Born in Hungary, he came to the Bauhaus in 1920, aged just 18, after briefly studying art in Vienna, Austria. There, he started as an apprentice in the carpentry workshop, which he eventually went on to lead.
His colleagues included artists with a similar idealism, among them Josef Albers, Alma Buscher, Erich Dieckmann and Peter Keler. From 1921, he produced his first furniture designs, such as an expressionist, folk-inspired "African Chair", a table and chairs for children, a dressing table and a cupboard with an integrated display cabinet.
A leather armchair made up of cubes from this early period looks just as constructivist as the slatted chairs that are easily recognisable as close relatives of Gerrit Rietveld's work. Breuer saw his later furniture as "apparatus of contemporary life". It was meant to be practical, light, easy to dismantle, hygienic and affordable – a blunt rejection of any desire for cosiness.
The B 3 tubular steel armchair of 1925 – later known as the Club Chair or Wassily – met these criteria. Although it did not become the everyday object he had hoped for, it created a type of furniture that brought industrial aesthetics into the living room. Like jazz and neon, the B 3 was a symbol of modernity; it later became the epitome of the design classic and sparked a wave of tubular steel furniture worldwide. Breuer himself explored this new paradigm with a series of follow-up designs, including stools, folding chairs, cantilever chairs, tables, nesting tables, desks and a daybed on wheels (now made by Tecta).
What was overlooked, however, was that the experimenter was also ahead of his time in other fields. He designed modular "add-on cabinets" (based on a 33 cm unit), a system of the kind that Hans Gugelot only developed in the 1950s. He also explored architectural concepts such as the "slab high-rise". As a Hungarian Jew, Breuer had no future in Germany after 1933. Emigration took him via Switzerland to London, UK, where he designed a number of interesting plywood pieces for the company Isokon – his last furniture designs. The endless dispute over copyright may have played a part in this.
Finally, Breuer followed his mentor Walter Gropius to the USA, where at Harvard he quickly inspired a generation of design students, including Philip Johnson, Florence Knoll and Eliot Noyes. After the end of the Second World War, he became one of the first star architects.
Marcel Breuer died in 1981.
