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NY TIMES ARCHIVES ARTICLE FROM 1981, MARCEL BREUER, 79, DIES; ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER, By PAUL GOLDBERGER

Marcel Breuer, the Bauhaus architect who played a major role in shaping 20th-century architecture and design, died last night at his home on East 63d Street in Manhattan. He was 79 years old.

Mr. Breuer had been ill for some time with a heart condition, and had done little work since his retirement in 1976, according to Marceline Thomson, a spokesman for his architectural firm. A retrospective of his furniture and interiors is scheduled to open July 25 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Breuer (pronounced BROY-er) made small objects of tubular steel early in his career and vast buildings of concrete later on. In each case, he showed an interest in bending technology to sculptural purposes.

Began as Furniture Designer

One of modern architecture's internationally recognized masters, Mr. Breuer actually began his career designing furniture, in 1920, at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, where he produced, among other designs, some chairs that today are considered 20th-century classics.

But as an architect Mr. Breuer took on projects of enormous size and scale. Among his major building works were the Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), in 1953-58; the I.B.M. Research Center in La Gaude, France, 1960-61; St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., 1953-61, and the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, 1963-66, his best-known work in New York, where he had based his practice since 1946.

Mr. Breuer had hoped in the 1960's to build a building in New York bigger than any of these. In 1968 he accepted the commission of a British developer to design 175 Park Avenue, a massive skyscraper that was to sit over the concourse of Grand Central Terminal and obliterate the train station's facade. Opposed on Grand Central

The project caused considerable controversy, and was blocked by New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission, which was later taken to court in an attempt to overturn the landmark status of Grand Central Terminal. Most of the city's architectural community opposed the project, leaving Mr. Breuer, long considered one of the more respected figures on the New York architectural scene, with few colleagues to defend him.

The final outcome of the legal struggle was determined in June 1978, when the Supreme Court upheld the Landmarks Preservation Commission's ban on construction of the building. The building would have been an 830-foot-high version of a prefabricated concrete style that Mr. Breuer had relied on extensively in his later years.

He designed a number of buildings in the 1960's, including the headquarters of the Housing and Urban Development Department in Washington, which consisted of highly textured prefabricated concrete panels, each containing a window set deeply into the panel to create shadow and a sense of depth.

The buildings with these prefabricated concrete panel facades were generally rather massive - although many, like the H.U.D. building and the I.B.M. research facility, were set on concrete legs to lighten their visual appearance - and were substantially different from the tensile, light structures of wood and metal that Mr. Breuer designed in his early years. Born in Hungary

Marcel Breuer was born on May 21, 1902, in Pecs, Hungary. He began to study art in Vienna in 1920, but left the Academy of Fine Arts after just five weeks, when he heard about the new Bauhaus school in Weimar. He enrolled there in the same year, and by 1924 was himself a Bauhaus Master in charge of the carpentry and furniture department.

Mr. Breuer was never entirely at ease with the Bauhaus's arts-andcrafts orientation. Although he shared its conviction that the machine age demanded a new approach to design, he urged a greater emphasis on architecture technology and actual building than the Bauhaus offered.

While at the school he devoted himself to designs for prefabricated housing and modular furniture, and in 1925 invented one of his more famous designs, the Wassily chair of leather straps slung across a frame of tubular steel.

Named for Wassily Kandisnsky, who purchased the first one, the chair was inspired by the tubular steel curve of bicycle handlebars. It has been frequently imitated, and both Breuer-authorized versions and altered imitations remain in production today. The Famous Chair

Mr. Breuer left the Bauhaus for Berlin and his own architectural practice in 1928. Soon thereafter he designed a dining chair of one piece of tubular steel bent in cantilever form with a caned seat and back - his most famous furniture design of all. Commonly called the cesca chair, it is probably more widely used today, almost four decades after its design, than ever before.

There was little actual building work for a young architect in Berlin after 1929, and Mr. Breuer designed a number of theoretical projects for housing, hospitals and highways, including an early cloverleaf interchange in 1928. In 1931 he left Berlin and, using his car as a mobile headquarters, traveled and lectured around Europe and North Africa.

He received two major commissions at this time, however, and the buildings that resulted are considered by historians to be among his best - the Harnischmacher House in Weisbaden, Germany, of 1932, a light structure of projecting porches that used steel cable as wind bracing, and the Doldertal Apartment in Zurich, 1934-36, a tensile box notable for its tightness and control.

In 1936 Mr. Breuer left Germany for England and a brief association with the architect F. R. S. Yorke, which led him to some design motifs he was to use later with increasing frequency, such as walls of stone and glass, extensive use of concrete and repeated use of a single prefabricated element on a facade. Practiced With Gropius

Mr. Breuer left England after just a year to join his old Bauhaus associate, Walter Gropius, at Harvard University's School of Architecture. He and Gropius practiced together briefly, and Mr. Breuer became a major figure in the transplanted Bauhaus group surrounding Gropius at Harvard.

He and Gropius taught many Harvard students who were themselves to become major figures in American architecture, such as I. M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Ulrich Franzen, Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph.

While at Cambridge, Mr. Breuer designed a number of small houses that attempted to combine his European modernist background with American materials. The result was a set of influential buildings of wood and, occasionally, stone, generally boxy and horizontal with the same light, tensile quality of the architect's white structures in Europe.

The Breuer houses did not embrace their sites, as Frank Lloyd Wright's ''organic'' structures did, although they were carefully related to views and to other surroundings. A house should ''not seem overdesigned or cluttered with funny details,'' he once told an interviewer, and then went on to talk of the importance, to him, of ''the transparency of architecture, the flow of space through a structure and between its walls.''

In 1946 Mr. Breuer moved his practice to New York City, and in 1947 he built for himself a house of wood cantilevered from a concrete base in New Canaan, Conn.

The structure epitomized the light and tensile work of his early career, but just four years later the architect built himself another house, also in New Canaan, that indicated a change in direction. The second house was set solidly on the ground, and its walls were of fieldstone. The squarish form of the International Style still prevailed, but the feeling switched to one of massiveness. Heavy and Scuptural

From then on, Mr. Breuer's work became more openly heavy and sculptural. At St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., he designed a church of concrete slabs with a grille-like facade, and, in front, a latter-day belltower - an abstract form consisting of a huge concrete slab sitting on four curving legs and punctured by openings for a sculptured cross and church bells.

To the critic Paul Heyer, the tower ''prepares you for an occasion'' and is ''an inspiration of faith and hope.'' Vincent Scully, the architectural historian, complained, however, that the change in direction of Mr. Breuer's work was yielding merely ''a table ornament in front of a radio cabinet.''

The sculptured style, heavy with masonry, continued with the Whitney Museum, a building sheathed in granite and marked by a cantilevered form that projects each floor out more toward the street than the floor below.

A museum in Manhattan, Mr. Breuer said at the time his design was first shown in 1963, ''should have identity and weight in the neighborhood of 50-story skyscrapers, of mile-long bridges, in the midst of the dynamic jungle of our colorful city. It should be an independent and self-relying unit.''

Perhaps the most significant building of Mr. Breuer's late period, at least in terms of its influence on his own work, was the I.B.M. Research Center. There the Breuer system of prefabricated concrete window panes received its first mature use, and the building's double-Y plan and base of treelike concrete columns, which left the ground area bare, were devices the architect used frequently in other projects of the 1960's -most notably, in the opinion of many critics, in Mr. Breuer's H.U.D. headquarters in Washington. Other Major Work

Mr. Breuer's other major work in his late career ranged from a series of buildings designed for New York University's Bronx campus (now Bronx Community College) from 1956 to 1964; a large ski-resort town in Haute Savoie, France, 1960-69, and a series of office buildings and factories for the Torin Corporation of Torrington, Conn., all done at the instigation of Rufus Stillman, Torin's chief exective, who was so enthusiastic a patron that he also commissioned two Breuer houses.

Mr. Breuer was one of the nation's more honored architects; he received the accolade, rare for an architect, of an exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973, and he was awarded the American Institute of Architects' highest honor, its gold medal, in 1968.

At the time he received the medal, Mr. Breuer told the A.I.A.: ''Buildings should not be moody, but reflect a general, durable quality. Architecture should be anchored in usefulness; its attitude should be more direct, more directly responsible, more directly social.''

He also called for a balance between esthetic, social and functional concerns. ''Only this combination of polar qualities,'' he concluded, ''can assure us an architecture which is alive and of our time.''

Mr. Breuer maintained offices at 15 East 26th Street and, since 1964, had a branch office for his firm in Paris. In recognition of his extensive work in France he was awarded the Grande Medaille d'Or, or Gold Medal of the French Acadiemie d'Architecture, in 1976.

He retired from active work in 1976, and sold the well-known house in New Canaan and moved to Manhattan. His practice has been carried on by his partners, Herbert Beckhard, Robert F. Gatje, Tician Papachristou and Hamilton Smith in New York, and Mario Jossa in Paris.

He is survived by his wife, Constance, a daughter, Francesca, and a son, Tomas. Funeral arangements were incomplete.

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