Modern Architecture in the 20th Century

Outline

• Introduction • New Materials • The Schools of Modernity The Chicago School The Werkbund The Bauhaus • The International Style • The Big Three • Frank Lloyd Wright • Key Buildings • Characteristics

Modernism in Architecture

The defining feature of modern architecture is the modern aesthetic which may be summarized as “plain geometric forms”.

Modern Architecture takes its roots from the Industrial Age when architects are exploring new materials such as steel and reinforced concrete. The design of buildings are not anymore influenced by religion nor classicism, but rather architecture is inspired by the machine.

Today, we are so accustomed to the modern aesthetic that it can be difficult to imagine the controversy surrounding its development. Yet many decades were required for this aesthetic to mature and gain mainstream acceptance, which was finally achieved in the early twentieth century (under the leadership of the Bauhaus).

The New Materials

The two principal materials for the new forms and high massive buildings:

• steel (pioneered in Britain and brought into general use in America)

• reinforced concrete (developed in France)

Steel

The fundamental technical prerequisite to large-scale modern architecture was the development of metal framing.

Glass and iron, iron frame

Eiffel Tower, Gustav Eiffel, 1887 Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton, 1851

The First Structures

The first definitive skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building, Chicago built in 1883-85 by William le Baron Jenney. Of fireproof construction, it has a metal frame clad in brick and masonry.

Reinforced Concrete

Francoise Hennebique in 1892, perfected a system

for the best location of steel reinforcement in concrete; the combination of the compressive strength of concrete with the tensile strength of concrete in a homogenous grid was one of the turning points in architectural history.

The First R.C. Structure

Church of St. Jean-de Montmarte , Anatole de Baudot, Paris, 1897. The first example of reinforced cement in church construction.

Auguste Perret (1874-1954)

Elimination of unnecessary detail and expression of structure are basic to any understanding of modern architecture.

The architect who brought that approach to its first satisfying climax was Auguste Perret (1874-1954).He was a French architect and a specialist in reinforced concrete construction.

Rue Franklin Apartments, 1904 August Perret

In 1903 he designed an apartment in Paris and went further than the Chicago architects. He realized that that the 8-storey frame made load-bearing walls unnecessary; since the walls held nothing up, the building could have open space inside.

Theater de Champs Elysees, 1913

Notre Dame Du Raincy, 1923 Auguste Perret

Segmental vaults of in situ reinforced concrete were elegantly supported on a few

slender shafts, so that a new light and airy space was encircled by non-load bearing screen walls of pre-cast concrete units filled with coloured glass.

The ‘Schools’ of Modernity

The Chicago School

The Werkbund

The Bauhaus

The Chicago School

Chicago's architecture is famous throughout the world and one style is referred to as the Chicago School. In the history of architecture, the Chicago School was a school of architects active in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.

Right: The Chicago fire of 1871

destroyed most of the city and gave an opportunity for architects to design and build new structures.

The first skyscraper

The intent of the Chicago architects was to dispense of historical styles. This set the tone for the modern movement.

The crucial event of the movement was

the design of the skyscraper. • new technologies: steel-frame

construction in commercial buildings • the elevator, invented in 1852 made

multi-storey buildings possible • spatial aesthetic which co-evolved

with, and then came to influence, parallel developments in European Modernism.

Louis Sullivan,the Father of Modern Architecture, 1856-1924

Louis Henry Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism" .

It is the pervading law of all things organic and

inorganic,

Of all things physical and metaphysical,

Of all things human and all things super-human,

Of all true manifestations of the head,

Of the heart, of the soul,

That the life is recognizable in its expression,

That form ever follows function. This is the law. -The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,

1896

"form follows function", as opposed to "form follows precedent"

•ten floors of offices •covered with white terracotta tiles hung on the steel frame •punctuated by rows of large windows. •Sits on a two-storey base •Framed as part of the metal structure •Panels above and around the main doorways are filled with Sullivan’s own luxurious decoration in cast iron.

Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building, Sullivan, 1899

Carson Pirie Scott Department Store.

The Werkbund

The Deutscher Werkbund (German Workforce) was a German organization of artists, architects, and designers aiming to refine human craft. It was founded by Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffman, and Richard Riemerschmid in 1907.

The Werkbund was to become an important event in the development of modern architecture and industrial design, particularly in the later creation of the Bauhaus school of design. Its initial purpose was to establish a partnership of product manufacturers with design professionals to improve the competitiveness of German companies in global markets.

Poster for the 1914 exhibition in Cologne.

Left: Chair, Peter Behrens 1901

Sitzmachine Chair, Josef Hoffman, 1905

Desk, Richard Riemerschmidt, 1905

This movement is stimulated by Arts and Crafts movement in England. The group also seeks to mass produce products and focus more on the functionality of objects.

“from sofa cushions to city-building”

AEG Turbine Factory, 1908, by Peter Behrens

Fagus Shoe Factory, Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer 1913

Deutz Motor Pavilion, Walter Gropius 1914 Cologne Exhibition

Glass Pavilion, Bruno Taut, 1914 Cologne Exhibition

The Wiessenhof Estate, Stuttgart,Germany

1927

A series of 21 buildings in Stuttgart was built as a part of the Deutsche Werkbund Exhibition on 1927. A team of 17 architects led by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe plan the housing estate for the working class. In a way, Wießenhof became a prototype of the International Style.

Unity of the houses was achieved by: •flat roofs •simple facades •the use of muted tones as exterior wall colours

Apartment, J. J. Oud

Duplex ,Josef Frank

House, Hans Scharoun

House, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret) and Pierre Jeanerette

House, Victor Bourgeois

The Bauhaus School 1919-1933

The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence.

The concept of the school at the beginning was influenced by

medieval construction of churches wherein craftsmen and artists collaborated in the completion and details of the building.

The school provided workshops in: • metalwork • Weaving • Ceramics • Furniture • Typography • theatre.

The faculty consists of “masters of form” which are artists and architects and “masters craftsmen” of different skills.

Ar/Prof. Walter Gropius, (1883-1969) founder of the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus School, founded 1919

The Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught.

The term Bauhaus is German for "House of Building" or "Building School".

The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.

The masters of Bauhaus (Left to Right): Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer.

Bauhaus was considered to be the first design school in the modernist style. It influenced the art and architectural trends in the whole world. The school existed in three German cities (Weimar ,Dessau and Berlin), under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime.

The Bauhaus Influence

The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design.

Examples of architecture in the Bauhaus Style are the buildings in White City, Tel Aviv, Israel. Another major influence of the school is furniture design.

Idea Organization of the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, 1923

The teaching methods of the Bauhaus school are adapted in design schools today such as Parsons, The New School for Design.

African Chair by Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl, 1921

Tea Kettle by Marianne Brandt, 1924

Chess Set by Josef Hartwig, 1924

Slit Tapestry,Red/Green Gunta Stölzl, 1928

Homage to the Square, by Josef Albers, 1964

Typography

Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers.

Chair by Marcel Breuer, 1925

The Teachers of Modernity

Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-

Nagy re-assembled in Britain during the mid 1930s to live and work in the Isokon project before the war caught up with them.

Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the

Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split. The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.

In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, enjoyed the sponsorship of the influential Philip Johnson, and became one of the pre-eminent architects in the world.

Moholy-Nagy also went to Chicago and founded the

New Bauhaus school under the sponsorship of industrialist and philanthropist Walter Paepcke. This school became the Institute of Design, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Bauhaus Directors Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

The International Style

Philip Johnson

The term International Style was coined in 1932 by the organizers of the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since that time it has come to represent the mainstream of modern architecture from about the 1920s to the end of the 1950s.

International Style

The book produced for the exhibition declared that ‘there is now a single body of discipline, fixed enough to integrate contemporary style as a reality and yet elastic enough to permit individual interpretation and to encourage natural growth...

The MOMA Exhibit addressed buildings from 1922 through 1932. Johnson named, codified, promoted and subtly re-defined the whole movement by his inclusion of certain architects, and his description of their motives and values.

The MOMA Exhibit

Important buildings in the 1932 MOMA exhibition include:

• Alvar Aalto: Turun Sanomat building, Finland 1930

• Le Corbusier: Stein house, Garches, France, 1928

• Le Corbusier: Villa Savoye, Poissy-Sur-Seine, France 1930

• Le Corbusier: Carlos de Beistegui Penthouse, Champs-Élysées, Paris , France, 1931

• Otto Eisler: Double House, Brno, Czechoslovakia 1926

• Walter Gropius: Bauhaus School, Dessau, Germany 1926

• Walter Gropius: City Employment Office, Dessau, Germany 1928

• Erich Mendelsohn: Schocken Department Store, Chemnitz, Germany 1930

• Mies Van Der Rohe: Apartment House, Weissenhof Siedlung, Stuttgart 1927

Characteristics

The common characteristics of the International style include:

• a radical simplification of form • a rejection of ornament • and adoption of glass, steel and concrete as preferred

materials. The ideals of the style are commonly summed up in four

slogans: Adolf Loos “Ornament is a Crime” Louis Sullivan “Form follows Function” Le Corbusier “Machines for Living“ Truth to materials is a tenet of modern architecture (as

opposed to postmodern architecture), which holds that any material should be used where it is most appropriate and its nature should not be hidden.

The Seagram Building, 1957 Mies Van der Rohe

The Big Three

The Big Three of Modernism

Le Corbusier,Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius By the 1920s the most important figures in modern architecture had established their

reputations. The big three are commonly recognized as Le Corbusier in France, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany.

LE CORBUSIER, 1896-1967

The Domino House, Le Corbusier, 1914

The transparency of buildings construction (called the honest expression of structure), and acceptance of industrialized mass-production techniques contributed to the international style's design philosophy. The machine aesthetic, and logical design decisions leading to support building function were used by the International architect to create buildings reaching beyond historicism.

Domino House (1914–1915) is an open floor plan structures, supported by reinforced concrete columns meaning that the floor space was free to be configured into rooms without concern for supporting walls and the physical . The building envelope expression is an independent expression subject to the interpretation of Its Architect.

Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-31

In his seminal first book, Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier announced the ‘five points of a new architecture’:

•Free standing supports (pilotis)

•The roof garden

•The ribbon window

•The free plan

•The freely composed facade

The Villa Savoye is an elevated white concrete box cut open horizontally and vertically.

Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, Poissy, France, 1929

As with the paintings of the period (cubism) it is a crucial part of the concept that the observer is not standing in one place but moving around. As he does so, the forms of the building overlap and becomes sometimes solid sometimes transparent. The pilotis free the ground and the roof garden re-creates the air the land that is lost below.

The Modulor Man by Le Corbusier

The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965). It was developed as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, the Imperial system and the Metric system. It is based on the height of an English man with his arm raised.

Unité Habitation by Le Corbusier Berlin, 1957

Unité Habitation by Le Corbusier Briey, 1963

The design of these residential blocks are very innovative with the building suspended on piloti. The location of amenities are strategically located that the intention of the building as an anti-snob zone would be achieved.

These structures shows the features of Brutalist architecture and the use of brise soleil.

Notre-Dame-de-Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1950-54

In 1950-54 Le Corbusier produced a small church which is considered by many to be the greatest single architectural work of the century. The whole chapel is a study in light.

Notre-Dame-de-Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1950-54

On one side the walls are immensely thick, with deep irregular windows filled with coloured glass; on other walls, tiny windows are tunnels punctured through at different angles.

LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE, 1886-1969

Because of the rise of Nazi in Germany, many modernists were theatened to leave the country. Mies van Der Rohe went to the United States of America in 1937 to Chicago and then became the head of the architecture department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His famous works in Europe are the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat, while those in America are found in Chicago such as the Federal Center and the Crown Hall of the IIT.

The German Pavilion, Barcelona Expo

Mies Van Der Rohe: German pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition, Spain 1929 (above), left: the Barcelona Chair

Barcelona Pavilion by Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe, 1929, Barcelona, Spain

Tugendhat House by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Brno, Czech Republic, 1928-1930

Crown Hall by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, I.I.T., Chicago, Illinois, 1956

Federal Center, Chicago, Illinois, 1970 Sculpture by Alexander Calder

WALTER GROPIUS

After leaving the Bauhaus in 1928 and eventually fleeing from Germany in 1934, he migrated to the United States and taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

He founded The Architects’ Collaborative, an architectural firm. He together with Le Corbusier and Mies van Der Rohe are considered as the pioneers of the International Style.

The Bauhaus School Building, 1925

Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1938

MetLife (formerly PanAm Building)

By Emery Roth & Sons, Walter Gropius, and Pietro Belluschi,

1963, New York City, New York

Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867-1959

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) worked with Louis Sullivan.

His work spanned 70 years of

extraordinary versatility in the handling of steel, stone, redwood and reinforced concrete, extending geometrical plans and silhouettes to create a new and exhilarating relationship with the natural environment.

Martin House, Buffalo, 1904

He created, he claimed, the open plan and called his house ‘Prairie Houses’ inspired by the open spaces of the American Midwest.

Martin House, Buffalo, 1904

• Basic form – crossing of axes

• The extension of these axes into the garden forms other contained shapes which provide a single spatial experience through the interpenetration of internal and external shapes.

• Internal spaces flow into one another.

• Corners of rooms are dissolved

• Walls becomes screens.

• Horizontal emphasis is maintained by low sweeping ceilings and roofs and long clerestory windows

• Levels change without barriers and doors

Robie House, Chicago, 1908-09

The Robie House combined the traditional virtues of craftsmanship and good detail with modern technical installations. But his work demonstrated not so much the technology as the dramatic composition of roofs and the flow of the interior spaces into one another, which changed forever the concept of the house as a collection of boxes.

Fallingwater, Pennsylvania, 1936-37

Fallingwater is probably the most frequently illustrated house of the twentieth century.

Like his earlier houses, it is brilliantly organized. The stepped sections of reinforced concrete thrust outwards from a core of masonry to hover in overlapping planes above the rocks, trees and falling water.

He mastered an apparently impossible site and created the most vivid example of man-made form complementing nature.

The Guggenheim Museum, 1959

Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the cylindrical museum building, wider at the top than the bottom, was conceived as a "temple of the spirit" and is one of the 20th century's most important architectural landmarks.

The building opened on October 21, 1959.

Key Modernist Buildings

De Stijl (The Style)

In the Netherlands a group of artists and architects who called themselves De Stijl was formed in Leiden in Germany.

They published an influential magazine under that name, inspired by the work of Piet Mondrian, who used interlocking geometric forms, smooth bare surfaces and primary colours in his paintings and constructions.

The Schroder House, 1923

The Schroder House in Utrecht of 1923-24 by Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) is the outstanding example of De Stijl aesthetics.

It is a cubist construction of smooth planes at right angles, set in space and articulated by primary colours. Inside the walls slide away to make a large uninterrupted space.

Outside it is an abstract sculpture, as it Rietveld’s well-known chair of straight lines and primary colours.

Philip Johnson, Glass House, 1949

Philip Johnson (b1906) took up Mies’ themes of glass and steel, shown in his Bauhaus project for a glass house and created for himself at New Canaan, Connecticut an exquisite group of buildings which are a rigorous exercise in transparency, using the outside view as the walls.

The Lever House, New York, 1951-52

From Mies’ projects for glass skyscrapers of 1923, the influential firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill found inspiration for the first realization of his visionary ideas.

Lever House in New York became the model for tall buildings all over the world –the curtain wall of blue-green glass in light steel sections wrapped around the outside of the main structure, the technology of the services, which set an international standard, and the basic arrangement of a tall, thin slab above a low podium containing the entrances and the larger social areas.

Oscar Neimeyer. 1907

In South America a more spectacular architecture was rising.

After the Second World War, Brazil exploded in a stunning architecture of its own.

Lucio Costa (1902) was the planner of the new capital of Brasilia, having won the competition for its design in 1957.

The architect for most of the central buildings was Oscar Neimeyer (b1907).

The Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasilia, 1960.

Brasilia, 1957

The government complex at the center of Brasilia defines its separate functions in different elementary geometric shapes. The twin towers house the administrative offices, the dome holds the Senate Chamber and the saucer the Assembly Hall.

Brasília became the world’s first centrally planned city, one whose entire design was (and remains) modernist, leading to it becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The United Nations Headquarters (Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Sir Howard Robertson),

The Seagram Building and the Toronto-Dominion Centre (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)

Notre-Dame-de-Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1950-54

Other Characteristics

Characteristics – Flat Roofs

Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1928-1931, by Le Corbusier

Characteristics – Cubic shapes

The Walter Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts Architect Walter Gropius used Bauhaus ideas when he built his monochrome home in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Characteristics – Open Plan

The International Style Glass House designed by Philip Johnson, 1949.

COLORS -WHITE, GRAY, BEIGE, OR BLACK

Fallingwater, Pennsylvania, 1936-1937 by Frank Lloyd Wright

FIN

FUNCTIONAL FURNITURE

Exclusively

designed by Mies van der Rohe for the German Pavilion, that country's entry for the International Exposition of 1929, which was hosted by Barcelona, Spain.

Barcelona chair, designed by Mies van der Rohe.

Drawings

Notre-Dame-de-Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1950-54

Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-31

In his seminal first book, Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier announced the ‘five points of a new architecture’:

•Free standing supports (pilotis)

•The roof garden

•The ribbon window

•The free plan

•The freely composed facade

The Villa Savoye is an elevated white concrete box cut open horizontally and vertically.

As with the paintings of the period (cubism) it is a crucial part of the concept that the observer is not standing in one place but moving around. As he does so, the forms of the building overlap and becomes sometimes solid sometimes transparent. The pilotis free the ground and the roof garden re-creates the air the land that is lost below.

Fallingwater, Pennsylvania, 1936-37

Fallingwater is probably the most frequently illustrated house of the twentieth century.

Like his earlier houses, it is brilliantly organized. The stepped sections of reinforced concrete thrust outwards from a core of masonry to hover in overlapping planes above the rocks, trees and falling water.

He mastered an apparently impossible site and created the most vivid example of man-made form complementing nature.