Modern Architecture

C

Japan

In Japan, an era of massive industrialization after World War II (1939-1945) brought the first successful fusion of Japanese and modernist traditions. Exemplifying this approach is the Prefecture of Kagawa (1955-1958), an office building in the city of Takamatsu by Japanese architect Kenzō Tange. Its lightweight appearance, achieved through imitation of traditional Japanese post-and-beam construction, belies its concrete structure.

During the 1960s Tange, and later Fumiko Maki, led a distinctly Japanese movement in modern architecture called metabolism. Fascinated by high technology and mass production, the metabolists produced fanciful drawings for cities that seemed to come from science fiction. They envisioned huge structures with movable modules for living, some floating on water, some rising as skyscrapers. Also during the 1960s a similar group in England called Archigram was led by architects Peter Cook, Ron Herron, and others. Archigram’s futuristic proposals expressed hope about the power of technology to transform and improve the world. Both movements enjoyed enormous success as publicity ventures but produced few actual buildings. Fascination with the image of high technology lived on after Archigram’s end in the early 1970s, in the work of English architect Richard Rogers. It can be seen in his Lloyd's Building in London (1986) and in the Pompidou Center in Paris (1971-1977), designed in collaboration with Italian architect Renzo Piano. The Pompidou Center made visible pipes, ducts, escalators, and other utilities.

D

Other Nations

For the developing world, reliance on Western modern architecture was neither cost-effective nor responsive to the particular histories, building traditions, and living and working patterns of inhabitants. But modern architecture did provide convenient, inexpensive, and rapidly constructed images for multinational corporations as they spread outside the United States and Europe. American architectural firms such as Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill designed buildings in Saudi Arabia and Iran, generally of the same type as they would have built at home. In many cases, industrializing nations adopted Western modernism primarily because it was a symbol of modernity, and jettisoned local building traditions on its behalf.

A remarkable exception to this rule is the architecture of Luis Barragán in Mexico. After the turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Mexico struggled to find a new, modern identity. As was common elsewhere, modern architecture was both promoted and resisted for its internationalism. While some architects adopted the modern art deco style, others turned to International Style towers to provide much of the country's public housing. But by the mid-1930s a reaction against modernism began to set in. Barragán and others returned to local traditions, to the simple, strong colors and plain, unadorned walls seen in much of rural Mexico. With elementary geometric forms set off by still pools of water and lush vegetation, Barragán’s designs were serenely detached from the machine-age sleekness of the International Style.

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XI

Scandinavian Modernism

A desire to enhance national traditions while embracing the tenets of modernism characterizes the architecture of early Scandinavian modernism. The leaders were Erik Gunnar Asplund of Sweden, Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto of Finland, and Arne Jacobsen of Denmark. Asplund, in his design for the Stockholm City Library (1928), set a rotunda (round building with a dome) within a rectangular cube. The design was neoclassical in inspiration, but the building’s plain surfaces were characteristic of rationalist modernism. Asplund went on to create decidedly modernist buildings for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, with slender piers and extensive use of glass and steel. But his most influential building may have been the small, unadorned Woodland Chapel at the Stockholm Cemetery (1920). With its shingled roof and temple-like columned entry porch, the chapel seemed to transcend both local and classical architectural traditions.

Jacobsen worked within Danish tradition throughout his career, but was deeply influenced by the craft and rigor of Asplund's designs. In the Jespersen Office Building (1955) in Copenhagen, Jacobsen also incorporated the curtain wall and steel frame typical of high-rise buildings in the United States.

Eliel Saarinen was a member of a group of artists, musicians, and writers who celebrated Finnish nationalism, and with them he participated in a broad movement to revive Nordic vernacular traditions. His Helsinki Central Railway Station (1904-1914) utilized local masonry techniques to emphasize bold architectural forms and expressive sculptural decoration. But he allowed functional considerations to guide him in designing its sleek, streamlined appearance and rational organization of space. Saarinen moved to the United States in 1923, where he designed buildings for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Eliel’s son, Eero Saarinen, secured his fame with two designs. The first was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, for which he won a competition in 1948 (though it was not built until 1963). Its soaring line has since become a world-recognized symbol of St. Louis. The second design was for the TWA Terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport (1962) in New York City, a building that expresses flight with its sweeping curves. Although visually pleasing, the terminal’s curving shape proved maddeningly resistant to expansion.

Alvar Aalto's early work reveals the influence of Asplund's designs, although Aalto was later influenced by Russian and Dutch constructivism, Finnish neoclassicism, and Frank Lloyd Wright's house designs. In collaboration with his first wife, Aino Marsio, Aalto designed houses, public buildings, and plywood furniture. After working with reinforced concrete, a standard material in modern European designs, he began to use more wood because of its association with native Finnish tradition and its greater warmth and expressiveness. For the Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku, Finland, Aalto layered sensuous strips of teak and other woods, even using teak for the venetian blinds on the exterior of the windows. The natural materials he used—wood-paneled interiors, a rough granite base for the house, and an exterior wall of stone rubble—stand in sharp contrast to the clean white walls of International Style modernism, although they display a sympathy with the natural materials of Wright's architecture. Aalto was less interested in arguing for a specific style than in finding solutions that would dignify places of human habitation.

XII

Postmodernism and Diversity

While the International Style continued to dominate the world of architecture through the 1960s, only in the 1970s did it become apparent that the International Style and modern architecture were not necessarily the same. Indeed, the work of such diverse architects as Aalto, Barragán, Tange, and many others reveals that modern architecture has never been limited to a single style. Among the architects who produced important variants are Pier Luigi Nervi and Aldo Rossi of Italy, and Louis Kahn of the United States. Nervi’s vast airplane hangars (1936-1941) and sports arenas (1932, Florence; 1960, Rome) demonstrate the pure poetry of modern forms in reinforced concrete. At the other end of the spectrum, the Torre Velasca in Milan, Italy (1958) by the Italian architectural firm Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers (BBPR) reveals the resilient appeal of medieval tower design transformed into a 20th-century skyscraper. Rossi and Kahn explored the architectural potential of elementary building blocks, drawn from history as well as from the geometry of the cube, sphere, and cylinder. This approach is exemplified by Kahn’s highly original designs from the 1960s for government buildings in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh. While clearly modern, Rossi’s and Kahn’s architecture was rooted in a respect for older traditions, which they transformed through new combinations into highly personal poetic statements. This is especially visible in Rossi’s Bonnefanten Museum (1990) in Maastricht, Netherlands, and in Kahn’s Salk Institute (1959-1965) in La Jolla, California.

In the 1970s a new movement known as postmodernism began to challenge long-held modernist principles. The architects who led the movement asserted that the use of historical references in architecture was not only permissible but desirable. To the dictum of Mies van der Rohe, 'Less is more,' American architect and leading postmodernist Robert Venturi replied, 'Less is a bore.' Arguing that the modernist aesthetic was stifling to creativity, disliked by the masses, and uninteresting to design, postmodern architects celebrated diversity, color, and historical references in their designs. Venturi articulated many of these ideas in his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Other leading voices of postmodernism include Americans Charles Moore, Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, and Frank Gehry. Moore's design for the Piazza d'Italia (1975-1978) in New Orleans, Louisiana, is a boldly colored, open-air plaza celebrating the city’s Italian community, for which Moore playfully arranged fragments of classical columns and other traditional forms, along with images drawn from a delicatessen.

Graves’s design for the Portland Public Services Building (1982) in Portland, Oregon, is a striking example of postmodernist architecture. Garlands over windows, a giant keystone, and a statue of a mythical figure adorn this 15-story celebration of color and ornament. Surrounded by modernist high-rise towers of steel and glass, Graves’s building is a startling insertion in the cityscape and a strong statement against the austere terms of modern architecture.

One of the most exuberant expressions of postmodern freedom came in the design of the Guggenheim Museum (1997) in Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry. The originality of its undulating metal forms relate to the organic expressionism of Antoni Gaudí’s designs of a century earlier, also in the Catalan region of northern Spain.

But even as postmodernism thrived, modernism did not disappear. The dramatic and elegantly understated Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) by American architect Maya Lin dates from the same year as Graves’s Portland Building. Another premier example of modernism, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, by American architect Richard Meier, was completed the following year. Meier went on to design the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities (1997, Los Angeles, California), a paragon of elegantly spare modernist design. Indeed, variety is the most consistent characteristic of the architecture built since the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s.

In the 1980s a variation on postmodernism emerged, known as deconstruction, which sought to demonstrate the arbitrariness of all previous cultural assumptions. Deconstructivist architects applied these analytical, abstract ideas to the design of buildings. Leading practitioners included Zaha Hadid of England, Peter Eisenman of the United States, and Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi. In Eisenman’s design for the Wexner Center for the Arts (1989) in Columbus, Ohio, the architect used local conditions in generating a seemingly arbitrary mechanism to govern his design. One wall of the art center is aligned with an adjacent building, another wall with a nearby football gridiron, and a third with the flight path of planes that regularly pass overhead. After a brief flurry of interest in the late 1980s, interest in deconstruction faded, and only a handful of buildings were ever constructed to represent it.

Much more significant, in the United States and in the rest of the world, was a resurgence of interest in regional traditions and materials, and a greater willingness to meld features of rationalist modernism with elements from many other traditions, especially vernacular architecture. Emblematic of this is the work of Antoine Predock in the American Southwest. In his Nelson Fine Arts Center (1989) in Tempe, Arizona, Predock presents a modern vision inspired by the warm colors, stucco surfaces, and square cutout windows of local Spanish and Native American traditions. Others who approach architecture with a comparable openness to historical and local practices and produce designs of extraordinary sensitivity include Sam Mockbee in Alabama; Carlos Jiménez, a Costa Rican architect based in Texas; Enrique Norten in Mexico; Liangyong Wu in Beijing, China; and Ada Karmi-Melamede in Israel. Their work points toward an architecture that focuses less on debates among competing movements and more on buildings that are economical, environmentally responsible, and beautiful.

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