19 Facts About Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944.

Marcel Breuer's work includes art museums, libraries, college buildings, office buildings, and residences.

Marcel Breuer is regarded as one of the great innovators of modern furniture design and one of the most-influential exponents of the International Style.

Commonly known to his friends and associates as Lajko, Marcel Breuer was born in Pecs, Hungary, to a Jewish family.

Marcel Breuer was forced to renounce his faith in order to marry Martha Erps due to anti-Semitism in Germany at the time.

Marcel Breuer was recognized by Gropius as a significant talent and was quickly put at the head of the Bauhaus carpentry shop.

Marcel Breuer was known to such giants as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, whose architectural vocabulary he was later to adapt as part of his own, but hardly considered an equal by them who were his senior by 15 and 16 years.

Marcel Breuer designed his Long Chair as well as experimenting with bent and formed plywood, inspired by designs by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

In 1937, Gropius accepted the appointment as chairman of Harvard's Graduate School of Design and again Marcel Breuer followed his mentor to join the faculty in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Marcel Breuer broke with his father-figure, Walter Gropius, in 1941 over a very minor issue but the major reason may have been to get himself out from under the better-known name that dominated their practice.

Marcel Breuer had married their secretary, Constance Crocker Leighton, and after a few more years in Cambridge, moved down to New York City in 1946 to establish a practice that was centered there for the rest of his life.

Marcel Breuer built two houses for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut: one from 1947 to 1948, and the other from 1951 to 1952.

Marcel Breuer was a supporter of the Council for the Advancement of the Negro in Architecture and employed Beverly Lorraine Greene, the first African-American woman to be licensed as an architect in the United States.

Marcel Breuer is credited as draftsperson on a number of projects Breuer worked on in the 1950s including the Grosse Pointe Public Library.

In 1966 Marcel Breuer completed the Whitney Museum of American Art at 945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Marcel Breuer designed the Washington, DC, headquarters building for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development which was completed in 1968.

Marcel Breuer was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects at their 100th annual convention in 1968 at Portland, Oregon.

Marcel Breuer died in his apartment in Manhattan in 1981, leaving his wife Connie and his son Tamas.

Marcel Breuer donated his professional papers and drawings to Syracuse University library beginning in the late 1960s.