Breuer's Bohemia

Hardback

The Architect, His Circle, and Midcentury Houses in New England

Breuer's Bohemia explores a vibrant period of midcentury modern design and culture as seen through the influential New England houses designed by Marcel Breuer for his circle of clients and friends.

The iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which is often overshadowed by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his large-scale projects. Breuer's Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in Connecticut and Massachusetts from the 1950s through the 70s, many of which were commissioned by a few culturally progressive clients chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin who coalesced around him into a dynamic social circle. Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder,

Arthur Miller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Philip Roth, and William Styron, and more, marking a unique intersection of postwar architecture, art, and letters.

The publication of Breuer's Bohemia coincides with the feature-length documentary of the same name by author and filmmaker James Crump, exploring Breuer s explosive residential practice on the East Coast. Through original research and interviews, the voices of principal characters from Breuer s circle and notable figures from the field of architecture help tell the story of Breuer s collaborations with his friends and clients, breathing new life into the history of the rich cultural atmosphere of which they all played a vital part.

Heavily illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs as well as rarely seen archival materials, Breuer's Bohemia is a unique glimpse of a twentieth-century milieu that produced an aesthetic, intellectual, and sometimes sybaritic community during a fertile period of American design and culture.