When Marcel Breuer died, in 1981, Newsweek proclaimed him “the Last Modernist.” Emerging 15 years after pioneers of modernism such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the architect had always been stuck between two movements. Breuer rejected the first generation’s rigid focus on glass façades, while also distancing himself from the monolithic designs favored by his contemporaries Alvar Aalto and Richard Neutra. Navigating his career in this middle ground extended into his design philosophy, which was deeply rooted in contrasts. “A concept is unthinkable without its opposite,” wrote his friend the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee in 1961. “There is no such thing as a concept in itself.”
Born in Pecs, Hungary, in 1902, Breuer left home at 18 to study at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Having always dreamed of becoming an artist, he was immediately disillusioned by the academy’s emphasis on theory over the physical creation of art. He left school on his first day and never returned, choosing instead to work for a local cabinetmaker.
