Breuer

A lively journey into the modern age

Elegant steel and vibrant concrete

In 1956, Time magazine described him as one of the leading "designers of the 20th century". To this day, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) - Bauhaus graduate and lecturer, emigrant from Nazi Germany, professor at Harvard and internationally renowned architect - is regarded by architects and designers alike as a shining light of modernism. With his famous tubular steel chairs, which are still in use today, he reinvented sitting and was already regarded as a design god before he turned to architecture. Breuer's buildings, including the UNESCO building in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York, are less well known, but are in no way inferior to his furniture icons. His innovative single-family homes, which distinguish between semi-public and private spaces, are also considered outstanding designs.

In this introduction, we chart Breuer's entire career through some of his most influential projects and ideas, from his distinctive tubular steel furniture to the famous two-cell houses and the large-scale projects that made him a pioneer of Brutalism.

The author

Arnt Cobbers studied art history, history and musicology, wrote his doctorate on medieval church architecture and lives as a freelance author in Berlin. He has worked as an architecture critic and written numerous books on Berlin architecture. His monographs on Erich Mendelsohn and Marcel Breuer have been published by TASCHEN.

The editor

Peter Gössel runs an agency for museum and exhibition design. For TASCHEN he has published monographs on Julius Shulman, R. M. Schindler, John Lautner and Richard Neutra as well as several architecture titles in the small series.