. For them he developed many cantilever chairs, such as the Cesca, whose rear-legless cantilever principle took up the ideas of Dutch architect Mark Stam. The cantilever chairs are produced to this day and almost unchanged by Thonet.

Shortly after Marcel Breuer retired, he died in New York City on July 1, 1981 at the age of 79.

(1902 - 1981)

1902 Marcel Breuer is born in Pécs (Hungary).

1920 Marcel Breuer goes to Weimar after a discontinued study and enrolls at the Bauhaus.

1920 - 1924 Breuer works in Weimar in the furniture workshop.

1925 he takes over as head of the furniture workshop at the Bauhaus.

In 1927 he creates the famous armchair "Wassily". The tubular steel armchair, which still bears the name "steel club chair type B3" is renamed later. At that time, together with Stefan Lengyel (Hungarian architect), he founded the company "Standart-Möbel" without first consulting the Bauhaus management about the product rights - resulting in many of the tubular steel furniture we know today.

In 1933 Marcel Breuer emigrated to Hungary to escape Nazi persecution because he was of Jewish descent.

1935 Breuer goes to England and

1937 he moves to the USA where he teaches at Harvard University's design school until 1946 (as does Walter Gropius).

1939 together with Walter Gropius creates several private houses, the Pennsylvania Pavilion for the New York World's Fair and the private house of Walter Gropius in a joint architectural practice.

In 1941 Breuer again had his own architectural practice in New York in which he designed numerous office and university buildings and over 70 residential houses.

In 1981, shortly after his retirement, Marcel Breuer dies in New York at the age of 79.