Modern Architecture

B

Chicago School

The construction of buildings taller than Perret’s was made possible by the safety elevator, first demonstrated in 1854 by American inventor Elisha Otis. Architects in Chicago, Illinois, were the first to exploit the possibilities offered by the elevator in combination with the new steel and concrete technologies. Following a disastrous fire in 1871, Chicago experienced a massive boom in new housing, warehouses, and commercial buildings. The collective response of a diverse group of architects to the reconstruction of the city led to the development of the skyscraper.

Architect William Le Baron Jenney devised a solution to the problem of fireproof construction for tall buildings by substituting steel in the structural system for cast iron, which melts at high temperatures. He continued to clad the building’s exterior with traditional masonry, however. Jenney brilliantly demonstrated his system in the Second Leiter Building (1889-1891, Chicago), in which a steel frame held together by rivets supported itself as well as all the interior walls and floors and the exterior cladding.

Architect Daniel H. Burnham and Charles B. Atwood, a designer in Burnham’s firm, took Jenney’s system and drove it to new heights with the Reliance Building (1889-1895), which stood 16 stories high, at least 6 stories higher than had been possible with masonry construction. Their design stripped away the ornamentation characteristic of most buildings at that time and instead used tall windows to emphasize the beauty of the building’s skyward thrust. Most importantly, they eliminated Jenney’s heavy masonry exterior, creating a system known as curtain-wall construction. In this system, the exterior wall of each floor is hung on the iron or steel frame so that the wall supports only its own weight and not the floors above it. This method of construction reduced the overall weight of a building, which allowed it to be built higher, and permitted the extensive use of glass on the façade. The glass-and-steel skyscrapers erected through most of the 20th century drew much of their aesthetic as well as technological inspiration from the clean lines and light appearance of late-19th-century Chicago buildings such as this one.

IV

Cities and Suburbs

The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and the 19th centuries that brought forth advances in materials and technology was also responsible for large-scale changes in patterns of living and working, and for the rapid growth of cities. By the beginning of the 20th century, the population of cities such as Paris, London, and New York City numbered well over a million people. Such population concentrations created demand for new roads, railroads, bridges, and subways, and for a wide range of new buildings, including railroad stations, department stores, opera houses, and covered public markets. Perhaps the most troubling feature of the Industrial Revolution was the squalor created wherever factories were found. Reformers throughout the 19th century struggled to change laws and customs in order to improve working conditions and provide decent and sanitary housing for the new urban masses.

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Among the reformers were those who dreamed of using architecture to create industrial utopias that would help control the unchecked urban growth and keep the working classes themselves in line. In 1901 French architect Tony Garnier submitted designs for an imaginary city where workers would live in lushly landscaped residential areas and commute by streetcar to clean and pleasant factories (published as Cité Industrielle, 1917). Although his plans went unrealized, such utopian projects exerted a powerful force on architects and governments at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1928 the Congrès Internationaux de l'Architecture Moderne (International Congress of Modern Architecture, or CIAM) was founded to promote social justice and modern architecture. In 1933 this group issued the Athens Charter, which recommended simple, clear urban-planning schemes that would separate leisure, work, housing, and traffic. Unfortunately, by separating these functions, many of these plans eliminated any sense of community. Governments and private enterprise sponsored new towns based on these guidelines, which assumed that people living in the right environment would be more likely to behave in accordance with the dictates of society. Much urban planning in the 20th century was devoted to decentralizing cities and setting up self-sufficient garden suburbs.

V

Art Nouveau and Related Movements

Art Nouveau, which flourished in Europe between 1890 and 1910, was one of the earliest (and shortest-lived) efforts to develop an original style for the modern age. Art nouveau artists and designers transformed modern industrial materials such as iron and glass into graceful, curving forms often drawn from nature, though with playful elements of fantasy. In contrast to both Perret and the architects of the Chicago School, art nouveau designers were interested in architecture as a form of stylistic expression rather than as a structural system.

In the three centers of art nouveau—Barcelona, Spain; Brussels, Belgium; and Paris, France—architects struggled to define a style with distinctly local characteristics. In Barcelona, one of the most ambitious projects of architect Antoni Guadí was the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Família (Church of the Holy Family, 1883-1929, 1979 to present). Gaudí turned to nature for a rich variety of animal and plant forms to decorate the towering façades of the Sagrada Família. He also used natural forms structurally: columns shaped like bones, undulating walls in brick, a roofline resembling the profile of an armadillo. His wide use of ceramic tile, a local building material, gave color and texture to his designs. The deeply personal nature of his fanciful designs meant that no school developed to follow him. Much more effective in generating a following was architect Victor Horta of Brussels.

Like Gaudí, Horta reacted against prevailing styles with an architecture that responded to local traditions and materials, although Horta transformed iron and glass as well as Belgian brick into slender, graceful forms inspired by flowers. Among his most influential designs was the Hôtel Tassel (1892-1893) in Brussels, a three-story house in which thin iron columns flow into stylized vines and serve both as structural and as decorative elements. The creation of these organic forms depended not on mass-production or modern machines, but on craftsmanship, thereby restoring to architecture what many feared was being lost to an increasingly technological engineering mentality. Horta’s flowing lines became the hallmark of art nouveau and were rendered by others in iron, glass, and plaster as well as in graphic design. In Paris, Hector Guimard produced entrances for the Métro subway system (1899-1904), rendering fanciful plantlike forms in iron and glass.

As art nouveau’s influence spread throughout Europe and North America, regional variations developed: stile Liberty in Italy, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, and modernisme in Spain. Among the major achievements of these art nouveau offshoots were the Elvira Photo Studio (1896-1897) in Munich, Germany, by German architect August Endell; and the Stadtbahn (city railway system, 1894-1899) in Vienna, Austria, by Otto Wagner. Perhaps the greatest of these achievements is the Willow Tea Room (1903-1904) in Glasgow, Scotland, designed with sinuous, willowy lines by Scottish architect and graphic designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

VI

Arts and Crafts and Related Movements

The Arts and Crafts Movement, which began in England around 1860 and continued into the first decade of the 20th century, shared many of the ideas of art nouveau. The movement’s earliest proponents reacted against cheap manufactured goods, which had flooded shops and filled houses in the second half of the 19th century. The Arts and Crafts ideal they offered was a spiritual, craft-based alternative, intended to alleviate industrial production’s degrading effects on the souls of laborers and on the goods they produced. It emphasized local traditions and materials, and was inspired by vernacular design—that is, characteristic local building styles that generally were not created by architects.

English designer William Morris, who led the Arts and Crafts movement, sought to restore integrity to both architecture and the decorative arts. The Red House (1859) in Kent, designed for Morris and his family by English architect Philip Webb, demonstrates the architectural principles at the heart of the English movement. The unpretentious brick façades were free of ornament, the ground plan was informal and asymmetrical, and the materials were drawn from the area and assembled with local building techniques.

Spurred by the experience of furnishing his home, Morris set up a studio with several associates, including Webb and English artists Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Edward Burne-Jones. They designed everything—from wallpaper to stained glass, books, and teapots—according to the highest standards of craftsmanship. The idea of the house as a total work of art, with all of the interior objects designed by the architect, emerged from this studio and remained standard practice throughout the Arts and Crafts movement.

In Scotland, Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art in two phases, which reveal a dramatic shift from his early art nouveau phase to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. The building’s asymmetrical front (1897-1899) featured a range of styles and curving art nouveau ironwork. The rear of the building (1906-1909) presented something quite different: To light the artists’ studios within, Mackintosh opened up the façade with tall windows set into an austere masonry grid. Spare, simple, functional, and breathtakingly different, this elevation predicted many of the qualities that came to be associated with modern architecture after World War I (1914-1918). Inside, the library, with its soaring interior space, dark wood, and exquisitely crafted furniture and lighting fixtures, revealed Mackintosh's fascination with Japanese architecture and design.

Mackintosh's influence spread across the European continent to Vienna, Austria, where architects Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffman and painter Gustav Klimt formed a group known as the Vienna Secession after they had seceded from the tradition-bound Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. Olbrich designed a headquarters and exhibition space for the group, a white block topped with a dome of gilded, wrought-iron leaves. Hoffman eventually became the leading architect of the Secession movement and with painter and designer Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) in 1903. This artists’ cooperative was dedicated to the production of furniture and other household objects.

Viennese architect Otto Wagner, an early proponent of art nouveau styles, designed one of the most important early modernist buildings in Vienna, the Postal Savings Bank (1904-1906). Its sleekly engineered interior featured a ceiling of glass panes framed in aluminum and luminous ceramic tile wall surfaces.

A Japanese Secession movement that arose in 1920 demonstrates the global reach of architectural ideas in the 20th century. This fledgling organization, composed of architects Mamoru Yamada, Sutemi Honiguchi, Mayumi Takizada, and Kikuji Ishimoto, signaled the first appearance of the modern movement in Japan, where modernization inevitably was connected with westernization. The group was also influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, who built the Imperial Hotel (1915-1922) in Tokyo.

The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Union), founded in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius, Peter Behrens, and Fritz Schumacher, differed from the other Arts and Crafts movements by allying artists and architects with industrialists. The Werkbund's ambition was to bring the talents of artists to bear on industrial products. The most fruitful alliance was that of Peter Behrens with the German electricity company, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). As AEG’s architect and chief designer, Behrens produced lightbulbs, radiators, stationery, lamps, and fans, in addition to factory buildings and a large housing complex for company workers near Berlin. The Werkbund also worked to transform the education of craftspeople so a body of skilled artisans would be available to carry out its designs.

VII

The Age of Machines

A powerful new aesthetic that celebrated the machine began to emerge in the early years of the 20th century, as architects for the first time designed buildings specifically suited to the needs of industry. One of the earliest examples is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building (1904, destroyed), designed for a mail-order company in Buffalo, New York. Massive, minimally decorated brick towers dominated the exterior of this fortress-like office building; but inside, a vast central atrium four stories high created a brightly lit, open space for workers. Wright designed each detail for maximum efficiency, from an innovative new air conditioning and ventilation system to desks with built-in chairs. The plain exterior and highly functional interior reflected Wright’s desire to create a building that would work as smoothly as a well-designed machine.

Behrens's AEG Turbine Factory (1908-1910) in Berlin combined elements of the classical Greek temple with modern industrial materials and building technology. A series of steel arches span the vast main hall, descending to form a row of steel wall piers (pillars) reminiscent of the columns in a church or Greek temple. Between these steel supports, the side walls were mostly of glass. Massive-looking concrete piers anchored each corner of the building and supported a temple-like pediment at each end. From the pediments a thin grid of steel and glass was hung like a curtain. This glass and steel wall was a forerunner of glass curtain walls common in later skyscrapers.

German architects Walter Gropius and Adolph Meyer, former employees of Behrens, presented an even more modern approach in their designs for the Fagus Factory (1911, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany). Gone were Behrens’s references to classical architecture. Instead of heavy masonry corners and a vaulted interior space, the Fagus Factory had open glass corners and a flat roof that emphasized its simple post-and-beam construction system. Such dynamic glass and steel architecture appeared as the vanguard of the new modernism.

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