Marcel Breuer

1902–1981 · Hungarian-American · 12 buildings on the wall

Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) was a Hungarian-American modernist architect and furniture designer, born in Pécs. One of the first and youngest students at the Bauhaus, he was put in charge of its carpentry workshop and designed the Wassily and Cesca chairs there. In 1937 he followed Walter Gropius to Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and his later buildings, many of them brutalist, made him one of the most popular architects of the mid-20th century.

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His first major public commissions came in the 1950s. He designed the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1958) with Bernard Zehrfuss and Pier Luigi Nervi, and drew the master plan and church for St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota (St. John's Abbey Church, 1961). The Breuer Building in New York (1966), built for the Whitney Museum, steps its granite and concrete floors outward over the entrance like an upside-down ziggurat. The Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in Washington, D.C. (1968), headquarters of the US housing department, has drawn wide criticism; one former housing secretary called it "10 floors of basement". Marcel Breuer's buildings are studied for heavy concrete and stone forms shaped with a furniture maker's eye.

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