Breuer house I – 1948

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

Breuer house I, M. Breuer - Breuer-Bratti House, New Canaan, Connecticut, USA, 1947-48
Breuer's first home from 1948 in New Canaan stands on a sloping site with views downhill in two directions.
"New Canaan is a conservative, pretty, estate city in beautiful Fairfield County, a short distance from New York. Its surprising notoriety began about six years ago when Marcel Breuer, one of the world's most famous and most contemporary architects admired, they moved and built a small house, a single-storey building suspended in midair on a cantilevered platform by means of steel cables. Breuer is a master and obviously the masters attract the disciples. In no time New Canaan had a colony of new residents all busy designing new homes for themselves.

"Until recently, the only way to build was to take advantage of the dead weight of stones or bricks or wooden logs, stack them on top of each other; beams or arches that depended on gravity, their strength was the principle of compression The big 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; Egyptian pyramid is wide at the base and narrows to the highest point. The "new structure" in its most expressive form is empty at the bottom and substantial at the top - just the reverse side of the pyramid. It represents a new era in human history, the realization of one of his oldest ambitions, the defeat of gravity ... "
Marcel Breuer