Projects by Name

In 1967, Bertram and Phyllis Geller approached Breuer about designing another house for them. The couple had been Breuer’s first residential clients after Breuer dissolved his partnership with Walter Gropius and struck out on his own. Breuer and his partner Herbert Beckhard based the Geller’s new house on an earlier unbuilt design for the Paepcke Vacation House. The house was a striking departure from most of Breuer’s previous residential work and featured a square floor plan underneath a curved parabolic concrete vault. A compressible material separated the vault from the rest of the structure to allow for the necessary expansion and contraction of the vault resulting from changes in temperature. The first floor contained an open plan, double height kitchen-living-dining room space along with three bedrooms. The smaller, upper floor housed a studio and storage spaces. Light flooded the space through the floor-to-ceiling glazed south façade but was carefully controlled by a symmetrical sunscreen composed of deep concrete ribs that created a geometric pattern. As Isabelle Hyman points out, Breuer was surely aware of Le Corbusier’s use of concrete vaults in projects such as the Maison Jaoul in Neuilly-sur-Seine and absorbed some of those ideas into his own work.