The Walls of Shadows.  Marcel Breuer’s Faceted-Molded Facades at Yale and Bronx

​

Miguel A. Calvo Salve

Marywood University, USA

​

Between the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Hungarian-American and Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer designed  numerous buildings with an innovative facade system of exposed pre-cast, reinforced concrete elements. The  interest in this system, used by Breuer almost as an obsession from 1960 until his retirement, was based on its  extraordinary sculptural quality due to the faceted depth of the section of its elements and the shadows cast. These  facades explore the visual contrasts that these elements, in all their different versions, recreate on the surfaces as a  play between solid and void, as well as the movement of the shadows on them along the day. This visual contrast  gives Breuer's designs an extraordinary aesthetic quality. 

​

In Breuer’s system, the pre-cast faceted panels act as the outermost surface (flesh), protecting and housing all the  internal mechanical systems and performing multiple functions. These faceted-molded designs play with the sun  to create a dynamic composition (shadows) that breaks the monotony, silence, and melancholy of these facades,  demonstrating Breuer’s interest in the search for the maximum expressiveness of his architecture. The changing  shadows on the panels generate different patterns (geometries) along the day that resemble Giorgio de Chirico's  drawings and poems: “The geometry of shadows lacerated the heart all melancholy morning. But evening came,  and the volumes and forms fused.” Like de Chirico drawings, Breuer’s pre-cast facades use shadows to trace  triangles, rectangles, squares, and trapezoids on the panel's surfaces with “such pleasant blackness that burning  eyes love to refresh themselves there.” 

​

Among all Breuer’s designs of facades using this system, there are two in which there are no windows, just a solid  faceted wall exposed to the sun. Shadows cast on the panel's surface trace lines and geometries of “sun and  Shadow,” following Breuer’s motto taken from the Spanish bullrings. For the 9-story Technology Building at New  York University (today Bronx Community College) and the 6-story Becton Laboratory Building at Yale  University, Breuer designed two different large windowless facades composed of a system of faceted-molded  precast panels. These windowless facades of solid pre-cast faceted panels, where the impact of the sun is more  critical, perform a dynamic movement of shadows and geometries during the day, avoiding the hardness of a large  wall facade with no openings.  

​

This paper will showcase Breuer’s interest in the search for the maximum expressiveness of his buildings, moving him to unify the building enclosure and structure in one system and create what he called the “Faceted Molded  Facade” and we will discover Breuer´s design process for the different panels, paying attention to the generation  of shadows, geometries, and protection from the direct sun. We will also explore the factors determining Breuer's  adoption of this type of pre-cast façade based on his studies of chiaroscuro under the artist Johannes Itten in the  Preliminary Course at the Bauhaus, the failure of his first designs of large glass wall facades, and his friendship  and collaboration with the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.