Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. The Bauhaus curriculum stressed the education of its students in the elements of visual art, craft, and the production of architecture. Breuer was eventually appointed to a teaching position as head of the school's carpentry workshop. He later practiced in Berlin, designing houses and commercial spaces. In the 1920s and 1930s, Breuer pioneered the design of tubular steel furniture. Later in his career he would also turn his attention to the creation of innovative and experimental wooden furniture.
Perhaps the most widely-recognized of Breuer's early designs was the first bent tubular steel chair, later known as the Wassily Chair, designed in 1925 and was inspired, in part, by the curved tubular steel handlebars on Breuer's Adler bicycle. In the 1930s, due to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Breuer relocated to London. While in London, Breuer was employed by Jack Pritchard at the Isokon company; one of the earliest introducers of modern design to the United Kingdom. Between 1935 and 1937 he worked in practice with the English Modernist F. R. S. Yorke with whom he designed a number of houses. Breuer eventually ended up in the United States. He taught at Harvard's architecture school, working with students such as Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and I.M.Pei who later became well-known U.S. architects. At the same time, Breuer worked with old friend and Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius, also at Harvard, on the design of several houses in the Boston area and elsewhere. One of the most intact examples of Breuer's furniture and interior design work during this period is the Alan I W Frank House in Pittsburgh, designed with Gropius as a Total Work of Art.