cover image Architecture Without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard

Architecture Without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard

David Masello. W. W. Norton & Company, $35 (171pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03491-2

Twenty innovative houses engendered by the collaboration between Hungarian-born Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer (1902-81) and American architect Herbert Beckhard (b. 1926) are examined in this handsome volume. Breuer (famous for the eponymous chair he designed), who emigrated to the U.S. in 1937, and Beckhard, who now heads a Manhattan-based architectural firm, favored large, open interior spaces, fieldstone walls, uninterrupted glazed surfaces and structures that ``float'' above their sites by means of posts, trusses and supporting walls. Despite these similarities, the houses they designed together, in California, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Switzerland, are highly individualistic, modernist compositions reflecting their clients' lifestyles. Masello, a contributor to Architectural Record , affectionately walks readers through these eclectic, deliberately asymmetrical dwellings, aided by 100 black-and-white photographs and 16 pages in color. (Aug.)