Remembering Breuer’s Gagarin House

As told by Architect Mark Cavagnero

About 15 years ago, my husband and I ended up having cocktails after our high school class reunion with a group of old friends, including Mark Cavagnero. He was catching us up on his life, and I was unaware that he was an architect. I didn’t remember seeing him anywhere near the art dept. when we were in high school.

Mark was a very good student, so I supposed good at math, so that part of architecture made sense; and he was also an athlete. Football, primarily. I asked him where his aesthetic came from.

Mark said he frequented the school library, where he took out books about the architect Marcel Breuer, and his work.

When the library was getting rid of a bunch of those books, the librarian remembered Mark’s interest and called his dad, who happened to be the chair of the Board of Ed, and offered him the books. Mark ultimately went to Harvard, where Breuer used to teach, and went on to become an architect of some note, in San Francisco.

I recently attended a showing of the documentary, ‘Breuer’s Bohemia’. Remembering how Breuer interested Mark, I sent him a picture of the cover of the book that accompanies the film. Then I asked him if he would write me a little memory of his early infatuation with Breuer’s work so I could include it in my blog. What he sent me was unexpected, and exponentially more amazing; a seminal bit of provenance for his chosen life’s work. Mark had a much closer connection to Breuer than simply those books, and it made me think about the moments that resonate in our lives.

MARK WROTE THIS FIVE YEARS AGO, FOR AN INDUSTRY PERIODICAL, BUT NEVER ENDED UP GIVING IT TO THEM. THIS IS WHAT HE GAVE ME:

“Litchfield County is an old and well preserved enclave of gable-roofed New England white clapboard houses. But in July of 1957, four miles from the hospital where I was entering this world, contractors were finishing the new house for Andrew and Jamie Gagarin designed by Marcel Breuer. This house is commonly considered Breuer’s most spectacular of the 1950’s. It would be one of six he designed in the small, isolated town of Litchfield, Connecticut.

When I was in junior high school my father took me to see the house as he was meeting with Gagarin, his colleague at Torin Corporation. I was enthralled, having never seen a modern house before. Breuer’s design of wood and stone was a bolt of electricity. My father, an engineer by training, explained it to me the best he could.

The house is long and low, glass walls cutting in and out to make courtyards below and terraces above. Set on a long second floor terrace, the house looks across a sweeping meadow to the open space preserve of hills and ponds beyond. Stepping down from the second floor terrace is a magnificent stair cantilevered from a stone wall. At the toe of this stair is a swimming pool and an entire level of five bedrooms with a play space designed exclusively for the Gagarin children. I was overwhelmed. I went home and sat in my small bedroom with one double hung window and wondered how people could live like that, and why I had to live like this.

Photo from the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive from Syracuse University.

Breuer also designed Torin’s Executive Headquarters and my father’s first domain, the Machine Division Plant. He designed a number of their factories in the US and abroad. Shortly after my first visit to Gagarin’s house, Torin hired Breuer to design my father’s Research And Development Center in nearby Torrington (my father was Vice President in charge of Engineering), immediately adjacent to Stillman and Gagarin’s Executive Headquarters Building. My father came home many nights and spoke glowingly about working with Breuer and the genius of the man. He was excited as the drawings developed and the plans took shape.

My father and his engineers and technicians moved into the new building just as I graduated from eighth grade. When I saw the “Tech Center” one Saturday morning I fell in love. The building is composed of concrete masonry and pre-cast window frames shading the low east and west sun. The entrance had a large textile, designed by Breuer, hung on the opposing wall. My father’s office and conference room was bathed in daylight with huge windows opening directly out to a grove of birch trees. The engineers worked in a very large, tall open office encased in daylight from three sides. Everyone seemed happy; architecture had created this wonderful little community.

That Fall, I went to the library in my high school and read my first book on architecture called “Who Was Le Corbusier”. Our library had a dozen architecture books, and I read them all, keeping my homework to a minimum. I wanted to learn about this world of architecture; I was fascinated. I soon gave up on wanting to be the New York Yankees next great centerfielder.

Meanwhile, Breuer was designing a new house for the Gagarin’s and three for another Torin colleague, Rufus Stillman. He would soon design one for our Congressman, Toby Moffet then another for Stillman’s cousin. He had designed Litchfield’s High School, nearby Bantam’s Elementary School and the Connecticut Junior Republic, also in Litchfield. Architecture, and Marcel Breuer, had hit northwestern Connecticut with a surge. And I realized what I wanted to do for a living.

Years later I moved to New York and worked for Edward Larrabee Barnes, intrigued with his background as a colleague and former student of Marce Breuer at Harvard. I learned a great deal from Barnes, and he often spoke with me about his days at Harvard studying with Breuer and Gropius. I felt somehow completed, as New York City and Litchfield County seemed to come full circle in my life. Litchfield no longer felt quite so small and New York no longer felt quite so vast.

When I went home occasionally on weekends, I often visited one of the Breuer structures as a touchstone, connecting my adult and child years with a touch of wood, glass or concrete. Eventually I moved to California with my wife and started my own practice with John Barnes, Ed’s son. In our little office we often spoke about Ed Barnes’ practice and ideas, what he learned from Gropius and Breuer, what he learned from Kahn and Mies. I tried to integrate this with what I learned about Le Corbusier when I studied at Harvard, and what I knew about Breuer from my childhood.

Breuer was about feel, intuition and composition. He understood weight and mass, surface and texture. He had hounded Ed Barnes about the importance of balancing light and his work had a level of ease and comfort because of it. To me, Breuer was soft where Mies and Kahn were hard. Breuer had a feel I could never fully understand or get away from at the same time. Breuer felt as New England to me as the birch trees in our backyard.

As I became older and developed my own practice, I realize how much I strive for lightness within a larger composition of clarity and purity. It is the passion for lightness that I saw in Breuer which never left the pit of my stomach.

Quest Diagnostic Flagship Laboratory by Mark Cavagnero Associates Architects.

And so I recently drove down Gallows Lane to “touch” Gagarin’s’ houses, which sit a few hundred yards apart. I noticed the front of Gagarin One was torn up with several pick-up trucks parked in its muddy, unpaved driveway. Without hesitation I pulled in and walked through the front door. I introduced myself to the skeptical builder who soon spoke with me about everything he was doing. We walked through the house and reveled in his photos from the family depicting its original condition, furniture, art and decoration. He spoke of the new owner’s desire to completely restore the house, inside and out.

I felt excited and relieved. An important piece of modern architecture was being restored and preserved. More importantly, a small piece of me was in that fieldstone wall, hanging out there with the stair treads. This house was a vision made manifest. It tied together the Yankee sensibility of simplicity and restraint with the twentieth century introduction of light, openness and a direct connection to the landscape.

The manicured landscape surrounding the Gagarin House, in clear counterpoint to the wild meadow beyond, spoke to our agricultural past. The integration of art by Calder and Miro spoke to our industrialized and worldly present. And the green roofs, the abundant cross ventilation and the use of local wood and stone spoke to our shared vision of a sustainable future. The house reminded me of my father talking about the genius of the man. It reminded me why all these years I have loved architecture, and my father, who died sixteen years ago.”