Word: breuer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cynic must allow no one to exceed him; parity begins at home. That home can be designed by one of the world's great architects-Marcel Breuer. At 70, Breuer is not anxious to design houses. He will take on a dwelling, says his office, "if it allows him to explore new ideas." Such exploration would necessarily include "a nice site and a client who is not only nice but who will also allow construction without an economic struggle." Breuer's value is universally acknowledged. His price: 15% of the building's cost, the standard commission charged...
Honest and Earthy. Breuer himself was finding new solutions in the intimate, beautiful houses he was designing with Gropius around Boston. His inspiration, he told TIME Reporter Leah Gordon, was the simple American frame house. "I liked the fact that anyone could construct these houses simply by nailing boards together. They are earthy, honest and dignified, like Huckleberry Finn and Abraham Lincoln...
...Breuer kept those qualities-and brought them up to date. His glass walls brought the outdoors in and made views a part of ownership. His sure mastery of native materials-fieldstone and wood-gives the houses a feeling of security and protection. Architectural students still marvel at the details, studying how Breuer made the houses grow so naturally out of the sod, how he cantilevered staircases and, above all, how he met the needs of occupants. In some H-shaped houses, he separated the daytime areas-kitchen, dining and living rooms-from bedrooms by a central hall. In his rectangular...
Architecture has been called an old man's profession because the big jobs come only after hard structural and spatial lessons have been learned. For Breuer, his most commercially successful period began in 1953, when he was barely into his 50s. Though he was practicing on his own in New York by that time, his breakthrough came with a major commission in France: the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. With it, he burst out of the Bauhaus box and turned to concrete, becoming more adventurous in its use than any other U.S. architect except perhaps I.M. Pei. He faceted...
...that Breuer minds; he has always been his own man. He lives in houses of his own design in New Canaan, Conn., and Wellfleet, Mass., with his wife and daughter, 18 (he also has a son, 29), and is known as a bon vivant, chess player and bawdy raconteur. As busy as ever, Breuer is constantly on the go. One project is a recreational town of 48,000 units along the dune-dotted Aquitaine coast in southwestern France. Another is the Koerfer House in Switzerland that just won a top architectural award. Back in the U.S. is a new hydropower...