Marcel Breuer

The prominent architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer Lajos (nicknamed Lajkó) was born in Hungary in 1902. He designed furniture in both steel and wood, striving to provide maximum comfort with minimum use of materials and labour. In the 1920s he went to study and teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Here he tried to keep up with the general principles of originality and functionality. He encouraged his students to create with simple means. Here he took perhaps the most important step of his career - he began to design furniture made of bent steel tubes. In 1925 he designed the first and most famous chair made of this material, known as "Wassily" (originally designed for the painter Vasily Kadinsky). The chrome tubes that form the structure of the chair are covered with leather. Wassily was complemented by the so-called Laccio table in the same style, which is a combination of glass and chrome tubes. The chair has been in continuous production since 1925 and has influenced other designers such as Mart Stam and Mies van de Rohe. It is said that he was inspired to bend the steel tubes on the Wassily by the handlebars of his Alder bicycle.

In 1930 Breuer left for London. His departure was a reaction to the Bauhaus's problems with the German Nazis, who saw to its complete dissolution in 1933. In London, he worked with Isokon. In 1935 he expanded its range to include chaise longue made of laminated beechwood and plywood. With this chaise longue, he was able to use modern furniture technology to create a construction in which perfection of form is still paramount. This chaise longue is still in production today in various versions, but mostly without the upholstery that accompanied the original. Despite his achievements in furniture design, Breuer was in his time more recognised as an architect. In 1937 he accepted an offer from Walter Gropius (a former Bauhaus leader) to lecture at Harvard University in the United States. Here he also continued his career as an architect. The buildings designed by Breuer are majestic and grand, but it is his chairs that have gained him greater fame. He died in 1981 in New York.