Breuer left home in Pécs, Hungary, at eighteen to study art in Vienna, lasted a few weeks, and enrolled instead at the new Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920, one of its first and youngest students. Walter Gropius made him head of the carpentry workshop at twenty-two; the tubular-steel Wassily and Cesca chairs he designed there, borrowing the idea from bicycle handlebars, remain in production a century later. He left for London in 1935 as the school's politics soured, then followed Gropius again in 1937, this time to Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where the two ran a joint practice designing houses before Breuer opened his own office in New York in 1946. His architecture, unlike his furniture, grew heavier and rougher with time: raw and board-marked concrete, sculpted into cantilevers and folded planes, on buildings for the United Nations, UNESCO and a run of American college and corporate clients. He won the AIA Gold Medal in 1968.
