Projects by Name

In 1944, Harvard, MIT, local veterans' organizations and the Cambridge War Memorial Committee launched a campaign to create a war monument on a 70-square-foot site at the southern end of the Cambridge Common. Joseph Hudnut, who had been appointed Chairman of the Committee to secure a design, offered the commission to Breuer. Lawrence Anderson, a professor at MIT, contributed the landscape design. The names of approximately 15,000 servicemen and -women were inscribed at eye level on planes of translucent glass that appeared to float within the square of the plaza. Concrete benches concealed lights that illuminated the contrasting materials of the flagstone pavement and glass slabs. The bids for the monument came in too high, and the City Council postponed construction due to discomfort with the modernist design. Philip Johnson, then the head of the Architecture Department at the Museum of Modern Art, approached Breuer about creating a replica in the museum garden for an exhibition of war memorials, but that exhibition also remained unrealized.