To commemorate the Bauhaus centennial, E.R. Butler & Co. has published a special slip-cased edition of our research library’s first published books: Transitional Moments: Marcel Breuer, the W.C. Vaughan Co. and the Bauhaus in America, with an essay by Robert Wiesenberger and catalogue entries by H. Reynolds Butler; and Manufacturing Modernism: Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and the W.C. Vaughan Co., by H. Reynolds Butler with a foreword by Peter McMahon.

Transitional Moments focuses on architect Marcel Breuer. His “House in the Museum Garden,” now considered one of the most influential architecture exhibitions of the 20th century, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and built in their garden in 1949. Exhibited to record attendance, the house featured the updated Bauhaus prescriptions for modern living—an airy, informal combination living room / dining room and a pass-through kitchen—and was intended to inspire the future of American housing. The project featured custom hardware produced by the W.C. Vaughan Co. in collaboration with Breuer, which included everything from mahogany door knobs to cabinet hinges. Vaughan also supplied hardware for Breuer’s iconic Frank House, the Geller House, Breuer’s own houses in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and houses by Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson and other modernist masters.

Transitional Moments is complemented by Manufacturing Modernism, a history of the residential projects of Gropius and Breuer which used the hardware of the W.C. Vaughan Co., first under the Gropius–Breuer partnership and later by Breuer alone, from 1938 through 1959. The book also reproduces the entire surviving archive of Vaughan drawings for Gropius and Breuer projects.

Historic black-and-white and color photographs by Ezra Stoller, Robert Damora and Paul Davis complete this engaging architectural publication.