Why Marcel Breuer's Brutalism Lives on in Atlanta

One of Marcel Breuer’s finest works, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, opened in September 1966. Among the many who were struck by the distinctly Brutalist design was Carlton Rochell, the director of Atlanta’s public library system. A few years later, he would ask the architect to bring something similar to Atlanta—and more essential to that city. Rochell told the Atlanta Journal years later that he believed Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, and Eero Saarinen were the three greatest architects of their time.

Before coming to the United States, the Hungarian-born Breuer had been one of the Bauhaus’s greatest students and instructors. He arrived at the art school in 1920 as an 18-year-old and would go on to design and build chairs, tables, storage units, cabinetry, even home interiors for his friends. The school’s director Walter Gropius asked Breuer back as an instructor, and then, after the Bauhaus closed for good, to split an architecture practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, building mostly private homes. Breuer later moved to New York to start his own practice and, on top of his known ability to design stunning modern homes, developed a reputation for his expert use of concrete as a functional and expressive face for institutions across the U.S. and Europe. He won an AIA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors in U.S. architecture, in 1968.