Modern Arhitecture

7/29/2019 Modern Arhitecture

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MODERN ARCHITECTURE

PARTIAL ELEVATION OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE

The Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exposition of 1851

in London (the first worlds fair), would certainly be on any-

ones list of The Most Important Monuments of Modern

Architecture. Although designed by a gardener, Joseph

Paxton, not an architect, few public buildings have been sopopular or influential. It was built almost entirely of standard-

ized, factory-produced parts of iron and glass. The Crystal

Palace entranced a public accustomed to heavy buildings

of stone and brick and showed the possibilities, aesthetic as

well as practical, of building with prefabricated parts, metal,

and glass.


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127m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e

THE MODERN AGE

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

By the end of Louis XIVs 72-year reign, Paris and Versailleshad replaced Rome and Florence as the centers of taste,

culture, and intellectual matters. French art, music, dance,

and architecture were widely imitated. The King may have

had centralized control over the government during his

reign, but intellectual activities during the Age of Reason

began to take on a life independent from the government, a

life that would eventually take down the monarchy and cre-

ate the basis of the modern world.

Age of Reason philosophies led to major scientific discover-

ies. Sir Isaac Newtons formulations of the Laws of Univer-

sal Gravitation and The Calculus, appeared to confirm thespeculations of philosophers that humans could understand

the laws that governed the universe with intellect rather than

accept them on faith. If so, argued such great Enlighten-

ment philosophers as Benjamin Franklin, reason should

rule, and reasonable men should shape government rather

than kings who had inherited their power. These philoso-

phies lay behind the American War of Independence in

1776, and a series of political revolutions in other countries,

beginning with The French Revolution of 1789.

The liberal, rationalist, scientific, and humanitarian artists

and philosophers of this age of revolutions rejected the

sometimes frivolous, usually sensuous and light-hearted,

Rococo style of art and architecture that was popular. En-

lightened patrons demanded a morally serious art and archi-

tecture, an art that would teach values and reflect intellec-

tual and scientific discoveries. Few architects managed to

bridge the gap between Enlightenment intellectualism and

the emotional appeal of the Baroque. One was the Italian

Guarini. A leading mathematician, he used forms and the

principles of the new mathematics (especially descriptive

geometry) to create mystical drama and diaphanous domes

in such buildings as Santissima Sindone (Church of theHoly Shroud) and San Lorenzo in Turin. More characteristic

of the new style that was emerging out of the Enlightenment

are paintings such as J. L. Davids The Oath of the Horatii.

It is relentlessly austere in form and composition and mor-

ally uplifting in its Stoic republican message.

Even more rigorous in form and composition than Davids

painting is the monument to the intellectual hero of the

San Lorenzo view into d

San Lorenzo


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128 m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e

Enlightenment, Sir Isaac Newton. Designed by Boulle

the Newton Cenotaph was a pure product of the intellect

It could never have been built. Boulle intended the grea

sphere to symbolize the universe, whose laws Newton had

discovered. The surface of the sphere was to have beenpierced by holes arranged like the constellations. Sunligh

coming through these holes would have given, during the

day at least, the effect of a planetarium, more than a cen-

tury before one was invented. In plan, the project is a series

of concentric circles, a schematic of the solar system. In

volume, every form and detail, even the un-climbable stairs

leading to a ring of cypresses (an ancient symbol for eter-

nity), derived from this circular geometry. Compared to Ba-

roque architects, Boulle and his compatriots had returned

to the classicism of Bramantes Tempietto, thus the new

style is sometimes referred to as Neoclassicism.

The contrasts between Rococo confection and Neoclassica

Puritanism parallel the political tensions between the super-

numerary, pleasure-loving aristocracy and the intellectua

community, tensions that were released explosively in the

severing of aristocrats heads from their bodies during the

French Revolution of 1789.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

In England, the Age of Reason led to an industrial rather

than a political revolution. Why the Industrial Revolution did

not begin earlier is difficult to explain. Virtually all of the nec-essary technology and theory had been around since Hel-

lenistic times. In any case, several interrelated phenomena

lay behind the Industrial Revolution: a green revolution

that provided more food to support a massive increase in

population; a modern banking system; the development of

the steam engine (and eventually the railroad); the exploita-

tion of coal as a source of cheap energy for the steam en-

gines; and the production of iron in large quantities (which in

turn required the cheap energy of coal). These things made

possible the factory system and the transportation network

chiefly canals but also roads and railroads, necessary fodistributing raw materials and finished goods. These inno-

vations in England, which revolutionized finance, culture

art, and nearly every other aspect of society, changed the

world as much asor perhaps more thanthe political rev-

olutions.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution on architecture were

immediate and profound. With industrialization came urban-

Newton Cenotaph


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ization (still a phenomenon today) and all of the new types

of buildings and structures associated with a big industrial

city: factories, railroad stations, office buildings, hospitals,

warehouses, department stores, and so on. With industri-

alization came new building materials and technologies forthe architect: iron, steel, reinforced concrete, aluminum, and

glass in large sizes and quantities. With industrialization

also came the pumps and motors that made very tall and

very large buildings possible.

At first, the professional architect resisted both using the

new materials and designing buildings for industry. Histori-

cal precedent had become extremely important for him, and

there was no historical precedent for the new building types.

The architect had worked hard since the Middle Ages to

make architecture a profession: hearchitects were male

until the 20th century

considered industry beneath hishigh social position. As the 19th century wore on, however,

it became obvious to a larger and larger group of architects

that industrialization was unavoidable and would be the

source of the big commissions in the future. By the turn of

the 20th century, architects were beginning to include in-

dustrial materials, and even industrial forms, in most of their

buildings, though frequently they hid them behind tradition-

al-appearing surfaces.

Initially, the new materials were introduced in utilitarian

structures such as factories and bridges. The Ironbridge

at Coalbrookdale, built in 1777-79 by Abraham Darby II,

the first all-iron structure, demonstrated the potentials of

the iron from Darbys nearby mills, one of the first to pro-

duce iron on a large scale. This first iron structure had only

a 100-foot span, no advance over contemporary stone or

wood construction, and it used standard wood construction

techniques. But, in contrast to traditional stone or wooden

bridges, it appeared light and airy to contemporaries and

excited many of them who better realized the possibilities

of building with iron. Numerous projects for bridges in iron

appeared in the following years, which showed the spirit of

competition that characterized the Industrial Age. As ever-larger spans were attempted, techniques that took better

advantage of the inherent characteristics of iron, both cast

and wrought, were introduced. Foremost of these was the

suspension system.

Suspension bridges depend on the tensile strength of

wrought iron and eventually steel (see discussion of ten-

sile structures, in The Practice of Architecture section). CastIron Bridge at Coalbrook


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iron, by contrast, is brittle and has great compressive but

little tensile strength. Tensile structures not only deliver

more performance per pound, to use a phrase that the

20th century American architect Buckminster Fuller made

famous, but they also permit incredible spans. In a sus-pension bridge, the roadway is suspended from cables or

chains hung from the tops of towers rather than support-

ed by heavy, deep beams or trusses. Within 50 years of

the Ironbridge, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, near Bristol

England, had spanned 900 feet between supports. By 1867

the spans of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, the firs

major bridge to use steel cables, had reached 1,595 feet

The record distance spanned between two towers is on the

Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, opened in 1998; it is more

than a mile (6,529 feet). Larger spans are planned or are

under construction. In addition to the efficient use of materi-

als, the curves of the suspension cables or chains are noarbitrary choices by a designer; they must follow the laws of

nature (catenary curves). With the suspension bridge, form

does not follow some abstract theory of design; it is deter-

mined by mathematics and the nature of the materials from

which the structure is made.

The related idea that architectural form should be dictated by

the nature of the building problem itself had been suggested

by several Enlightenment theoreticians but only began to be

put into practice during the Industrial Revolution, especially

in buildings such as warehouses and factories that were

built for purely utilitarian purposes. These buildings tended

to be solidly constructed but completely undecorated, deco-

ration having no obvious utilitarian function. Vitruviuss cri-

teria of Firmness and Commodity were satisfied, but was

Delight? Many of these utilitarian buildings did have a sort

of raw beauty to them, and at least some architects began

to propose that a functional form could be beautiful withou

being decorated.

Other functional buildings, such as greenhouses, intro-

duced new and intriguing forms and architectural effects

which captivated viewers by their novelty and, in some re-spects, redefined the traditional concepts of beauty and

structure. In the Palm Stove at Kew Gardens (just outside

London), for example, the old relationship between carrier

and carried is negated by the soap-bubble surface of glass

Its weightless appearance and the alternately reflective

translucent, and transparent nature of the glass, and the

ability to see through the wall, fascinated the public and ar-

chitects alike.

Palm Stove at Kew Gardens


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Greenhouse construction inspired a variety of buildings,

among which were the sheds of vast extent built to cover

the platforms of the new railroad stations. The hotels and

entries in front of the train sheds often were conceived as

quite traditional buildings, however, and illustrate the sepa-ration between architect and engineer that was developing.

Even more spectacular and influential than the train sheds

was the Crystal Palace, the building housing Londons Great

Exposition of 1851, the first worlds fair. Its designer, Pax-

ton, had planned a number of greenhouses as a gardener

for the Duke of Devonshire for which he invented a system

of machine-made, standardized parts. He used the same

techniques to build the immense (1,851 feet long) exhibi-

tion building. The glass and iron structure was planned and

erected in a mere 39 weeks. Paxton had not only introduced

the all-glass building, he had also virtually invented the as-sembly-line technique of using prefabricated (factory-made

parts) to do it. Though roundly criticized by contemporary

architects (The Crystal Humbug, Pugin called it), the Crys-

tal Palace was a popular success and has influenced archi-

tects to the present, for example, Phillip Johnsons Crystal

Cathedral (1980) in California.

ROMANTICISM

From its very beginnings, the side effects of industrialization

(destruction of the agrarian economy) had disturbed many:

the creation of huge, dirty, ugly, industrial cities with horrible

slums and despicable sanitation; decreasing life expectancy;

and increasing crime rates. Read Charles Dickenss novels.

One reaction was Romanticism, the escape to the distant

in time or space. Romantic literature described the mythi-

cal, the exotic, and the medieval (Sir Walter Scotts Ivanhoe,

among others). There were many architectural manifesta-

tions. James Wyatt, for example, built Fonthill Abbey, animmense evocation of a Gothic monastery where the eccen-

tric Englishman William Beckford could have parties. John

Nash built the Brighton Pavilion, a fantastic concoction of

architectural motifs from India and Arabia, for the Prince Re-

gent. Ancient Greece also appealed. Leo von Klenze built

Valhalla, a romantic copy of a Greek temple, on the hills

near Regensburg, Germany.Brighton Pa


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THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

Only aristocrats and the newly rich industrialists who were

causing the social problems could afford Romantic escapes

from the ugly side of the Industrial Revolution into an archi-tectural fantasy world of Gothic castles, Greek temples, and

Palladian villas. But the attention that Romantic literature

and architecture gave to the Middle Ages led another group

of artists and writers to attack the Industrial Revolution in a

different way. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin published

an effective assault on the evils of industrialism in a series

of satirical drawings, which showed the same town as it had

been during the Middle Ages and as it had become. The

medieval cities were beautiful and the people were shown

as happy and healthy, whereas the modern cities were ugly

and polluted, and the people were illustrated as starving

and miserable. His point, expanded by John Ruskin (themost famous art critic of the Victorian Age), was that indus-

trialization had destroyed society; that the sheer mindless-

ness of the assembly line and division of labor in factories

intrinsically reduced men (and women and children) to ma-

chines, destroying their pride and individuality in the pro-

cess. He argued that to recover artistic integrity, craftsmen

should return to the medieval handicraft practices. He wen

farther; he argued that the dishonesty and mindlessness of

industrial production corrupted not only the worker, but also

society as a whole.

As examples of dishonesty in architecture, Ruskin and his

followers, especially the great artist and craftsman William

Morris, pointed to brick buildings that were covered in plas-

ter that was scored and painted to make it look like stone

and to cast-iron columns and cornices that lookedsor

ofas if they had been carved by hand out of stone. (Wha

would Ruskin and Morris think of wood-grained plastic?)

They also condemned rug and wallpaper patterns, decora-

tions for flat surfaces, that looked three-dimensional, that

gave the illusion of depth. Morris felt that designs for flat sur-

faces should have flat patterns. One of Pugin, Ruskin, and

Morriss most influential conclusions was that buildings, es-pecially houses, should be developed from a functional plan

rather than having functions crammed into a preconceived

outer form, as was (and still is) commonly done. In sum

materials and designs should be "fit for their purpose." Or

as Modern architects phrased this approach: form should

follow function.


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Ruskin and Morriss conclusions that artists and architects

should return to medieval handcrafts were unrealistic and

influenced few peopleonly the wealthy could afford Mor-

riss handmade products. It was obvious to most people

that industrialization was inevitable. Soon the productionof household machines (which could not be simultaneous-

ly mass-produced and handcrafted) made the return to a

medieval culture seem even ridiculous. But the other con-

clusions of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as Ruskin and

Morriss followers called their approach, were widely influ-

ential, particularly the concepts of fitness for purpose and

of developing a building from a functional plan, from the

inside out, as Frank Lloyd Wright liked to say. Their pre-

cept that art and architecture were not only an expression of

the moral values of a society but also could actually shape

those values was one of the most potent artistic theories in-

troduced in the 19th century. (See Churchills observationsthat once we shape our buildings, they shape us, quoted at

the beginning of this book.)

Ruskin, Morris, and their followers were discussing the so-

cial responsibilities of artists, craftspeople, and architects at

the same time that Karl Marx was writing the Communist

Manifesto. Indeed Morris was an avid and active support-

er of the socialist movement for a while. He declared that

there shouldnt be art for the few any more than freedom for

the few, and proposed an art for the masses. Unfortunately

for him, he never could reconcile this declaration with the

fact that the handcrafting process he advocated was prohib-

itively expensive, and that consequently, only the rich bour-

geoisie could afford his creations. However, he was wealthy

enough to put his theories into practice in his own house,

the Red House at Bexleyheath (near London). Its plain red

brick construction and an exterior form that corresponded

exactly to the functional plan demonstrated his principles

of honesty in design. The furnishings of the house were

all designed and fabricated by Morris and his friends and

were paragons of the Arts and Crafts ideal of fitness for

purpose. Aspects of the Red House were emulated by

many architects in England, Europe, and the United States.The Red House also marked the beginning of architects

interest in the design of the upper-middle-class house and

eventually in low-cost housing. Before this, architects had

designed housingvillas, palaces, and manorsonly for

the aristocracy and the very rich. Morris was also one of the

founders of the historic preservation movement.

Red H

Red House

ground floor upper floo


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ECLECTICISM, EVOLUTION, AND ARCHI-

TECTURE

Romanticism (escape from the Industrial Age) and the Arts

and Crafts Movement (opposition to it) represent only two ofthe several directions architecture took in the 19th century

Historicism (replication of past styles) and engineers (em-

bracing of industrialization) represent two more directions

As you may well imagine, these are the extreme approach-

es; most of the architecture built lay somewhere between or

among them. Most architecture used some details of build-

ings from the past, some engineering details, and some

handcrafted decorations or furnishings. Most buildings were

a mixture of styles combining, for example, Gothic win-

dows in facades that looked Byzantine or Romanesque but

used iron and glass construction for skylights and attached

greenhouses. This mixture of details from various periods is

called Eclecticism and was, in fact, the dominant mode o

architectural design in the 19th century. It was considered

modern by most. After all, it showed that the modern ar-

chitect was aware of all the past styles andengineering ad-

vances and was sophisticated enough to choose the most

appropriate details, structure, and techniques for the task at

hand.

Some architects were not content merely to copy the ar-

chitecture of the past, whether in detail or wholesale. They

argued that a totally new architectural expression, indepen-dent of the past, should be developed for the industrial age

They argued that the styles of the past had been developed

without the advantage of iron, glass, and the other modern

materials and techniques. They argued that the past had

never had to design most of the types of buildings that ex-

isted in the present and that past forms were therefore in-

appropriate. Until the end of the 19th century, however, no

critic or architect could propose a satisfactory new style for

the modern age. In practice, architects tended to design in

one sort of eclectic style or another.

Nonetheless, the demands for a new style were buttressedby scientific developments, notably Darwins theory of evo-

lution, which he published in his 1859 Origin of the Species

Architectural theorists, following upon the evolutionists, ar-

gued that if plants and animals had evolved, then architec-

ture, as a reflection of society, should also evolve. The New

Architecture should not look like the historical styles and

should be superior to them.


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Viollet-le-Duc, a French medieval scholar, restoration archi-

tect, and probably the most influential architectural theorist of

the 19th century, offered a counter-argument in his Lectures

on Architecture (Entretiens sur I Architecture). He pointed

out that he, like most of hiscontemporaries, believed thatthe Parthenon had never been excelled as a piece of archi-

tecture and that the Gothiccathedrals were, on the whole,

better buildings than virtually anything built in modern times.

Thus, whilenot necessarily arguing against the theories of

evolution as they applied to organic life,he concluded that

the analogy between architecture and evolution was neither

valid nor reasonable: architecture had, demonstrably, not

evolved during the history of man. What was common to

great monuments of the past, like the Parthenon or Chartres

Cathedral, was the clear reason for being of every element

in them. The greatest buildings of the past, regardless of pe-

riod, had responded to site, climate, society, and the highestlevel of technology available to their architects. On the basis

of this reasoning Viollet, too, argued for a RATIONALIST

New Architecture, one that respected the principles of his-

tory without copying details; one in whicheach detail was

the evident and logical result of an analysis of the build-

ing program. He said that architectural forms should be de-

termined by their functionsanother architect who thought

that form follows functionwithout preconception or preju-

dice on the part of the architect. It was obvious to Viollet that

a modern architect would use the latest engineering meth-

ods and the most recently developed building materials to

achieve this end. Therefore, Viollet concluded, the New Ar-

chitecture would be architecture of iron construction (neither

reinforced concrete nor steel construction had been devel-

oped when he wrote) that was openly expressed, and took

forms that expressed irons strength. Viollet realized that he

had studied and restored too many medieval buildings to be

able to find the appropriate newforms for iron construction;

that would require a younger architect, one with a fresher

point of view.

ART NOUVEAU

Viollets theories managed to transcend the questions that

had divided architecture into so many different stylistic

streams by concluding that style would inevitably result

from analysis of the architectural program if the architect

had no preconceptions. Viollets theories respected and took

into account the principles of the great architecture of the

past, but he was opposed to copying historic details. At the


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same time, he reconciled engineering advances with tradi-

tional views on architecture. Most of the recognized masters

of Modern architecture, such as Frank Lloyd Wright in the

US, Gaudi in Spain, and Le Corbusier in France, based thei

theories in greater or lesser degree on Viollets. But it was ayoung Belgian architect, Victor Horta, who first put Viollets

theories into practice. His planning innovations revolution-

ized domestic architecture, and the style of architectureo

rather the style of decoration, Art Nouveauthat he origi-

nated swept Europe for a short while.

In the Tassel House in Brussels in the late 19th century

Horta radically reorganized the townhouse and opened the

interior by using an exposed iron skeleton. It allowed him

to create the open plan (plan libre) by eliminating mos

of the interior partitions and replacing others with movable

non-bearing glass doors. This made the house, which wasbuilt on a very narrow deep city lot, flexible. It also made i

seem larger than it was, and allowed natural light and ven-

tilation to penetrate into the center of the house through a

large, sky-lit conservatory-stairhall. As more middle-class

people built houses, and clients gradually rejected the dark

Victorian house cut up into discrete rooms, the open plan

became common.

Horta created decoration for the house derived from the

plants in the conservatory (greenhouse), rather than histori-

cal examples. As a contemporary critic (Ludwig Hevesi) re-

marked, No detail derives from anything at all in existence.

Horta translated the plant forms into curvilinear, whiplash

vegetal decorations at the tops of the iron columns, which

were in turn reflected in paintings on walls and ceilings, mo-

saics on the floor, and stained glass in windows and doors

Similar to details in Viollet-le-Ducs work and some wallpa-

per patterns, the Tassel House decorations immediately be-

came popular even among those who ignored the houses

structural and spatial innovations. In the hands of many ar-

chitects and decorators, Art Nouveau (New Art), as the

new style was known, became merely a new and fashion-

able decorative vocabulary applied to otherwise traditionabuildings.

Even though it was not copied from historical examples

Hortas ornament still seemed somehow tied to the past to

some architects. An architecture that was entirely new, both

in concept and in attitude towards decoration appeared in

Vienna and Paris in the years just before the outbreak o

World War I. It was mostly an outgrowth of European de-Tassel House


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velopments, but it was also inspired in important ways by

developments in the United States.

THE UNITED STATES

COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE

When Europeans arrived in the new world, they found cul-

tures and architecture that bore little resemblance to those

they had left. The colonists considered the indigenous peo-

ples culturally inferior and their architecture either some-

thing to be ignored or, in the case of the Aztec, Mayan, and

Incan architecture of Central and South America, to be de-

stroyed. In North America, by contrast, the Europeans found

relatively little permanent architecture or architecture they

were interested in.

Early European settlers, therefore, modeled their buildings

on familiar European models. From time to time European

architects were asked to send designs to the Colonies for

important buildings. There were no trained architects among

the colonists at first, mostly because the population was too

dispersed to support or need them. Architecture that is not

designed by architects and is based on the traditions of

its people, in this case, traditions in Europe, is referred to

as vernacular. Beginning in the early 19th century, a few

Americans, like Thomas Jefferson, had studied architecture

in Europe. Not surprisingly, then, until the latter half of the

19th century (there werent even schools of architecture un-

til the 1860s) architecture in the United States largely paral-

leled developments in Europe.

In the absence of trained architects, craftsmen (such as car-

penters or masons), who frequently based their designs on

illustrated books of the latest European buildings, designed

most structures. They unconsciously created a recogniz-

able and unique body of architecture quite different from the

European prototypes: a church designed to be built of stone

looks quite different when built from wood by local crafts-

men and workers.

Thomas Jefferson was instrumental in trying to find a style

of architecture less dependent on European traditions and

more expressive of the ideals of the new republic. He was

a genuine Renaissance man, a talented architect as well

as a great writer, philosopher, inventor, and politician. His

early training had been informal, chiefly through Palladios

Four Books on Architecture and engravings of buildings Mont


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by English architects. In its original form, Jeffersons own

house, Monticello, was based on Palladios Villa Cornaro

He utterly transformed it after receiving architectural train-

ing during the years he was the American ambassador to

France. Jefferson was particularly impressed by the Enlight-enment buildings hed seen and architects hed met. When

he returned to this country, relying on what he had seen and

learned abroad, he designed some of the finest buildings

in the United States. These are the Capitolat Richmond

Virginia, and in collaboration with other architects, the Uni-

versity of Virginia, as well as several houses that continued

to be inspired by Palladios villas. Like many contemporary

French architects, he admired Republican Roman archi-

tecture and thought it should be the model for monumenta

civic American buildings. In fact, Jefferson based hisdesign

for the capitol of Virginia very closely on the Maison Carre

at Nmes(which he believed to be a Republican Temple).

WASHINGTON, D. C.

Jefferson also profoundly influenced the planning of the new

capital of the United States, to be constructed on a sitecho-

sen by George Washington. Washington and a French en-

gineer, Pierre LEnfant, proposed a city plan thatwas an ad-

aptation of Le Notres gardens at Versailles where LEnfan

had grown up. He located the Capitol and Presidents House

(later called the White House) on the most prominent hills, on

sites corresponding respectively to those of the palace andthe Grand Trianon at Versailles. Foreign embassieswere to

linea mall directly analogous to the main axis of the garden

at Versailles. From these features, LEnfant and Washing-

ton proposed axes and radiating street patterns that would

define the location of other major public buildings. Jefferson

on the other hand, wanted the plan of the new Capitalto be

a Cartesian grid. The final plan was a compromisebetween

Jefferson and LEnfants ideas.

Washington, D. C., was planned on a monumental scale

that did not correspond to the actual size of the new country

but demonstrated the optimism and vision of the founders. I

grew very slowly, and LEnfant, Washington, and Jeffersons

plan was often ignored in the 19th century. It was returned to

only early in the 20th century. I. M. Peis East Wing addition

to the National Gallery and HOKs Air and Space Museum

are examples of contemporary buildings whose forms and

locations were inspired by LEnfants original plan, though

on sites originally proposed for embassies.

Washington D.C. plan

National Gallery East Wing


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The first two public buildings for the new city were designed

through competitions. James Hoban, an amateur architect,

won the competition for the Presidents House. His simple,

handsome scheme strongly resembled contemporary Euro-

pean Neo-Classical buildings, but Jefferson criticized it astoo ostentatious. (His anonymous competition entry, based

on the Villa Rotonda had been rejected.) Another amateur,

a physician, Dr. Thornton, designed the Capitol. His project

incorporated references to the Pantheon for the central part

of the building and to several modern French and English

buildings for the Senate and House of Representative ex-

tensions to each side. Thorntons original design has been

drastically modified over the years to accommodate the vast

expansion of the country from the original 13 states. Most

significant were the additions by Bulfinch early in the 19th

century, and the enormous extensions (including the pres-

ent cast-iron dome) that were made during the Civil War byThomas U. Walter. (Both of these men were professionally

trained architects.)

AMERICAN INNOVATIONS

The Neo-Classical architecture of the Capitol and White

House, replete with classical Orders and other motifs from

ancient Greece and Rome and from the Renaissance, did

establish an official American style. It was emulated in

capitol and courthouse buildings across the United States.

As the century wore on, this style was supplemented by the

eclectic approach popular at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in

Paris (the most influential school of architecture in the 19th

century). For religious buildings, however, architects often

turned to the revival of medieval architecture then fashion-

able in Britain and on the Continent.

American domestic architecture showed more originality

than government buildings and churches. In the established

Eastern cities, the more pretentious upper class houses

resembled their European counterparts, but in the rapidly

expanding frontier towns, unique problems evolved a more

purely American architecture: a house needed to be builtquickly; brick and stone were often in short supply whereas

wood was plentiful; and building sites were much larger than

in the cities. The frontier builders were usually less learned

and concerned with European trends and precedents than

their urban colleagues and more willing to solve problems

on their own merit.

The invention of the balloon-frame construction technique,

National Gallery East Wing roof

Balloon-f


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a system using small, standardized pieces of factory-sawn

wood addressed most of these problems and suggested

new forms and decorations. As take-off points, carpenters

used houses from pattern books developed by designers

(such as Downing). One consequently finds variations of thesame basic design all over the Midwest, elaborated or sim-

plified according to wealth and the skill and imagination of

the carpenter-builder.

These variations depended upon the fact that balloon-frame

construction is much more adaptable (and cheaper) than

masonry construction and much easier for untrained work-

ers to construct; its structure is much less critical. Conse-

quently the plan of a house could be modified at will; rooms

made larger or smaller, windows and doors could be en-

larged or grouped together; towers and gables could eas-

ily be added. In the extreme cases, houses became gin-gerbread castles"carpenter gothic," as it was sometimes

called.

Influenced by his teacher Louis Sullivan, the writings of Vio-

llet-le-Duc, and such American philosophers as Emerson

Wright made his Prairie Houses, for example the Robie

House (1909), seem to belong to their sites. These Prairie

houses expressed the flat farmland around Chicago with

low, horizontal lines and shallow, spreading roofs anchored

to the ground by a central hearth and chimney. Like Horta

in the Tassel House, Wright removed as many of the in-

terior partitions as possible so that rooms flow from one

into another. Often the only distinction between one major

area and another was a difference in floor or ceiling heigh

or both. Wright used strips of windows on the exterior of

his buildings and banks of floor-to-ceiling glass doors tha

opened onto porches and patios under the hovering roofs

Interior and exterior flow into one another in a Wright house

just as one room flows into the next.

Wright also designed brilliantly innovative office buildings

for example, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York, and

churches, most significant among them Unity Temple in OakPark, a suburb of Chicago. The Larkin Building, which un-

fortunately has been demolished, pioneered advanced sys-

tems of ventilations in addition to seeming to be without his-

torical precedent. In Unity Temple, Wright used reinforced

concrete, the first time anyone had used it in a building that

was internationally recognized as a major architectural ac-

complishment.

Stick Style

Robie House


17/40


Wright called his architecture ORGANIC ARCHITEC-

TURE, a concept that even he had a difficult time explain-

ing clearly. He meant that every aspect of a building relates

to the next larger in a way analogous to Gothic architecture

or Michelangelos design for St. Peters. The same analogyto a tree holds: each part flows into the next much in the

way that the trunk of a tree flows into a branch, the branch

into a twig, and the twig into a leaf. As one of Wrights many

admirers, the architect Fay Jones, put it succinctly: Part is

to part as part is to whole. Wright meant for the analogy to

living things to be taken poetically. The way in which spaces

in Wrights buildings are shaped, not contained, by vertical

planes seemed radically new to American and European ar-

chitects alike. Wrights ideas proved crucial to the develop-

ment of architecture on the Continent; and in America; sim-

plified and modified by contractors everywhere, it developed

into the split-level and ranch house designs of todayssuburbs.

American architectures other great innovation that altered

the direction of world architecture, the very tall building,

or skyscraper, was also largely a contribution of Chicago.

Three inventions were required to make the skyscraper pos-

sible: the steel skeleton (skyscraper construction), a safe

elevator, and mechanical systems, particularly plumbing,

that could reach great heights. The height of masonry build-

ings with load-bearing walls is limited since, for structural

reasons, ground-floor walls become increasingly thicker as

the building gets higher. They take up much of the ground-

floor area in a really tall building. But if an iron, steel, or

reinforced-concrete skeleton is substituted for the masonry,

a building may become very tall, with columns no larger at

their base than they are on the top floor.

William LeBaron Jenney built the first tall building with a me-

tallic frame in Chicago in 1886 (the Home Insurance Com-

pany). He said he got the idea from the writings of Viollet-

le-Duc. It and many of the early skyscrapers did not look

tall, however. They looked like stacks of lower buildings. In

1889, beginning with the Wainwright Building in St. Louis,Louis Sullivan, aided by Wright, designed tall buildings that

did look tall. In them, Sullivan expressed the columns of

steel that held them up with uninterrupted vertical lines, and

he clearly differentiated the base, with its show windows,

from the main part of the building, with its many floors of

identical offices; and he gave the mechanical penthouse on

the top floor its own unique appearance. This change of the

appearance of the different parts of the building illustrated Wainwright Bu


18/40


Sullivans famous dictum that Form follows Function. Sul-

livan and his colleagues in Chicago, the so-called Chicago

School, explored these and similar new ideas in many build-

ings, and like Wright, influenced not only other architects in

the United States, but also those in Europe.

THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE

THE FIRST GENERATION

At the time the Chicago School was flowering, the cente

of AVANT-GARDE architecture in Europe was Vienna (the

Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris was relatively conservative by

comparison). In addition to a style comparable to Art Nou-

veau called Secession, Otto Wagner and his students were

experimenting with glass, steel, and aluminum in buildings

that appear strikingly modern. Another Viennese, a writeand architect named Adolf Loos, thought architects of his

time (including Wagner) were too preoccupied with decora-

tion to produce a really modern, 20th century architecture

In 1908, after his return from a trip to Chicago, he published

an article titled Ornament and Crime in which he equated

ornamentation with decadence and depravity. He conclud-

ed that the progress of a society could be measured by the

degree to which it has eliminated decoration. This article

was widely read by young architects who saw it as a way to

answer the critics of Art Nouveau.

At about the same time in Paris, Braque and Picasso were

revolutionizing painting. They rejected realistic, illusionis-

tic paintingphotography could better record realityand

following the lead of Cezanne (a brilliant late 19th century

French painter), they analyzed nature into its most charac-

teristic shapes, reduced these to planes, and rearranged

these planes onto their canvases. The result was called

Cubism. Since Cubists frequently superimposed severa

different views of the same object on their canvases, re-

jecting perspective, some critics saw in the paintings the

representation of a 4th dimension, a concept that con-

temporary scientists and mathematicians were investigat-ing. Einstein was working out his theories of Relativity a

roughly the same time Braque and Picasso created Cub-

ism, but there is no evidence the painters were aware of his

theories. The impersonal, objective, hard-edged shapes in

the Cubistpaintings alsoappealedto contemporary critics

They lookedmodern; they looked machine-made.

The Steiner House


19/40


The Italian Futuristswere among those influencedby the

revolutionarynew art. They were fascinated with the Ma-

chine Age, modern science and technology; they were ob-

sessed with speed and change and spoke eloquentlyof the

motor car and electricpower stations. The brilliantyoungarchitect SantElia wrote a manifesto of Futurist architecture

in which he asserted that to be reallymodern, architecture

shouldreject everything of the past. The architectureof the

future should:

1.have no decoration(as Loos had alreadysaid);

2. make no reference to historyor historical styles;

3. use onlynew, industrial, materialsand technologies (no

natural materials likewood, stone and brick); and

4. use dynamic forms and shapes which derived from or

resembled machines. SantElia was killed inWorld War I

before he could build any of his designs, which still look likecities of the future from science-fiction magazines and mov-

ies.

It was natural, then, that the factory shouldbecome an ideal

prototype for Machine-age architects. The German architect

Walter Gropius designed the most famous of these Early

Modern buildings inspired by factories, an office building

(the Faguswerk) in1911 and a schoolof architecture(the

Bauhaus) in1925. In both buildings, sheer glasswallspass

in front of the floor slabs; inthe Bauhaus, even the columns

are behindthe glass walls. In effect, at least poetically, the

traditional ideaof carrier and carriedhas been negated:

the exterior wallno longer holdsup the building in appear-

ance or in reality. The variable reflectivity/transparencyof

the glass walls superimposed views into the buildings with

reflections of the outside in a fashion directly recalling Cub-

ist painting. These buildings introduced the glass box so

characteristic of 20th century architecture.

As important as the Bauhaus building itself was, the cur-

riculum that Gropius designed for the school it housed was

probably even more influential. Gropius patterned the cur-

riculum on the writings of Ruskin and the practices of Morris.Each student was required to learn one or more handicrafts

from a combination of an artisan and an artist. Gradually

the emphasis shifted from pure handcrafts to products that

could be mass-produced by industry. Strictly speaking, no

courses in architecture were taught at the school; it was as-

sumed that the basic design principles taught in the school

were sufficient training for an architect. With some modi-

fications, the basic design courses at many schools of ar-

Airship Ha

Fagus


20/40


chitecture throughout the world are based on those of the

Bauhaus. Many of the furnishings, especially furniture and

fabrics, designed by the faculty and students of the Bau-

haus are still sold in stores all over the world.

No one has ever fully and convincingly explained why Gro-

pius, though he retained their ideas that architecture could

shape society, turned from Ruskin and Morriss total rejec-

tion of industrial manufacture to an emphasis on mass-pro-

duction in his school, but the impact of the Dutch de Stij

group on Gropius and his students was one factor.

De Stijl (Dutch for The Style) was the name of a group of

artists and architects in Amsterdam that included the painte

Mondrian and the architect, Rietveld. They were inspired by

Cubism, by Frank Lloyd Wrights buildings, and by other

avant-garde theories. De Stijl artists and architects wishedto produce a universal art; they thought of space as a grid

extending infinitely in all directions and considered paintings

and buildings to be just parts of that grid. Rietvelds Schro-

eder House in Utrecht was conceived as a series of vertica

and horizontal planes floating in the universal grid. It is no

longer tied to the idea of a specific site, nor are all of the

walls permanently fixed. At least some of them can be slid

or folded to change the interior of the house at will, making

it even more universal. It adapts to the changing needs of

the inhabitant.

Like Gropius, Mies van der Rohe was influenced by Wright

and the de Stijl group. In plan, his Barcelona Pavilion, de-

signed for the 1929 Worlds Fair in Barcelona, Spain, looks

like a de Stijl painting; its floating horizontal and vertica

planes remind one of a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie House

Mies manipulated plane and space in this building in such a

way that distinctions between interior and exterior seems

entirely arbitrary, and the space implied by the planes be-

comes as real and important as the solid elements. The

materials, proportions, and details of this building were so

elegant and carefully considered that many consider it a

masterpiece on a par with the Parthenon. It was disassem-bled after the end of the fair, but it inexplicably disappeared

during its transport back to Germany. (It was made of rather

expensive marbles that probably ended up in the villa of

some Nazi official.) Almost universally considered a master-

piece, it was reconstructed in Barcelona in 1983-86.

Mies projects for all-glass skyscrapers were among the

most influential architectural designs of the 1920s. The

Schroeder House

Barcelona Pavilion


21/40


aesthetic effect of these buildings depends on the play of

light and reflection on their sheer glass facades and irregu-

lar or curvilinear plans. The Depression and World War II

prevented Mies or anyone else from constructing them, but

after the war, SOM (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, an ar-chitectural firm based in Chicago) designed Lever House in

New York (1951). It was a rectangular box, rather than the

irregular shapes, similar to contemporary German Expres-

sionist paintings, that Mies had projected, but the idea of

an all-glass skyscraper is the same. By this time, Mies had

moved to Chicago. He had headed the Bauhaus after Gro-

pius left Nazi Germany until he, too, was forced into exile.

Mies himself designed the most elegant of the glass-box

skyscraper, the Seagrams Building in New York City. Its

bronze and glass curtain wall is so beautifully proportioned,

using the systems of the Renaissance that Bramante him-

self might have approved.

Soon after he arrived in Chicago, Mies was made head of

the school of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology

and was commissioned to design a master plan for the cam-

pus as well as several of its most important buildings. De

Stijl influence is evident in his attempts to create simple,

universal buildings on a universal grid. Some people have

criticized this approach by saying that at IlT its hard to know

which building is the architecture building, which the chapel,

and which the power plant. Indeed, in following his famous

dictum Less is more, Mies was forced to sacrifice the natu-

rally complicated functions of a building to simplicity. None-

theless, Mies designed some of the most elegant buildings

in history, and his glass-and-steel boxes became the arche-

typical urban buildingthough frequently cheapenedof

the 20th century.

The fourth great master in the First Generation of Modern

Architecture (after Wright, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe)

was Le Corbusier, born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) in

Switzerland. A painter as well as an architect, he spent most

of his active life in Paris. As a young man, he had spent

weeks on the Acropolis in Athens and had studied Greek,Turkish, and Mediterranean vernacular architecture. He had

also assimilated the ideas of Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc, Horta,

the Vienna Secession, the Cubists, Loos, and Auguste Per-

ret, among many others. Perret was especially important.

He had pioneered the use of reinforced concrete (concrete

with steel bars that resist tension). Corbu, as many refer to

him, designed most of his structures for this new material.

Lever H

Seagram T


22/40


If the reinforcing bars are cleverly placed, reinforced con-

crete can be molded into almost any form. Perret had rec-

reated a sort of classicist, trabeated architecture with it. Le

Corbusier, however, created buildings that looked as if they

had been produced by a machine. His most famous housethe Villa Savoye (1929) in Poissy, a town west of Paris,

uses sleek surfaces that appear stretched over a frame

curves which match the turning radius of the automobiles

that dropped guests off at the front door; ramps like those

in parking garages; exposed heating pipes and lighting fix-

tures; and windows similar to industrial windows used in

factories. A house, wrote Le Corbusier, is a machine for

living. The Villa Savoye looks like a machine for living. I

is still somewhat shocking today, but once accustomed to

it, most visitors find it exciting and strangely beautiful in a

classical way.

Nothing about the Villa Savoyeor Gropiuss or Miess

buildings for that mattersuggests where they were built

They could as easily be in Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, or

Los Angeles as Paris or Dessau or Tokyo or Chicago

Critics have often applied the term International Style to

these buildings. It refers more to buildings nearly univer-

sal appropriatenessor inappropriatenessthan to the se

of common decorative or formal features that we normally

mean when we use the word "style."

At its best, the masterpieces of the International Style are

buildings of great refinement and technological beauty

which places them alongside the great monuments of the

past. At their worst, International Style buildings are inhu-

mane and crushingly boring. Simple elegance becomes ag-

gressively commonplace when clients are interested only

about profit and their architects only in the size of fees.

Some architects and critics criticized International Style ar-

chitecture because it did not relate to or reflect local cus-

toms, materials, and climates. Frank Lloyd Wright, who had

passed into a period of relative obscurity after the success

of the Prairie Style, was one of them. His practice revived inthe late 1930s, and he flashed into a new period of creativity

Although he condemned the International Style as soulless

and inhumane, counter to his principles of organic architec-

ture, he was quite evidently influenced by it. Fallingwater, the

house in Pennsylvania which he designed in 1936, is a bril-

liant synthesis of the best qualities of the International Style

and Wrights genius for wedding a building to its site through

forms and materials. Its smooth concrete cantilevers recre-

Villa Savoye

allingwater


23/40


ate in man-made forms the rock layers under the waterfall

over which the house is built. Wrights Guggenheim Muse-

um in New York is a late, if controversial, masterpiecehe

was 92 when he died during its constructionbut it has ev-

ery characteristic except simplicity of an International Stylebuilding.

THE SECOND GENERATION

Very few examples of International Style architecture can be

found in the United States prior to World War II. Even in Eu-

rope, the general public and many architects were opposed,

often violently, to the International Style. Mies, Le Corbusier,

and other members of the avant-garde had built mostly rela-

tively small, private structures, and the Great Depression

and the rise of Nazi Germany, which considered Modern

art and architecture decadent, had put an end to even thatmuch. The post-war recovery period brought new economic

conditions, a different generation of client, and a changed

public attitude. A steadily increasing proportion of buildings

began to be built in the Modern style that Mies, Gropius,

and Le Corbusier had pioneered in the teens, 20s and early

30s. Most new Modern architecture was built in the United

States, to which Mies and Gropius had emigrated and which

had suffered less physically and economically than Europe,

and then in Western Europe as it recovered from the war.

Ironically, by this time, several of the leading pre-war design-

ers had already begun to reject their earlier projects. Some

were bored with simple geometry and bare, often austere

forms. Some were committed to the avant-garde principle of

rejecting anything that the public acceptedincluding their

own projects. Le Corbusier began to speak ill of his designs

of the 1920s, including the Villa Savoye. He turned away

from the industrial, highly-machined look of the International

Style to a more personal architecture. He combined natural

materials with reinforced concrete that showed the marks

of the rough-sawn boards used for formwork. Most of his

buildings from this period also have brightly colored parts

and handcrafted elements. In effect, he returned to aspectsof architecture that Ruskin, whose writings he had admired

as a young man, proposed. His chapel of Notre Dame at

Ronchamp, France, (1950-55) startled and confused his

admirers. It is very irregular in plan and volume; its roof is

of rough-formed concrete and its extremely thick walls are

coated in coarsely textured plaster. Nothing about it seems

to refer to the machine-age ideals of the First Generation,

nor does Ronchamp seem to refer to any buildings of the

Ronch

Ronchamp


24/40


past. However strange and puzzling the pilgrimage church

seems at first sight, almost everyone who visits it, peasan

and architect alike, are won over by its profoundly religious

feeling.

Le Corbusier designed another religious building, the mon-

astery of La Tourette near Lyon, France. It, too, shows no

trace of the high technology that had originally excited the

First Generation, and Le Corbusier violates another of the

premises of the early Modernists when he defers to historica

precedent. He has brilliantly evoked the medieval monas-

tery, several of which he studied in preparation for designing

La Tourette, but it must be stressed, with uncompromisingly

original forms and details. It took a while for younger archi-

tects to assimilate these new directions, but many did, espe-

cially in Japan, South America, and the Indian subcontinent

where Le Corbusiers influence was even greater than inEurope or the United Statesexcept as a city planner.

Le Corbusier was probably more influential as a city plan-

ner than as an architect, especially in Europe and the Unit-

ed States, for better or worse. He hated low, dense cities

like Paris and conceived the ideal city as a series of widely

spaced skyscrapers, set up on freestanding columns in a

landscaped park. Published as a series of projects in the

1920s and modified over the following decades, Corbu first

had the opportunity to try out in practice his ideal "city in

a park" just after World War II with the Unit dHabitation

(1952) in Marseilles, the only completed unit of a projected

group of residential high-rise buildings. In it, he replaced the

old city street with a shopping floor half way up the build-

ing, and he designed the roof as a school, playground, and

garden. Le Corbusiers ideas on city planninghe wrote

several books and articles on the subjectwere especially

influential in designing post-World War II urban renewal and

mass housing projects. Too often, the worst aspects of Cor-

bu's ideas were copied and the better ideas misunderstood

Isolated towers and the elimination of the street destroyed

the close-knit social patterns of the neighborhoods they re-

placed. These tower-apartment blocks were unmitigated di-sasters when used for low-cost housing. Correspondingly

low budgets eliminated amenities like the roof terraces and

landscaping around the blocks, elevators frequently broke

down; parents found it impossible to look after children on

the ground from a 12th-floor apartment window. The Pruitt-

Igoe (1952-55) housing project in St. Louis proved so crime-

ridden and detested by its inhabitants that the city was forced

to dynamite most of it in 1972. Other cities have followed

a Tourette plan

a Tourette


25/40


suit, replacing the towers in a park with more traditional low-

rise townhouses on streets.

Commercial success turned the once-shocking aspects of

the International Style into cheap clichs. Less is More re-sulted in elegant, extremely expensive buildings when the

architect was someone like Mies van der Rohe, but many

developers found that Less could be Cheap. Simple el-

egance became simplistic, banal, and monotonous in their

hands. The leading younger architects (the Second Gener-

ation) began to reject the very notion of a universal style of

architecture, suggesting instead that each building should

have its own, special identity that varied with client, site, and

context (the immediate physical surroundings). The Second

Generation Modern architects used the International Style

predominantly for utilitarian or commercial types of build-

ings. The Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, for ex-ample, used a Mies-Iike aesthetic for the General Motors

Technical Center where a machine-age image was appro-

priate, but he used more decorative and sculptural forms

(much as Le Corbusier at Ronchamp) for others. In the ter-

minal for Trans World Airlines at Kennedy Airport in New

York, Saarinen created non-functional but soaring shapes

expressive of flight in concrete; and in a series of dormi-

tories at Yale University, he, as Corbu had at La Tourette,

turned to the Middle Ages for inspiration.

Paul Rudolph, another leader of the Second Generation,

developed sculptural towers to fit the Arts and Architec-

ture Building at Yale into its Neo-gothic context and make

it stand out on a prominent corner. Widely admired for its

spatial complexity when it was built, it was soon criticized

for being too self-conscious and for ignoring the needs of

the people who used the building. It burned in the late 60s,

perhaps set on fire as a protest by the students who used it.

(The fire may have been an accident, but student protestors

used it as an excuse to criticize the building, in any case.)

The more orthodox Modern architects (who considered

themselves Functionalists) criticized these Second Gen-eration architects for sacrificing function to form and for not

clearly expressing the structure of the building on its exte-

rior. This was, for the most part, a revival of the old Ratio-

nalist versus Formalist controversy.

Some of the structural-engineer/architects of the period,

such as the Italian Nervi (Rome Olympic Stadium), the Ger-

man Frei Otto (German Pavilion at the Montreal Worlds Unit dHabit


26/40


Fair andas consultantthe Munich Olympic pavilions)

the American Buckminster Fuller (the GEODESIC DOME)

and the Spanish-Mexican Felix Candela (thin-shell concrete

vaults), experimented with new structural systems that ren-

dered the Rationalist/Formalist controversy irrelevant. Intheir buildings, carrier and carried are one and the same

thing. The structure is the form of the building.

The most avant-garde of the Second Generation also avoid-

ed the Rationalist/Formalist controversies. They took forms

from a non-architectural context and turned them into build-

ings. The Archigram group from London used comic book

illustrations, oil refineries, and even insects as sources for

their buildings. They also declared that process and change

should be substituted for delight in the Vitruvian triad be-

cause modern society changes so rapidly and is so mobile

parts of their buildings were designed to move or changewith the needs of the inhabitants (the plug-in city). One Ar-

chigram project was for an entire city that moved wherever

its inhabitants wanted to go. Most of this type of architec-

ture, like the earlier and comparable Futurist architecture

remained on paper, but Piano and Rogers used Archigram

imagery in their design for a cultural center incorporating

the museum of modern art in Paris (the Centre Pompidou

or Pompidou Center), which was built in 1972. The Metabo-

lists in Japan also pursued directions parallel to the Archi-

gram group. Although these buildings look very functiona

and technological, in many cases they arent: technology is

used for sensational effect.

These are only several of the directions explored by Sec-

ond Generation architects in an attempt to find a modern

style to replace the International Style of the First Genera-

tion. There were many others. The unprecedented wealth in

the West and Japan during this period permitted architects

and engineers to experiment with an astonishing variety

of forms and structural techniques. Typically, little concern

was given either to the context of the buildings or to their

energy consumption in the headlong search for something

new and different. James Stirling of England created a num-ber of striking buildings by combining references to Futur-

ist architecture with Archigram-Iike ideas and references to

such 19th century buildings as the Crystal Palace. In the

US, Richard Meier was one of several architects who re-

vived the aesthetic of the early Le Corbusier. John Hejduk

experimented with de Stijl forms. Only their dissatisfaction

with the limitations of the First Generation ties these Second

Generation architects together. They all reacted to one o

Rome Olympic Stadium

German Pavilion

Meiers Hanselman House


27/40


more of the characteristics of the International Style. In hind-

sight, we can see references to the near and far historical

past begin to creep into architecturein contrast to the First

Generation who wished to start each project with a clean

slate, free of historical references.

Louis Kahn also reacted to First Generation forms and prin-

ciples, but he was more immediately influential than most of

the other Second Generation. His philosophies and buildings

assimilated and synthesized so many (sometimes appar-

ently conflicting) ideas that they served as the springboard

for widely divergent approaches in others. He is the only

American architect of his generation whose worldwide repu-

tation and influence has not only remained undiminished,

but has actually increased since his death. Kahn rejected

the less is more approach to architecture and interpreted

the dictum form follows function in a poetic, metaphysicalway (What does this building want to be?). He included

forms and compositional techniques, for example, those of

the Ecole des Beaux-Arts that had been avoided as messy

or impure in the First Generation. His buildings were rich

in allusions to many periods of history, especially to those

where the play of light over form and through space was as

masterful as in his structures. Kahn reemphasized the Ra-

tionalist theory that decoration should derive from the pat-

terns left by the construction of the building.

The Richards Medical Center for the University of Penn-

sylvania was Kahns first famous structure. It gave poetic

feeling to the expression of the different functional areas of

the plan and was one of the most imitated buildings of the

mid-century. Kahn separates the laboratories (the served

spaces) into one set of blocks and the services (stairs, air-

ducts, etc.)the "servant" spacesinto another set. The

resulting building looks both modern and like a medieval

castle. The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California and the Kim-

bell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, are both examples of

his later work. Serene, they are rare examples of buildings

that justify the adjective sublime. For many, they, like Mies

van der Rohes Barcelona Pavilion, can be placed in thesame category as the Parthenon.

Robert Venturi, one of Kahns followers and the author of

an immensely controversial and influential book on architec-

ture, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, devel-

oped one aspect of Kahns philosophies, the willingness to

include more than one type of form or compositional device

in the same building (the inclusivist approach). He argued

Richards Medical C

Kimbell Art Mus


28/40


that less is a bore and that buildings should reflect the

natural complexity of life. According to Venturi, the simple

minimalist forms of the First Generation were possible only

because they excluded the expression of functions that

would complicate plans and elevations (the exclusivist ap-proach).

Even more controversial among architects was his demand

that they respond to what the average person builds and

likes rather than try to impose sophisticated architectura

theories and forms. Main Street is almost all right, wrote

Venturi. He meant that the neon signs, commercial architec-

ture, and billboards that line most main streets in America

are the real modern American vernacular architecture and

should be the source of the architects design vocabulary

He designed buildings along highways that resembled ab-

stracted billboards, which he called Build-ing boards.

In effect Venturi has rejected any traditional concept of

beauty. His Guild House (1960-65) makes no attempt to be

attractive; rather, it is intentionally made to resemble the ba-

nal, speculative apartment buildings in the neighborhood

its major piece of decoration is a television antenna - not be-

cause TV antennas are beautiful but (says Venturi) because

television is the most meaningful part of life for the elderly

who live in the building.

POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE

A very curious thing happened as a result of the Enlighten-

ment obsession with classification: people became aware

of their place in history. Until that time, people and societies

had a rather hazy notion of what had happened in the pas

and when it had occurredif they were at all concerned

"History" meant stories that pointed out some useful moral

When an event happened (and, in fact, ifan event actu-

ally happened) was of little importance. For the people o

the Renaissance, for example, the Roman Empire had oc-

curred a long time ago. Everything in between was bar-

baric. None of these cultures was aware of producing art orarchitecture of a certain style; that is, it would never have

occurred to Bramante that he was designing buildings in the

High Renaissance style.

The concept of style, like the classification systems of biol-

ogy and zoology, was introduced in an attempt to find pat-

terns in the phenomena of the world, to find universal laws

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that explained where wed been, and, by extension, where

we were going. As strange as it sounds to us today, such

questions were of no interest to anyone before the Renais-

sance and of very little interest before the Enlightenment.

Newton, however, found that three statements could groupand explain what had seemed to be a number of unrelated

physical events. Linnaeus discovered that there were not

a vast number of individual plants and animals, but that

they could be arranged in a few related families. In the

same way, scholars grouped art and architecture chrono-

logically according to style: families of attitudes toward

structure, decoration, compositional devices, etc. Architects

were made aware of and attempted to produce buildings

in a certain style: a Romanesque style, a Gothic style,

andeventuallya "Modern" style.

Strictly speaking, "modern" means what is being done atthe moment. In 1889, the Eiffel Tower was "modern." But

we have come, with respect to architecture, to use the term

"Modern" to refer to the architecture of the First and Sec-

ond Generations as we have described it. Postmodern,

the next period after Modernism, is less coherent than

Modern. It is a period of architectural pluralism, with many

different directions; there is no prevailing theory, no singu-

larly accepted approach. We were starting to see different

directions emerging after the Industrial Revolution, and in

the Postmodern period, the approach to architecture is even

more eclectic. One characteristic that separates Modern

from Postmodern architecture is that history is embraced; it

is just interpreted in a variety of ways.

The basic tenet of Modern architecture is the rejection of

any specific references to the historical past. A building

was not considered Modern if it used the Greek Orders; or

if Gothic decorative motifs were used; or if anything that a

critic could directly associate with a building of the past was

used. Indeed all decorative features were avoided if possi-

ble because most buildings of the past had been decorated.

Modern architects tried to produce something entirely new

for what they felt was an entirely new age.

As we have seen, starting in the 1950s, architects gradu-

ally began to accept references to history in their architec-

ture. Le Corbusier based La Tourette on a study of medieval

monasteries. Saarinen studied the plans of medieval towns

when he was designing dormitories at Yale. This practice

was criticized to varying degrees, but it was generally ac-

cepted among Modernists as long as the references to the


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past were not explicit and as long as the architects were us-

ing the principles of historical buildings but not the specific

forms or details.

Later, rebellious leaders of early Postmodernism took a di-rect stance against the Modernists rejection of history and

began to introduce historical details and imagery, even that

of the Orders. Some Postmodern architects such as Thom-

as Gordon Smith revived historical styles (in his case Clas-

sicism), but most Postmodern architects did not revive his-

torical styles as the 19th century Eclectics (or in the sense

the Renaissance architects) did. They took isolated histori-

cal details and transformed them into something "new" by

changing their original function, size, or scale or by parody-

ing them: setting a keystone on top of a column, for exam-

ple; or making an Ionic capital out of stainless steel. There is

something Mannerist about this, something like what GiulioRomano had done with High Renaissance architecture. Bu

in several respects their approaches were still Modernist

Firstly, the Postmodernists were still trying to shocka top

priority of the First Generation. In the second place, they

were, ironically, rejecting history; however, they rejected re

centhistory. They rejected the First Generations rejection

of history, a neat little paradox much appreciated by many

of the Postmodernists.

Phillip Johnson, for example, annoyed most Modern archi-

tects when he designed the AT&T (now Sony) Building in

New York City, one of the first important Postmodern build-

ings with obvious historical reference. An elder statesmen

of the American architectural profession, he had been Mies

van der Rohes collaborator on the Parthenon of the Modern

skyscrapers, the Seagrams Building, as well as one of the

leading architects of the Second Generation. He had also

first used the term International Style in the 1930s. These

credentials as a Modernist made his use of a classical pedi-

ment on top of the AT&T skyscraper and a motif borrowed

from Brunelleschi for the entrance especially surprising. I

was, for many of the more established architects, as if the

pope had suddenly declared he was an atheist.

In addition toand related totheir rejection of historica

architecture, Modern architects typically rejected the idea o

applied decoration or superficial ornamentation. In a Modern

building, form, textures of the construction materials, and the

joints between those construction materials were the deco

ration. Postmodernists embraced the idea of applied orna-

ment, often exaggerating its decorative character. RobertAT&T Building


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Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used plywood silhouettes

of the Doric Order and pre-cast concrete moldings and Or-

ders. Michael Graves (probably the most fashionable of the

early Postmodern architects) stirred great controversy with

his Portland Office Building with super-scaled keystone mo-tifs, details from neo-classical architecture and buildings of

the 1930s, and applied decoration, including a large statue.

As many of the Postmodernists themselves have observed,

these non-traditional historical decorations are illusions no

deeper than a layer of paint or an appliqu of plywood or

cardboard. It is no wonder that many Postmodern architects

have been hired to design buildings with oversized swan ac-

roteria or miniaturized European cities within the fabricated

fantasy world of Walt Disney.

Postmodernists use of applied ornament was entirely dif-

ferent from the Modernists reductivist philosophy of lessis more, in which architecture strives to be efficient, sim-

ple, and pure. Venturis Postmodern less is a bore phi-

losophy encourages what he calls messy vitality that can

be achieved through decoration. According to Venturi, it is

okay, for example, to attach a plywood portico onto the front

of a prefabricated metal building intended for industrial use

and call it a banquet hall. This is acceptance of what a non-

architect builder might typically do.

A Postmodern architect can also be inspired by local tradi-

tions, culture, climate, and materials, unlike the many ma-

chined Modernist buildings that could just as well sit in In-

dia as they would in Boston. Many Modernist buildings are

made of steel, glass, and concrete, and can be mass pro-

duced in any industrialized society. However, some Post-

modern architects have chosen to reflect regional or vernac-

ular character by using a variety of material palettes while

showing a Modernist influence. Architect Antoine Predock,

preceded by architects like Luis Barragn in Mexico and

Carlos Scarpa in Italy (each of these Modernists adopted

techniques and traditions of their respective countries), is

well known for architecture that reflects the character of the

Southwestern American desert. His Nelson Fine Arts Cen-ter in Tempe, Arizona, features strong sculptural forms that

mimic Native American colonies nestled in the cliffs. The

building is covered in smooth, colored stucco, made pink to

match the nearby desert earth. This project and many of his

others literally and metaphorically reveal the character of

their specific locations.

Another group of Postmodern architects has continued

Portland Office Bu

Hotel at Disney W

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to explore the machine aesthetic of Modernism. These

high-tech architects who try to give their buildings space

age/computer age imagery (much as the First Generation

used machine-age imagery) by emphasizing technical com-

ponents: heating and air-conditioning ducts, elevators andescalators, and highly machined, polished, and industrially

produced surfaces. They expose structural and mechani-

cal systems, which the Modernists had hidden, and they

become a primary aspect of a buildings aesthetic appeal

These buildings are influenced by Piano and Rogers previ-

ously mentioned Pompidou Center, which, in essence, is a

museum turned inside-out so that its systems and structure

are on the exterior to make room for flexible and large open

spaces on the interior. Other high-tech buildings feature un-

usual elements. In Jean Nouvels Arab World Institute, also

in Paris, metal panels, aesthetically designed to incorporate

traditional Islamic ornamentation, cover the windows andrespond to light like our eyes pupil, mechanically opening

with cloud cover and closing with sunlight.

As you can imagine, high-tech architecture can require so-

phisticated engineering and custom fabrication. Not only

are these buildings expensive to build, they are expensive

to maintain. Ironically, a high-tech architect was initially in-

terested in designing a building that could be built from an

inexpensive kit-of-parts, an inherently Modern idea. None-

theless, these architects have responded to our cultures

fascination with technology and delighted users, as in Nor-

man Fosters high-rise Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. For

the building, he designed a large-scale exterior truss struc-

tural system within which he suspended the floors. Interio

offices open onto a light-filled atrium. High-tech architecture

is rationalist in the sense that it exposes the structure of the

building, so it becomes one of the branches of Postmodern-

ism that isnt easily classified as simply anti-Modern.

Another architect who has maintained a Modern aesthetic in

his architecture is Richard Meier, known for his trademark

gleaming white buildings with abundant glass. As previous-

ly mentioned, he has been heavily influenced by the earlyarchitecture and ideas of Le Corbusier, making his archi-

tecture neo-Modern, another branch of Postmodernism

His recent Getty Center Museum is an impressive museum

complex (with its own tram) whose strong geometric forms

stretch across a hilltop overlooking Los Angeles. In the Get-

ty Center, as in his houses, schools, and other museums

he uses a Modernist language of pure geometries.Getty Center Museum plan

Pompidou Center

romA Global History of Architecture by Francis D. K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek and Vikra-

aditya Prakash, by permission from John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


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The Getty Center was a big undertaking for Los Angeles.

Museums and concert halls have become the most promi-

nent building types for many American and international

cities, serving as statements of societal values. To a cer-

tain degree, the museum is to our cities what the cathedralchurch was to medieval towns, or what the skyscraper

the cathedral to commerce, previously a distinctly American

preoccupationis to developing cities like Dubai. Often the

most elaborate and expensive materials and most sophisti-

cated engineering are used in museums, which can become

artistic statements as strong as the art or artifacts they pro-

tect. Two architects who have successfully designed mu-

seums as cultural statements as well as provided pleas-

ant and effective places to view art are I.M. Pei and Renzo

Piano.

I.M. Peis masterpieces like the National Gallery in Washing-ton, D. C. and his Louvre Museum renovation and Pyramid

in Paris are of Modernist influence, and they have helped

make museum going more popular among the masses.

Again, like many medieval towns that built cathedrals to at-

tract pilgrims, many cities have picked up on this and are

building museums to attract tourists.

Bilbao, Spain, was little visited by tourists before Los An-

geles architect Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim

Museum on its riverbank. The brilliant building contrasts its

dense, traditional surroundings with a series of complex and

sculptural titanium forms that come together to create the

dramatic, even baroque, entry. It is the focal point, the com-

manding symbol of the city, and has created a revival for

Bilbao by attracting tourists who would otherwise have not

ventured there. It works because its site on the river calls

for a focal point object that contrasts with its otherwise quiet

Modern Arhitecture

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