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Toshiko Mori unifies Breuer home with diaphanous glass "bridge and break" staircase

Mori Breuer, Please

Toshiko Mori unifies Breuer home with diaphanous glass "bridge and break" staircase

For a dead architect, Marcel Breuer is blowing up the news this year: After the Whitney decamped to the Meatpacking, the Met annexed Breuer’s signature Upper East Side museum building, honoring the architect in a suave rechristening. Virginia’s only Breuer building was headed for the wrecking ball, but saved; this year, too, his Atlanta Central Library was scheduled to meet its end, but will not be demolished thanks in part to the dedication of Brutalism preservation activists.

Now, Toshiko Mori has revamped a 1951 Breuer project in New Canaan, Connecticut, unifying a two-building complex with a “bridge and break” angular glass staircase that honors Breuer’s forms while flooding the home with light.

The New York–based architect updated the home’s interiors to Breuer’s original specifications, save the elimination of a ground-floor bedroom and a skylight she added to the main circulation corridor.

“Visually, the skylight connects the original structure to the new addition and connecting stair,” Mori told Dezeen. “The massing of the addition takes its cues from the original Breuer house, adhering to the orthogonal lines and modest proportions of the existing site.”

Like a modernist caterpillar cozying up to a choice leaf, the staircase, diagonally sited between the two original structure, rises gradually from the partially sunken lower level and switches back sharply to take residents to the upper floor. Mori’s work adds 3,000 square feet of living space to the original 2,200: Three bedrooms occupy the home’s top story, which is clad in transparent glasses and cantilevers out over the lower floor, while a garage, service area, and common rooms round out the program on the ground floor.

New York–based Quennell Rothschild & Partners restored and updated the landscape to dialogue with Mori’s work.

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