cover image Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the Buildings

Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the Buildings

Isabelle Hyman. ABRAMS, $85 (395pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-4265-3

From UNESCO's Paris headquarters to the Hooper House II in Baltimore and New York's Whitney Museum, Marcel Breuer's buildings are ""strongly tied to idioms of modern architecture pure forms of geometry, interlocking flat-roofed cubes and to the architectonic attributes of painting and sculpture of the modern movement."" Isabelle Hyman (coauthor, Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity, and professor of fine arts at New York University), presents Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the Buildings, a defense of his alternately maligned and revered architecture. Beginning as a furniture designer at the Bauhaus, Breuer widened his sights to include architecture in the 1920s and by mid-career, while teaching at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, was lauded for his buildings. Near the end of his 50-year career and since his death in 1981, reviews have been more mixed, and critics tend to look down on his architecture while celebrating his furniture design. Hyman persuasively argues for Breuer's eminence strictly as an architect. 295 illus., 35 in full color. ( Nov.)