Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), Hungarian architect and designer, was one of the great protagonists of the Bauhaus. After being a pupil of the Bauhaus School in Weimar, he was chosen at a very young age by the director Walter Gropius to manage the school's furniture workshop. He therefore has the opportunity to experience as a protagonist an inimitable season of creative ferments, in which the very concept of “modern furniture” takes shape. His creations of the time feature an innovative material such as tubular metal, to which Breuer manages to give an unusual elegance, and will find the way to mass production thanks to the Thonet company. With the coming to power of Nazism, Breuer, of Jewish origin, was forced to flee abroad, first taking refuge in London for a few years (during which he was able to create furniture for the Isokon brand) and then following his mentor Gropius in the United States. There he became a professor of architecture at Harvard University and began an intense and successful activity as an architect, with works such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan or the Hooper House in Baltimore. In the 1960s he met the brilliant Italian entrepreneur Dino Gavina who convinced him to put his furniture back into production for the Gavina company (which was then sold to Knoll a few years later).