Designer and architect Marcel Breuer in his Wassily Chair, ca. 1926.

Courtesy Constance L. Breuer

PROVIDENCE Poor Marcel Breuer. If he’d just stuck to furniture, his place in the pantheon of great 20th-century designers might be secure.

Indeed, even if they don’t know Breuer’s name, most Americans are familiar with his most famous creation — the so-called “Cesca Chair,” the sleek steel-and-mesh chair he first designed in the 1920s and that is still in commercial production today.

But Breuer, who’s the focus of a major traveling exhibition opening Friday at the RISD Museum, didn’t just do furniture. In a career that spanned nearly 50 years, the Hungarian-born architect and designer created everything from gem-like private residences to giant government buildings and corporate headquarters. Along with fellow émigrés such as Eero Saarinen and Walter Gropius, he also helped introduce America to European-style modernism.

Then, in the late 1950s, Breuer shifted course. In particular, he embraced Brutalism, a movement that sought to give buildings the same rough-hewn shapes and textures found in modern sculpture.

Breuer’s best-known building, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, is considered a masterpiece of the genre. But many other Brutalist buildings (see, for example, the Brown Sciences Library on the East Side) are reviled as ugly, overblown eyesores.

“It’s probably the most unpopular architectural style ever,” says the RISD Museum’s assistant director, James Hall. “Partly, it’s the name. I mean how can you say anything good about something called Brutalism? It just sounds so harsh. But there’s also something about big concrete buildings that drives people — and especially New Englanders — crazy.”

All of which raises a question: Should Breuer be celebrated for his early work as a pioneering designer-architect in the mold of, say, Charles and Ray Eames? Or should he be blamed for spawning one of the least popular architectural styles in history?

“Marcel Breuer — Design and Architecture” probably won’t end the debate. But the show, which was organized by Germany’s Vitra Design Museum and is making its final stop in Providence, does offer a thorough look at Breuer’s career, from his early days as a wunderkind Bauhaus designer and architect to his later years as the godfather of Brutalism.

“I think people will be surprised at how familiar a lot of this stuff is,” says Hall. “Even if they don’t know who Breuer is, they almost certainly know his work. I mean, if you’ve ever leafed through a copy of Dwell or Modern Home or Architectural Digest, you’ve probably seen Breuer’s work. If you’ve ever shopped at Design Within Reach — again, it’s all Breuer.”

That feeling — call it design déjà vu — is especially true of the tubular-steel tables and chairs Breuer began designing in the mid-1920’s.

Indeed, Breuer’s very first effort — a lightweight club chair featuring a curving tubular-steel frame and strap-like leather seat and back — is considered an icon of modern design. Dubbed the “Wassily Chair” after the Russian painter (and Breuer admirer) Wassily Kandinsky, the chair is still produced by the contemporary furniture-maker Knoll International.

Another early work, the so-called “Cesca Chair,” is just as famous. Like the Wassily Chair, the Cesca Chair (named for Breuer’s daughter) features a tubular-steel frame. But the Cesca’s cantilevered shape is even more sleekly aerodynamic. As a final touch, Breuer used another lightweight material — a see-through cane mesh — on the chair’s seat and back.

Though similar framing techniques had been used before — the French furniture-maker Thonet had been making its own wooden cantilevered chairs for years — Breuer was the first to experiment with steel. Hall says Breuer was inspired by an unlikely source: bicycles.

“The story is that he owned a bike and became intrigued by the tubular-steel handlebars,” Hall says. “After doing some research, he quickly realized that steel tubes have an amazing amount of strength and flexibility for their size. And, of course, they look good, too.”

Breuer was also one of the first to experiment with another new material: plywood. Though other designers are more closely associated with the material — notably, the Eameses, who used it extensively in their own work — Hall says Breuer deserves equal credit.

“Nowadays, it’s easy to forget how novel plywood furniture was in the 1920s and ’30s,” Hall says. “For designers like Breuer and the Eameses, plywood offered a way to make tables and chairs that were just as strong as traditional furniture, but at a much lower cost.”

Breuer developed many of his early furniture designs at the Bauhaus, the legendary design school in Weimar, Germany. First as a student and then as a “young master” or teacher, Breuer mingled with a Who’s Who of modernism, including German architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, Hungarian designer Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and the Swiss painter Paul Klee.

But with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Breuer was forced to join the other Jews fleeing Germany. In 1935, he settled in London, where he began developing a line of plywood furniture for Isokon, a British company specializing in modern design. Two years later, he accepted an offer from his old friend Gropius to join the architecture faculty at Harvard University.

For next few years, the two Bauhaus refugees worked together, designing a series of small modernist-style houses for Boston-area clients (many of them Harvard professors). (Gropius’ own house in Lincoln, Mass., is now owned by the preservation group Historic New England and is open to the public. Breuer’s house nearby is still in private hands.)

At the time, many of the materials and techniques used in these houses — things like recessed lights, built-in furniture, sliding glass doors and open floor plans — were considered novel, if not downright revolutionary. Now they’re commonplace.

“People forget that New England was one of the hotbeds of modern architecture,” Hall says. “In the 1930s and ’40s, you have major figures like Saarinen, Gropius and Breuer all working around Boston. You also have TAC.” (The Architects Collaborative, an influential design firm founded by Gropius in 1945 and staffed with graduates from Harvard and MIT.)

Breuer’s career got another boost in 1948, when Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibit devoted to his work. The show, which included a life-size modernist house built in the museum’s sculpture garden, was a huge success, attracting tens of thousands of visitors.

Besides confirming Breuer’s status as a modern master, the MoMA show triggered a flurry of new commissions, many for large-scale government and corporate projects.

In 1952, he was one of three architects (the others were Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss) selected to design the new UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The commission was considered a major coup, especially since France’s most famous modernist architect, Le Corbusier, was also in the running.

Other large-scale projects included the IBM Research Center in France (1960); the headquarters for the federal Health, Education and Welfare Dept. (HEW) in Washington, D.C. (1972); and Atlanta’s Central Public Library, which was completed a year after Breuer’s death in 1980. There were also colleges (including a major expansion for Amherst College), religious buildings (notably the St. John’s Abbey monastery in Collegeville, Minn.) and at least one major public works project (the Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1975).

In many of his later works, Breuer worked almost exclusively with concrete, creating massive sculptural forms that stand in stark contrast to his lightweight furniture and gem-like private residences. The results were often dramatic: the Whitney Museum, which Breuer completed in 1966, is as elegant and mysterious as any of the sculptures in the museum’s permanent collection.

But Breuer’s work also started a vogue for large-scale concrete buildings that produced such hard-to-like projects as Boston City Hall (1968) or any of the dozens of anonymous poured-concrete office buildings that turn parts of Washington, D.C., into architectural dead zones.

Though Breuer doesn’t deserve all the blame — Boston City Hall, for example, was designed by the Boston firm Kallmann, McKinnel and Knowles (now Kallmann, McKinnell and Wood) — he did lay many of the foundations on which Brutalism was born. (By the way, don’t bother sending your hate mail to Breuer for the Brown Sciences Library, either. That sad hulk of a building was designed in 1967 by the firm of Warner, Burns, Toan & Lund.)

Hall, for one, hopes visitors will take time to learn more about Breuer and his work.

Certainly the exhibit, which fills most of the museum’s new Chace Center galleries, contains plenty of material, including examples of Breuer’s early furniture designs along with a trove of photographs, drawings and other vintage materials. Other highlights include several interactive computer displays and about a dozen large-scale architectural models created especially for the exhibit.

Asked if the exhibit will change anyone’s mind about Brutalism, Hall smiles.

“Just wait a few years,” he says. “Twenty years ago, you couldn’t give away a modernist house. Now, a day doesn’t go by when some movie star or Internet mogul is making news by buying a house by Richard Neutra or Paul Rudolf or Charles and Ray Eames. Sooner or later, it’s going to be Brutalism’s turn.”

“Marcel Breuer — Design and Architecture” opens Friday at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St. in Providence.

bvansicl@projo.com