Marcel Breuer’s Grosse Pointe Public Library

Marcel Breuer is probably better known for two key projects, the Wassily Chair, at the start of his career, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1963 – 66, towards the end of his career.  Breuer studied in the Bauhaus, completing a preliminary course and then joining the workshop in 1921.  He was a prolific craftsman with little patience for the intellectual debates that characterized the school. 

The Wassily Chair[1], also known as the Model B3 Chair, was designed in 1925 in time for the opening of the new building for the Bauhaus in Dessau, with Breuer as head of the furniture workshop.  Breuer’s interest in tubular steel perfectly matched the Bauhaus’ orientation towards innovation in materials and structure.  It both ‘looked’ modern and ‘was’ modern: the tubular steel acted as supporting frame but also looked its role, highlighted by the multiple turns and bends. 

In 1927, the Bauhaus opened the Architecture Department under Hannes Meyer’s direction.  In early 1928, Walter Gropius resigned as Director of the Bauhaus, and several members of his staff followed his lead, including Breuer.  Gropius was replaced by Meyer, who directed the school towards a more ‘socially responsible’ program, emphasizing social rather than aesthetic considerations.[2]

Breuer attempted to establish an architecture practice in Berlin, and later in Budapest, but his experience was small and neither practice was succesful.  In 1933 the National Socialists took power, so instead of returning to Germany he moved to Switzerland and then to London in 1935, joining Walter Gropius.[3]  In 1937, he followed Gropius to Harvard University, where they both taught and kept an architectural office until 1941, when he established his own firm in New York. His practice was oriented towards residential buildings in the East Coast.

In 1949, Breuer designed and furnished an exhibition house for the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the innovative cut-out plywood MoMA chair, made from a single board.  The MoMA projects helped his career, and he got several commissions for private houses.[4]  Breuer’s residential work mostly used stone rubble, natural wood and glass, which helped integrate the buildings with their surroundings.

Most of the modern architecture in the United States can be characterized as belonging to the ‘International Style’- that is, influenced by Phillip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock’s 1932 exhibition in the MoMa.  The International Style usually bears a resemblance to Le Corbusier’s white villas from the 1920’s and early 30’s.  Architects representative of this period often emigrated from Europe early in their careers, escaping the Second World War, and often developed on their own in their new adopted countries.

Breuer stands apart as an architect that was trained and taught at the Bauhaus, and evolved in a parallel manner as his European contemporaries.  This choice of materials brings him closer to Le Corbusier’s work from the 1930’s, such as the Weekend House for Helene de Mandrot at Toulon (1931) and the Ferienhaus Sextant at Mathes (1935).  Le Corbusier visited New York in 1935 and was involved in the United Nations project, also in New York, dated 1949 – 1952.  His Maisons Jaoul (1951-55), with their brutalist exposed concrete, brick and wood, are also an important reference.

W. Hawkins Ferry, an architect and historian that had possibly studied under Breuer, got him involved in the Grosse Pointe Public Library project in 1951.  According to Breuer’s plans, the library was originally meant to be called the Ferry Sales Central Library.  Ferry was a collector of modern art, and got the Calder mobile and the Kandinsky painting for the Library.  His family was also responsible for Breuer’s involvement in the Dexter Ferry Cooperative at Vassar, also done in 1951. There is a W. Hawkins Ferry Collection at the Detroit Institute of Art, and a W. Hawkins Ferry Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University.  There is a W. Hawkins Ferry Fund that purchases and donates art to museum collections: both the University of Michigan and DIACenter have pieces via this fund.

The Calder (left) and the Kandinsky (right) in the main reading room. via

Breuer delivered the plans on August 15, 1951, and they were bidded by the Board of Education on August 23, 1951.  Construction was finished on 1953.

Source: Grosse Pointe News, 23 August 1951

Ferry’s own house was designed by William Kessler, a Detroit architect who studied under Marcel Breuer.[5]  It was built in 1964 and is part of the Grosse Pointe Historical Society Tour (the Library is not part of the tour, and is only cited as a resource for the Local History Archives).[6]  There is another Breuer project in Michigan, the St Francis de Sales Church in Muskegon, from the 1961 - 66. 

Breuer designed his second house in the United States, Breuer II, in New Canaan the same year as the Library, 1951.  It was completed in 1953, as he was working in several projects in Europe and the United States, most notably the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, done in collaboration with Pier Luigi Nervi.  The library was done at a turning point in Breuer’s career: with the UNESCO building, Breuer started getting more commissions in Europe and bigger commissions in the United States.  He even did two projects in Venezuela in 1958.  This fruitful decade culminated with the construction of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1963 – 1966, and the  St Francis de Sales Church mentioned above.  In these later works Breuer explored the formal qualities of reinforced concrete, both as envelope and structure.  These buildings act like sculptures on the outside and celebrate Breuer's attention to detail and material on the inside.

Marcel Breuer received the AIA Gold Medal in 1968.  He died in 1981 in New York.