Marcel Breuer
Also known as: Marcel Lajos Breuer
Biography
Weimar did not hire Marcel Breuer, it trained him: he arrived in 1920 as an eighteen-year-old student, sat a journeyman's examination before the city's chamber of crafts, and came out of the workshop system as the master of it.
A student who stayed
Born in Pécs in 1902, Breuer won a scholarship to the academy in Vienna in 1920 and left it almost at once for the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he went through Johannes Itten's preliminary course like everyone else. From 1920/21 to 1924 he worked in the carpentry workshop under Gropius, and in 1924 he took his journeyman's examination in front of Weimar's chamber of crafts — a detail worth pausing on, because it is the Bauhaus's whole claim in one line: the school put its students through the same trade examination as any apprentice joiner in the town.
From wood to steel
Gropius appointed him Jungmeister in 1925, and until 1928 he ran the furniture workshop, the school's joinery. In the same year, 1925, his armchair B 3 became the first tubular steel chair made for living rooms rather than factories — a piece of plumbing hardware turned into domestic furniture, and the design that made his name. The slatted chair he built in Weimar is in the Bauhaus-Museum's collection here.
After the school
He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and opened an architecture office in Berlin; the American career, and the buildings most people know him for, came later. He died in New York in 1981. Of the Bauhaus figures Weimar can claim, he is the one the city made rather than imported.
Notable Works & Achievements
the slatted chair (Lattenstuhl)
the B 3 tubular steel armchair (1925)
Connected Places in Weimar
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, 99423 Weimar
He was a student and then a young master in van de Velde's buildings, in the carpentry workshop.
Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1, 99423 Weimar
His lattice chair is one of the pieces the museum is known for.
Historical Context
Arrived in 1920 as a student and left in 1928 as the head of the furniture workshop.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 and voted out by 1925 — time enough to change what a design school is, and not enough for the town that made it to keep it.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1902
1981
Hungarian
Historical figures
Historical figures
1888–1967 • painter • art teacher • Bauhaus master
Breuer arrived in 1920 and went through Itten's preliminary course before the carpentry workshop.
1883–1969 • architect • founder and director of the Bauhaus • teacher
Gropius taught him in the carpentry workshop and made him Jungmeister in 1925.