Marcel Lajos Breuer, Hungarian by birth, arrived to the United States of America in 1937 at the age of 35. He associated with Walter Gropius in a joint architectural practice and became a professor at Harvard University. One year after his arrival, Helen Storrow, the 74 year old widow of prominent banker James J. Storrow’s and chair of the World Committee of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), offered to Breuer a piece of land in Lincoln, Massachusetts, for the construction of his own house. As she did one year before in a similar proposal to Gropius, she would recover the investment through a monthly lease. Breuer’s house was finished in the summer of 1939, it was the third he designed and built (jointly with Gropius) in the US.

The house sits in a slope near Gropius’ own house, occupying approximately a 150 square meters surface. Three volumes are distributed transversally to the north-south axis. From west to east: a porch/veranda defined by low stone walls—enclosed originally by a mosquito net—separates from the second volume by a tall slightly curved stone wall where the chimney stands; then, one enters a generously sized living room with a crystal-wall south façade. The last volume, more cubic and slightly taller than the other two, is divided in two floors, having the dining room and the kitchen in the ground floor and two bedrooms in the upper floor. The spatial relation achieved between the living room and the bedroom-dining room volumes is surprising, this is the result of concentrated circulations and the programme distribution into intermediary floors. We can also identify two remaining volumes: the garage—an isolated shed— and the entrance, shorter than the rest and located precisely in the linkage between the living and the dining room volumes. Although in a schematic way, the logic used by Breuer to separate volumes, organize the architectural programme and the different entrances in this building somehow anticipated the development of the bi-nuclear houses that matured in the next decade. This would become a constant in his work, as he acknowledged in 1956 in Sun & Shadow, the Philosophy of an architect.

If the exterior composition of the independent volumes can be easily identified with the architect’s formative period, the articulation logic used here denotes a subtle reference to domestic Anglo-American tradition. In some way, this can be defined as some sort of syncretism, reinforced by the choice of wood and stone as building materials.

Chronologically, the house stands between the Hagerty House (1937-38)—with an elongated plan scheme—and the Little Cottage (1940)—elevated from the ground—built for Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain. The three projects form a defined group that mark the beginning of a typological research on the North American single-family house developed by Breuer in a more systematically manner since 1943, with the project for the H House in the Designs for Post-war Living A&A Competition, and the Cape Cod cottages studies in 1945. This research elaborated on essential aspects of the modern North American house.

(M.C.)