Marcel Breuer's Story

Marcel Lajos Breuer was a Hungarian-American modernist architect and furniture designer, known for the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair, which The New York Times have called some of the most important chairs of the 20th century.

His work includes art museums, libraries, college buildings, office buildings, and residences, among which are:

• New York's Whitney Museum of American Art (1966)
• IBM Research Center in La Gaude, France (1961)
• U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development in Washington, D.C. (1963–1968)
• UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1958)

He is regarded as one of the great innovators of modern furniture design and one of the most-influential figure in "internationalism" – a major architectural style dominant until the 1970s.

Cesca Chair

Marcel Breuer created the Cesca Chair shortly after leaving the Bauhaus in 1928 and named it after his adopted daughter Francesca. The chair consists of a tubular steel frame, rattan seat and backrest and inherently tied to the material innovation and design principles he formed at the German design school.

While designing the chair, Breuer found inspiration in the tubular steel construction of a bicycle.

The Cesca chair was the first tubular-steel-frame, caned-seat chair to be mass-produced. Now, the chair is considered as one of "the 10 most important chairs of the 20th century".