Art: Architectural Odyssey

When amateurs of the arts think of outstanding modern architects, the names most likely to pop into their minds are Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Miës van der Rohe. If they know of Marcel Breuer, they usually identify him as the inventor of tubular metal furniture. In the Bauhaus in 1925. 23-year-old Marcel Breuer first designed tubular steel chairs. His designs were promptly pirated and vulgarized, and being identified as a furniture designer has injured Architect Breuer ever since. Visitors last week at Harvard’s Robinson Hall, where models and photographs of his work are currently exhibited, had no trouble in seeing why.

Now research professor in Harvard’s department of architecture, of which Walter Gropius is chairman, Breuer is, like Gropius, a creator of the international school of architecture. And like most internationalists, he is restless, widely traveled, had roamed over Europe, settled in England, when he packed up to follow Gropius to Harvard last year. Breuer’s architectural Odyssey began when he graduated from the gymnasium at Pecs, Hungary, in 1920. Then 18, the son of a middle-class doctor, he streaked for Vienna, heard about the newly established Bauhaus, moved to Germany and then Paris, where his furniture designs had given him a reputation, was called back to Germany to become a Bruhaus professor at 23, a Berlin architect at 26.

Meanwhile, his buildings, spotted around Europe, excited critics.Henry-Russell Hitchcock called his first, in Wiesbaden, Germany, among the world’s best modern houses, was as enthusiastic about two small apartment buildings in Zurich. At the Harvard exhibition, visitors were impressed most by the variety and ingenuity of Architect Breuer’s projects. They range from a great “Garden City of the Future” to chairs made of plywood. They include his multiplying glass window—a group of small round windows, each curved like a camera lens, so that the same scene appears in a different focus, or from a different angle, in each panel. Associated with Gropius in designing houses as well as in teaching. Breuer is considered the more imaginative and intuitive of the two architects, Gropius the more logical and precise. Although critics praise the elegance of the designs for his Zurich apartment house, Architect Breuer is more pleased by the fact that they are 100% rented, while others nearby are only 70% occupied.