Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer is born on 22 May 1902 in the city of Pécs in Hungary. After growing up in Hungary, at the age of 18 he comes to Weimar in Germany to study at the Bauhaus School. The Bauhaus had opened the year before, making Breuer one of the first students from the now iconic school. Four years after his arrival, Marcel Breuer becomes head of the school's furniture department, where the focus is on the visual arts, craftsmanship and industrial production.

At the end of the 1920s, Marcel Breuer moved to Berlin and it is at this time that some of his most famous furniture first saw the light of day. Indeed, it is at this time that Breuer designs the first tubular steel furniture, including the backless S-shaped tubular steel chair. The chair is now copied and varied by many furniture manufacturers, but the original is made by Knoll International and is available from us at the NO-GA under the name Cesca Chair and Cesca Armchair, depending on whether you want it with or without armrests.

Marcel Breuer works in Germany until Hitler's rise to power, when he moves first to London to work for Jack Pritchard, before moving on to the United States a few years later. In the United States, Marcel Breuer becomes one of the most important architects and mediators of European functionalism. The buildings he designs at this time are characterised by radical functionalism in line with Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, among others. With the latter he also ran a joint architectural practice.

Marcel Breuer has several major international assignments to his credit. One of Breuer's most famous works is the UNESCO building in Paris, begun in 1954 and completed three years later. In addition to being a practicing architect, Marcel Breuer also worked as a teacher at Harvard University from 1937 to 1947. Marcel Breuer died in 1981 in New York at the age of 79.