The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the
Syracuse University
Library a $350,000 grant to create a digital scholarly edition of the works of Bauhaus
architect Marcel Breuer. The project, entitled "Marcel Breuer, Architect: Life and Work,
1922-1955" will run from May 2009 through April 2011 and culminate in the release of the
web-based edition in May 2011.
Breuer began donating his papers to Syracuse University Library more than 40 years ago,
in 1964. Today, the Syracuse Breuer collection includes thousands of original oversized
drawings and blueprints, correspondence and photographs. Upon Breuer's death in 1981,
his widow donated many of his remaining papers to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives
of American Art. This NEH-funded project will unite these geographically separate
collections in an online edition of 50,000 items. It will also incorporate Breuer materials from
other international archival repositories.
Based in the Library's Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and led by its director,
Sean Quimby, the project is a partnership with SU's School of Architecture (SOA). SOA
students and faculty will assist with usability testing as the web project develops. SOA
faculty member Jonathan Massey, along with Barry Bergdoll, Philip Johnson Chief Curator
of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, will serve on an advisory board.
"The Breuer project will not only enable a new generation of Breuer scholarship, it
will open a whole new set of questions about the profile and issues of American
modernism from the 1930s through the late 1970s," Bergdoll said in a letter
supporting the proposal.
Marcel Breuer was born in Pecs, Hungary in 1902. At the age of 21, he went to work
in the office of Walter Gropius, founder of the modernist Bauhaus School of Design.
At the Bauhaus School, Breuer taught furniture design, and in 1925 earned critical
acclaim for his "Wassily" chair, which combined the radical simplicity of form with
tubular steel and fabric. He and Gropius emigrated to the United States in the late
1930s, where they taught at Harvard University and maintained a joint architectural
firm in Cambridge, Mass. In 1941, Breuer established a singular reputation for his
"bi-nuclear" house, which organized physical space around new modes of day-to-
day life. The "bi-nuclear" house, along with his demonstration house in the garden
of New York's Museum of Modern Art (1949), helped to inspire America's fascination
with housing in the post-war era.
By the mid 1950s, Breuer had designed some 60 private residences and had begun to
undertake large-scale, institutional projects like the UNESCO headquarters in Paris
(1953), the Whitney Museum of Art in New York (1966), buildings on the campuses
of New York University and St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the
Cleveland Museum of Art (1970). The collections at Syracuse, the Smithsonian and
elsewhere document not only those buildings that were completed, but also projects
that never came to fruition. Together, they document the career of a man that Time
magazine in 1956 called one of the "form-givers of the 20th century."
For more information on the project, contact Quimby at 315 443-9759 or
smquimby@syr.edu.
