VIII.

The Industrial Age

The Industrial Revolution, which began in England about 1760, led to radical changes at every level of civilization throughout the world. The growth of heavy industry brought a flood of new building materials—such as cast iron, steel, and glass—with which architects and engineers devised structures hitherto undreamed of in function, size, and form.

A.

Eclectic Revivals

Disenchantment with baroque, with rococo, and even with neo-Palladianism turned late 18th-century designers and patrons toward the original Greek and Roman prototypes. Selective borrowing from another time and place became fashionable. Its Greek aspect was particularly strong in the young United States from the early years of the 19th century until about 1850. New settlements were given Greek names—Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy—and Doric and Ionic columns, entablatures, and pediments, mostly transmuted into white-painted wood, were applied to public buildings and important town houses in the style called Greek Revival.

In France, the imperial cult of Napoleon steered architecture in a more Roman direction, as seen in the Church of the Madeleine (1807-1842), a huge Roman temple in Paris. French architectural thought had been jolted at the turn of the century by the highly imaginative published projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicholas Ledoux. These men were inspired by the massive aspects of Egyptian and Roman work, but their monumental (and often impractical) compositions were innovative, and they are admired today as visionary architects.

The most original architect in England at the time was Sir John Soane; the museum he built as his own London house (1812-1813) still excites astonishment for its inventive romantic virtuosity. Late English neoclassicism came to be seen as elitist; thus, for the new Houses of Parliament the authorities insisted on Gothic or Tudor Revival. The appointed architect, Sir Charles Barry, was not a Gothic expert, but he called into consultation an architect who was—A. W. N. Pugin, who became responsible for the details of this vast monument (begun 1836). Pugin, in a short and contentious career, made a moral issue out of a return to the Gothic style. Other architects, however, felt free to select whatever elements from past cultures best fitted their programs—Gothic for Protestant churches, baroque for Roman Catholic churches, early Greek for banks, Palladian for institutions, early Renaissance for libraries, and Egyptian for cemeteries.

In the second half of the 19th century dislocations brought about by the Industrial Revolution became overwhelming. Many were shocked by the hideous new urban districts of factories and workers’ housing and by the deterioration of public taste among the newly rich. For the new modes of transportation, canals, tunnels, bridges, and railroad stations, architects were employed only to provide a cultural veneer.

The Crystal Palace (1850-1851; reconstructed 1852-1854) in London, a vast but ephemeral exhibition hall, was the work of Sir Joseph Paxton, a man who had learned how to put iron and glass together in the design of large greenhouses. It demonstrated a hitherto undreamed-of kind of spatial beauty, and in its carefully planned building process, which included prefabricated standard parts, it foreshadowed industrialized building and the widespread use of cast iron and steel. See Crystal Palace.

Also important in its innovative use of metal was the great tower (1887-1889) of Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel in Paris. In general, however, the most gifted architects of the time sought escape from their increasingly industrialized environment by further development of traditional themes and eclectic styles. Two contrasting but equally brilliantly conceived examples are the sumptuous Paris Opéra (1861-1875) by Charles Garnier and Boston’s grandiose Trinity Church (1872-1877) by Henry Hobson Richardson .

B.

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.

B.1.

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.

B.2.

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.

B.3.

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.

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.

B.4.

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.

B.5.

The International Style

Despite such noteworthy exceptions—including such later works of Wright as New York City’s Guggenheim Museum (completed 1959)—the style initiated by the Bauhaus architects and termed the International Style gradually prevailed after the 1930s. The theory and practice of the new style was introduced in the United States largely through the efforts of Philip C. Johnson, one of Gropius’s students at Harvard University. In the hands of its most gifted exponents, such as Mies, the International Style was particularly well suited to large metropolitan apartment and office towers. The chaste elegance and subtle proportions of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) in Chicago and (with Philip C. Johnson) his Seagram Building (1958) in New York City represent modernism at its finest. Many of his imitators, however, seized on its commercial potential; it proved extremely efficient for large-scale construction, in which the same module could be repeated indefinitely. Inner spaces became standardized, predictable, and profitable, and exteriors reflected the monotony of the interiors; the blank glass box became ubiquitous.

Assessing modernism after a half century in which it was dominant, commentators pointed out that even though it was embraced by big business and big government, the lay public never grew fond of it. At most an austere classicism was conceded to it, but this was achieved in a coldly impersonal and often overwhelming way. Modernism had cut off architecture’s roots in the past by about 1930. Suddenly it became incorrect for a new building to show any resemblance to old ones; and for a period of time the study of historical styles almost disappeared from professional schools.

B.6.

Postmodern Architecture

Between about 1965 and 1980 architects and critics began to espouse tendencies for which there is as yet no better designation than postmodern. Although postmodernism is not a cohesive movement based on a distinct set of principles, as was modernism, in general it can be said that the postmodernists value individuality, intimacy, complexity, and occasionally even humor.

Postmodern tendencies were given early expression in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; revised ed. 1977) by the American architect Robert Venturi. In this provocative work he defended vernacular architecture—for example, gas stations and fast-food restaurants—and attacked the modernist establishment with such satiric comments as “Less is a bore” (a play on Mies’s well-known dictum “Less is more”). By the early 1980s, postmodernism had become the dominant trend in American architecture and an important phenomenon in Europe as well. Its success in the United States owed much to the influence of Philip C. Johnson, who had performed the same service for modernism 50 years earlier. His AT&T Building (1984) in New York City, with its Renaissance allusions and its pediment evoking Chippendale furniture, immediately became a landmark of postmodern design.

Other postmodern office towers built during the 1980s aspired to a similar high stylistic profile, recalling the great art deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s or striving for an eccentric flamboyance of their own. Vivid color and other decorative elements were effectively used by Michael Graves in several notable buildings, while Richard Meier developed a more austere version of postmodernism, influenced by Le Corbusier, in his designs for museums and private houses. Outstanding American practitioners of postmodernism, in addition to Venturi, Johnson, Graves, and Meier, are Helmut Jahn, Charles Gwathmey, Charles Willard Moore, and Robert A. M. Stern.

Closely related to the postmodernist interest in historical styles was the historic preservation movement, which during the last decades of the 20th century led to the renovation of many landmark older buildings and to a tendency to resist new architecture that seemed to threaten the scale or stylistic integrity of existing structures. The stark, confrontational approach of modernism has been replaced by a more inclusive sense of the architectural heritage that acknowledges and seeks to preserve the very finest achievements of every period.

See also African Art and Architecture; Canadian Architecture; Interior Design; Oceanian Art and Architecture; Seven Wonders of the World.