Marcel Lajos Breuer was born on 21 May 1902 in Pecs, Hungary. In 1920 he won a scholarship to study painting and sculpture at Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, however he left in a matter of weeks to work in an architects office. Encouraged by a friend, Breuer moved to Weimar, Germany to study at the Bauhaus art and design school that had recently been formed by Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
Protégé of Gropius, Breuer embodied many of the school's distinctive concepts, however a designer through-and-through, Breuer did not enjoy the theory side of his studies so dropped out in 1924 and temporarily worked as an architect in Paris, before returning to Bauhaus in 1925 to teach a furniture workshop.
During his time teaching he designed his tubular-steel furniture collection including the Wassily Chair, which was given its name years later when it was discovered that artist and Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky had one in his office.
In 1928 Breuer resigned from the Bauhaus and spent time travelling Europe while drifting between architecture and furniture design. By 1935, when he travelled to London to meet Gropius, Breuer was one of the best-known designers in Europe.
In 1937 Gropius asked him to join Harvard’s architecture faculty and during WWII their partnership revolutionized American house design while teaching a new generation of architects.
Breuer left Harvard in 1946 to set up an office in New York with Eliot Noyes and from it they designed 70 houses mostly on the East Coast.
For the rest of his career Breuer focused on architecture. Though he still designed furniture for special projects such as the cut-out plywood MoMA Chair that he created for the exhibition house that he had built in 1949 for the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Some of his most notable buildings include UNESCO's headquarters in Paris (1953), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1963) and the headquarters of the Departments of HUD and HEW in Washington DC.
In 1968 he won the American Institute of Architects’s Gold Medal and first ever Jefferson Foundation Medal that cited him “among all the living architects of the world as excelling all others in the quality of his work.”
He retired in 1976 and died in 1981 after a long illness.