Marcel Breuer
Rufus Stillman Cottage

I like to think that Breuer made a plan all for us and that our way of life dictated his thinking. However, in all honesty I cannot think that. I remember our first conversation. We had talked about our life for a good two hours when he looked up and said, “Your program is very similar to my own house.” For a budget of $24,000, for a family of five, for people who wanted to ask friends for a weekend, for a client who had already bought the site, for young parents with young children—our house couldn’t be very much else and still be Breuer’s solution to this set of needs.

If the house becomes the client’s alter ego, if he feels that his problems are unique, and if he simultaneously dreads that his house will looks like a thousand others, then he will confine the architect and divert him from the logical, reasonable solution which his experience and skill evoke.

I do not mean to suggest that there is only one solution for a particular set of circumstances. Each solution involves the philosophy and purpose of both architect and client. These cannot be isolated from each other. Many unsuccessful houses can be traced to an isolation, where the client, on the one hand, with years of living “knows what he wants” and the architect, on the other hand, tries to say something all his own, to satisfy his private and separate needs.

There must be a give and take between these two forces. If I had the right I would offer my client the following very simple advice: first, choose the architect carefully, not so much from the work he has done but from an evaluation of his capacity to do. Many people have preconceived ideas about how a house should look, and this sometimes gets in the way and sets up prejudices. Clients, in looking at an architect’s work, are liable to trip over details and lose sight of the final objective.

Breuer knows this well. I have seen him talk to prospective clients, either singly or in committee, without reference to his work. I have witnessed a committee working with plans for more than six months, the members never really knowing the “look” of the building or, for that matter, the “look” of Breuer, but instead spending endless hours on the “use.”

Breuer lets the client grow with the house, keeping him on the essential track, making him feel that he is part of the creation. He leads clients very gently to their own conclusions—and this may take months—very much like a teacher, never swerving from what he believes to be true. While they work, the client comes to know Breuer, the man, and with this new insight into the man, they understand and come to believe in his architecture.

After the client has chosen the man, I would think that he must tell the architect how he lives, how he likes to meet people and what sort of people, what he likes to do in the evenings, in summer and in winter. He must tell him what he can afford, and about his children. He should talk about food and art and work and music. The third and most difficult principle to follow—he must give the architect freedom of choice.

It seems to me many clients will worry about each detail until the details start interfering with the whole. A client can thus force the architect into spending most of his time on detailing little spaces for trivia, when he should be spending the same time on creating areas for living.

Both architect and client search the other’s thoughts and then proceed on the faith that comes from this knowledge. The question “why” has been asked as well as “how,” and almost as often. Again it is the architect who must answer. He brings to the problem solutions out of his experience: he brings his talent and his skill but, more importantly, he brings insight and reason. No on can say that a house is too small or too large, or too luxurious, or too anything without knowing the architect-client purpose represented in the design. A house is too big if it is designed to inflate the ego of its owner or its architect. It is too small if its size confuses the lives of those who live in it. It is too luxurious if the choice of materials both inflates and confuses.

For us, all these seemingly complicated problems were made easy. Because we did not think we knew enough to talk in terms of design and plan, we had to talk about ourselves. We knew so little that we did not try to narrow Breuer’s approach.

As we talked we found great areas of agreement. For instance, we found (or rather Breuer found for us) that we believed in the separation-connection of children and parents. Over a long period of time he had developed an architectural translation of this belief—the binuclear house, the hillside house, the U-house.

Our house, built on the hillside, has the children’s bedrooms on the ground floor and the parent’s bedroom along with kitchen, living and dining rooms on the second floor. Practically always, visitors ask if we can hear the children. But I am sure if they found us all jumbled together—neither group having sufficient privacy, privilege or freedom—they would ask the other question, “Where do you go if you want peace, or if you want to read a book?”

Other and richer generations found “the study” a useful way to handle this problem. It was to that room that children crept on tiptoe to kiss Papa a silent goodnight. Breuer is not afraid to express this need in bold terms and face the criticism that he has put children in the cellar. Our children’s “cellar” has the grass to the windows and their own door to the fields. It has deep colored walls and slate blackboards and sun splattered floors. Somehow it seems to me a far more generous solution to their problems than the “upstairs” bedroom, next to the parents.

And the parents—where do they get placed, and why? We had a very special reason for the placement of our bedroom. Because of an injury, I have a difficult time navigating stairs, and therefore it was practicable that I should be able to live on one floor. But, even if I could climb three steps at a time, we probably would have found ourselves next to the kitchen—if for no other reason than to be near coffee in the morning.

Other reasons demand this solution. There has to be a balance between upstairs and downstairs. If it takes 1,200 square feet to “bed” the children and the guests, to give children a play area, to heat the house, and launder the clothes, you have to use 1,200 square feet upstairs—and so the parents landed upstairs. And we hear the children—plenty!

Breuer stops nature at the walls and you know that you are in a building. Although he is very sensitive about nature, he makes no compromise; his house is man-made and it looks it. You sit on the cantilevered porch and look at the sweep of the roof. You sit by the pool and watch the color panels reflected in the water. You walk out of the door and into the field and you watch the birches shadow the wall. You see building against trees, the horizontal against the vertical. And you sit inside and see nature lightly framed by the windows. You see crisp walls cutting the grass into patterns. You see a house, and you see nature, and you understand that the two are apart, but that they give to each other. People have come to say, “The house fits so well into the hillside.” I remember asking Breuer to suspend our porch with wire to suggest the wonderful freedom of a hawk gliding into the hillside, but his solution offset the porch from the house, giving us a clear view of the valley. This logical answer concretely demonstrates his respect for nature.

As the house works with nature, so it works with people. It complements them but it stands by itself. Breuer’s plans result in an effortless flow of living. I feel no abruptness when moving from bedroom to living room to dining room. The ceiling and windows sweep throughout the house, with the chimney and a low closet wall simply screening the use of one area from another without splintering the space. However, no part of the house’s function has been sacrificed for effect. Breuer claims that architecture is only one percent art; but that last percent tips the scale. You see art in Breuer’s choice of materials and contrasting textures; you see it in his choice and placing of colors, and in the simple, raw details that let you understand the structure. He wastes nothing. I can hear him saying,” It is not bad to spend money, even a lot of money, on a house. It all depends on how you use it.” His houses are not covered with veneer and slickness, but stand like skeletons. The money and the art are in the skeleton, in the bones, and in the cavity—they are not wasted on externals. He points out that there is nothing so luxurious as space—space for its own sake. “You hear people talk of proportions,” he once said. “It is scale that can make the difference. Proportions change with scale.”