Marcel Breuer

Person

Designer

Born 22 May 1902 Pécs, Hungary Died 1 July 1981 New York City Marcel Breuer completed an apprenticeship in cabinetmaking at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1920 to 1923 and began designing furniture at an early stage, including pieces for Walter Gropius’ Haus Sommerfeld in Berlin. In 1923 he presented the Slatted Chair and other wooden furniture at the first Bauhaus exhibition in Haus am Horn, Weimar. Appointed a Jungmeister at Bauhaus Dessau in 1925, he developed some of the earliest tubular steel furniture, including the B 3 lounge chair, and furnished the new Bauhaus building. After founding Standard Möbel in Berlin and leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, he ran his own office, designing further furniture classics such as the B 32 chair and numerous interiors. From 1935 to 1937 he worked in Great Britain for Isokon before emigrating to the USA in 1937. There he taught at Harvard University until 1946 and worked in partnership with Walter Gropius until 1941. From 1946 he practised architecture from New York. His major projects included a model house for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1962 the Italian company Gavina reissued the B 3 lounge chair under the name Wassily.