Barry Bergdoll, Jonathan Massey (eds.)

Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions

Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions is a collection of essays by a group of scholars, which examine Breuer’s approach and way of working, his strategies and his signature buildings. These essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, which are now accessible online.

Often seen as a pioneer of a “brutalist modernism” of reinforced concrete, Marcel Breuer might best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional structures in and for which he worked. More recently historians, architects, and – with the reopening of the great megalith of his Whitney Museum as the Met Breuer in New York – a larger public are gaining new insights into the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned.

Breuer (1902–1981) is celebrated as an architect, furniture designer and teacher who is known as a “formgiver” of modern American architecture. Originally from Hungary, Breuer was one of the first students at the Bauhaus before he emigrated to the USA in 1937.

Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions is a collection of essays by a group of scholars, which examine Breuer’s approach and way of working, his strategies and his signature buildings. These essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, which are now accessible online.

Often seen as a pioneer of a “brutalist modernism” of reinforced concrete, Marcel Breuer might best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional structures in and for which he worked. More recently historians, architects, and – with the reopening of the great megalith of his Whitney Museum as the Met Breuer in New York – a larger public are gaining new insights into the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned.

Breuer (1902–1981) is celebrated as an architect, furniture designer and teacher who is known as a “formgiver” of modern American architecture. Originally from Hungary, Breuer was one of the first students at the Bauhaus before he emigrated to the USA in 1937.


"The collection of essays both celebrate and interrogate Breuer’s work and ongoing legacy"

- TL Mag

 "A handsome collection of essays, extensively illustrated with photographs and drawings" 

- Architectural Record

«Im reich illustrierten Buch springt ins Auge, wie vielfältig und expressiv Breuer seine Großbauten gestaltet hat – Brutalismus in seinen schönsten Anfängen»
Marlowes


 

Edited by Barry Bergdoll, Jonathan Massey

With essays by Lucia Allais, Barry Bergdoll, Kenny Cupers with

Laura Martínez de Guereñu, Teresa Harris, John Harwood,

Jonathan Massey, Guy Nordenson, Timothy Rohan, and an introduction to the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive at Syracuse University

Design: Integral Lars Müller,

16,5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in

368 pages, 345 illustrations

paperback

2018, 978-3-03778-519-5, English
CHF 40.00

Barry Bergdoll

Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where from 2007 to 2013 he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design.

Jonathan Massey

Jonathan Massey is Professor and Dean at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. The author of Crystal and Arabesque:
Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture (2009), Massey is also a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, and coeditor of its book, Governing
by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the 20th Century (2012).