Word: breuer
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...when he left the Bauhaus to set up his own practice in Berlin. The school had pioneered in what is now known as the "international style" of building-lean, elegant structures whose interior steel skeletons allowed architects to create airy and light façades of glass. Breuer took this cold idiom and domesticated it in his first building, a house in Wiesbaden. Flat-topped, generously windowed and raised on stilts above the ground, it used contrasted materials to give a feeling of warmth and porches to extend interior space outward...
...there were few jobs to be had in Depression-worn Berlin, so Breuer moved on to Zurich and then to England. There, he joined a pioneer modernist, London Architect F.R.S. Yorke, and designed in 1936 a small completely innovative pavilion at an exhibition in Bristol. Its taut glass juxtaposed with romantically rough walls of stone, it enclosed a beautifully proportioned space, and architects everywhere began to talk about Breuer. Even more striking was a project for the "Civic Center of the Future" that contained a lively assortment of innovative building shapes-Y-shaped, stepped-back and cantilevered structures, slabs, buildings...
Meantime Walter Gropius had moved to the U.S. to head Harvard University's design school. In 1937 he asked Breuer to teach and practice with him in Cambridge, Mass. He was adored by his students, fine architects including I.M. Pei, John Johansen, Paul Rudolph, Ulrich Franzen. "Gropius was the establishment figure, stern and rational," recalls Franzen. "Breuer was the artist. He opened our minds to everything." Adds Johansen: "He was always accessible. We had lots of parties at his place. But in class, he goaded us. 'Why not do it?' he asked in his Hungarian accent...
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...