Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) was born in Pécs, Hungary, and arrived at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920 as a student, taking charge of its carpentry workshop five years later. There he designed the Wassily chair in 1925-26, one of the first pieces of furniture made from bent tubular steel, and the Cesca chair that followed it, both still in production a century later.

He left Germany in 1934, worked briefly in London, and moved to the United States in 1937 to teach architecture at Harvard alongside Walter Gropius, opening his own New York office in 1946. His buildings include the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, St John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota and the Whitney Museum of American Art, completed in 1966. His drawings and papers are held by the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive at Syracuse University.