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Abstract
This study is an exploration of Marcel Breuer’s basic design methodology as it appears in his writings, particularly his 1956 monograph Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, the Philosophy of an Architect. By identifying the influences that helped shape the background to his theoretical approach, and with the support of broader philosophical resources, the characteristics and subtleties of Breuer’s particular concept of dualism in architecture are outlined. This allows for a new interpretative approach to the critical analysis of his postwar architecture, using structuralism, through which the specific qualities of Breuer’s dualism are evaluated in terms of design.
Notes
1. Marcel Breuer, Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, the Philosophy of an Architect, ed. Peter Blake (London: Longmans, Green, 1956).
2. Ibid., 9.
3. Marcel Breuer Papers, 1920–1986. Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution. Series 6.1: Lecture titled “Wo Stehen Wir? (“Where do we stand?”), Zurich, 1934.
4. Ibid.
5. Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 6.1: Manuscript of lecture titled “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 11, 1948.
6. Breuer, Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, 32–33.
7. For an overview of dualism in the philosophy of mind, see Howard Robinson, “Dualism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta (Fall 2017 Edition).
8. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
9. George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society, vol. II, The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955).
10. Ηράκλειτος, Άπαντα, introduction, translation and commentary by Athanassios Kyriazopoulos (Athens: Κάκτος, 1995), 20–21. Characteristic on the subject are fragments DK B8, B10, B15, B50, B53, B80 and B111 of the Heraclitan work On Nature.
11. Ibid., 171. See also fragments DK B30, B32 and B48.
12. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, Papers on Architecture, 1977), 23.
13. Ibid., 23.
14. There are numerous monographs and exhibition catalogues that present Breuer’s architecture along with interesting historical data. For monographs, see, for instance, Tician Papachristou, Marcel Breuer: New Buildings and Projects (New York: Praeger, 1970); Robert F. Gatje, Marcel Breuer: A Memoir (New York: Monacelli Press, 2000); David Masello, Architecture Without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993); Isabelle Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect. The Career and the Buildings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001); Victoria M. Young, Saint John’s Abbey Church: Marcel Breuer and the Creation of a Modern Sacred Space (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Exhibition catalogues include Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Marcel Breuer and the American Tradition in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Special Collections Rare, Loeb Design, Harvard University, 1938) and Peter Blake, Marcel Breuer: Architect and Designer (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949). However, there are few studies that launch a critique, and those that do focus mainly on the question of scale, identifying a weakness in his larger projects which, it is claimed, is due to his education as a furniture designer – see William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (New York: Doubleday, 1972); Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses (London: Phaidon Press, 2000). There has also been some criticism of his work in the context of the influence of former Bauhaus masters in the United States (see William H. Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies and Breuer,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, eds. D. Fleming and B. Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); Klaus Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983)) or of late modernism (Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963); Charles Jencks, The New Moderns: From Late to Neo-Modernism (New York: Rizzoli, 1990)).
15. H. M. Wingler, The Bauhaus. Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969).
16. Marcel Breuer Papers, ΑΑΑ, Series 4.1: Breuer’s interview in Les Archives du XXième Siecle, 1974.
17. Wingler, Bauhaus, 45.
18. Walter Gropius would say later that “The preliminary course of the Bauhaus curriculum and the subsequent experiences in the workshop had more to do with Breuer’s finding himself as a creative artist than any other influence,” (Walter Gropius to Peter Blake, January 10, 1949, Breuer file, MoMA).
19. Johannes Itten, Design and Form, The Basic Course at the Bauhaus, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975 [1963]), 12.
20. Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 43. “[…] je ne me sentais pas très harmonieux avec Itten,” declared Breuer, in his interview in Les Archives du XXième siècle, 1974, a production of ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion télévision Française), in Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 4.1.
21. Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Expressionism, Abstraction, and the Search for Utopia in Germany,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1986), 212.
22. Walter Gropius, circular, 3 February 1922, in Wingler, Bauhaus, 51–52.
23. As Gropius wrote regarding Breuer, “his preoccupation has always been structural and I don’t remember him to have been under anyone’s spell for long,” Walter Gropius to Peter Blake, January 10, 1949, Breuer file, MoMA.
24. Marcel Breuer Papers, ΑΑΑ, Series 6.2: “On Reorganization of the Bauhaus,” 1922.
25. Le Corbusier expressed something very similar concerning the application of the scientific approach to problem-solving to architecture in Vers une architecture, previously published in the journal Esprit Nouveau – see Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Éditions Crès, Collection de “L'Esprit Nouveau,” 1923), for example 113, 159.
26. Washton Long, “Expressionism, Abstraction, and the Search for Utopia in Germany,” 212.
27. Breuer’s interview in Les Archives du XXième Siècle (Marcel Breuer Papers, ΑΑΑ, Series 4.1).
28. In the second part of his seminal book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914), Kandinsky includes a section on “The Language of Form and Colour” in painting, based on the relation both between color and form, and between two basic antithetical pairs, namely, warm and cold, light and dark – see Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. and with an introduction by M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 36.
29. Speech at the Klee Symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art, February 2, 1950 (Marcel Breuer, AAA, Series 6.1).
30. Paul Klee, “Towards a Theory of Form-Production,” in Paul Klee: Notebooks Vol. 1: The Thinking Eye, ed. J. Spiller (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), 15.
31. From the introduction by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 8.
32. Ibid., 43.
33. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 43.
34. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. P. M. Shand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 23. See also his article “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus” (translation of “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar”), published in 1923 at the Bauhausverlag.
35. Evangelia Tsilika, Η σχέση επιφάνειας-βάθους και ο δρόμος της μάσκας στην αρχιτεκτονική του 20ου αιώνα. Η περίπτωση του Marcel Breuer [The Relation Between Surface and Depth and the Way of the Mask in 20th Century Architecture. The Case of Marcel Breuer] (PhD diss., Athens: National Technical University of Athens, 2008), 99–115.
36. See the constitutional program of the Bauhaus school in Weimar, April 1919 (Wingler, Bauhaus, 31).
37. Marcel Breuer Papers, ΑΑΑ, Series 6.1: “Where do we stand?”
38. Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Arts and the Humanities, 1995 [1928]), 87, 94–96, 100, 183.
39. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, C. Bally and A. Sechehaye (Lausanne and Paris: Payot, 1916), English translation W. Baskin, Course in General Linguistics (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977). Once again, this idea can be found first in Heraclitus. As stated in a fragment of his work On Nature: “Wisdom is only one thing: to know that reason [ορθός λόγος] rules everything through their inner relationships” (DK B41. Ηράκλειτος, Άπαντα). It is perhaps interesting to note that Kyriazopoulos classifies Heraclitus as a materialist philosopher, together with the Miletian School of philosophy (Thalis, Anaximandros, Anaximenis), in distinction from the idealists of the Eleatic School (Xenophanis, Pythagoras, Parmenidis) (Ηράκλειτος, Άπαντα, 279).
40. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1962), 210.
41. Heinrich Wölfflin, Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1932), and Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957).
42. Marcel Breuer Papers, ΑΑΑ, Series 6.1: “History of Modern Architecture,” not dated. It is assumed that this was part of a lecture delivered at an American university; from its content, it seems that it was written just after the war. The lecture starts as follows: “There are three epochs of the architecture we call modern. First, the revolutionary, after the first world war, ending about 1925–1930. The second, somewhat interrupted by the war, but going on now, is a period of ‘interlocking philosophy and realization’. Third will be the period of broad utilization, – probably identical with the ‘Post War’ period.” Breuer considered himself as belonging to the second epoch.
43. All biographical notes on Breuer can be found in Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect.
44. See for example his projects Veterans’ House A and B (1945, not built).
45. The type, for Breuer, precedes form and defines it. It does not repeat itself as an image but acts as a set of rules that can give rise to works that are not alike, as it creates dialectical relationships with construction, function, aesthetic perceptions, place and society.
46. Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 8.
47. Ibid., Breuer’s own terminology.
48. In his residences, Breuer was trying to provide all the aspects of housing he thought a young American family was looking for. According to Peter Blake, he preferred to respond to actual rather than theoretical or hypothetical issues, to “real problems, real people and real sites” (Peter Blake, No Place like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept (New York: Knopf, 1993), 138).
49. Driller, Breuer Houses, 38.
50. Paul Rudolph, “Rudolph,” in Perspecta 7, The Yale Architectural Journal (1961), 51.
51. Marcel Breuer Papers, ΑΑΑ, Series 6.1: “On Form and Function.”
52. Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 6.1: “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?”
53. Marcel Breuer, Buildings and Projects, 1921–1961, captions and introduction by Craston Jones (New York: Praeger, 1962).
54. Breuer enthusiastically shared Gropius’s interest in American methods of construction and especially in lightweight balloon frame construction. As Hitchcock observes, the influence of these methods allowed Breuer and Gropius to develop new architectural forms, new departures for the Modern Architecture they brought with them (Hitchcock, Marcel Breuer and the American Tradition in Architecture).
55. Breuer, Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, 34. As Breuer stated in a panel discussion in 1961, he was critical of the unreasonable and unilateral use of glass “as a universal enclosure of space” because, quite simply, “there are also many human needs that our glass wall does not fulfil.” However, he appreciated all the advantages offered by the new use of the material and the emergence of phenomena such as “the transparency of architecture; the interior space connected with the exterior one, at least visually; the flow of space through a structure and between its walls […]” (Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 2: “Individual Expression Versus Order: The Issue in Architecture Today,” Architectural League of New York, 1961).
56. As Breuer explains, “when stone is used in a wall, the aim is not to evoke some notion of rock, but to build a clear-cut slab made of stone because stone is a good and durable and texturally pleasant material. It should be clear that this is a wall built by a mason, executing drawings with dimensions and a given geometry; it is not a grotto or part of a romantic anachronism.” (Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 2: “Individual Expression Versus Order”).
57. Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 6.1: “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?”
58. His first trip to Greece was in 1931 with Herbert Bayer (Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 70). Breuer visited Greece at least four more times: in 1934 when he met Stamos Papadakis, in 1958 with Ι. Μ. Pei and Dr. Van der Wal, in 1961 with Hamilton Smith on their way back from Pakistan, and one last time, in 1967 or 1969 (Marcel Breuer Papers, AAA, Series 2). Highly impressed by ancient Greek architecture, Breuer also noted the contrast between the extroverted character of its public buildings and the intense introspection of its houses (Breuer, Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, 33).
59. Breuer, Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, 40.
60. For a more thorough study of the way in which the spaces of the Bijenkorf are occupied, see Evangelia Tsilika, “Reinventing the Department Store in Rotterdam: Breuer’s Bijenkorf 1953–57,” in Investigating and Writing Architectural History, ed. M. Rosso (Torino: Politecnico, 2014), 799–811.
61. Evangelia Tsilika, “The Creation of Civic Identity in Post-war Corporate Architecture: Marcel Breuer’s Bijenkorf in Rotterdam (1953–57),” in Shopping Towns Europe, eds. J. Gossay and T. Avermaete (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 193–194. This is a response to the call for a “New Monumentality” made by Sigfried Giedion, Josep Lluis Sert, and Fernand Léger, and formulated during the war as “Nine Points of Monumentality” (1943). “The reconquest of the monumental expression” for Giedion would be the most difficult challenge of modern architecture (see Sigfried Giedion, “The Need for Monumentality,” in New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, ed. Paul Zucker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 552).
62. Different functions were housed inside the office annex, ranging from offices and private boutiques or showrooms to mechanical plant.
63. Door handles, many pieces of furniture, and the temporary construction site kiosk for the Bijenkorf were also generated from the idea of the honeycomb.
64. Tsilika, “The Creation of Civic Identity in Post-war Corporate Architecture,” 183–195.
65. “Notes and Observations on a Visit of Mr. Breuer to St. John’s, April 20, ’53,” typescript, Folder 4, Box 5, Building Committee, Comprehensive Plans and Reports, St. John’s Abbey Archives, Collegeville, MN.
66. Breuer, Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, 35.
67. It should be noted that the implementation of structuralism as a method both in architecture and in architectural criticism did not occur consciously and explicitly until the middle of the twentieth century. According to K. Michael Hays, the adoption of de Saussure’s principles and methods by intellectuals from diverse fields – intellectuals such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes or Luis Althusser – was far more influential for architects than the work of de Saussure himself: “What attracted the architectural community to structuralism were those pronouncements that seemed most general and transposable to the problems of architectural interpretation. In particular, Levi-Strauss’s arguments that beneath the immense heterogeneity of myths are certain constant universal structures to which any particular myth can be reduced […],” K. Michael Hays, Unprecedented Realism: The Architecture of Machado and Silvetti (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 2, 18.
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Evangelia Tsilika
Evangelia Tsilika is an architect and an independent researcher. She graduated from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1997), completed her master’s degree at Harvard Graduate School of Design (1999) and received her PhD from the National Technical University of Athens (2008). She has lectured on architectural design and theory at several universities and institutions. She has worked as an architect both in New York and Athens. Currently she works for the Hellenic Republic involved in projects for museums and cultural spaces.