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Isabelle Hyman . Marcel Breuer, Architect. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001.

Marcel Breuer, one of the most prominent architects of the Twentieth Century, was born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1902. His early years were spent studying and teaching at the famous Bauhaus in Germany, where he specialized in furniture design. It was also here, however, that he met the renowned architects Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, who were to be instrumental in the development of his professional career. Gropius brought him to London in 1935 and then to Harvard in 1937, where he taught during the years of WWII. He opened an office in New York City in 1946 and firmly established his reputation with such buildings as the UNRSCO Headquarters in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and the headquarters of HUD and HEW in Washington, D.C. His designs both for buildings and for furnishings were based on simple structural units that were combined into a complex but functional whole. In 1968 he received the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects and the Jefferson Foundation Medal, which declared him "among all the living architects of the world as excelling all others in the quality of his work."

Isabelle Hyman is a professor of architectural history at New York University. Her monumental work on Marcel Breuer made extensive use of the unpublished archival material, drawings, and photographs from the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University. These collections, which Hyman calls "the foundation for all Breuer research," provided many of the photographs in Marcel Breuer, Architect.

The Book of the Month is curated by Kenneth Lavender, Rare Book Librarian.