Breuer House I – 1948

Marcel Breuer – first house in New Canaan, Connecticut-USA, 1947-1948

Breuer house I, (Breuer-Bratti House), New Canaan, Connecticut, USA, 1947-48
Breuer's first house of 1948 in New Canaan sits on a sloped site with views downhill in two directions.
“New Canaan is a conservative, pretty, station wagon town in beautiful Fairfield County, a short drive from New York City. Its surprising notoriety began about six years ago when Marcel Breuer, one of the world’s most famous and admired contemporary architects, moved in and built himself a little house, a one-story building suspended in mid-air on a cantilevered platform by steel cables. Breuer is a master, and of course masters attract disciples. At no time did New Canaan have a colony of new residents all busy designing new homes for themselves.

“Until recently, the only way to build was to exploit the dead weight of stones or bricks or logs of wood, stacking them on top of each other; beams or arches that depended on gravity, their strength was the principle of compression. The great change in construction has been the transition from simple compression structures to continuous and fluid tension structures. This change is so radical that it alone would justify a completely new architectural concept. The past used gravity to defeat gravity; the Egyptian pyramid is broad at the base and narrows to the top. The “new structure” in its most expressive form is hollow at the bottom and substantial at the top – the very reverse of the pyramid. It represents a new epoch in the history of man, the realization of one of his oldest ambitions, the defeat of gravity … “

Marcel Breuer