MARCEL BREUER: FROM TABULAR STEEL TO BRUTALIST CONCRETE

Marcel Breuer is the only figure in twentieth-century design who is equally famous for a chair and a building, and the chair came first. He was twenty-three, a junior master at the Bauhaus, when he looked at the handlebars of his new bicycle and wondered whether steel tube that could be bent into those could be bent into furniture. The result — the B3 club chair, later called the Wassily — is still in production a century on, and so is the cantilevered Cesca that followed it. Forty years later he answered a different question, what a museum in Manhattan should look like, with a dark granite box that leans out over Madison Avenue — the building New York now calls simply the Breuer. In between came the Bauhaus, Berlin, two years in a Hampstead block of flats designing plywood for Isokon, Harvard with Gropius, and a New York practice that built some of the most uncompromising concrete architecture in America. The thread through all of it is the one he named himself: structure as a principle and a passion.

  • Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in Sussex, England.
  • Last updated: 26-Oct-26.

Photograph by Herbert Behrens, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Marcel Breuer architectural model collection

We make two of Breuer's American buildings as handcrafted plaster models — and a third building he lived in.

Browse the Brutalist architecture models collection

Who was Marcel Breuer?

Marcel Lajos Breuer (1902–1981) was a Hungarian-born designer and architect, a student and then a master at the Bauhaus, and later one of the leading figures of American Brutalism. He is known equally for the tubular-steel furniture he designed in the 1920s — the Wassily and Cesca chairs above all — and for the monumental concrete buildings of his last three decades: the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Saint John's Abbey church in Minnesota, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Armstrong Rubber Company Building in New Haven. He received the AIA Gold Medal in 1968, was the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in 1972 — described at the time as the first the Met had given a living American architect — and died in New York on 1 July 1981.

Facts panel

  • Born: 21 May 1902, Pécs, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary)
  • Died: 1 July 1981, New York City
  • Bauhaus: student 1920–24; junior master of the furniture workshop, Dessau, 1925–28
  • Berlin practice: 1928–33; Budapest and Zurich 1933–35
  • England: 1935–37, in partnership with F. R. S. Yorke; Controller of Design, Isokon
  • United States: from 1937; Harvard Graduate School of Design 1937–46; partnership with Walter Gropius 1937–41; own practice from 1941, New York from 1946
  • Marcel Breuer and Associates: partners Herbert Beckhard, Robert F. Gatje, Hamilton P. Smith, Tician Papachristou; retired 1976
  • Citizenship: naturalised American, 1944
  • Honours: AIA Gold Medal 1968; Grande Médaille d'Or, Académie d'Architecture, 1976
  • Retrospectives: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972–73; Museum of Modern Art (furniture and interiors), 1981
  • Furniture still in production: Wassily (1925–26), Laccio tables (1925–26), Cesca (1928), B35 (1929), Isokon Long Chair (1935–36)

The Bauhaus: 1920–1928

Breuer arrived at the Bauhaus in Weimar in April 1920, aged eighteen, after a few unhappy weeks at the Vienna Academy, and joined the joinery workshop. He passed his journeyman's examination in 1924, and when the school moved to Dessau in 1925 Walter Gropius made him a Jungmeister — junior master — and put him in charge of the furniture workshop, at twenty-three. He stayed until 1928, the year Gropius himself left.

Those three years in Dessau are among the most productive in the history of furniture. The workshop's job was to furnish Gropius's new school building and the Masters' Houses beside it, and Breuer took the Bauhaus idea — standardised, industrial, honest about its materials — further than anyone. Read our guide to the Bauhaus movement for the school and its building, which we make as a model.

The architect as designer: Breuer's furniture

For many people, Marcel Breuer means a chair before it means a building, and the chairs deserve their own section.

Tubular steel: the Wassily and the Cesca

The story of the bicycle is true. In 1925 Breuer bought an Adler bicycle, admired its handlebars — strong, light, bent from seamless steel tube, mass-produced — and reasoned that if tube could be bent into those it could be bent into furniture. The Museum of Modern Art, which owns an early example, records that he obtained seamless steel tube and built his first prototype with a local plumber; the finished chair is bolted rather than welded. He called the result the least artistic, the most logical, the least cosy and the most mechanical chair he could imagine — and meant it as praise.

That chair was the B3 club chair of 1925–26: a traditional armchair's volumes drawn in the air with bent tube and stretched canvas, the sitter apparently suspended in a cage of chrome. Wassily Kandinsky, Breuer's colleague at the Bauhaus, admired it and Breuer made him one; the name "Wassily" came decades later, from the Italian manufacturer Gavina when it reissued the chair around 1960. Breuer and Kálmán Lengyel set up Standard-Möbel in Berlin to make it; Thonet took the company over in 1929 and put Breuer's steel furniture into its catalogue, where it transformed the firm.

Photograph by Tim Evanson, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Cesca of 1928 — Thonet's B32 — was the cantilever: a single run of tube, bent into a continuous S, carrying a seat and back of cane-filled beech frames with no back legs at all. Breuer wanted the sitter to feel they were sitting on columns of air. The name, again later, is for his adopted daughter Francesca. The Laccio nesting tables (1925–26) and the B35 lounge chair (1929) complete the Bauhaus group. All of these are made today by Knoll, which bought Gavina in 1968 largely to secure the rights to Breuer's designs, and the Cesca and B35 also by Thonet.

Aluminium

In 1933, working between Budapest and Zurich, Breuer entered an international competition for the best aluminium chair with the Swiss maker Embru and won — twice over, from two independent juries. The aluminium chaise longue that came out of it, flat strips of metal in a sprung curve, is in the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Neue Galerie in New York; it was never put back into production, but it is the direct ancestor of what he did next in England.

Plywood: the Isokon years

Breuer came to London in 1935 at Gropius's suggestion and moved into Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead — the Isokon Building, Wells Coates's white concrete block of minimal flats that we make as a model. Gropius was already there, in flat 15; Breuer took flat 16. Jack Pritchard, who had built the flats, ran a furniture company from them, and when Gropius left for Harvard in March 1937 he recommended Breuer to succeed him as Isokon's Controller of Design.

The Isokon Long Chair of 1935–36 is Breuer's aluminium chaise translated into bent plywood, under the influence of Alvar Aalto's work that Pritchard was importing: a single sinuous ribbon of moulded birch ply on a laminated frame, the most comfortable chair he ever designed and, at over six pounds in 1936, too expensive to sell in any numbers before production stopped in 1939. The Short Chair, the nesting tables and a stacking dining chair followed in 1936–37. The Long Chair is made today by Isokon Plus under licence from the Pritchard estate, and the nesting tables were reissued in 2022. Read our Isokon Building architecture guide.

Photograph by Sailko, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Why the furniture matters to the buildings

The same mind is at work in both. The B3 shows its structure and hides nothing; the Cesca cantilevers; the Long Chair is a single structural gesture. Thirty years later the Whitney cantilevers out over Madison Avenue three times, and the Armstrong Rubber Company Building hangs five floors of offices from trusses above a void. Breuer never made a distinction between the two scales. Structure, he said, is not just a means to a solution; it is also a principle and a passion.

Breuer in England: 1935–1937

Breuer's two English years produced little that survives, and the little is remarkable. In partnership with F. R. S. Yorke he built the Gane Pavilion at Ashton Court, Bristol, for the furniture maker Crofton Gane — a temporary show-house for the 1936 Royal Show, walled in rough Cotswold stone, that was demolished after a week and that Breuer later named, with UNESCO, as one of his two favourite works. It is the first time he used rough stone against modern planes, a combination that runs through everything he built afterwards.

The other survivor is close to our own studio. Sea Lane House at East Preston, near Angmering in West Sussex, designed with Yorke in 1936 and built in 1937, is an L-shaped brick and concrete house raised on columns with a curved sun terrace facing the Channel. Its client, James Macnabb, probably never lived in it. It was listed Grade II in January 1971 and is the only Breuer building standing in Britain — a Bauhaus master's house on the Sussex coast, fifteen miles from where our models are made.

America: Harvard and the houses, 1937–1946

Gropius had gone to Harvard in 1937 to chair the Graduate School of Design, and Breuer followed him that year as a professor. For four years they practised together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, building the New England houses — Breuer's own at Lincoln (1939), the Chamberlain Cottage, the Frank House — that taught American modernism to use timber, fieldstone and the pitched roof. Their students included Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph and Edward Larrabee Barnes, which is to say most of the next generation of American architecture.

Breuer went out on his own in 1941, became an American citizen in 1944, and moved his office to New York in 1946 with a young Australian, Harry Seidler, as chief draughtsman. The Geller House on Long Island (1945–47) introduced his "bi-nuclear" plan, living and sleeping in separate wings; his own Breuer House II at New Canaan (1947) hung a cantilevered deck from steel cables, and sagged; and in 1949 the Museum of Modern Art built a full-size Breuer house in its sculpture garden, which was later moved to the Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills. The Geller House was demolished in January 2022.

America: concrete, 1952–1980

The commission that made Breuer an international architect came in 1952: the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, designed with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi and the French architect Bernard Zehrfuss and inaugurated on 3 November 1958 — a Y-shaped secretariat on seventy-two concrete pilotis, with a folded-concrete conference hall. From then on Breuer was a concrete architect, and the buildings came quickly:

  • Saint John's Abbey Church, Collegeville, Minnesota (1958–61): a folded concrete shell behind a 112-foot bell banner, the masterpiece of his religious work
  • IBM research centre, La Gaude, near Nice (1960–62, with Robert Gatje): the Y-plan on sculpted concrete legs that became a Breuer signature
  • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1963–66, with Hamilton Smith): the granite inverted ziggurat now known as the Breuer Building
  • Department of Housing and Urban Development, Washington (1968, with Herbert Beckhard): the first precast-concrete federal building in the capital
  • Armstrong Rubber Company Building, New Haven (1968–70, with Robert Gatje): five floors suspended above a void, now Hotel Marcel
  • Hubert H. Humphrey Building, Washington (1977): among his last projects
  • Atlanta Central Library (1980): his final building, opened five weeks after his seventy-eighth birthday; he was too ill to attend

Breuer retired in 1976; the practice carried on under Gatje, Papachristou and Smith until 1986. He died in New York on 1 July 1981.

What Breuer's buildings look like

Breuer's mature architecture is unmistakable, and its signatures are the same at every scale:

  • The cantilever. From the Cesca to the Whitney, Breuer liked things that stood out over nothing. Buildings, he said, no longer rest on the ground; they are cantilevered from the ground up.
  • Precast concrete as a façade system. Deep, repeated, sun-shading panels — at HUD, IBM, the Armstrong building — that turn a wall into a grid of shadow.
  • The sculpted leg. His pilotis are never simple columns but tapered, faceted concrete forms that make the building's weight visible.
  • The trapezoid window. The Whitney's angled openings are the best-known example of his habit of cutting a few deliberate, odd windows into a blank mass.
  • Rough against smooth. Fieldstone against white render in the New England houses; flame-finished granite against bronze at the Whitney; board-marked concrete throughout. The Gane Pavilion's Cotswold stone started it.
  • Heavy lightness. His own phrase for the Whitney, and the ambition of all his late work: enormous mass that appears to float.

Legacy

Breuer's furniture has never gone out of production; his buildings have had a harder time. The Geller House and the American Press Institute have been demolished in the last decade, and the Armstrong building lost a third of its base to a car park before its rescue. But the reassessment of Brutalism has carried him with it: the Whitney became a New York City landmark in 2025 and reopened as Sotheby's headquarters the same year; the Armstrong building is a net-zero hotel; Atlanta's library was renovated rather than replaced. The Bauhaus master who built his first house at thirty now has two buildings on the National Register, one on the Historic England list, and a chair in more museums than any other designer of his century.

Frequently asked questions about Marcel Breuer

What is Marcel Breuer famous for?

Two things: the first tubular-steel furniture for the home — the Wassily chair of 1925–26 and the cantilevered Cesca of 1928, both still made by Knoll — and the Brutalist concrete buildings of his American career, above all the Whitney Museum in New York (the Breuer Building) and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Which chairs did Marcel Breuer design?

The Wassily (B3) club chair, the Cesca (B32) cantilever chair, the Laccio tables and the B35 lounge chair at the Bauhaus and for Thonet; an aluminium chaise longue for Embru in 1933; and the plywood Long Chair, Short Chair, nesting tables and dining chair for Isokon in London in 1935–37. Marcel Breuer's Wassily, Cesca, Laccio and Long Chair are all in production today.

Why is it called the Wassily chair?

After Wassily Kandinsky, Breuer's colleague at the Bauhaus, who admired the chair and was given one. Breuer did not name it; the Italian maker Gavina did, when it reissued the chair around 1960. Marcel Breuer called it simply the B3.

Was Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus?

Yes. Marcel Breuer studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1920 to 1924 and ran its furniture workshop in Dessau as a junior master from 1925 to 1928, under Walter Gropius.

Did Marcel Breuer design the Whitney Museum?

Yes. Marcel Breuer, with his partner Hamilton Smith, designed the Whitney Museum of American Art at 945 Madison Avenue, which opened in 1966. The Whitney moved out in 2014; the building is now known as the Breuer Building and houses Sotheby's.

Did Marcel Breuer live in England?

From 1935 to 1937, at the Isokon Building in Hampstead, where he designed plywood furniture for Isokon and worked in partnership with F. R. S. Yorke. Marcel Breuer's Sea Lane House at East Preston, West Sussex, is his only surviving British building.

What buildings did Marcel Breuer design?

UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1958), Saint John's Abbey Church in Minnesota (1961), IBM La Gaude in France (1962), the Whitney Museum in New York (1966), the HUD headquarters in Washington (1968), the Armstrong Rubber Company Building in New Haven (1970) and the Atlanta Central Library (1980), among many houses and institutional buildings. Marcel Breuer's two best-known buildings are both available as our plaster models.

When did Marcel Breuer die?

On 1 July 1981, in New York City, aged 79. Marcel Breuer had retired from practice in 1976.

Is the Isokon Long Chair still made?

Yes. Marcel Breuer's Long Chair of 1935–36 is made by Isokon Plus in London under licence from the Pritchard estate, in the same bent birch plywood as the original.

Related pages and models

Sources and further reading