Any good technician can build a functionally perfect house. But a serious architect will do more, infusing space with beauty, soul and wisdom, creating places that interact with time and the seasons and honor their surroundings.

The late Marcel Breuer was such an architect and the man who envisioned the vistas, the nooks, the textures and subtleties of Bismarck's Annunciation Monastery, built during 1958-1963 by request of the Benedictine Sisters after seeing Breuer's work at St. John's University in Minnesota.

This week, New York City architect Yutaka Takiura made a visit to the Bismarck monastery to see Breuer's work in person. Born in Japan, Takiura studied architecture in the U.S. and worked with Breuer's partner, the late Herbert Beckhard.

An architect, urban designer and professor, Takiura has studied Breuer's architecture for the past 10 years and restored some of Breuer's famous buildings, including the Ferry House at Vassar College in 2003, said Jill Ackerman, communications director for the monastery.

Takiura, who had visited St. John's University last summer, also to see Breuer's creations, was accompanied by his mother, Kiyoka Takiura, who is pastor of a Japanese church. Sister Edith Selzler, a member of the Annunciation community and a longtime student of Breuer's work, accompanied the pair on a tour of the structures.

Takiura had seen photos of Breuer's work at Annunciation, but the reality is always different, he said.

In photos, the concrete and stone structures of the chapel, canopies and bell banner look massive, almost brutal, but in person there is an intimacy to the spaces that is characteristic of Breuer and modernist work, he said.

Modernism, so new in the 1910s and 1920s, so different from the formality of previous architecture, appealed to Takiura as a student, because the movement changed the way we think about the space we use - "people are more free in the space," he said.

Annunciation's chapel, for example, is so different from the traditional Gothic church, he said.

Breuer truly understood the importance of scale, he said, choosing the height of ceilings to create intimate spaces and the width of corridors and the length of walkways to evoke reflectiveness. An architect also has the power to manipulate space to frame a view, close off or open up vistas in turn, he said.

The use of natural materials, their beauty unhidden, brings forward their texture; the use of local materials fits the context of a building's surroundings, its neighborhood, its community, Takiura said.

"People feel comfortable (with natural materials)," he said. "It has shape and beauty, and people know how to use it.

"You feel good when you touch natural materials. It appeals to the five senses."

As a professor, Takiura finds that he has gravitated to the same teaching style that Breuer used at Harvard. Breuer would never reach in and draw over a student's work; rather, he would ask questions, listen, guide. Takiura asks students to consider space and light in their work, "what happens in summer, what happens in winter - massaging their brains, bringing out their creativity," he said.

Takiura said that his generation of architects is the last to touch Breuer and the modernists in real time; his generation's job, he said, is to bring that design wisdom to new generations of architectural students dazzled by trends and fads.

Takiura works with clients in the same manner, he said. His role is to open up possibilities beyond the magazine picture they may have brought in for him to copy, to get people to consider: "What's done in this space? What do they experience in this space?"

Like Breuer, he aims for spaces that have surprises - an angle that brings in the best light one particular morning of the year, spaces that have a magical quality, a "wow" moment.

Takiura was able to visit with Breuer's widow during the last years of her life. Modernism, she told him, was not about the flashy or the expensive - "it was all about decency," she said, about sharing technology and design with the wider world.

After living with the care and thought that went into the details of Breuer's houses, Takiura said, "If (every night) you go to sleep looking at the best, at something you love, and every morning you wake up to the best - 10 years later, your life's totally different.

"That's the importance of design."

(Reach Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@bismarcktribune.com.)