Marcel Breuer

Istvan Banyai created this image for the Extremely Hungary Festival. Extremely Hungary is a yearlong festival showcasing contemporary Hungarian visual, performing, and literary arts in New York and Washington, D.C., throughout 2009. The festival reveals the roots of Hungary’s thriving contemporary culture and its impact on American society through a broad spectrum of events at leading cultural institutions in the two cities. Extremely Hungary is organized by the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York.

By the time I learned who Marcel Breuer was, he’d already indelibly shaped my ideas about knowledge, my thoughts about spirit, and my first steps into adulthood. I went to college at St. John’s University, a small Catholic school for men run by Benedictine monks, nestled among the trees between a couple small lakes and a lonely stretch of I-94 in central Minnesota. The campus has a distinctly divided architectural flavor. On one hand, many of the buildings are red brick and stately.