MARCEL BREUER

full name : Marcel Lajos Breuer

birthdate : May 21, 1902

Birthplace : Pecs, Hungary

1920

Wins a scholarship to study painting and sculpture at Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Leaves after a few weeks to work in an architect's office. Moves to Weimar, Germany to study at the Bauhaus.

1921

Becomes an apprentice in the Bauhaus furniture workshop where his first piece is the ornate African Chair.

1922

Designs the De Stijl-influenced Wood-slat chair.

1924

Leaves the Bauhaus for Paris, where he works for an architect.

1925

Accepts Walter Gropius’ invitation to return to the new Bauhaus in Dessau as head of the furniture workshop. Starts to develop the innovative tubular steel Steel Club chair, later christened the Wassily Chair.

1927

Co-founds Standard-Möbel to manufacture and distribute his tubular steel furniture. Designs furniture for Erwin Piscator's apartment.

1928

Quits the Bauhaus when Gropius resigns as director and sets up an architectural office in Berlin, but struggles to find work.

1931

Still scratching for architectural commissions, Breuer takes several months off to travel in southern Europe.

1932

Dividing his time between Hungary and Switzerland, Breuer starts developing aluminium furniture with which he will win a competition in 1933.

1934

The first aluminium pieces go into production.

1935

Breuer joins Gropius in London, where he designs plywood furniture for Isokon, a company owned by Jack Pritchard, and opens an architectural office with F.R.S. Yorke. Together they design the Gane Pavilion in Bristol which combines local stones and woods with International Style glass and metal.

1941

Closes practise with Gropius, but they remain friends and continue teaching at Harvard together.

1946

Completes his first post-war building, the Geller House on Long Island, and opens an office in New York with Eliot Noyes as his partner. This office will design some 70 houses mostly on the East Coast including Breuer's own.

1937

When Gropius leaves London to become architecture professor at Harvard, Breuer follows. He is given a professorship there and opens an architectural office with Gropius which begins by designing their own homes

1949

Having staged a touring exhibition of Breuer's work in 1948, the Museum of Modern Art, New York commissions him to design a house in the museum garden. This commission revitalises Breuer's career.

1953

Designs UNESCO's headquarters in Paris with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss.

1957

Begins work on lecture halls and residences for New York University.

1963

Starts a three year project to design the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (probably the best known).

1968

Wins the AIA’s Gold Medal and the first Jefferson Foundation Medal that cited him “among all the living architects of the world as excelling all others in the quality of his work.”

1970

Designs Armstrong Rubber Company headquarters in West Haven, Connecticut with Robert F. Gatje and starts work on the Australian Embassy in Paris as consulting architect to former assistant Harry Seidler.

1976

Retires from work.

1981

Marcel Breuer dies in New York on the 1st of July after a long illness.

1976

Retires from work.

1981

Marcel Breuer dies in New York on the 1st of July after a long illness.

He was one of the most influential exponents of the International Style; he was concerned with applying new forms and uses to newly developed technology and materials in order to create an art expressive of an industrial age.

ALTERNATIVE FRUIT BOWLS

Just some random fruit bowls ..........

WILLIAM MORRIS

William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball (1888) and the utopian News from Nowhere (1890). He was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with the movement over goals and methods by the end of that decade. He devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press, which he founded in 1891. The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design.
Born in Walthamstow in east London, Morris was educated at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. In 1856, he became an apprentice to Gothic revival architect G. E. Street. That same year he founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, an outlet for his poetry and a forum for development of his theories of hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts. In 1861, Morris founded a design firm in partnership with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti which profoundly influenced the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. His chief contribution to the arts was as a designer of repeating patterns for wallpapers and textiles, many based on a close observation of nature. He was also a major contributor to the resurgence of traditional textile arts and methods of production.

links :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris Works by William Morris at Project Gutenberg. Plain text and HTML versions.
Works by William Morris at Internet Archive. Scanned books, many illustrated.
Works by William Morris at The Online Books Page.
Works by William Morris at sacred-texts.com, including full text of The Earthly Paradise.
William Morris Index Entry at Poets' Corner
The William Morris Internet Archive (marxists.org)