Marcel Breuer; A Memoir

New York: The Monacelli Press, 2000. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Trade paperback. Very good. 320 pages. Illustrations. Foreword by I. M. Pei. Dramatis Personae. Index. Cover has front and back flaps. Cover has slight wear and soiling. This includes an Introductory Biography of Marcel Breuer: 1902-1953. Robert F. Gatje FAIA (November 27, 1927 - April 1, 2018) was an American architect. Gatje completed his bachelor's degree in architecture from Cornell University in 1951, after working for the United States Army Corps of Engineers between 1946 and 1947. He was a Fulbright Scholar in London before joining Marcel Breuer's firm in 1953, as a draftsman. Gatje left Breuer's firm in 1982, forming a partnership with Tician Papachristou and Hamilton Smith, then joined Richard Meier five years later. Gatje established a private practice in 1995. Marcel Lajos Breuer (21 May 1902 - 1 July 1981), was a Hungarian American modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944. At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair, which The New York Times have called some of the most important chairs of the 20th century. Breuer extended the sculpture vocabulary he had developed in the carpentry shop at the Bauhaus into a personal architecture that made him one of the world's most popular architects at the peak of 20th-century design. His work includes art museums, libraries, college buildings, office buildings, and residences. Many are in a Brutalist architecture style. He is regarded as one of the great innovators of modern furniture design and one of the most-influential exponents of the International Style. Modern master Marcel Breuer, born in Hungary in 1902, studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau; his earliest projects were two legendary chair designs and residential work in Germany. In 1937 he was invited by Walter Gropius to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he taught for nine years, and in 1946 he moved to New York City and opened an office on Eighty-eighth Street. In 1953 young architect Bob Gatje joined the firm -- by this time, Breuer had built an exceptional series of private houses in New England and was deeply involved in the design of the Paris headquarters of UNESCO. This fascinating memoir recounts daily life in Breuer's office and also offers comprehensive, firsthand discussions of many of the firm's most important projects: it is a study not only of an architect but of an architecture practice. Drawing on his own recollections, as well as extensive interviews with other architects, friends, and clients of Breuer, Gatje re-creates more than two decades in the Breuer office. His narrative includes many of the firm's most important projects: several buildings, including the sculptural "bell banner," at Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota; major buildings for IBM in La Gaude, France, and Boca Raton, Florida; the master plan and three buildings for the Hall of Fame campus of New York University; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; numerous private residences; and the master plan and all the buildings at Flaine, an enormous ski resort high in the French Alps. Illustrated with the author's own striking drawings of many of the projects, as well as with beautiful archival images and personal snapshots, Gatje draws a vivid and affecting picture of a unique architecture office, and of one of the great architects of the modern era.