Modernism
Functionalism breaks with history and builds anew for everyone, from the Bauhaus to Brasília.
After the First World War, architects wanted to start afresh. Out went ornament and borrowed styles – in came light, air, industry and housing for everyone. From the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier’s Paris and the Netherlands of De Stijl the new architecture spread across the world, to the glass towers of Chicago, Aalto’s Finland and Brasília.
Adolf Loos and the Viennese architects were attacking ornament as early as around 1910.
The Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe formulated the new architecture in the 1920s.
De Stijl and the Amsterdam School showed two different ways out of historicism.
Load-bearing frames of concrete and steel freed the walls: ribbon windows, the free plan and glass walls.
CIAM, founded in 1928, and the exhibition on the International Style in New York in 1932 made modernism a world movement.
The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933; Gropius and Mies continued in the USA, where the glass tower became the symbol of corporations.
After 1945 cities were rebuilt with suburbs, tower blocks and new towns, from Rotterdam and Harlow to Vällingby.
Brasília, inaugurated in 1960, and Chandigarh showed the dream of wholly planned cities.
In the Nordic countries Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen and Sigurd Lewerentz gave modernism a softer, material-focused tone.
Vienna and ornament. Around 1900, Vienna was a centre of new ideas about art and society. The Secession Building of 1898, with its dome of gilded laurel leaves, marked the break with academic historicism. Otto Wagner moved towards the rational: his Postal Savings Bank, built 1904–1906, has a façade of thin stone slabs fixed with visible bolts and a banking hall beneath a glass roof, where every detail shows how the building is made. Josef Hoffmann designed the Stoclet Palace in Brussels as a composition of smooth white surfaces framed by metal strips. The sharpest voice was Adolf Loos. In the lecture and essay Ornament and Crime he argued that ornament was a waste of labour and material and belonged to an earlier stage of culture. His commercial and residential building on Michaelerplatz, built 1909–1911 opposite the imperial palace, has a ground floor clad in green-veined marble but completely plain upper storeys, and it caused a scandal. At the same time Loos was working on an idea he called the Raumplan, in which rooms are set at different levels according to their importance. His ideas of the plain, the honest and the functional became one of the cornerstones of modernism.
The new architecture. In Germany, France and the Netherlands an entirely new architecture was formulated in the 1910s and 1920s. The Deutscher Werkbund was founded in 1907 to unite artists and industry; Peter Behrens designed the AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin in 1909, and Walter Gropius’s Fagus Factory of 1911 had glazed corners without columns. Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, and the school’s building in Dessau of 1925–1926 became a symbol of the new age with its glass walls and asymmetrical plan. In Vers une architecture of 1923 Le Corbusier wrote of the house as a machine for living in, and in 1927 he formulated five points: pilotis that lift the house, a roof garden, the free plan, ribbon windows and the free façade. The Villa Savoye outside Paris, completed in 1931, is their textbook example. Mies van der Rohe directed the Weissenhof Estate exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927, and in the Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 he let space flow freely between walls of marble and glass. Everything depends on a load-bearing frame of concrete or steel freeing the walls. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, and several of the leading architects moved to the United States, where the new architecture became known as the International Style.
De Stijl and the Amsterdam School. The Netherlands was neutral during the First World War, and there the new architecture took two completely different paths. In Amsterdam architects such as Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer built workers’ housing in richly modelled brick, with undulating façades, towers and sculpted details; Het Schip of 1921 is the best-known work of the Amsterdam School. At the same time the painter Theo van Doesburg founded the magazine De Stijl in 1917, in which artists such as Piet Mondrian and architects such as J.J.P. Oud and Gerrit Rietveld sought to reduce art to straight lines, planes and primary colours. Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht of 1924 is a De Stijl painting in three dimensions: walls as free-standing slabs, projecting balconies and an upper floor where sliding partitions reshape the rooms. In Rotterdam Oud built white terraced housing for the municipality, and the Van Nelle factory, completed in 1931, became one of the most admired works of the new architecture, a factory of glass and concrete full of light.
The Bauhaus. In 1919 Walter Gropius merged the academy of art and the school of arts and crafts in Weimar into the Bauhaus. The school’s idea was to unite art and craft, and later industry, under architecture. Students began with a preliminary course on form, colour and material, taught by Johannes Itten among others and later by László Moholy-Nagy, and then worked in workshops for metal, furniture, textiles, ceramics and printing. The teachers included the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. When the political right took power in Thuringia the school moved in 1925 to the industrial town of Dessau, where Gropius designed the school building with the glass wall of its workshop wing and houses for the teachers. The tubular steel furniture that Marcel Breuer designed there is still in production. Under Hannes Meyer and then Mies van der Rohe the teaching focused more on architecture and housing. The school moved to Berlin in 1932 and closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis. Teachers and students then spread its ideas across the world, and the Bauhaus became as much a myth as a school.
Le Corbusier. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, took the name Le Corbusier in Paris around 1920. As early as 1914 he had drawn Dom-Ino, a skeleton of concrete slabs on columns with a staircase, which showed that walls no longer needed to bear loads. In the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau and the book Vers une architecture he compared temples with cars and aeroplanes and demanded an architecture for the machine age. His urban plans were just as radical: the Plan Voisin of 1925 proposed demolishing large parts of central Paris and replacing them with cruciform towers in a park. After the war he tested his ideas at full scale, in the Unité d’habitation in Marseille and in the new state capital of Chandigarh in India. At the same time he reinvented himself: the chapel at Ronchamp and the monastery of La Tourette showed a freer, heavier architecture of raw concrete. Few architects have had such influence, and few have been so harshly criticised for what their ideas about the city led to.
Mies van der Rohe. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a stonemason’s son from Aachen, summed up his architecture in the words “less is more”. In the 1920s he designed glass skyscrapers that were never built and directed the Weissenhof exhibition in Stuttgart. The Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, completed in 1930, show his idea of a freely flowing space between walls of onyx and glass, under a roof carried on chrome-clad columns. He was the last director of the Bauhaus and moved to Chicago in 1938, where he designed the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the USA he refined the steel frame: the Farnsworth House is a glass box on columns above a floodplain, and the Seagram Building in New York, designed with Philip Johnson, became the model for office towers all over the world. Details were everything, and the words “God is in the details” are often attributed to him. His followers turned his glass façades into a standard that often lacked his precision.
Wright and America. Frank Lloyd Wright, who had started out with Louis Sullivan in Chicago, wanted to create an architecture for the American prairie. His Prairie houses of the first decade of the 20th century have low, extended roofs, a large fireplace at the centre and rooms that flow into one another, and the Robie House in Chicago of 1910 is the purest. When his drawings were published in Berlin in 1910–1911, in the so-called Wasmuth portfolio, they influenced young European architects. Wright called his architecture organic: the house was to grow out of its site and its materials. Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, built in 1936–1939, cantilevers concrete terraces over a waterfall. His Guggenheim Museum in New York, opened in 1959, the year of his death, is a spiral in which visitors walk down a single ramp. Wright stood outside the International Style but was America’s best-known architect for more than fifty years.
The International Style. In 1932 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed an exhibition of modern architecture, and in the same year the curators Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson gave the new European architecture the name International Style. They described it in three principles: volume rather than mass, regularity rather than symmetry, and no applied ornament. Since 1928 Europe’s modernists had gathered in CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, to discuss housing and planning; the congress of 1933 formulated principles for separating housing, work, recreation and traffic, which Le Corbusier later published as the Athens Charter. When Gropius came to Harvard in 1937 and Mies to Chicago in 1938, the style found a new base. After the war the glass tower with a curtain wall – a façade of glass and metal hung outside the frame – became the office building of the whole world, from Lever House in New York of 1952 to the United Nations headquarters. Critics felt that the style became a formula, but it built a large part of the post-war city.
The new city. The modernists wanted to design not just houses but whole cities. In Frankfurt the city architect Ernst May built some twelve thousand homes in new suburbs in 1925–1930, with a standardised kitchen, the Frankfurt kitchen, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. In Berlin Bruno Taut built housing estates such as the horseshoe-shaped Hufeisensiedlung. The ideal was slab blocks set in parkland, where every flat received sun and air, instead of the closed blocks of the masonry city. After the Second World War the ideas took hold on a large scale. The centre of Rotterdam, bombed in 1940, was rebuilt with car-free shopping streets, Britain founded new towns such as Stevenage and Harlow. In eastern Europe large estates were built of industrially made concrete panels. From the 1960s suburbs of tower blocks were built on a large scale, from the French grands ensembles to the concrete estates of Eastern Europe, and they were soon criticised as monotonous and isolated.
Concrete and glass. After the Second World War, modernism became the world’s official architecture. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille, built 1947–1952, was an apartment block for around 1,600 people raised on pilotis, with an internal shopping street and a roof terrace with a nursery and running track. He left the concrete untreated, béton brut, bearing the imprint of the formwork, and this gave its name to Brutalism, which spread in the 1950s and 1960s. His chapel at Ronchamp of 1955 showed that modernism could also be sculptural. In the United States the glass skyscraper became the symbol of corporate power; Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York of 1958 has a façade of bronze and tinted glass. Brasília, inaugurated as the capital of Brazil in 1960 to Lúcio Costa’s plan and with Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings, and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India embodied the dream of wholly planned cities. Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, inaugurated in 1973, became a world icon. Recognise post-war modernism by repeated façade modules, exposed concrete, large expanses of glass, flat roofs and free-standing buildings in parks or beside major roads. At the same time criticism grew of the large scale and of cities planned for cars rather than for people.
Aalto and the Nordic countries. In the Nordic countries modernism emerged from a light, simplified classicism of the 1920s and broke through around 1930. Alvar Aalto in Finland soon became the leading figure of Nordic modernism. His sanatorium at Paimio, completed in 1933, and the library in Viipuri of 1935 were white and bright, but they already had undulating wooden ceilings and a care for how it feels to take hold of a door handle. The Villa Mairea of 1939 and the town hall at Säynätsalo of 1952 unite modernism, brick, wood and landscape. In Denmark Arne Jacobsen designed everything from houses to cutlery. Nordic modernism gained a reputation for being humane and attentive to daylight, and it has influenced architects all over the world.
Brasília and Chandigarh. After the Second World War the modernists had the chance to build whole capitals from scratch. Brazil’s president Juscelino Kubitschek moved the capital from Rio de Janeiro to the high plateau of the interior. Lúcio Costa’s plan has the shape of an aeroplane or a cross, with the government buildings along a monumental axis and residential superblocks, superquadras, along the wings. Oscar Niemeyer designed the National Congress, with two bowls and two towers, the cathedral and the presidential palace in curving concrete forms, and the city was inaugurated in 1960 after only a few years of building. In India the state of Punjab needed a new capital after partition in 1947, and from 1951 Le Corbusier designed Chandigarh, with parliament, high court and secretariat in heavy, sculptural concrete. Brasília and Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex are now World Heritage Sites, but the cities have also become examples of how hard it is to plan life from above: the car dominates, and much grew up in informal settlements outside the plan.