Modern Architecture

I. Introduction
Modern Architecture: the buildings and building practices of the late 19th and the 20th centuries. The history of modern
architecture encompasses the architects who designed those buildings, stylistic movements, and the technology and
materials that made the new architecture possible. Modern architecture originated in the United States and Europe and
spread from there to the rest of the world.
Among notable early modern architectural projects are exuberant and richly decorated buildings in Glasgow, Scotland, by
Charles Rennie Mackintosh; imaginative designs for a city of the future by Italian visionary Antonio Sant’Elia; and houses
with flowing interior spaces and projecting roofs by the American pioneer of modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright. Important
modern buildings that came later include the sleek villas of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier; bold new factories in
Germany by Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius; and steel and glass skyscrapers designed by German-born architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
II. Characteristics
Modern architects reacted against the architecture of the 19th century, which they felt borrowed too heavily from the past.
They found this architecture either oppressively bound to past styles or cloyingly picturesque and eclectic. As the 20th
century began they believed it was necessary to invent an architecture that expressed the spirit of a new age and would
surpass the styles, materials, and technologies of earlier architecture. This unifying purpose did not mean that their
buildings would be similar in appearance, nor that architects would agree on other issues.
The aesthetics (artistic values) of modern architects differed radically. Some architects, enraptured by the powerful
machines developed in the late 19th century, sought to devise an architecture that conveyed the sleekness and energy of a
machine. Their aesthetic celebrated function in all forms of design, from household furnishings to massive ocean liners and
the new flying machines. Other architects, however, found machine-like elegance inappropriate to architecture. They
preferred an architecture that expressed, not the rationality of the machine, but the mystic powers of human emotion and
spirit.

Modern architects also differed in their understanding of historical traditions. While some abandoned historical references
altogether, others used careful references to the past to enhance the modernity of their designs. Italian architect Antonio
Sant'Elia resoundingly rejected traditional architecture in his Futurist Manifesto of 1914 (Futurism). He called for each
generation to build its houses anew and celebrated glass, steel, and concrete as the materials to make this possible. The
modern designs of his countryman Giuseppe Terragni, on the other hand, referred explicitly to the past. Terragni’s Casa del
Fascio (Fascist Party Headquarters, 1932-1936) in Como, Italy, featured an inner atrium for public assembly inspired by the
courtyards of Italian Renaissance palaces, and windows laid out according to ancient Greek and Roman theories of ideal
architectural proportions. Terragni saw tradition as providing ideal building blocks for a new architecture. But the building’s
concrete and steel construction and its sleek, unornamented form expressed a thoroughly modern aesthetic.
In the United States Frank Lloyd Wright also rejected 19th-century European architecture. He attributed his new
architectural concepts to educational building blocks he had played with as a child, to Japanese architecture, and to the
prairie landscape on which many of his houses were built. Yet the fireplaces with adjacent seating that occupied a central
position in his houses referred to the very distant past, when tending and maintaining a fire was essential for human
survival. In Wright’s houses, few dividing walls separated rooms and one room seemed to flow into the next. Wright’s open
design was extremely influential, and variations of it were used, not only for the houses of the wealthy, but for apartments
and middle-class homes in Europe and the United States.
Modern architecture also challenged traditional ideas about the types of structures suitable for architectural design.
Important civic buildings, aristocratic palaces, churches, and public institutions had long been the mainstay of architectural
practices, but modernist designers argued that architects should design all that was necessary for society, even the most
humble buildings. They began to plan low-cost housing, railroad stations, factories, warehouses, and commercial spaces. In
the first half of the 20th century many modernists produced housing as well as furniture, textiles, and wallpaper to create a
totally designed domestic environment.
III. New Materials and Technology
Developments in two materials—iron and concrete—formed the technological basis for much modern architecture. In 1779
English architect Thomas Pritchard designed the first structure built entirely of cast iron: Ironbridge, a bridge over the River
Severn in England. At around the same time, another Englishman experimented with a compound of lime, clay, sand, and
iron slag to produce concrete. Iron had been used since antiquity to tie building elements together, but after the erection of
Ironbridge it took on a new role as a primary structural material. Builders throughout Europe and North America began to
erect warehouses with beams of iron instead of wood and to create storefronts with cast-iron façades.
One of the most spectacular examples of early iron construction was the Crystal Palace in London, England, designed by
English architect Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Spreading over 7.3 hectares (18 acres), the building
consisted entirely of panels of glass set within iron frames. Paxton adapted two major features of the Industrial Revolution to
the architecture of the Crystal Palace: mass production (in the manufactured glass panels and iron frames) and the use of
iron rather than traditional masonry (stones or brick). He managed to erect this vast building in less than six months, a feat
he accomplished by detailed planning and by prefabrication of the building parts off-site. In 1889 French engineer Gustave
Eiffel carried forward Paxton's daring ideas for iron construction in his 300-m (984-ft) tall Eiffel Tower in Paris. Steel for
construction also became abundantly available in the 19th century.
A. Reinforced Concrete
Improvements in concrete ran parallel to developments in iron and steel technology. In 1892 French engineer
François Hennebique combined the strengths of both in a new system of construction based on concrete reinforced
with steel. His invention made possible previously unimaginable effects: extremely thin walls with large areas of
glass; roofs that cantilever (project out from their supports) to previously impossible distances; enormous spans
without supporting columns or beam; and corners formed of glass rather than stone, brick, or wood.
One of the earliest architects to experiment with these new effects was Belgian architect-engineer Auguste Perret,
whose 1903 apartment building on Rue Franklin in Paris, France, exemplified basic principles of steel
reinforcement. On the façade, Perret clearly separated the structural elements of steel-reinforced concrete
from the exterior walls, which were simply decorative panels or windows rather than structural necessities. The
reinforced concrete structure also eliminated the need for interior walls to support any weight, permitting a
floor plan of unprecedented openness. Perret's building stood eight stories high, with two additional stories set
back from the front of the building, the typical height of most Paris buildings at the time.
B. Chicago School
The construction of buildings taller than Perret’s was made possible by the safety elevator, first demonstrated in
1854 by American inventor Elisha Otis. Architects in Chicago, Illinois, were the first to exploit the possibilities
offered by the elevator in combination with the new steel and concrete technologies. Following a disastrous fire in
1871, Chicago experienced a massive boom in new housing, warehouses, and commercial buildings. The collective
response of a diverse group of architects to the reconstruction of the city led to the development of the skyscraper.
Architect William Le Baron Jenney devised a solution to the problem of fireproof construction for tall buildings by
substituting steel in the structural system for cast iron, which melts at high temperatures. He continued to clad the
building’s exterior with traditional masonry, however. Jenney brilliantly demonstrated his system in the Second
Leiter Building (1889-1891, Chicago), in which a steel frame held together by rivets supported itself as well as all
the interior walls and floors and the exterior cladding.
Architect Daniel H. Burnham and Charles B. Atwood, a designer in Burnham’s firm, took Jenney’s system and
drove it to new heights with the Reliance Building (1889-1895), which stood 16 stories high, at least 6 stories higher
than had been possible with masonry construction. Their design stripped away the ornamentation characteristic of
most buildings at that time and instead used tall windows to emphasize the beauty of the building’s skyward thrust.
Most importantly, they eliminated Jenney’s heavy masonry exterior, creating a system known as curtain-wall
construction. In this system, the exterior wall of each floor is hung on the iron or steel frame so that the wall
supports only its own weight and not the floors above it. This method of construction reduced the overall weight of a
building, which allowed it to be built higher, and permitted the extensive use of glass on the façade. The glass-and-
steel skyscrapers erected through most of the 20th century drew much of their aesthetic as well as technological
inspiration from the clean lines and light appearance of late-19th-century Chicago buildings such as this one.
IV. Cities and Suburbs
The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and the 19th centuries that brought forth advances in materials and technology
was also responsible for large-scale changes in patterns of living and working, and for the rapid growth of cities. By the
beginning of the 20th century, the population of cities such as Paris, London, and New York City numbered well over a
million people. Such population concentrations created demand for new roads, railroads, bridges, and subways, and for a
wide range of new buildings, including railroad stations, department stores, opera houses, and covered public markets.
Perhaps the most troubling feature of the Industrial Revolution was the squalor created wherever factories were found.
Reformers throughout the 19th century struggled to change laws and customs in order to improve working conditions and
provide decent and sanitary housing for the new urban masses.
Among the reformers were those who dreamed of using architecture to create industrial utopias that would help control the
unchecked urban growth and keep the working classes themselves in line. In 1901 French architect Tony Garnier submitted
designs for an imaginary city where workers would live in lushly landscaped residential areas and commute by streetcar to
clean and pleasant factories (published as Cité Industrielle, 1917). Although his plans went unrealized, such utopian
projects exerted a powerful force on architects and governments at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1928 the Congrès Internationaux de l'Architecture Moderne (International Congress of Modern Architecture, or CIAM)
was founded to promote social justice and modern architecture. In 1933 this group issued the Athens Charter, which
recommended simple, clear urban-planning schemes that would separate leisure, work, housing, and traffic. Unfortunately,
by separating these functions, many of these plans eliminated any sense of community. Governments and private
enterprise sponsored new towns based on these guidelines, which assumed that people living in the right environment
would be more likely to behave in accordance with the dictates of society. Much urban planning in the 20th century was
devoted to decentralizing cities and setting up self-sufficient garden suburbs.
V. Art Noveau and Related Movements
Art Nouveau, which flourished in Europe between 1890 and 1910, was one of the earliest (and shortest-lived) efforts to
develop an original style for the modern age. Art nouveau artists and designers transformed modern industrial materials
such as iron and glass into graceful, curving forms often drawn from nature, though with playful elements of fantasy. In
contrast to both Perret and the architects of the Chicago School, art nouveau designers were interested in architecture as a
form of stylistic expression rather than as a structural system.
In the three centers of art nouveau—Barcelona, Spain; Brussels, Belgium; and Paris, France—architects struggled to define
a style with distinctly local characteristics. In Barcelona, one of the most ambitious projects of architect Antoni Guadí was
the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Família (Church of the Holy Family, 1883-1929, 1979 to present). Gaudí turned to
nature for a rich variety of animal and plant forms to decorate the towering façades of the Sagrada Família. He also used
natural forms structurally: columns shaped like bones, undulating walls in brick, a roofline resembling the profile of an
armadillo. His wide use of ceramic tile, a local building material, gave color and texture to his designs. The deeply personal
nature of his fanciful designs meant that no school developed to follow him. Much more effective in generating a following
was architect Victor Horta of Brussels.
Like Gaudí, Horta reacted against prevailing styles with an architecture that responded to local traditions and materials,
although Horta transformed iron and glass as well as Belgian brick into slender, graceful forms inspired by flowers. Among
his most influential designs was the Hôtel Tassel (1892-1893) in Brussels, a three-story house in which thin iron columns
flow into stylized vines and serve both as structural and as decorative elements. The creation of these organic forms
depended not on mass-production or modern machines, but on craftsmanship, thereby restoring to architecture what many
feared was being lost to an increasingly technological engineering mentality. Horta’s flowing lines became the hallmark of
art nouveau and were rendered by others in iron, glass, and plaster as well as in graphic design. In Paris, Hector Guimard
produced entrances for the Métro subway system (1899-1904), rendering fanciful plantlike forms in iron and glass.
As art nouveau’s influence spread throughout Europe and North America, regional variations developed: stile Liberty in
Italy, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, and modernisme in Spain. Among the major achievements of these
art nouveau offshoots were the Elvira Photo Studio (1896-1897) in Munich, Germany, by German architect August Endell;
and the Stadtbahn (city railway system, 1894-1899) in Vienna, Austria, by Otto Wagner. Perhaps the greatest of these
achievements is the Willow Tea Room (1903-1904) in Glasgow, Scotland, designed with sinuous, willowy lines by Scottish
architect and graphic designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
VI. Arts and Crafts and Related Movements
The Arts and Crafts Movement, which began in England around 1860 and continued into the first decade of the 20th
century, shared many of the ideas of art nouveau. The movement’s earliest proponents reacted against cheap
manufactured goods, which had flooded shops and filled houses in the second half of the 19th century. The Arts and Crafts
ideal they offered was a spiritual, craft-based alternative, intended to alleviate industrial production’s degrading effects on
the souls of laborers and on the goods they produced. It emphasized local traditions and materials, and was inspired by
vernacular design—that is, characteristic local building styles that generally were not created by architects.
English designer William Morris, who led the Arts and Crafts movement, sought to restore integrity to both architecture and
the decorative arts. The Red House (1859) in Kent, designed for Morris and his family by English architect Philip Webb,
demonstrates the architectural principles at the heart of the English movement. The unpretentious brick façades were free
of ornament, the ground plan was informal and asymmetrical, and the materials were drawn from the area and assembled
with local building techniques.
Spurred by the experience of furnishing his home, Morris set up a studio with several associates, including Webb and
English artists Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Edward Burne-Jones. They designed everything—from wallpaper to stained glass,
books, and teapots—according to the highest standards of craftsmanship. The idea of the house as a total work of art, with
all of the interior objects designed by the architect, emerged from this studio and remained standard practice throughout the
Arts and Crafts movement.
In Scotland, Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art in two phases, which reveal a dramatic shift from his early art
nouveau phase to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. The building’s asymmetrical front (1897-1899) featured a range of styles
and curving art nouveau ironwork. The rear of the building (1906-1909) presented something quite different: To light the
artists’ studios within, Mackintosh opened up the façade with tall windows set into an austere masonry grid. Spare, simple,
functional, and breathtakingly different, this elevation predicted many of the qualities that came to be associated with
modern architecture after World War I (1914-1918). Inside, the library, with its soaring interior space, dark wood, and
exquisitely crafted furniture and lighting fixtures, revealed Mackintosh's fascination with Japanese architecture and design.
Mackintosh's influence spread across the European continent to Vienna, Austria, where architects Joseph Maria Olbrich
and Josef Hoffman and painter Gustav Klimt formed a group known as the Vienna Secession after they had seceded from
the tradition-bound Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. Olbrich designed a headquarters and exhibition space for the group, a
white block topped with a dome of gilded, wrought-iron leaves. Hoffman eventually became the leading architect of the
Secession movement and with painter and designer Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) in
1903. This artists’ cooperative was dedicated to the production of furniture and other household objects.
Viennese architect Otto Wagner, an early proponent of art nouveau styles, designed one of the most important early
modernist buildings in Vienna, the Postal Savings Bank (1904-1906). Its sleekly engineered interior featured a ceiling of
glass panes framed in aluminum and luminous ceramic tile wall surfaces.
A Japanese Secession movement that arose in 1920 demonstrates the global reach of architectural ideas in the 20th
century. This fledgling organization, composed of architects Mamoru Yamada, Sutemi Honiguchi, Mayumi Takizada, and
Kikuji Ishimoto, signaled the first appearance of the modern movement in Japan, where modernization inevitably was
connected with westernization. The group was also influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, who built the Imperial Hotel (1915-
1922) in Tokyo.
The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Union), founded in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius, Peter Behrens, and Fritz
Schumacher, differed from the other Arts and Crafts movements by allying artists and architects with industrialists. The
Werkbund's ambition was to bring the talents of artists to bear on industrial products. The most fruitful alliance was that of
Peter Behrens with the German electricity company, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). As AEG’s architect and
chief designer, Behrens produced lightbulbs, radiators, stationery, lamps, and fans, in addition to factory buildings and a
large housing complex for company workers near Berlin. The Werkbund also worked to transform the education of
craftspeople so a body of skilled artisans would be available to carry out its designs.
VII. The Age of Machines
A powerful new aesthetic that celebrated the machine began to emerge in the early years of the 20th century, as architects
for the first time designed buildings specifically suited to the needs of industry. One of the earliest examples is Frank Lloyd
Wright’s Larkin Building (1904, destroyed), designed for a mail-order company in Buffalo, New York. Massive, minimally
decorated brick towers dominated the exterior of this fortress-like office building; but inside, a vast central atrium four stories
high created a brightly lit, open space for workers. Wright designed each detail for maximum efficiency, from an innovative
new air conditioning and ventilation system to desks with built-in chairs. The plain exterior and highly functional interior
reflected Wright’s desire to create a building that would work as smoothly as a well-designed machine.
Behrens's AEG Turbine Factory (1908-1910) in Berlin combined elements of the classical Greek temple with modern
industrial materials and building technology. A series of steel arches span the vast main hall, descending to form a row of
steel wall piers (pillars) reminiscent of the columns in a church or Greek temple. Between these steel supports, the side
walls were mostly of glass. Massive-looking concrete piers anchored each corner of the building and supported a temple-
like pediment at each end. From the pediments a thin grid of steel and glass was hung like a curtain. This glass and steel
wall was a forerunner of glass curtain walls common in later skyscrapers.
German architects Walter Gropius and Adolph Meyer, former employees of Behrens, presented an even more modern
approach in their designs for the Fagus Factory (1911, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany). Gone were Behrens’s references to
classical architecture. Instead of heavy masonry corners and a vaulted interior space, the Fagus Factory had open glass
corners and a flat roof that emphasized its simple post-and-beam construction system. Such dynamic glass and steel
architecture appeared as the vanguard of the new modernism.
VIII. Expressionism and Rationalism
Two tendencies emerged in Germany after World War I (1914-1918): expressionism and rationalism. Expressionism drew
inspiration from such expressive individualists as Gaudí and was connected with a broader movement in German art,
literature, and drama. After the war’s horrible slaughter, which mass-produced weapons had made possible, some German
architects grew less enchanted with the machine and sought a design ideal that would express emotion and the essence of
life. These architects included Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, and Erich Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower (1920-1924,
Potsdam, Germany) housed a domed observatory atop a rounded, free-form tower. Its surging sculptural forms and varied
volumes demonstrated the newly expressive possibilities of concrete, which in this case hid a conventional brick structure
underneath.
The second movement, rationalism, garnered many more supporters than expressionism. The Neue Sachlichkeit (new
objectivity), as the rationalist movement was called in Germany, grew out of a desire among painters for an art that directly
addressed pressing social and political problems. Architects, in turn, sought to design buildings that might improve the lives
of those within them. They called for designs of great clarity that paid strict attention to function and made use of modern
materials and technologies. The Van Nelle Factory (1927-1929) in Rotterdam by Dutch architects Johannes Brinckmann,
Leendert van der Vlugt, and Mart Stam, represented an early realization of a rationalist building conceived as a set of
floating planes and interpenetrating volumes. A glass curtain wall along its length both enclosed and revealed the building’s
reinforced concrete structure. At the same time, it allowed for maximum penetration of light for the workers within.
A. Art Deco
The style known as art deco combined the exuberance of expressionism with the clean, functional lines of
rationalism. Named after an exposition of decorative art held in Paris in 1925, art deco rapidly spread through
Europe and the United States. As had architects in the arts and crafts movement, art deco architects produced
lamps, tableware, household appliances, and jewelry. Streamlined art deco architecture mimicked the sleek
design of ocean liners, but it also drew on the decorative qualities of art nouveau and the flowing forms of
expressionism. Bruno Taut and Peter Behrens in Germany and Rob Mallet-Stevens in France were among the
most prominent art deco designers.
Art deco enjoyed the widest diffusion in the United States, where it was employed in the design of many post
offices and government buildings of the 1930s. One of the premier art deco buildings is the Chrysler Building
(1930) in New York City, a 77-story celebration of one of the nation's largest automobile manufacturers, by
architect William Van Alen. With its striking pyramid of shiny metal arches rising to the pinnacle and its stainless
steel gargoyles based on the 1929 Chrysler hood ornament, it quickly became a New York City landmark.
B. De Stijl
The houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, with their open, flowing floor plans, had seemed strikingly original to
European architects before World War I. But after the war, European architects began to strip away the heavy
masonry of Wright's buildings to reveal the purity of his flowing plans, typically in modern glass structures with
interlocking volumes. Among the first to do so were members of the De Stijl (Dutch for “the style”) group in the
Netherlands. This diverse group of architects, artists, and craftspeople was active from 1917 to 1931.
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and designers Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld were the chief exponents of
De Stijl. The spare intersecting planes in primary colors of Mondrian's paintings found architectural realization
in the Schröder House (1924) in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Designed by Rietveld and the client, Truus Schröder,
the house featured steel beams and industrial railings set off by solid red and white walls. Sliding panels
enabled the occupant to choose between a single expansive space or separate sleeping, eating, bathing, or
work rooms.
C. Bauhaus
 Perhaps the most influential wing of the modern movement developed at the Bauhaus, a school founded by
Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. Following the goals of the Deutscher Werkbund, of which Gropius was a
member, the Bauhaus sought to unite art, architecture, and design in one institution, where students learned in
workshops dedicated to theater, sculpture, stained glass, ceramics, or other arts and crafts. Students worked
collaboratively with teachers who were some of the outstanding innovators of the era: Swiss painter Paul Klee,
Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, Austrian-American type designer Herbert Bayer, Hungarian-American
architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer, and German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The school moved to Dessau in 1924, where the Bauhaus building (1926) designed by Gropius became a
symbol of modern architecture. Above the ground floor, the studio and workshop wing was sheathed in an
extensive glass curtain wall so that it appeared to hover like a transparent box. Elsewhere in his design,
Gropius set narrow ribbon windows flush with stucco walls, a feature that later appeared in much modern
architecture.
Many Bauhaus faculty members fled to the United States after the National Socialist (Nazi) Party came to
power in Germany in 1933. As a result, Bauhaus architectural ideas and teaching strategies spread quickly
through such institutions as Harvard University, where Gropius and Breuer taught, and the Illinois Institute of
Technology, headed by Mies van der Rohe.
D. New Guidelines for Architecture
During the 1920s Swiss-born French architect Charles Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, defined five
features of modern architecture: (1) interior walls arranged freely, without regard to the traditional demands of
structural support; (2) pilotis, or slender columns that lift the building above the ground; (3) a flat roof to be used
as a garden-terrace; (4) external curtain walls that bear no weight, with a free arrangement of windows or other
openings; and (5) a preference for ribbon windows, or narrow horizontal bands of glass across the length of a
façade. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1928-1931) at Poissy, France, exemplifies all of these features, and its
circular staircase and series of ramps help to showcase his arrangement of spaces and volumes. Le Corbusier
also published a magazine in Paris called L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit). He saw this new spirit as an ideal
collaboration of architects, industrialists, and business people.
Le Corbusier's most famous statement, 'The house is a machine for living in,' reflected his belief that everything
about the house must be designed to meet functional needs. He also applied this idea to the city and felt that
streets should be dedicated to the efficient flow of automobile traffic rather than to the leisurely pace of the
pedestrian. He envisioned replacing the narrow, crowded streets in the center of Paris with vast expanses of
grass and massive skyscrapers. Although his plans for Paris were never realized, his notion of towers in parks
as the ideal city plan became the dominant model for low- and mid-priced housing on the outskirts of major
cities in Europe and other parts of the world. Le Corbusier's vision became a rallying cry for opponents of
modern architecture, who decried his insistence on rational efficiency. They foresaw the consequences of this
vision, if applied on a large scale: cities enslaved to automobiles on wide, congested roads, lined with tediously
repetitive residential towers.
Le Corbusier’s contemporary, Mies van der Rohe, chose a more widely accepted architectural slogan: 'Less is
more.' The spare, clean lines of his buildings, from a 1919 design for a glass-walled skyscraper to his pavilion
representing Germany at the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929, consistently exemplified this view. The
Barcelona Pavilion, a small building with an adjacent reflecting pool, had a radiant clarity, with wall planes that
visually overlapped one another and dynamic play between the alternately reflective and transparent surfaces
of water and glass. Although destroyed following the fair and recorded in only a handful of photographs, this
building shares with Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Gropius’s Bauhaus the status of one of the foremost
examples of early-20th-century modern architecture. (The pavilion was reconstructed in Barcelona in 1986.)
E. Totalitarianism’s Stifling Effect
Repressive and authoritarian regimes in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Germany during
the 1930s ended research in modern architecture in those countries. In the USSR, support eroded for architects
involved in the experimental movement of constructivism, after Communist Party leaders judged its designs to
be too abstract and machine-like. Under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, architects found themselves confined to
the approved neoclassical style that glorified the state. In Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler encouraged traditional
German architecture. Local governments closed down the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1925 and in Dessau in 1933,
and the Nazi party then launched a campaign against so-called decadent art (meaning modern art).
 The one European dictatorship hospitable to modern architecture was that of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Because
he promoted the modernization of Italy as an integral part of fascism, architecture with a modern, streamlined
aesthetic fit in with his goals. And because Mussolini also pledged to root the modern state in long-standing
Italian traditions, his regime tolerated diverse architectural styles for its public buildings.
Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio (1932) in Como, Italy, embodied both a modern aesthetic and a reference
to historical roots. Headquarters for the local branch of the fascist party, the Casa borrowed its plan from the
traditional Italian Renaissance palace. The central court, left open in Renaissance palaces, here was covered
with glass to form an indoor atrium. The Casa’s sleekly modern, marble-clad façades depended upon the
placement of window openings for architectural interest. The corner tower and the building’s placement on a
main square recalled traditional town hall buildings of the region.
IX. The International Style
In 1932 American architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and American architect Philip Johnson wrote a highly
influential catalog to accompany an exhibition of architectural photographs and models at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York City. In the catalog, International Style: Architecture Since 1922, the authors outlined what they saw as the
characteristics of the new architecture: an emphasis on volume, not mass; on regularity, not symmetry; on proportions and
sleek, technical perfection rather than ornament; and a preference for elegant materials that included those of the machine
age. Republished many times as a book, International Style became a bible of modern architecture, a doctrine against
which all contemporary architecture could be measured. Attempting to bring order to a confusing group of architectural
styles, the authors however had not intended to lay down any laws.

Early in his career, Hitchcock had distinguished between architects he described as new traditionalists, who simplified
ornament but generally accepted historical traditions, and new pioneers, who eliminated historical references and ornament
from their work and emphasized planes and space. The International Style exhibition, however, focused only on the new
pioneers, and architects and historians took that style to be the heart of modernism, to the exclusion of many other
innovative modern buildings.
The catalog of International Style architecture included few examples from the United States, and those few were mainly the
work of Europeans who had immigrated to the United States. Thus, it included the Lovell Beach House (1926, Newport
Beach, California), a reinforced concrete structure with flat roof and bold cantilevered elements by Austrian-born architect
Rudolph Schindler. And for the same client, the Lovell House (1929, Los Angeles, California) by Richard Neutra, also of
Austria, which featured a flat roof, slender steel frame, and freely arranged interior plan. But the catalog ignored the
Austrians’ debt to the pioneering work of American architect Irving Gill, in the La Jolla Women's Club (1914, La Jolla,
California) and Dodge House (1916, Los Angeles). Gill's spare, smooth concrete walls, flat roofs, and asymmetrically
arranged rooms were unquestionably modern and were not matched in Europe until the mid-1920s.
Perhaps the gravest omission was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose designs had inspired many European architects.
Yet his opposition to the thin, transparent walls of international style buildings ruled him out. In retrospect, Wright's
Fallingwater (1937, Bear Run, Pennsylvania) seems like a brilliant response to that slight. The house is built over a
waterfall; cantilevered slabs of concrete jut out over a rushing stream just where it becomes a waterfall. The chimney and
rugged stone supporting piers intersect the cantilevers to form vertical counterpoints to these horizontals. Wright's daring
use of materials in this profoundly modern house expresses his insistence on an architecture that is at one with nature and
with its particular site.
The term International Style came to refer generally to modern European architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, and the later
architecture that it influenced. In the United States, this style dominated progressive architectural design well into the 1960s.
Its spread was assisted by the presence of many European architects who had fled European dictatorships during the
1930s.
The steel-framed high-rise best expresses the later International Style and is exemplified by the steel and glass Lake Shore
Drive Apartments (1948-1951) in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe. Other notable International Style towers include the
Equitable Life Assurance building (1944-1947) in Portland, Oregon, by Italian-born architect Pietro Belluschi; the Lever
House (1951-1952) in New York City by the American architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill; and the bronze and
glass Seagram Building (1958) in New York City by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson. Whereas skyscrapers of the
1930s commonly had setbacks at their upper stories to permit light to reach the street, this new generation of skyscrapers
consisted of uncompromising slabs that rose with unadorned severity to increasingly greater heights, celebrating
technological sophistication and the power of American corporations.
Although New York and Chicago are known as the chief skyscraper cities, modern skyscrapers appeared in most large
American cities from the 1960s on. Notable examples are the Transamerica Pyramid (1972, San Francisco, California) by
William Pereira and Associates; the 60-story John Hancock Tower (1976, Boston, Massachusetts) by I. M. Pei & Partners;
and Pennzoil Place (1976, Houston, Texas) by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.
High-rises and skyscrapers enhanced another trend in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: urban renewal. The
strategy behind urban renewal was the replacement of run-down housing and shabby retail areas with new office buildings,
shopping areas, and townhouse and apartment complexes. But in the process, urban renewal destroyed small-scale urban
housing and retail districts and moved low-income residents out of the inner city. City planners, politicians, and architects
achieved the pristine sidewalks and cityscapes they sought, the machine-inspired ideal of Le Corbusier and his followers.
But by the 1980s many had begun to realize that cities had lost their street life and with it their sense of community as an
unintended consequence of urban renewal.
X. Beyond Europe and the United States
Adherents of the modern movement were eager to carry their ideas beyond Europe and the United States to other
countries. Le Corbusier was especially successful in locating followers and buildings elsewhere in the world, particularly in
Brazil and India.
A. Brazil
Le Corbusier’s influence in Brazil began in the 1930s, after Lúcio Costa, a young Brazilian architect, won a design
competition for a major government building, the Ministry of Education and Health (1936-1943) in Rio de Janeiro.
Costa insisted on sharing this commission with other architects who had not won, and invited Le Corbusier to serve
as a consultant on the project. The result of Le Corbusier's visit of less than a month was a high-rise design based
on his principles and a coterie of followers dedicated to his ideas.
Corbusian design became part of a movement already underway to modernize Brazilian design by purging it of
traces of its past as a Portuguese colony and by discovering, or inventing, a national architecture. A number of
European architects who had immigrated to Brazil in the 1920s became influential teachers and helped spread
modern architectural ideas. An exhibition of Brazilian architecture held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City in 1943 celebrated the International Style accomplishments of this diverse group, which included Costa, Oscar
Niemeyer, and Roberto Burle Marx.
The most prominent work of these architects was built in Rio de Janeiro, but in the 1950s Brazilian architects had
an opportunity to showcase their designs in an entirely new capital city to be built in the center of Brazil. Planned by
Costa and filled with buildings by Niemeyer, the city of Brasilia was a lavish testimony to Le Corbusier’s principles of
modern architecture and planning. Costa divided residential zones by class, designated a monumental government
and business center, and designed mammoth streets dedicated to the expeditious movement of the automobile.
The grim unfriendliness of Brasilia’s urban spaces became apparent, however, as residents tried to adjust to them,
and Brasilia thus provided an eloquent demonstration of the deficiencies of this planning ideal.
B. India
As a British colony, India had absorbed British architectural styles. From 1912 to 1931 British architects Sir Edwin
Landseer Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker were responsible for the construction of New Delhi as Britain’s new
imperial capital of India. The challenge they faced was to produce an architecture that successfully combined local
traditions with a statement of colonial power. New Delhi’s urban plan, with its emphasis on wide, straight roadways
radiating like the spokes of a wheel from major imperial landmarks, was a direct expression of British control. But
Lutyens's design for the Viceroy's House (1912-1931), though inspired by neoclassicism, also paid homage to
Delhi’s Mughal architecture in its use of red and yellow sandstone, its dome, and in other details.
Following India's independence in 1947, the new nation prepared to assert itself as a modern country. The Indian
state of Punjab chose Le Corbusier and a handful of other internationally famous European architects to design its
new capital city of Chandīgarh. Unlike Lutyens’s design, Corbusier’s modernist designs for the Secretariat (1952-
1956), Palace of the Assembly (1953-1963), and other government buildings have no Indian inflections. Huge
distances separate buildings and the small-scale amenities that make city life appealing are missing. As a result,
the only sign of life on the streets has been the automobile.
C. Japan
 In Japan, an era of massive industrialization after World War II (1939-1945) brought the first successful fusion of
Japanese and modernist traditions. Exemplifying this approach is the Prefecture of Kagawa (1955-1958), an office
building in the city of Takamatsu by Japanese architect Kenzō Tange. Its lightweight appearance, achieved through
imitation of traditional Japanese post-and-beam construction, belies its concrete structure.
During the 1960s Tange, and later Fumiko Maki, led a distinctly Japanese movement in modern architecture called
metabolism. Fascinated by high technology and mass production, the metabolists produced fanciful drawings for
cities that seemed to come from science fiction. They envisioned huge structures with movable modules for living,
some floating on water, some rising as skyscrapers. Also during the 1960s a similar group in England called
Archigram was led by architects Peter Cook, Ron Herron, and others. Archigram’s futuristic proposals expressed
hope about the power of technology to transform and improve the world. Both movements enjoyed enormous
success as publicity ventures but produced few actual buildings. Fascination with the image of high technology lived
on after Archigram’s end in the early 1970s, in the work of English architect Richard Rogers. It can be seen in his
Lloyd's Building in London (1986) and in the Pompidou Center in Paris (1971-1977), designed in collaboration with
Italian architect Renzo Piano. The Pompidou Center made visible pipes, ducts, escalators, and other utilities.
D. Other Nations
For the developing world, reliance on Western modern architecture was neither cost-effective nor responsive to the
particular histories, building traditions, and living and working patterns of inhabitants. But modern architecture did
provide convenient, inexpensive, and rapidly constructed images for multinational corporations as they spread
outside the United States and Europe. American architectural firms such as Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill designed
buildings in Saudi Arabia and Iran, generally of the same type as they would have built at home. In many cases,
industrializing nations adopted Western modernism primarily because it was a symbol of modernity, and jettisoned
local building traditions on its behalf.
A remarkable exception to this rule is the architecture of Luis Barragán in Mexico. After the turbulent years of the
Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Mexico struggled to find a new, modern identity. As was common elsewhere,
modern architecture was both promoted and resisted for its internationalism. While some architects adopted the
modern art deco style, others turned to International Style towers to provide much of the country's public housing.
But by the mid-1930s a reaction against modernism began to set in. Barragán and others returned to local
traditions, to the simple, strong colors and plain, unadorned walls seen in much of rural Mexico. With elementary
geometric forms set off by still pools of water and lush vegetation, Barragán’s designs were serenely detached from
the machine-age sleekness of the International Style.

XI. Scandinavian Modernism

A desire to enhance national traditions while embracing the tenets of modernism characterizes the architecture of early
Scandinavian modernism. The leaders were Erik Gunnar Asplund of Sweden, Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto of Finland, and
Arne Jacobsen of Denmark. Asplund, in his design for the Stockholm City Library (1928), set a rotunda (round building with
a dome) within a rectangular cube. The design was neoclassical in inspiration, but the building’s plain surfaces were
characteristic of rationalist modernism. Asplund went on to create decidedly modernist buildings for the 1930 Stockholm
Exhibition, with slender piers and extensive use of glass and steel. But his most influential building may have been the
small, unadorned Woodland Chapel at the Stockholm Cemetery (1920). With its shingled roof and temple-like columned
entry porch, the chapel seemed to transcend both local and classical architectural traditions.
Jacobsen worked within Danish tradition throughout his career, but was deeply influenced by the craft and rigor of Asplund's
designs. In the Jespersen Office Building (1955) in Copenhagen, Jacobsen also incorporated the curtain wall and steel
frame typical of high-rise buildings in the United States.
Eliel Saarinen was a member of a group of artists, musicians, and writers who celebrated Finnish nationalism, and with
them he participated in a broad movement to revive Nordic vernacular traditions. His Helsinki Central Railway Station (1904-
1914) utilized local masonry techniques to emphasize bold architectural forms and expressive sculptural decoration. But he
allowed functional considerations to guide him in designing its sleek, streamlined appearance and rational organization of
space. Saarinen moved to the United States in 1923, where he designed buildings for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Eliel’s son, Eero Saarinen, secured his fame with two designs. The first was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, for
which he won a competition in 1948 (though it was not built until 1963). Its soaring line has since become a world-
recognized symbol of St. Louis. The second design was for the TWA Terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport (1962) in New
York City, a building that expresses flight with its sweeping curves. Although visually pleasing, the terminal’s curving shape
proved maddeningly resistant to expansion.
Alvar Aalto's early work reveals the influence of Asplund's designs, although Aalto was later influenced by Russian and
Dutch constructivism, Finnish neoclassicism, and Frank Lloyd Wright's house designs. In collaboration with his first wife,
Aino Marsio, Aalto designed houses, public buildings, and plywood furniture. After working with reinforced concrete, a
standard material in modern European designs, he began to use more wood because of its association with native Finnish
tradition and its greater warmth and expressiveness. For the Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku, Finland, Aalto layered
sensuous strips of teak and other woods, even using teak for the venetian blinds on the exterior of the windows. The natural
materials he used—wood-paneled interiors, a rough granite base for the house, and an exterior wall of stone rubble—stand
in sharp contrast to the clean white walls of International Style modernism, although they display a sympathy with the
natural materials of Wright's architecture. Aalto was less interested in arguing for a specific style than in finding solutions
that would dignify places of human habitation.

XII. Postmodernism and Diversity

While the International Style continued to dominate the world of architecture through the 1960s, only in the 1970s did it
become apparent that the International Style and modern architecture were not necessarily the same. Indeed, the work of
such diverse architects as Aalto, Barragán, Tange, and many others reveals that modern architecture has never been
limited to a single style. Among the architects who produced important variants are Pier Luigi Nervi and Aldo Rossi of Italy,
and Louis Kahn of the United States. Nervi’s vast airplane hangars (1936-1941) and sports arenas (1932, Florence; 1960,
Rome) demonstrate the pure poetry of modern forms in reinforced concrete. At the other end of the spectrum, the Torre
Velasca in Milan, Italy (1958) by the Italian architectural firm Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers (BBPR) reveals the
resilient appeal of medieval tower design transformed into a 20th-century skyscraper. Rossi and Kahn explored the
architectural potential of elementary building blocks, drawn from history as well as from the geometry of the cube, sphere,
and cylinder. This approach is exemplified by Kahn’s highly original designs from the 1960s for government buildings in
Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh. While clearly modern, Rossi’s and Kahn’s architecture was rooted in a respect for older
traditions, which they transformed through new combinations into highly personal poetic statements. This is especially
visible in Rossi’s Bonnefanten Museum (1990) in Maastricht, Netherlands, and in Kahn’s Salk Institute (1959-1965) in La
Jolla, California.
In the 1970s a new movement known as postmodernism began to challenge long-held modernist principles. The architects
who led the movement asserted that the use of historical references in architecture was not only permissible but desirable.
To the dictum of Mies van der Rohe, 'Less is more,' American architect and leading postmodernist Robert Venturi replied,
'Less is a bore.' Arguing that the modernist aesthetic was stifling to creativity, disliked by the masses, and uninteresting to
design, postmodern architects celebrated diversity, color, and historical references in their designs. Venturi articulated many
of these ideas in his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Other leading voices of postmodernism
include Americans Charles Moore, Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, and Frank Gehry. Moore's design for the Piazza
d'Italia (1975-1978) in New Orleans, Louisiana, is a boldly colored, open-air plaza celebrating the city’s Italian community,
for which Moore playfully arranged fragments of classical columns and other traditional forms, along with images drawn
from a delicatessen.
Graves’s design for the Portland Public Services Building (1982) in Portland, Oregon, is a striking example of postmodernist
architecture. Garlands over windows, a giant keystone, and a statue of a mythical figure adorn this 15-story celebration of
color and ornament. Surrounded by modernist high-rise towers of steel and glass, Graves’s building is a startling insertion in
the cityscape and a strong statement against the austere terms of modern architecture.
One of the most exuberant expressions of postmodern freedom came in the design of the Guggenheim Museum (1997) in
Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry. The originality of its undulating metal forms relate to the organic expressionism of Antoni
Gaudí’s designs of a century earlier, also in the Catalan region of northern Spain.
But even as postmodernism thrived, modernism did not disappear. The dramatic and elegantly understated Vietnam
Veterans Memorial (1982) by American architect Maya Lin dates from the same year as Graves’s Portland Building. Another
premier example of modernism, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, by American architect Richard Meier, was
completed the following year. Meier went on to design the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities (1997, Los Angeles,
California), a paragon of elegantly spare modernist design. Indeed, variety is the most consistent characteristic of the
architecture built since the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s.
In the 1980s a variation on postmodernism emerged, known as deconstruction, which sought to demonstrate the
arbitrariness of all previous cultural assumptions. Deconstructivist architects applied these analytical, abstract ideas to the
design of buildings. Leading practitioners included Zaha Hadid of England, Peter Eisenman of the United States, and Swiss-
born architect Bernard Tschumi. In Eisenman’s design for the Wexner Center for the Arts (1989) in Columbus, Ohio, the
architect used local conditions in generating a seemingly arbitrary mechanism to govern his design. One wall of the art
center is aligned with an adjacent building, another wall with a nearby football gridiron, and a third with the flight path of
planes that regularly pass overhead. After a brief flurry of interest in the late 1980s, interest in deconstruction faded, and
only a handful of buildings were ever constructed to represent it.
Much more significant, in the United States and in the rest of the world, was a resurgence of interest in regional traditions
and materials, and a greater willingness to meld features of rationalist modernism with elements from many other traditions,
especially vernacular architecture. Emblematic of this is the work of Antoine Predock in the American Southwest. In his
Nelson Fine Arts Center (1989) in Tempe, Arizona, Predock presents a modern vision inspired by the warm colors, stucco
surfaces, and square cutout windows of local Spanish and Native American traditions. Others who approach architecture
with a comparable openness to historical and local practices and produce designs of extraordinary sensitivity include Sam
Mockbee in Alabama; Carlos Jiménez, a Costa Rican architect based in Texas; Enrique Norten in Mexico; Liangyong Wu in
Beijing, China; and Ada Karmi-Melamede in Israel. Their work points toward an architecture that focuses less on debates
among competing movements and more on buildings that are economical, environmentally responsible, and beautiful.

Modern Masters
The modern movement in architecture and industrial design, which emerged in the early 20th century, responded to
sweeping changes in technology and society. A new world of machines and cities forced artists to think anew about their
environment, and soon revolutionized the way we perceive, portray, and participate in the world. Modernist ideas have
pervaded every form of design, from graphics to architecture, as well as being a key influence on art, literature and music.

Many modern designers insisted that they followed no "style." And indeed modernism was more than a style, it was a new
worldview, conditioned by new perceptions of time and space. But even though there were ways of expressing that
worldview, these are the hallmarks of modern design: an interest in exploring new materials, a rejection of historical
precedents, and a simplification of forms by a reduction of ornament.

Our word modern comes from the Latin modernus, which meant "just now," although the term was not widely used before
the 1500s, when it provided a way of distinguishing the period after the Renaissance from the ancient and medieval worlds.
It also meant "new-fashioned, not antiquated or obsolete." Then, towards the end of the 1800s, the term became more
closely attached to the "new art" of the coming twentieth century.

Virginia Woolf famously designated 1910 as the year in which those changes coalesced into a cultural revolution: "in or
around December, 1910,” she wrote, “human character changed." In his provocative paper "What Was Modernism?" critic
Robert Adams agreed with Woolf, identifying the Postimpressionist show at the Grafton Galleries in London as modernism’s
first defining moment: "Within five years either way of that date a great sequence of new and different works appeared in
Western culture, striking the tonic chords of modernism. Ten years before that fulcrum of December 1910, modernism is not
yet; ten years after, it is already."

The ideology of modernism had several sources. One of the earliest was the English artist William Morris, whose writings
formed the basis for the arts and crafts movement. Morris advocated a return to well-made, handcrafted goods instead of
mass-produced, poor quality machine-made items. In his famous statement, “Have nothing in your house that you do not
know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” Morris outlined the modern belief that utility was as important as beauty.

Another important figure in this development, and the first great modern architect, was the American Louis Sullivan, who
coined the phrase “Form Follows Function.” For Sullivan, functionalism meant the elimination of ornament so the building
plainly expressed its purpose, and the principle led to the idea of designing buildings from the inside outwards, letting the
essential structure dictate the form and therefore its external appearance.

Viennese architect Adolf Loos, following Sullivan, insisted that functional objects should not be decorated; to do so was a
waste of effort, material, and capital. He wrote a manifesto entitled “Ornament and Crime,” in which he argued that the
avoidance of ornament was "a sign of spiritual strength." This essay became one of the foundation texts for the modern
movement.

The Wiener Werkstätte (German for the "Vienna Workshop") also offered important contributions to the development of
modernism. Its founders, architect Joseph Hoffman and painter Koloman Moser, formed this movement in 1903. It was
dedicated to developing high quality art and design to be brought into people's daily life, a philosophy which reflected the
influence of William Morris. Reacting against historicism, the Wiener Werkstätte employed simplified shapes, geometric
patterns, and minimal decoration. A great deal of attention was put on fine craftsmanship. This followed the group's motto:
“Better to work ten days at one piece than to manufacture ten pieces in one day.”

But by the 1920s, modern designers began to embrace new technologies and the possibility of mass production; the
aesthetic of the machine then became a central theme in modernism. Two figures in particular promoted the language of
industry: Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

Gropius was the leader of the Bauhaus, the school of art and architecture in Germany. The Bauhaus revolutionized art
training by combining the teaching of the pure arts with the study of crafts. Gropius aimed to unite art with technology, and
he educated a new generation of designers and architects to reject historical precedents and adopt the ideology of modern
industry. For the Bauhaus, Gropius wrote the curriculum, designed the building, and he assembled its faculty: an
extraordinary group that included Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer.

Le Corbusier, probably the most influential modern architect, introduced a fascination with the designs of engineers, such as
grain silos, cruise ships, and automobiles. His radical ideas were given full expression in his 1923 book Vers Une
Architecture ("Towards a New Architecture"), an impassioned manifesto. It is still the best-selling architecture book of all
time, and it includes Le Corbusier’s famous motto: "A house is a machine for living in."

In the 1930s, many of the leading European modernists emigrated to the United States; thus the theory and practice of
Modernism became widespread. The 'tradition of the new', as Richard Weston called it, became the dominant mode of
progressive artists. What had begun as a cluster of loosely related artistic movements scattered across Europe emerged as
the dominant style of the 20th century.

Written by Anthony S. Denzer, Ph.D.