A Gropius-Breuer House Like Notable Others

One of the last commissions of the brief American partnership between Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, the Virgil Abele House (Framingham, Massachusetts, 1940–41), has remained in the scholarly shadows until now. This placement stemmed from its heavy borrowing of design elements from other Gropius and Breuer projects, which led previous commentators to discount or overlook it. Using the lenses of consumerism and connoisseurship to reconstruct the Abele House’s design and stewardship repositions it as significant in understanding the Gropius-Breuer practice and important in illuminating the spread of modern architecture in the interwar period.