Crump, James Breuer's Bohemia (1580935788)

The iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which tends to be obscured by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his large-scale projects. Breuer's Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in Connecticut and Massachusetts from the 1950s through the '70s, many of which were commissioned by culturally progressive clients--chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin--who coalesced around him into a dynamic social circle.

Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage, Arshile Gorky, Philip Roth, and more, marking a unique intersection of postwar architecture, art, and letters.

The publication of Breuer's Bohemia coincides with the feature-length documentary film of the same name by author and filmmaker James Crump, exploring Breuer's explosive residential practice on the East Coast. Through original research and interviews that flow into both the book and the film, the voices of principal characters from Breuer's circle and notable professionals from the field of architecture help tell the story of Breuer's collaborations with his clients, breathing new life into the history of a rich cultural atmosphere of which they all played a vital part.

Heavily illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs as well as rarely seen archival materials, Breuer's Bohemia is a unique glimpse of a twentieth-century milieu that produced an aesthetic, intellectual, and sometimes sybaritic community during a rich period of American culture.