Breuer, Marcel Lajos [key], 1902–81, American architect and furniture designer, b. Hungary. During the 1920s he was associated, both as student and as teacher, with the Bauhaus in Germany. In 1925, Breuer won renown with his design of the first tubular steel and laminated plywood chair. He built only one private house (Wiesbaden, 1932) before leaving Germany to work in Switzerland and England. Breuer became associate professor of architecture at Harvard in 1937, and from 1937 to 1941 was a partner of Walter Gropius, with whom he designed several outstanding houses. He developed exterior sun shielding and made bold sculptural use of poured concrete. With Nervi and B. H. Zehrfuss he planned the Paris headquarters of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (1958). Among Breuer's major later designs are St. John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minn. (1953–61); the U.S. embassy at The Hague (1958); the former Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (1966), now leased to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the New York Univ. Technology I and II buildings (1969), New York City.
See his Sun and Shadow, ed. by P. Blake (1955), Buildings and Projects, ed. by C. Jones (1962), and New Buildings and Projects, ed. by T. Papachristou (1970).
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