Marcel Breuer: designer and architect

With Marcel Breuer: Design & Architecture, Paris' Cité de l'architecture & du patrimoine inaugurates a new collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum, known for their monographic traveling exhibitions on the masters of the Modern Movement: Gerrit Rietveld, Rudolf Steiner, Ray and Charles Eames, Georges Nelson, and, of course, Le Corbusier.

After Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the UK, and the USA, Vitra's presentation of one of the most influential and important designers of the 20th century, Marcel Breuer, stops in the ville lumière, where it will remain until July 2013. Breuer's seminal contribution to the modern movement was the design of the Wassily tubular steel chair (or the Model B3 chair), which he produced when he was only 23 and the head of the cabinet-making workshop at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Yet, Lajko — as friends used to call him — considered himself to be first and foremost an architect. It is precisely this somewhat neglected part of Breuer's oeuvre that Vitra aimed to revive when first curating the show in 2003, making accessible Vitra's extensive collection of Breuer's work: one of the most comprehensive and complete surveys of his work.

A rather classical retrospective exhibition, Marcel Breuer: Design & Architecture combines a strictly chronological approach with a more thematically oriented one. The display is, however, innovative in its way of looking at Breuer's career. Here, he is presented as both architect and designer, with equal importance given to both disciplines. The periphery of the exhibition room, divided into four of Breuer's favourite materials — massive wood, tubular steel, aluminium and plywood — is filled with original pieces (furniture prototypes, drawings, and photographs), all linked to Breuer's work as an object designer. In contrast, the central space focuses on the larger scale (architecture), using copies as exhibition apparatus: reconstructed scaled models, photocopies of plans, photos, etc. All together, these artefacts communicate twelve architectural projects divided between three themes: "houses", "spaces", and "volumes". A regrettably timid attempt at reuniting object and building is at the very end of the exhibition space, in a section called "Motifs".

For its presentation at the Cité, Breuer's travelling show has been enriched by four French examples: the UNESCO headquarters in Paris' 15th arrondissement (1952-58, in collaboration with Nervi and Zehrfuss); IBM's headquarters in La Gaude, near Nice (1961, with R. Gatje), the grands ensembles de hauts de Sainte Croix in Bayonne (1968-1971); and, most importantly, the winter sport complex in Flaine, Haute-Savoie (1960-76). This last project was commissioned by Eric and Sylvie Boissonas and moved by the desire to bring a modern mentality to France. The Flaine project is particularly well documented by the Cité, mainly thanks to a twenty-minute documentary film — unfortunately lacking English subtitles — presented at the back of the gallery space.

Making a considerable leap in time after its previous Labrouste exhibition, the Cité is now presenting a very didactic exhibition that should attract public's attention on an underestimated figure of the Modern Movement. With Marcel Breuer: Design & Architecture, curator Mathias Remmele is trying to show Breuer's consistent "design language", inviting the public to make connections between Breuer's furniture design and architecture. But if some links can easily be traced — such as the fascination for cantilevered structures and the use of long rectangular shapes —, it might not all be so easy for the very general audience normally visiting the Cité.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bright orange and richly documented 400 page English catalogue, produced by Vitra in 2003. The book contains a dozen essays on topics spanning the relationship between I.M Pei and Breuer, Breuer's residential architecture and the Paris UNESCO complex. Of note are R.F. Gatje's essay on "Working with Marcel Breuer" and Barry Bergdoll's 'Encountering America: Marcel Breuer and the discourses of the Vernacular from Budapest to Boston". Also published, this time especially for the Cité's show, is a 36 page special issue of the Beaux Arts Magazines.

The Parisian version of Marcel Breuer: Design & Architecture was inaugurated last 19 February by Guy Ansellem, who just recently succeeded François de Mazière as president of the Cité de l'architecture & du patrimoine. Evidently proud of the new partnership linking the Cité de l'architecture et du Patrimoine to the Vitra Design Museum, Ansellem furtively suggested other such possible collaborations with internationally renowned institutions: an inevitable reality in the years of economic crisis. But what about the fact that the exhibition has travelled so extensively? What does it entail in terms of curating practices and architecture and design mediation? Such an extensive tour — almost ten years, likely to continue — and the heavily researched catalogue pairing with the exhibition will most probably have an impact on design history. But weather or not it will change the way Breuer is placed historically might be too early to say. Léa-Catherine Szacka

Through 17 July 2013
Marcel Breuer: Design & Architecture
Cité de l'architecture & du patrimoine
1 Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, Paris