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H ear the name Marcel Breuer, and likely his cantilevered, steel-tube “Cesca” chair comes to mind. If you’re a New Yorker, you might also picture the modernist museum originally designed as the Upper East Side home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and later the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. As Sotheby’s now prepares to move into the landmark building this fall – currently being renovated by the Basel, Switzerland, firm Herzog & de Meuron, in partnership with New York-based PBDW Architects – it’s worth revisiting what exactly makes his design so visionary.
Born in Hungary in 1902, Breuer knew he wanted to be an artist from a young age. His days were spent painting, sketching and modeling. Breuer attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but was frustrated by what he felt was an emphasis on discussing aesthetic theory rather than actually making art. Like many young artists, he was lured to Weimar, Germany, by a brochure describing a new kind of school that leveled the distinction between art and craft. This school was called the Bauhaus.
Founded by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus encouraged students to practice their work within an environment that challenged traditional notions about art-making. But their progressive spirit threatened the Nazis, who believed in enforcing aesthetic hierarchies that promoted the pedigree of a German elite. In 1933, the Nazi Party labeled many of the Bauhaus teachers “degenerate” and forced the school to close.
Many representatives of the Bauhaus emigrated to the the United States, where they found an environment more receptive to their egalitarian ideals. In the late 1930s, Gropius moved with Breuer to England and then Massachusetts, where they practiced architecture together. From 1938 to 1946, Breuer also taught at Harvard, where his students included I.M. Pei, Eliot Noyes, Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson.
His Connecticut neighbors commissioned modernist houses, affording Breuer several opportunities to develop the ideas and materials that would later appear in his museum. The light-filled, two-storied Stillman House, completed in 1951, features a concrete diving board that echoes the canopy designed for the building. Similarly, its entrance, suspended by marine rigging of stainless steel, looks like part of the museum’s sunken sculpture court. Stillman II, also in Litchfield and completed in 1966, deploys natural materials and large windows that bring nature in, much like the trapezoidal windows of the museum that overlook the town homes while concealing a view of the inside.
In the wake of Europe’s devastation, New York City was fast becoming the new global epicenter of contemporary art. Yet at the same time, it was at risk of falling victim to an uninspired conformity: Gropius’ modernist vision of a functional building – enabled by standardization and innovative construction – had taken over everything from airports to public housing and even furniture. The Swiss-French architect known as Le Corbusier was instrumental in ushering in the immensely influential International Style of Modernism, which defined the glass-and steel look of a new Madison Avenue.
Breuer, who played a part in the International Style’s development, was one of several architects who felt the movement was losing its human touch. Perhaps inspired by the 1959 opening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – conceived by Frank Lloyd Wright as “a temple of spirit” just a few blocks uptown – Breuer believed a museum should be a sacred place, one where visitors could lose themselves in the simple yet profound act of looking at art.
In 1963, Breuer opened his pitch to the Whitney Museum of American Art with with a question: “What should a building look like, a museum in Manhattan?” He didn’t want it to resemble an Internationalist office building or the neighborhood’s prewar town houses, which he predicted would be replaced by high-rises. “It should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art,” he continued. “Its form and its material should have identity and weight in a neighborhood of 50-story skyscrapers, of mile-long bridges, in the midst of the dynamic jungle of our colorful city.”
Through the use of carefully considered choreography, Breuer achieved this in a way few museums ever have. The moment you pass under its concrete entrance canopy, you’ve left “the dynamic jungle of the colorful city” behind. Squeeze past its glass doors and dark narrow entryway, and you’re deposited in a grand lobby, gazing up at a cluster of lights. It’s a thoughtful transition that takes you from the profane city into the sacred realm of art.
“What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan? … It should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art.”
The Breuer building also embodies what the architect called “heavy lightness,” or the use of heavy materials to give the impression of weightlessness. The strikingly modern exterior nods to ancient architectural forms. Appearing like “an inverted Babylonian ziggurat,” in the words of one critic, the building appears to grow larger as it reaches into the sky, each cantilevered floor seeming to defy gravity. The stairwell, which expertly mixes concrete with chunks of obsidian for texture and color, similarly straddles the line between literal heaviness and an illusion of weightlessness. The teak and bronze railings invite human touch.
In the galleries, the museum again defies convention, eschewing permanent collections and the salon-style hangs that were previously common to exhibitions. Three floors, each with 2-by-2-foot ceilings of suspended, precast concrete, feature attachable lighting systems and movable wall panels to configure for all kinds of shows. For the Whitney Museum (and later the Met and the Frick), Marcel Breuer’s museum offered a radical departure from the encyclopedic modes of display common to Euro-American museums by introducing a sparser – even monastic – spatial model that encouraged individual contemplation.
Of course, not everyone was in love with the structure at 75th and Madison, where Jacqueline Kennedy watched the ribbon cutting in 1966. Ada Louise Huxtable, art critic for The New York Times, feared it was too “somber and severe for many tastes,” and art critic Emily Genauer, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, found it “oppressively heavy.” She even dubbed it “the Madison Avenue Monster.” Criticism at the time reflected the divisiveness of Brutalism more generally – and especially its monolithic presence in a corridor of the Upper East Side decorated with brownstones and affluent residences. Little more than a decade later, some thought the museum ought to expand.
In 1981, the Upper East Side Historic District was designated a landmark district – yet the Breuer building, which remained divisive, was not officially marked for preservation. That is, until just this year, when the modernist building achieved its rightful place in architectural history. On May 20, 2025, the New York City Landmarks Preservation History designated the building and its interior an official landmark in a vote endorsed by Sotheby’s.
Both the Met and Sotheby’s have restored elements of the Breuer building before moving in, attending especially to beloved elements such as its concrete light fixtures and concrete staircase. Yet throughout every stage of its life, Marcel Breuer’s building has remained immutable in its devotion to the idea that a modern building can encourage a spiritual outlook toward art. His unapologetically heavy, sculptural form has changed the way we look at buildings – and art museums – forever.
Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stozl and Oskar Schlemmer on the roof of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, c. 1920. Image via PVDE / Bridgeman Images
