Projects by Name

Breuer and his associate Herbert Beckhard collaborated with the Venezuelan architect Julio Volante of TESCA to produce designs for a cooperative apartment building and associated recreational facilities to be located at Tanaguarena near Caracas, Venezuela. The thin, sinuous form of the twenty-story apartment slab was raised on pilotis and allowed tenants clear views of the sea. Preliminary schemes for the north façade show Breuer and Volante using paired projecting balconies to create visual interest while the south façade featured continuous screened exterior walkways accessed by curved stair towers. The designs combined attributes of Breuer’s early designs for slab apartment buildings with the serpentine form of Alvar Aalto’s dormitory for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed a decade earlier in 1948. Recreational facilities consisted of a pool and a line of barrel-vaulted cabanas that snaked along the shore. Breuer and Volante also designed a club containing a restaurant and bar covered with thin shell, hyberbolic parabaloids supported by central columns that resembled inverted umbrellas. Breuer would use a similar structure for the Library of Hunter College in the Bronx. Unlike the library in the Bronx, however, the Recreational Apartments were never built.