Marcel Breuer

Sea Lane House was perhaps one of the two most important achievements of Breuer’s fruitful stay in Britain between 1935 and 1937, the other being his design for the Isokon Long Chair.

Born in Pécs, Hungary in 1902, Marcel Breuer briefly studied art in Vienna before joining the Bauhaus in the 1920s. First a student and then a teacher, he became head of the celebrated furniture workshop.

On leaving the Bauhaus, Breuer practised as an architect in Berlin before fleeing the Nazi regime and moving to London in 1935, where he stayed for two years. In 1939 he was invited by Walter Gropius (the founder of the Bauhaus and former teacher of Breuer) to work at Harvard University. At Harvard, Breuer taught pupils who went on to become some of America’s celebrated architects including Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and I.M. Pei.

In America, Breuer initially worked in an architecture practice with Gropius before forming his own firm with offices in New York and Paris. Breuer produced numerous important buildings before his death in 1981 including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.