Word: breuers
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From the first, Breuer showed an original spirit; he slept on top of a bathtub in an apartment he shared with two women. He quickly questioned the Bauhaus slogan of "Art and Technology-a new Unity." It implies, he said, that "art is wonderful, technology is wonderful, so the two together must be twice as wonderful. That is not so." As for the famous tag-"form follows function"-Breuer wryly added: "Not always." What he aimed at was "something simpler, more elemental, more generous and more human than a machine...
...asks Arthur Rosenblatt, a director of architecture and planning at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met's answer is visible this week. For the first time in its 102-year history, it is giving a one-man architectural show, devoting three central galleries to Breuer's projects...
...usual models and photographs of architectural projects are there, but also huge replicas of columns and wall details that convey the magnitude and impact of buildings. Regrettably, the effect is to emphasize Breuer's late work. While structurally forthright and beautifully executed-he considers every detail down to how his materials will weather over the years-these immense, sculptural buildings tend to lack the grace, originality and controlled exuberance of his earlier projects...
...Breuer was born in 1902, a doctor's son in the university town of Pecs in southern Hungary. Knowing precisely what he wanted, he turned up at the age of 18 at the most stimulating and revolutionary design school the world has ever seen-the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, founded by Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus recognized the force of industrialism, the beauty of the machine, the potential of designing a new man-made environment by cross-pollinating the arts...
...unerring sense of material, texture, esthetics and practicality. These are all marks of good architecture, but they first surfaced in Breuer's furniture: tables, kitchen cabinets and, above all, chairs. Inspired by his bicycle's handlebars in 1925, he bent tubular steel into a frame, slung canvas in between and created the great "Wassily" chair. Handsome as it and later, cantilevered models were, Breuer was not concerned only with looks. "It has been argued that if a chair is beautiful, it is also comfortable," he has said. "This is as questionable as to say: if it is comfortable...