A Book Chronicles Marcel Breuer’s House Designs for Friends

The illustrated volume Breuer’s Bohemia traces the architect’s special collection of modern houses designed for artists and patrons in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

By: Ethan Tucker

Illustrated with a collection of contemporary and historical photographs as well as rarely seen documents, Breuer’s Bohemia surveys an oft-overlooked corner of Modernist Marcel Breuer’s oeuvre. In addition to his Brutalist public and commercial buildings, from the 1950s through the ’70s, Breuer designed a series of homes for himself and his friends in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In these he created a constellation of modern dwellings inhabited by a cast of artists and patrons of modern design. 

The book, which is a companion volume to a documentary film by the same name, traces the architect’s relationship with his client, friend, and supporter Rufus Cole Stillman. Breuer designed four houses for the wealthy businessman in rural Litchfield, Connecticut, and Stillman arranged public, corporate, and residential commissions for the architect by introducing him to friends and family.

Many of these residences, in western Connecticut and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, housed or hosted members of an eclectic and hard-partying group of midcentury artists and intellectuals including Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Philip Roth, and William Styron. It’s from this circle, of which Breuer was certainly a member (a cottage he designed for himself and his wife Connie in Wellfleet was notorious for raucous summer gatherings), that the book’s author James Crump takes his title. However, the volume has less to do with chronicling Breuer’s bohemianism than with recording his search for new ways to design domestic spaces for modern people.