Soon after the Met Breuer was opened in the repurposed facilities of the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue — designed by its namesake Marcel Breuer in 1966 — another monument by the Bauhaus-trained architect faces possible demolition.
Atlanta-Fulton Central Library; Photo Credit: Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton College
The Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System Board of Trustees recently expressed interested in investing in a brand new library for Downtown Atlanta, with hope that it could revive the function of this public facility and present an attractive icon for the city and its visitors. Fulton County commissioner Robb Pitts, who supports this initiative, describes the current library building — designed by then-“starchitect” Marcel Breuer in 1980 — as looking “more like a jail” than a welcoming space for leisure and productivity.
Interior of the Atlanta-Fulton Central Library; Photo Credit: World Monuments Fund
The Central Library was the last building that Marcel Breuer designed with his associate Hamilton Smith, his death coming a year after the building’s opening. As petitions circulate to save the monument, the question at hand centers on the cultural value and social impact of brutalist architecture in today’s urban landscape.
In 2007, Breuer’s Grosse Pointe Public Library in Michigan faced a similar threat of demolition before being saved by the World Monuments Fund’s Modernism at Risk program. This campaign helped preserve one of the architect’s first major public commissions in the US along with its valuable art collection.
Grosse Pointe Public Library, Michigan; Photo Credit: World Monuments Fund.
Another of the architect’s buildings — the 1970 Pirelli Tire Building in New Haven, Connecticut — is one that Liz Waytkus, executive director at Docomomo US, has been surveying closely. Indeed, she reports that the building — which underwent partial demolition due to retail developments in 2003 — has been vacant for a while. As it now sits at the edge of the Connecticut IKEA parking lot, its most common purpose is to serve as a billboard for oversized adverts of Swedish furniture.
Pirelli Tire Building, Connecticut; Photo Credit: Sarah Ramsey, Postwar Concrete Postscript
At a time when architecture is striving to address connectivity with the public realm, the street, and to natural elements such as vegetation, light and natural ventilation, Breuer’s brutalist structures are a reminder of the robust formal movements of a previous era.
Breuer’s buildings and other brutalist icons inevitably polarize opinions. While many architects admire the Bauhaus’ characteristically bold architecture and stern façades, it could be argued that the raw interiors of buildings like Atlanta’s Central Library doom their qualifications as uncomfortable and dehumanizing spaces, unwelcoming to social and cultural interaction.
While the fate of Breuer’s landmark remains uncertain, these contrasting viewpoints will undoubtedly proliferate in the coming months.
Source: Michael Kahn, ArtsATL
Cover: Façade of the Fulton-Atlanta Central Library; Photo Credit: ArchPaper