The Most Important Buildings of the 20th Century

Among the most important buildings of the 20th century are the AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin of 1909, the Bauhaus building in Dessau of 1926, Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye of 1931, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater of 1939, the Seagram Building in New York of 1958, the Sydney Opera House of 1973, the Centre Pompidou of 1977 and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1997. They are not necessarily the largest or the most beautiful, but each one changed how other architects built. In Sweden, Asplund's Public Library and the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 belong here.

Facts

Before the First World War: the first steps

The AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin, designed by Peter Behrens and completed in 1909, is a factory that looks like a temple of industry. The steel arches and the vast areas of glass reveal the construction, and for the first time an industrial building received the same care as a monument. In those years Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier all worked in Behrens's office, the three who would shape Modernism.

At the same time Frank Lloyd Wright built the Robie House in Chicago, 1909–1910, a Prairie house that lies low and long, with eaves projecting several metres. The rooms flow into one another around a fireplace, one of the earliest examples of the open plan. In Vienna in 1911 Adolf Loos put up the Looshaus opposite the Emperor's palace, with smooth, unornamented façades above a ground floor in green marble. In his essay Ornament and Crime, Loos had argued that decoration belonged to the past.

The 1920s: the manifestos

After the war, buildings became programmes. Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House in Utrecht of 1924 looks like a painting by Mondrian in three dimensions, with sliding walls that make the upper floor a single room. Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau, 1925–1926, divides the building into parts by function – teaching, workshops, studio dwellings – that meet in an asymmetrical plan, and the workshop wing has a glass wall hanging outside the frame. The school and its ideas are described in the design guide to the Bauhaus.

The Barcelona Pavilion, Germany's pavilion at the 1929 World's Fair, had nothing to show except itself. A flat roof rests on eight chrome-clad steel columns, and freestanding walls of onyx, marble and glass guide the visitor's path. It was demolished in 1930 and rebuilt in 1986. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye outside Paris, 1928–1931, realises his five points: pilotis, roof garden, free plan, ribbon windows and free façade. The architects are described in the guides to Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

In Stockholm, Gunnar Asplund's Public Library of 1928 was a cylinder on a cube, Nordic Classicism pared down to pure geometry. Two years later Asplund was chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition, where light pavilions of glass and steel brought Functionalism to Sweden in a single summer. The buildings were demolished, but the ideas became those of the people's home.

The 1930s: Modernism becomes human

Alvar Aalto's sanatorium in Paimio in Finland, 1929–1933, is Functionalism in which everything is designed for the sick: rooms with light and views, silent washbasins, lamps that do not dazzle the person lying down, and a chair of bent wood. Aalto's softer Modernism is discussed in the guide to Alvar Aalto.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, 1936–1939, is a summer house built over a waterfall. Reinforced concrete terraces cantilever out over the stream from a core of natural stone, and the house unites the horizontal planes of Modernism with Wright's idea of an organic architecture. It has become the best-known villa of the 20th century. Wright is described in the guide to Frank Lloyd Wright.

After the war: concrete, glass and new forms

Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, 1947–1952, is a housing block for 1,600 people, built as a vertical city with shops in the middle and a school on the roof. The raw concrete on massive pilotis made the building a model for Brutalism. A few years later the same architect showed with the chapel at Ronchamp that Modernism could also be sculptural and free.

Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York, 1954–1958, stands set back behind an open plaza, with a façade of bronze sections and brown glass. It became the model for the office tower all over the world. A year later Wright's Guggenheim Museum opened on Fifth Avenue, a white spiral that broke with everything around it.

The Sydney Opera House by Jørn Utzon, 1959–1973, showed that a building could become the symbol of an entire city. The shells are cut from the same sphere, and the building became a World Heritage Site in 2007 as one of the youngest on the list.

Turning points: Postmodernism, high-tech and the computer

Robert Venturi's Vanna Venturi House in Philadelphia, 1962–1964, is a small house for the architect's mother, with a split gable and an arch that is only a moulding on the façade. It became the first icon of Postmodernism and a reply to Mies's dictum that less is more. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, 1971–1977, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, put the frame, the pipes and the escalator on the outside and became the breakthrough of high-tech architecture.

The century ended with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, 1993–1997, clad in titanium sheeting in forms that could be designed and built only with the help of the computer. It gave its name to the Bilbao effect and opened the way for the free forms of the 21st century, as the guide to Deconstructivism describes.

All the buildings are on the map below. The period is described in the history under Modernism, and Swedish Functionalism in the guide to Functionalism.

Why they count

Exercise

Which building realises Le Corbusier's five points for a new architecture?