SPACES +
The Making of a
Marcel Breuer House
The Sayer House, near Deauville,
France, built between 1972 and
1973, is the only house in that
country designed by Marcel Breuer.
Its concrete shell roof, in the form
of two hyperbolic parabolas, was
the fulfillment of a design vision
Breuer had developed over several
years, first for a house for actor
Peter Ustinov on Lake Geneva in
the late 1950s, which was never
built. The roof appeared again a
few years later in his design for the
Soriano House in Connecticut; this
house also remained unbuilt. The
construction photos of the Sayer
House allow one to see the complex
curves, peaks and valleys of the
wing-like roof, which seems barely
to hold to the earth, touching down
lightly at only three points onto
faceted concrete pillars, arrayed in a
triangle outside the house’s façade.
SPACES
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