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First Hong Kong Biennale | |
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Heavy Things Seem to Float in Air | |
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Heavy Things Seem to Float in Air The presentation opened with a photograph of a handsome young Breuer at the Bauhaus, reclining in one of his famous tubular-steel Wassily chairs. In this photo, he carries his head with a confident tilt, a foretelling self-assurance. Bergdoll spoke of the need "somehow to put together the early career at the Bauhaus, the early career of seeming so light that one, even the young Breuer here at about 20, can float on air. And the other, the turn to this absolute monumentality and heaviness of expression, of sculptural forms, a complete transformation of materials, of palette..." Bergdoll posited that several points of continuity exist across these two seemingly divergent halves of Breuer's career. These phases are connected by Breuer's fascination with concrete and concrete's expression; with large-scale planning, cutting-edge technology, and prefabrication; and with masonry walls and dramatic cantilevering. As Bergdoll put it, Breuer was enthralled with "carving out the undercroft of houses" to create a sense of lightness in large, heavy volumes. According to Bergdoll, two under-appreciated buildings of the 1950s are the most telling expressions of Breuer's shift from lightness to monumentality. The UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and St. John's Abbey in Minnesota both use a system of pleated concrete piers to create a feeling of elevated solidity — of simultaneous light airiness and monumental grandeur. In the church, Breuer raised the concrete structure to allow for a clerestory at floor level. And he achieved similar effects in steel frame at UNESCO, creating an homage to the Eiffel Tower. Bergdoll emphasized that Breuer's ambitions were on par with his obsession with innovation: he believed that "concrete would make it possible for the first time to collapse the distinction between space and structure which had been fundamental to the first generation of modernism." In Bergdoll's estimation, Breuer wanted nothing less than to "affect a synthesis of the emotive and the monumental effects of pharaonic architecture with the heroic engineering of the modern age." I. M. Pei, in conversation with Bergdoll, offered a portrait of Breuer on a more human scale. Pei delved vigorously into Breuer's personal side, offering reflections on Breuer's proclivities, opinions about career missteps, gossip about interpersonal conflicts, and an expression of deep regard for the artistry of a friend. Pei remembers Breuer as a great friend. Following the picture of the young Bauhaus Breuer was a vacation photo taken on a sailboat, on a long-ago summer day, with Breuer, Pei ("still wearing the same glasses," commented Bergdoll, "still as charming"), and their wives smiling into the camera, surrounded entirely by water. In its own small way, the image evokes the buoyancy of great things that were to come. Pei discussed some of Breuer's successes, citing New York University's Begrisch Lecture Hall as one of his most spectacular buildings. "The way it expresses structure, it's a gem," Pei stated. "That is a work of art. It's a piece of sculpture." Other notable achievements in Pei's eyes are the Whitney Museum, the Chamberlain Cottage, the Doylestown Apartments in Switzerland, and Breuer's first house in New Canaan, Connecticut. The treelike concrete structure in the library at St. John's University is, according to Pei, "something so beautiful that you should have a glass wall around it." But, Pei emphasized, Breuer's career wasn't always bright. The wild popularity of the house Breuer designed for the garden of the Museum of Modern Art ruined him in a sense, at least for a while. Despite it not being one of Breuer's best works, that exhibition house made him famous as a residential architect, boxing him in and constraining his creativity. Pei said it is no wonder that "some of [Breuer's] least distinguished work comes from that period." Breuer's career met further challenges. After the failure of a 1968 bid to replace New York's popular Grand Central Terminal with a modern skyscraper of Breuer's design, his practice diminished. And since then, the worldwide challenge of preserving important modern buildings has left his built works vulnerable. Only two — the Whitney Museum in New York and the IBM complex at La Gaude, France — are protected by national landmark status. "Hardly a day goes by," Bergdoll said, "that I don't get an email about another endangered Breuer building." For example, a substantial portion of the Pirelli Building in New Haven, Connecticut, designed by Breuer in 1969 for the Armstrong Tire Company, "was taken down in order that IKEA could sell its modernist furniture out of a blue block of its own design while advertising 'IKEA' on the remnants of the Breuer facade" — replacing the demolished Breuer footage with surface parking in a plan reported on in ArchitectureWeek No. 123. "He was interested in life," reflected Pei, relating how once on vacation in Greece, Breuer found the company of a shepherd and a tour of the shepherd's house far more captivating than the island's charming whitewashed buildings. "Breuer's interest [was] very much on life, on how people live," recalled Pei, describing how Breuer kept referring to himself as a peasant. But Pei said, "he's an artist." The lecture "Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture" was held at the National Building Museum on January 17, 2008; an audio recording of the event is available online. The exhibit of the same name, with materials from the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, continues through February 17. >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum... Katherine Gustafson is a Washington, D.C.-based author and editor who has also published in The Christian Science Monitor, Science & Spirit, The Iowa Review, and The Northwest Current.
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