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.