Projects by Name

In 1955, an administrator at Hunter College (now Lehman College) who was impressed by Breuer’s work at St. John’s Abbey approached the firm about designing a library and classroom/administration building for his campus. Breuer and his associate Robert Gatje separated the program into two rectangular volumes linked by a glass lobby reached by a ramp. The nearly square, three-story classroom and administration building was arranged around a square landscaped courtyard. It was constructed of masonry walls and concrete floor slabs. The slightly offset library building featured a hyberbolic-parabaloid roof like that proposed for the unbuilt New Haven Railroad Passenger Station in New London, Connecticut (1950). Eduardo Catalano, Breuer’s former student who had been experimenting with hyperbolic paraboloid structures in South America, also served as a consultant on the project. The roof consisted of six hyperbolic paraloloids made of thin shell concrete and supported by central columns. This structural technique allowed Breuer to create a nearly unobstructed, open plan for the library. Both buildings possessed fieldstone bases and featured sunscreens created from terra-cotta flue tiles turned on their sides on the northeast and southwest facades. The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised Breuer’s buildings for Hunter, crediting him with creating a “superior civic-minded design.”