Caesar's Cottage

Marcel Breuer – The Doris Caesar Cottage, Connecticut-USA, 1952

Between 1951 and 1952, Breuer designed and built a 60-square-foot cottage for Harry I. Caesar in Lakeville, Connecticut. This cottage is exemplary in Breuer's exploration of the relationship he proposes between architecture and nature, as well as his construction system.
The relationships can be seen in the way he incorporates existing trees into the project, in the way they connect and the role they play. We will observe this attitude in his other works as a peculiar way of relating to the landscape, which he embodied in “Architecture in the Landscape” in 1955, where he published some photographs of Caesar Cottage to refer to this contrast between architecture and nature.
This project can be understood as a final compositional evolution of the Cape Cod projects, 100 modernist houses built by Bauhaus architects. This is a different example of the residential typologies built by Breuer to date.

The architect conceives the house as an opaque box that opens to the view of a lake, rising from the ground to leave the hill intact, maintaining an attitude of respect for nature, seeking views, light comfort and the feeling of freedom. The architecture does not aim to eliminate the natural order of the site, nor to emulate it, it simply intends to dialogue with it.