Word: breuer
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Technique intrigued him deeply. To many, plywood seems a contemptible crossbreed, neither natural nor synthetic, but to Aalto it was a perfect hybrid of ancient material and industrial technology. Breuer eventually returned to plywood; after the war, Charles Eames pressed it into subtle topographies that had been beyond Aalto's means. But no one ever paid the material more respect than Aalto. He built up plywood layers one by one, twisted and glued them meticulously, experimented. He coaxed plywood first into a simple L-leg (1932) to make his wonderful three-legged stacking stool, then split the L into...
...their forested countryside, and timber is the country's economic mainstay. The hard, featureless blond birch that Aalto favored had been standard material for Finnish domestic objects. But in the polemical years around 1930, his abandonment of modern, mass-produced tubular steel was a retograde act. Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had based their famous chairs and couches on state-of-the-art tubing. Aalto became convinced that tubular steel was "not satisfactory from the human point of view." Indeed, an extreme, sometimes quixotic regard for the human factor was what separated Aalto from...
Aalto's furniture was never again so dashing and hard-edged. He spent the '30s making cantilevered chairs, each a reworking of an idea that the Bauhaus stars Breuer and Mart Stam had established using tubular steel in the '20s. The cantilever is springy, like an athlete's crouch. Indeed, Aalto's cantilevered chairs have a cheerfully anthropomorphic profile. His most splendid variations on the theme also seem the most characteristically Scandinavian: after he had tried seats and backs of plain plywood and boxy upholstery, Aalto designed birch frames crisscrossed with black linen webbing...
Some of the buildings were ego trips that overpowered the art they were to shelter and display, among them Frank Lloyd Wright's dizzying Guggenheim Museum (1959) and Marcel Breuer's brutal Whitney Museum of American Art (1966), both in New York City. Philip Johnson's Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln (1963) returned to a somewhat saccharine classicism. But the one museum of that hectic period that seemed to work best for the display of art was Barnes' Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1971). Its architectural form is not particularly...
Says Barnes: "We wanted the visitor to remember painting in space, sculpture against sky and a sense of continuous flow, a sense of going somewhere." Barnes, 68, studied with Bauhaus Leaders Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard, and has kept faith with their nononsense, functionalist International Style. His new 43-story IBM building in Manhattan, for all its green granite elegance, carries this style to an absurdly defiant extreme. His Dallas museum, on the other hand, is a joy precisely because at a time of architectural razzle-dazzle, it is so endearingly simple. It is thoughtfully and beautifully designed...