I think that
the architect, as an inventor is an artist of society of
technical developments. Everywhere where something is missing
the architect steps in. He is the man who fills the holes, if
I may say so.
One of the most interesting things about Marcel Breuer is
that he's one of the very few architects actually trained at
the Bauhaus. The period of enormous artistic invention and
questioning. Building was not simply making buildings. Building
was building a role for artists and building a new society. And
architecture would no longer represent or evoke things from
the past. This is what happened with the architects who designed
the original Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue which evokes the
great bathing halls of the ancients. The Bauhaus rejected
all of that. They thought that one was living in a world of
industrial production of radical new materials. Architects were
eager to take that into the buildings of everyday life, into
houses, into offices, even into museum buildings.
Picture the early 1960s the Whitney Museum of American Art,
wanted a new space. Marcel Breuer made an ambitious
presentation to the museum board. He opened his remarks by
saying "What should a museum look like a museum in Manhattan, it
should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity
and profundity of art."
The Met restored the building in 2016, but did not remodel.
We were asked to restore the building as though it were a
work of art, which of course it is.
Everything is original to 1966 with a few exceptions, for
example, as you enter above you as a constellation of lights in
aluminum domes. When the building was restored, all the
bulbs were replaced with LED versions That had to be specially
manufactured. Or notice the staircase. Each step was cast
separately in terrazzo. During the restoration workers removed
50 years of grime off every surface.
There's really a whole catalog of materials, a palette in a way,
that I would argue challenges the notion of a heavy, dark or
dull concrete.
Picture the team replacing 200 stone pavers, or scraping old
gum out of concrete with dental picks.
Essentially, what we did was humdrum for the average person
when they look at it. Because what happened, what did they do?
And we often say, well, not much, and I feel very proud of
not doing too much and accomplishing a lot.
Something about the building that slows down your pace,
a visitor to a museum doesn't want constantly to have the work of
architecture. in their face or in their way. They want somehow
for the architecture to disappear to allow for the most
direct experience with the work.
May I ask one other question, Marcel Breuer? What is the role
of architects in the Space Age? I don't know about the Space Age
as they understand it today, but they know that architecture is
the art of space.
The whole building of The Met Breuer is based on this study
of contrasts, and constantly playing on these contrasts as we
experience one thing more intensely by its juxtaposition
with another. To build a museum was a rare chance to make a
building that declared the art of architecture is one worthy of
the streetscape of Madison Avenue.
[Music Plays]