Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions

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.