Among the works presented at the Selected Design sale on December 11, 2019, PIASA offers a remarkable Isokon lounge chair by Marcel Breuer.
After a stint at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, Marcel Breuer spent a year in a Parisian architectural firm. Then he returned to the Bauhaus in Dessau, this time as a teacher, combining art and technology, to finally become the director of the carpentry workshop.
During this period, he created the so-called "Wassily" chair, the first chair made of folded steel tubes created in 1925 for Wassily Kandinsky, inspired in part by a bicycle handlebar.
Later, he practiced in Berlin, where he created houses and commercial spaces, as well as many tubular metal furniture, still produced today.
Faced with the brown threat, the designer fled Germany and moved to London where he was hired by Jack Pritchard to work for Isokon, one of the first manufacturers to introduce modern design in the United Kingdom. He extended his exile in the United States from 1937.
He teaches at Harvard University's School of Architecture, where he works with Philip Johnson and Walter Gropius, a former colleague of the Bauhaus, on the creation of several houses in the Boston area.
Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) Isokon
Estimate : 10000 / 15000 €
Breuer dissolved his partnership with Gropius in May 1941 and established his own company in New York where he built houses and villas. The "Geller House I", built in 1945 on Long Island, is the first to incorporate Breuer's concept, the "binuclear" house, which separates the wing from the bedrooms and the living room/kitchen, separated by an entrance hall, and with a "butterfly" roof (two opposite roofs inclined towards the middle). A demonstration house set up in the MoMA garden in 1949 created a new interest in the work of architects.
In 1953, the construction of UNESCO's headquarters in Paris marked a turning point in his career with the completion of larger projects and the adoption of concrete as a material. In the early 1960s, he multiplied architectural projects, including the IBM Research and Study Centre at La Gaude in the Alpes-Maritimes and the Flaine winter sports resort in Haute-Savoie.
The deckchair offered for sale by PIASA is one of its first creations. It dates from the early 1920s. Made of thermoformed birch veneered plywood, the furniture is estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000 euros.
