Marcel Breuer and the Invention of Heavy Lightness
How could an architect who had made the pursuit of lightness the essence of his design aspirations become one of the great form-givers of the aesthetics of weightiness?
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By the 1960s, Breuer’s New York office was at the height of its invention of new architectural approaches. The images of his work that then circulated most widely were of monumental buildings clad in large blocks of stone or with exteriors of reinforced concrete. Perhaps none was more iconic than the Whitney Museum of American Art (1964–66), described repeatedly in the press as a kind of “fortress” for art. From “floating on air” to a “fortress” — how can one address this radical reversal, the seeming paradox of a career with such a profound change of heart? How could this architect who had made the pursuit of lightness the sine qua non both of his personal aspirations as a designer and also of the very nature of modernity become one of the greatest form-givers of the aesthetics of weightiness associated with poured-in-place and precast concrete, and with International Brutalism in the 1960s and ’70s? 3 My title phrase, “heavy lightness” — an oxymoron lifted from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — is meant to suggest that what remained constant in Breuer’s long career, despite marked shifts between his early European and later American work, were the material and structural experiments and also, in transmogrified ways, the pursuit of lightness. It is worth backtracking to trace that evolution.
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