Modern Architecture

E

Totalitarianism’s Stifling Effect

Repressive and authoritarian regimes in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Germany during the 1930s ended research in modern architecture in those countries. In the USSR, support eroded for architects involved in the experimental movement of constructivism, after Communist Party leaders judged its designs to be too abstract and machine-like. Under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, architects found themselves confined to the approved neoclassical style that glorified the state. In Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler encouraged traditional German architecture. Local governments closed down the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1925 and in Dessau in 1933, and the Nazi party then launched a campaign against so-called decadent art (meaning modern art).

The one European dictatorship hospitable to modern architecture was that of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Because he promoted the modernization of Italy as an integral part of fascism, architecture with a modern, streamlined aesthetic fit in with his goals. And because Mussolini also pledged to root the modern state in long-standing Italian traditions, his regime tolerated diverse architectural styles for its public buildings.

Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio (1932) in Como, Italy, embodied both a modern aesthetic and a reference to historical roots. Headquarters for the local branch of the fascist party, the Casa borrowed its plan from the traditional Italian Renaissance palace. The central court, left open in Renaissance palaces, here was covered with glass to form an indoor atrium. The Casa’s sleekly modern, marble-clad façades depended upon the placement of window openings for architectural interest. The corner tower and the building’s placement on a main square recalled traditional town hall buildings of the region.

IX

The International Style

In 1932 American architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and American architect Philip Johnson wrote a highly influential catalog to accompany an exhibition of architectural photographs and models at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In the catalog, International Style: Architecture Since 1922, the authors outlined what they saw as the characteristics of the new architecture: an emphasis on volume, not mass; on regularity, not symmetry; on proportions and sleek, technical perfection rather than ornament; and a preference for elegant materials that included those of the machine age. Republished many times as a book, International Style became a bible of modern architecture, a doctrine against which all contemporary architecture could be measured. Attempting to bring order to a confusing group of architectural styles, the authors however had not intended to lay down any laws.

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Early in his career, Hitchcock had distinguished between architects he described as new traditionalists, who simplified ornament but generally accepted historical traditions, and new pioneers, who eliminated historical references and ornament from their work and emphasized planes and space. The International Style exhibition, however, focused only on the new pioneers, and architects and historians took that style to be the heart of modernism, to the exclusion of many other innovative modern buildings.

The catalog of International Style architecture included few examples from the United States, and those few were mainly the work of Europeans who had immigrated to the United States. Thus, it included the Lovell Beach House (1926, Newport Beach, California), a reinforced concrete structure with flat roof and bold cantilevered elements by Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler. And for the same client, the Lovell House (1929, Los Angeles, California) by Richard Neutra, also of Austria, which featured a flat roof, slender steel frame, and freely arranged interior plan. But the catalog ignored the Austrians’ debt to the pioneering work of American architect Irving Gill, in the La Jolla Women's Club (1914, La Jolla, California) and Dodge House (1916, Los Angeles). Gill's spare, smooth concrete walls, flat roofs, and asymmetrically arranged rooms were unquestionably modern and were not matched in Europe until the mid-1920s.

Perhaps the gravest omission was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose designs had inspired many European architects. Yet his opposition to the thin, transparent walls of international style buildings ruled him out. In retrospect, Wright's Fallingwater (1937, Bear Run, Pennsylvania) seems like a brilliant response to that slight. The house is built over a waterfall; cantilevered slabs of concrete jut out over a rushing stream just where it becomes a waterfall. The chimney and rugged stone supporting piers intersect the cantilevers to form vertical counterpoints to these horizontals. Wright's daring use of materials in this profoundly modern house expresses his insistence on an architecture that is at one with nature and with its particular site.

The term International Style came to refer generally to modern European architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, and the later architecture that it influenced. In the United States, this style dominated progressive architectural design well into the 1960s. Its spread was assisted by the presence of many European architects who had fled European dictatorships during the 1930s.

The steel-framed high-rise best expresses the later International Style and is exemplified by the steel and glass Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1948-1951) in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe. Other notable International Style towers include the Equitable Life Assurance building (1944-1947) in Portland, Oregon, by Italian-born architect Pietro Belluschi; the Lever House (1951-1952) in New York City by the American architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill; and the bronze and glass Seagram Building (1958) in New York City by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson. Whereas skyscrapers of the 1930s commonly had setbacks at their upper stories to permit light to reach the street, this new generation of skyscrapers consisted of uncompromising slabs that rose with unadorned severity to increasingly greater heights, celebrating technological sophistication and the power of American corporations.

Although New York and Chicago are known as the chief skyscraper cities, modern skyscrapers appeared in most large American cities from the 1960s on. Notable examples are the Transamerica Pyramid (1972, San Francisco, California) by William Pereira and Associates; the 60-story John Hancock Tower (1976, Boston, Massachusetts) by I. M. Pei & Partners; and Pennzoil Place (1976, Houston, Texas) by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.

High-rises and skyscrapers enhanced another trend in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: urban renewal. The strategy behind urban renewal was the replacement of run-down housing and shabby retail areas with new office buildings, shopping areas, and townhouse and apartment complexes. But in the process, urban renewal destroyed small-scale urban housing and retail districts and moved low-income residents out of the inner city. City planners, politicians, and architects achieved the pristine sidewalks and cityscapes they sought, the machine-inspired ideal of Le Corbusier and his followers. But by the 1980s many had begun to realize that cities had lost their street life and with it their sense of community as an unintended consequence of urban renewal.

X

Beyond Europe and the United States

Adherents of the modern movement were eager to carry their ideas beyond Europe and the United States to other countries. Le Corbusier was especially successful in locating followers and buildings elsewhere in the world, particularly in Brazil and India.

A

Brazil

Le Corbusier’s influence in Brazil began in the 1930s, after Lúcio Costa, a young Brazilian architect, won a design competition for a major government building, the Ministry of Education and Health (1936-1943) in Rio de Janeiro. Costa insisted on sharing this commission with other architects who had not won, and invited Le Corbusier to serve as a consultant on the project. The result of Le Corbusier's visit of less than a month was a high-rise design based on his principles and a coterie of followers dedicated to his ideas.

Corbusian design became part of a movement already underway to modernize Brazilian design by purging it of traces of its past as a Portuguese colony and by discovering, or inventing, a national architecture. A number of European architects who had immigrated to Brazil in the 1920s became influential teachers and helped spread modern architectural ideas. An exhibition of Brazilian architecture held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1943 celebrated the International Style accomplishments of this diverse group, which included Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Roberto Burle Marx.

The most prominent work of these architects was built in Rio de Janeiro, but in the 1950s Brazilian architects had an opportunity to showcase their designs in an entirely new capital city to be built in the center of Brazil. Planned by Costa and filled with buildings by Niemeyer, the city of Brasilia was a lavish testimony to Le Corbusier’s principles of modern architecture and planning. Costa divided residential zones by class, designated a monumental government and business center, and designed mammoth streets dedicated to the expeditious movement of the automobile. The grim unfriendliness of Brasilia’s urban spaces became apparent, however, as residents tried to adjust to them, and Brasilia thus provided an eloquent demonstration of the deficiencies of this planning ideal.

B

India

As a British colony, India had absorbed British architectural styles. From 1912 to 1931 British architects Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker were responsible for the construction of New Delhi as Britain’s new imperial capital of India. The challenge they faced was to produce an architecture that successfully combined local traditions with a statement of colonial power. New Delhi’s urban plan, with its emphasis on wide, straight roadways radiating like the spokes of a wheel from major imperial landmarks, was a direct expression of British control. But Lutyens's design for the Viceroy's House (1912-1931), though inspired by neoclassicism, also paid homage to Delhi’s Mughal architecture in its use of red and yellow sandstone, its dome, and in other details.

Following India's independence in 1947, the new nation prepared to assert itself as a modern country. The Indian state of Punjab chose Le Corbusier and a handful of other internationally famous European architects to design its new capital city of Chandīgarh. Unlike Lutyens’s design, Corbusier’s modernist designs for the Secretariat (1952-1956), Palace of the Assembly (1953-1963), and other government buildings have no Indian inflections. Huge distances separate buildings and the small-scale amenities that make city life appealing are missing. As a result, the only sign of life on the streets has been the automobile.

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