Marcel Breuer

Marcel Lajos Breuer (1902-1981) was a Hungarian born student and teacher at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, eventually becoming head of its carpentry workshop. His most famous design while there was of tubular steel though, the Wassily chair, which was inspired by his bicycle handlebars. Its manufacturers named it for Wassily Kandinsky, to whom Breuer gifted an early prototype. Breuer relocated to London in the 1930s, due to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. While in London, Breuer was employed by Jack Pritchard at the Isokon company, one of the earliest introducers of modern design to the United Kingdom. Breuer eventually ended up in the United States, teaching at Harvard's architecture school, working with students such as Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and I.M. Pei. He designed many houses in the Boston area alongside former Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius and formed a business with him until 1941, at which point Breuer started his own firm in New York.