Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) was a furniture designer and architect from Hungary. During the 1920’s he completed his studies at the Bauhaus. There itself he was appointed as the head of the carpentry workshop in the school. He was pretty interested in tubular steel furniture and he pioneered the same during the 1930’s. The first bent tubular steel chair that he designed was one of his most famous and widely recognized works. The chair is also known as Wassily Chair. In the 1930’s Breuer had to migrate to London because of the rise in Nazi party in Germany. There he worked for a design company “Isokon”. It is the company which introduced modern designs in the UK those early years. After working there for some time, he moved to United States and there taught the students of Harvard’s architecture school. Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson are two famous architects from the US who were students of Breuer in the Harvard’s architecture school.

In 1941 Breuer partnered with Gropius and started a design firm in New York. In 1953, he moved to Paris and this was the turning point in his career. It was because of the 1953 commission for the UNESCO headquarters he moved to Paris where he started receiving large projects. Then he started working with concretes as well. He was good at designing using concrete and he used to make them soft instead of making them sharp like others. This ability of Breuer was appreciated by many. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is one of his best projects. The works on the same began between ‘63 and ‘64.

Breuer then started a firm which was called “Marcel Breuer Architecte” in order to attract more and more European projects. Hamilton Smith, Murray Emslie, Herbert Beckhard, and Robert F. Gatje showed interest in the firm and partnered along with him to help him with the works in the firm.

The Wassily Chair