Marcel Breuer and the Invention of Heavy Lightness: From the Bauhaus to Atlanta.

Breuer’s architecture on the face of it experienced a radical shift over his long career, from the light weight floating volumetrics of his immediate post-Bauhaus designs, such as the Harnismacher House in Weisbaden, Germany of 1932 to the great civic monuments of his mature American period: St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Atlanta Public Library. Yet throughout the dramatic exploitation of the cantilever as the veritable experience of modernity remained constant. This lecture will explore the emergence of a new aesthetic of heaviness, of roughness, and of dramatic structural experimentation. And it will underscore how Breuer defined a new civic presence for architecture in an age of challenges to the city, one that is only slowly being reassessed and appreciated anew.