The Furniture Revolutionary Arrives
Marcel Breuer arrived at the Isokon Building in 1935, a year after Walter Gropius, and the two men's London stays overlapped for two years before both departed for America in 1937. Breuer was already one of the most celebrated furniture designers in the world — his bent tubular steel chair, the Wassily Chair of 1925, had established a new vocabulary for twentieth-century furniture design, and his subsequent work with bent plywood had demonstrated that industrial materials could produce objects of great beauty as well as functional efficiency. He brought to Lawn Road a reputation that preceded him, and his presence further enriched the already remarkable community of modernist talent that the Isokon had attracted.
The Isokon connection was particularly close for Breuer because of his involvement with the Isokon furniture company that Jack Pritchard had established alongside the building project. The company's ambition was to produce modernist furniture for the mass market — good design at prices accessible to ordinary households — and Breuer's skills as a furniture designer made him the natural collaborator for this enterprise. His bent plywood long chair, designed during his London period and produced by Isokon, became one of the icons of 1930s design: an essay in the organic possibilities of the industrial material that owed something to the ergonomic research that Breuer had been conducting since his Bauhaus years.
The Isokon long chair was the most famous product of Breuer's London collaboration with Pritchard, but it was not the only one. Breuer also designed tables, nesting tables, and other furniture pieces for the Isokon range, each embodying the Bauhaus conviction that everyday objects should be designed with the same intellectual seriousness as buildings or paintings. The Isokon furniture was admired by progressive design critics but proved difficult to sell commercially in Britain, where the market for modernist furniture remained small and the manufacturing infrastructure for producing bent plywood components was still developing.
Architecture and Design Practice in London
Alongside his furniture work, Breuer attempted to establish an architectural practice during his London years, collaborating with the British architect F.R.S. Yorke on a series of projects that applied modernist principles to British building programmes. The partnership of Breuer and Yorke produced several realised buildings, most notably a sequence of small private houses that demonstrated the possibilities of the International Style in domestic British architecture. These houses — modest in scale but bold in their architectural statement — were among the first buildings in Britain to apply the full vocabulary of modernist domestic design: flat roofs, ribbon windows, open plans, and the integration of interior and exterior space through large glazed areas.
The reception of Breuer and Yorke's work in Britain was mixed. Progressive architectural critics praised the houses as models of rational modern design; the architectural establishment tended to regard them as foreign importations incompatible with the English climate and the English temperament. The flat roof, in particular, was a perennial target for criticism — not entirely without justification, since the early flat roofs of British modernist houses did have a tendency to leak, a problem that the architects attributed to faulty construction rather than faulty design but which served as a convenient target for opponents of modernism.
Beyond the Yorke partnership, Breuer made connections with the broader world of British design during his London years. He lectured and wrote, participated in the discussions of the MARS Group, and contributed to the gradual formation of a British modernist design culture. His social world at the Isokon and in the wider NW3 community overlapped with artists, critics, and intellectuals who were engaged in their own versions of the project of modernising British cultural life, and the cross-pollination of ideas that resulted was, if not immediately transformative, at least productive of the conditions for later transformation.
The Isokon Chair and Its Legacy
The Isokon long chair deserves separate consideration as one of the most significant objects produced by the Belsize Park modernist community. Breuer had been experimenting with bent plywood as a furniture material since the early 1930s, following the work of Alvar Aalto in Finland, whose laminated wood furniture had demonstrated the organic possibilities of the material — its capacity to curve and flex in ways that tubular steel, for all its rationalist perfection, could not achieve. Where the tubular steel chair expressed the hard, machined precision of industrial production, the bent plywood chair offered something warmer and more intimate, more obviously connected to the natural world through its material.
The Isokon long chair combined the reclining form of the traditional chaise longue with the material economy and visual simplicity of the modernist aesthetic. The seat and backrest were formed from a single piece of moulded plywood, curved to support the human body in a comfortable reclining position without padding or upholstery — the material itself, correctly shaped, providing the ergonomic support that the older tradition had achieved through layers of stuffing. The simplicity of the solution was its genius, and it remains a frequently reproduced and admired object more than eighty years after its creation.
The chair was produced by Isokon in relatively small numbers during the 1930s, and original examples are now museum pieces of considerable value. It has been reissued periodically by various manufacturers, most recently by Isokon Plus, which continues to produce furniture based on the original Isokon designs. The chair's influence on subsequent furniture design — on the organic modernism of Charles and Ray Eames, on the Scandinavian design tradition, on the ergonomic furniture movement of the latter twentieth century — has been substantial, even where the direct lines of influence are difficult to trace.
Departure and the American Years
Breuer left London for Harvard in 1937, following Gropius to the appointment that would shape American architectural education for a generation. His departure marked the effective end of the most concentrated phase of Bauhaus influence in NW3, though the Isokon Building and its community continued to attract distinguished residents for decades afterward. In America, Breuer built a reputation as one of the most important architects of the mid-twentieth century, producing major institutional buildings, private houses, and urban schemes that applied the principles first tested in London to the very different conditions of American practice.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, designed by Breuer and completed in 1966, is perhaps his most celebrated American building — a powerful, brutalist statement in dark granite that divided critical opinion as sharply as his Belsize Park work had divided British opinion three decades earlier. Whether one responds to the Whitney's challenging presence or not, it is unmistakably the work of a designer of the first rank, a building that refuses to disappear into its context and demands engagement on its own terms. The directness and confidence of the design trace a clear line back to the Bauhaus training and the intellectual formation that Breuer received and contributed to during his years at Lawn Road.
The London years remained a formative episode in Breuer's own understanding of his career. He had arrived in Britain as a refugee, uncertain about his future and unable to speak the language; he left two years later with the beginnings of a significant practice, a celebrated piece of furniture to his credit, and the connections to the Harvard architecture school that would sustain his subsequent career. The Isokon Building had provided exactly the intellectual and social environment that made this transformation possible, and Breuer's acknowledgment of his debt to Jack and Molly Pritchard remained warm throughout his subsequent life.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*