Architecture (building)

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Modern Architecture

At the turn of the century, designers appeared who refused to work in borrowed styles. Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Spain, was the most original; his sinuous Casa Milà (1905-1907) and the unfinished Iglesia di Sagrada Familia (Church of the Holy Family, 1883-1926) exhibit a search for new organic structural forms. His work has some affinity with the movement called art nouveau, which had been inaugurated contemporaneously in Brussels and Paris. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose masterpiece is the Glasgow School of Art (1897-1899; 1906-1909), espoused a more austere version of art nouveau.

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The Skyscraper

The Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, in his Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St. Louis, Missouri, his Guaranty Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York, and his Carson Pirie Scott Department Store (1899-1904) in Chicago, gave new expressive form to urban commercial buildings. His career converges with the so-called Chicago School of architects, whose challenge was to invent the skyscraper or high-rise building, facilitated by the introduction of the electric elevator and the sudden abundance of steel. They made a successful transition from the masonry bearing wall to the steel frame, which assumed all the load-bearing functions. The building’s skeleton could be erected quickly and the remaining components hung on it to complete it, an immense advantage for high-rise buildings on busy city streets. Sullivan is memorable not only for his own work but for having provided the apprenticeship of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest native architect, whose career extended 50 years beyond that of Sullivan. See American Architecture.

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Reinforced Concrete

In France attention centered on reinforced concrete. Auguste Perret achieved early success in Paris with his apartment building (1902-1903) in the Rue Franklin and his Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (1911-1912). Tony Garnier had, during his studies in Rome, created a detailed design for an imaginary city with many buildings, all in concrete; its plans were published in 1917 as La cité industrielle. Vienna was the scene of work by Otto Wagner and by Adolf Loos, who worked in severe linear forms and proclaimed that “ornament is a crime.” Peter Behrens, a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Craft Alliance), is revered as a German precursor of modern architecture. See Modern Architecture.

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The Bauhaus

When the Bauhaus opened, the modern movement in architecture began to coalesce. The Bauhaus school (Weimar, 1919-1925; Dessau, 1926-1932; Berlin, 1932-1933) brought together architects, painters, and designers from several countries, all determined to formulate goals for the visual arts in the modern age. Its first director was Walter Gropius, who designed the innovative buildings for the move to Dessau; its second was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The new architecture demonstrated its virtues in new Siedlungen (low-cost housing) in Berlin and Frankfurt. An exhibition of housing types, the Weissenhof Siedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, brought together works by Mies, Gropius, the Dutch J. J. P. Oud, and the Swiss-French Le Corbusier; this milestone identified the movement with a better life for the common man. The chastely elegant German Pavilion (1929) by Mies for the Barcelona Exhibition, executed in such lavish materials as travertine, marble, onyx, and chrome-plated steel, asserted a strong, formal argument independent of any social goals. Gropius, his disciple Marcel Breuer, and Mies eventually established themselves in the U.S., where they enjoyed productive and influential decades—extending through the 1970s for Breuer—as architects and teachers.

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Le Corbusier, over a long career, exerted immense influence. His early publications championed a machine aesthetic and urged the replacement of traditional cities in favor of life and work in skyscrapers arranged regimentally in vast parks. His Villa Savoye (1928-1931) in the French countryside downplays a sense of structure and materials in order to dramatize complexity of spacial organization and allow a subtle ambiguity between interior and exterior space. In the 1950s, with Jawaharlal Nehru as client, he laid out the new capital city of the Punjab, Chandīgarh, and designed for it three monumental concrete government edifices standing in a vast plaza. In France he produced two unique religious buildings, the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp (1950-1955) and the Dominican monastery of La Tourette (1957-1961), both in concrete. Having abandoned the extreme rationalism of his early career, he manipulated form and light in these extraordinary structures for emotional response and dramatic effect.

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Innovative Architecture

Such structural engineers as the Swiss Robert Maillart, the French Eugène Freyssinet, and the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi produced works in reinforced concrete that combined imagination with rationality to achieve aesthetic impact. Among architects the Danish Jørn Utzon, in Australia’s Sydney Opera House (1957-1973), and the Finnish-American Eero Saarinen, in Dulles Airport (1960-1962) near Washington, D.C., employed unusual structural solutions. From his base in Helsinki, the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto extended his oeuvre through more than four decades, refusing to celebrate the industrialized repetition of steel, concrete, glass, and aluminum, but molding spaces with utmost sophistication, great care in the distribution of light, and the use of materials—stone, wood, and copper—with familiar and sympathetic tactile qualities. The American Louis I. Kahn infused his designs with a transcendent monumentality recalling Roman classicism, as in the transformation of tunnel vaults into light-modulating girders in his Kimbell Art Museum (1972), located in Fort Worth, Texas.

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