One of the most celebrated protégés to emerge from the Bauhaus School, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981, Hungarian) created architecture and furniture with a clearly designated purpose - to be modern, resilient and affordable. He designed a low-cost house for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, filled almost exclusively with plywood furniture; the UNESCO building in Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
What’s he famous for?
His Wassily chair (from £790.00), named after his Bauhaus roommate Wassily Kandinsky, was inspired by the steel tubes of bicycle handlebars and became the sheer definition of modern furniture in the 1920s. During this same period, Breuer was teaching furniture-making at the Bauhaus. His Cesca chair, named after his daughter Francesca, has graced many an eighties breakfast room (from £550.00). A lot of his furniture was actually more popular in the seventies than when it was originally designed, but either way, it remains classic stuff.
Keep a lookout for…
Chairs, chairs, chairs. Breuer is famed for his “machines for sitting”, although he always wanted to rather be acclaimed for his architectural work.
