Includes bibliographical references and index

Introduction: Bureaucratic genius -- I. Saint John's Abbey. Marcel Breuer and the invention of heavy lightness / Barry Bergdoll -- II. UNESCO. Architecture and mediocracy at UNESCO house / Lucia Allais -- Marcel Breuer: structure and shadow / Guy Nordenson -- III. Precast panel. From garden city to concrete city: Breuer and Yorke's garden city of the future / Teresa Harris -- Atomic bauhaus: Marcel Breuer and big science / John Harwood -- IV. New York. Architectures of opportunity at Breuer's Bronx campus / Jonathan Massey -- V. France. Modernism as accomodation / Kenny Cupers with Laura Martinez de Guereñu -- Breuer's ancillary strategy: symbols, signs, and structures at the intersection of modernism and postmodernism / Timothy M. Rohan -- VI. Global Breuer. Postface: the Marcel Breuer digital archive at Syracuse University / Lucy Mulroney

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) is celebrated as a furniture designer, teacher, and architect who changed the American house after his emigration from Hungary to the U.S.A. in 1937. More recently historians, architects, and -- with the reopening in New York of the great megalith of his Whitney Museum as the Met Breuer -- a larger public are gaining new insights into the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned. Often seen as a pioneer of a "Brutalist modernism" of reinforced concrete, Breuer might best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional structures in and for which he worked, a vantage developed in the fresh approaches gathered here in essays by a group of younger scholars. These essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, now accessible online