New insights into the cities and large-scale buildings planned by a
pioneer of Brutalist modernism"
Marcel Breuer (1902-81) is celebrated as a furniture designer, teacher
and architect who changed the American house after his emigration from
Hungary to the US in 1937. More recently historians, architects
and--with the reopening in New York of the great megalith of his Whitney
Museum as the Met Breuer--a larger public are gaining new insights into
the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned. Often seen as a
pioneer of a "Brutalist modernism" of reinforced concrete, Breuer might
best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional
structures in and for which he worked, a vantage developed in the fresh
approaches gathered here in essays by a group of younger scholars. These
essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the
Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, now accessible online.