Post-war modernism

After the war the USA became the new centre of modernism. The glass tower became the symbol of corporations, and Louis Kahn gave concrete a new gravity.

Mies van der Rohe, who had come to Chicago in 1938, built the Farnsworth House and the Seagram Building in New York, and Philip Johnson his Glass House. Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, opened in 1959, is a spiral in which the art hangs along a single ramp.

Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla and Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth show a modernism of concrete, light and silence.

• The Glass House
• Farnsworth House
• Seagram Building
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
• Salk Institute
• Kimbell Art Museum