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MODERN ARCHITECTURE
PARTIAL ELEVATION OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE
The Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exposition of 1851
in London (the first worlds fair), would certainly be on any-
ones list of The Most Important Monuments of Modern
Architecture. Although designed by a gardener, Joseph
Paxton, not an architect, few public buildings have been sopopular or influential. It was built almost entirely of standard-
ized, factory-produced parts of iron and glass. The Crystal
Palace entranced a public accustomed to heavy buildings
of stone and brick and showed the possibilities, aesthetic as
well as practical, of building with prefabricated parts, metal,
and glass.
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127m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
THE MODERN AGE
THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
By the end of Louis XIVs 72-year reign, Paris and Versailleshad replaced Rome and Florence as the centers of taste,
culture, and intellectual matters. French art, music, dance,
and architecture were widely imitated. The King may have
had centralized control over the government during his
reign, but intellectual activities during the Age of Reason
began to take on a life independent from the government, a
life that would eventually take down the monarchy and cre-
ate the basis of the modern world.
Age of Reason philosophies led to major scientific discover-
ies. Sir Isaac Newtons formulations of the Laws of Univer-
sal Gravitation and The Calculus, appeared to confirm thespeculations of philosophers that humans could understand
the laws that governed the universe with intellect rather than
accept them on faith. If so, argued such great Enlighten-
ment philosophers as Benjamin Franklin, reason should
rule, and reasonable men should shape government rather
than kings who had inherited their power. These philoso-
phies lay behind the American War of Independence in
1776, and a series of political revolutions in other countries,
beginning with The French Revolution of 1789.
The liberal, rationalist, scientific, and humanitarian artists
and philosophers of this age of revolutions rejected the
sometimes frivolous, usually sensuous and light-hearted,
Rococo style of art and architecture that was popular. En-
lightened patrons demanded a morally serious art and archi-
tecture, an art that would teach values and reflect intellec-
tual and scientific discoveries. Few architects managed to
bridge the gap between Enlightenment intellectualism and
the emotional appeal of the Baroque. One was the Italian
Guarini. A leading mathematician, he used forms and the
principles of the new mathematics (especially descriptive
geometry) to create mystical drama and diaphanous domes
in such buildings as Santissima Sindone (Church of theHoly Shroud) and San Lorenzo in Turin. More characteristic
of the new style that was emerging out of the Enlightenment
are paintings such as J. L. Davids The Oath of the Horatii.
It is relentlessly austere in form and composition and mor-
ally uplifting in its Stoic republican message.
Even more rigorous in form and composition than Davids
painting is the monument to the intellectual hero of the
San Lorenzo view into d
San Lorenzo
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128 m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
Enlightenment, Sir Isaac Newton. Designed by Boulle
the Newton Cenotaph was a pure product of the intellect
It could never have been built. Boulle intended the grea
sphere to symbolize the universe, whose laws Newton had
discovered. The surface of the sphere was to have beenpierced by holes arranged like the constellations. Sunligh
coming through these holes would have given, during the
day at least, the effect of a planetarium, more than a cen-
tury before one was invented. In plan, the project is a series
of concentric circles, a schematic of the solar system. In
volume, every form and detail, even the un-climbable stairs
leading to a ring of cypresses (an ancient symbol for eter-
nity), derived from this circular geometry. Compared to Ba-
roque architects, Boulle and his compatriots had returned
to the classicism of Bramantes Tempietto, thus the new
style is sometimes referred to as Neoclassicism.
The contrasts between Rococo confection and Neoclassica
Puritanism parallel the political tensions between the super-
numerary, pleasure-loving aristocracy and the intellectua
community, tensions that were released explosively in the
severing of aristocrats heads from their bodies during the
French Revolution of 1789.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
In England, the Age of Reason led to an industrial rather
than a political revolution. Why the Industrial Revolution did
not begin earlier is difficult to explain. Virtually all of the nec-essary technology and theory had been around since Hel-
lenistic times. In any case, several interrelated phenomena
lay behind the Industrial Revolution: a green revolution
that provided more food to support a massive increase in
population; a modern banking system; the development of
the steam engine (and eventually the railroad); the exploita-
tion of coal as a source of cheap energy for the steam en-
gines; and the production of iron in large quantities (which in
turn required the cheap energy of coal). These things made
possible the factory system and the transportation network
chiefly canals but also roads and railroads, necessary fodistributing raw materials and finished goods. These inno-
vations in England, which revolutionized finance, culture
art, and nearly every other aspect of society, changed the
world as much asor perhaps more thanthe political rev-
olutions.
The effects of the Industrial Revolution on architecture were
immediate and profound. With industrialization came urban-
Newton Cenotaph
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129m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
ization (still a phenomenon today) and all of the new types
of buildings and structures associated with a big industrial
city: factories, railroad stations, office buildings, hospitals,
warehouses, department stores, and so on. With industri-
alization came new building materials and technologies forthe architect: iron, steel, reinforced concrete, aluminum, and
glass in large sizes and quantities. With industrialization
also came the pumps and motors that made very tall and
very large buildings possible.
At first, the professional architect resisted both using the
new materials and designing buildings for industry. Histori-
cal precedent had become extremely important for him, and
there was no historical precedent for the new building types.
The architect had worked hard since the Middle Ages to
make architecture a profession: hearchitects were male
until the 20th century
considered industry beneath hishigh social position. As the 19th century wore on, however,
it became obvious to a larger and larger group of architects
that industrialization was unavoidable and would be the
source of the big commissions in the future. By the turn of
the 20th century, architects were beginning to include in-
dustrial materials, and even industrial forms, in most of their
buildings, though frequently they hid them behind tradition-
al-appearing surfaces.
Initially, the new materials were introduced in utilitarian
structures such as factories and bridges. The Ironbridge
at Coalbrookdale, built in 1777-79 by Abraham Darby II,
the first all-iron structure, demonstrated the potentials of
the iron from Darbys nearby mills, one of the first to pro-
duce iron on a large scale. This first iron structure had only
a 100-foot span, no advance over contemporary stone or
wood construction, and it used standard wood construction
techniques. But, in contrast to traditional stone or wooden
bridges, it appeared light and airy to contemporaries and
excited many of them who better realized the possibilities
of building with iron. Numerous projects for bridges in iron
appeared in the following years, which showed the spirit of
competition that characterized the Industrial Age. As ever-larger spans were attempted, techniques that took better
advantage of the inherent characteristics of iron, both cast
and wrought, were introduced. Foremost of these was the
suspension system.
Suspension bridges depend on the tensile strength of
wrought iron and eventually steel (see discussion of ten-
sile structures, in The Practice of Architecture section). CastIron Bridge at Coalbrook
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130 m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
iron, by contrast, is brittle and has great compressive but
little tensile strength. Tensile structures not only deliver
more performance per pound, to use a phrase that the
20th century American architect Buckminster Fuller made
famous, but they also permit incredible spans. In a sus-pension bridge, the roadway is suspended from cables or
chains hung from the tops of towers rather than support-
ed by heavy, deep beams or trusses. Within 50 years of
the Ironbridge, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, near Bristol
England, had spanned 900 feet between supports. By 1867
the spans of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, the firs
major bridge to use steel cables, had reached 1,595 feet
The record distance spanned between two towers is on the
Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, opened in 1998; it is more
than a mile (6,529 feet). Larger spans are planned or are
under construction. In addition to the efficient use of materi-
als, the curves of the suspension cables or chains are noarbitrary choices by a designer; they must follow the laws of
nature (catenary curves). With the suspension bridge, form
does not follow some abstract theory of design; it is deter-
mined by mathematics and the nature of the materials from
which the structure is made.
The related idea that architectural form should be dictated by
the nature of the building problem itself had been suggested
by several Enlightenment theoreticians but only began to be
put into practice during the Industrial Revolution, especially
in buildings such as warehouses and factories that were
built for purely utilitarian purposes. These buildings tended
to be solidly constructed but completely undecorated, deco-
ration having no obvious utilitarian function. Vitruviuss cri-
teria of Firmness and Commodity were satisfied, but was
Delight? Many of these utilitarian buildings did have a sort
of raw beauty to them, and at least some architects began
to propose that a functional form could be beautiful withou
being decorated.
Other functional buildings, such as greenhouses, intro-
duced new and intriguing forms and architectural effects
which captivated viewers by their novelty and, in some re-spects, redefined the traditional concepts of beauty and
structure. In the Palm Stove at Kew Gardens (just outside
London), for example, the old relationship between carrier
and carried is negated by the soap-bubble surface of glass
Its weightless appearance and the alternately reflective
translucent, and transparent nature of the glass, and the
ability to see through the wall, fascinated the public and ar-
chitects alike.
Palm Stove at Kew Gardens
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131m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
Greenhouse construction inspired a variety of buildings,
among which were the sheds of vast extent built to cover
the platforms of the new railroad stations. The hotels and
entries in front of the train sheds often were conceived as
quite traditional buildings, however, and illustrate the sepa-ration between architect and engineer that was developing.
Even more spectacular and influential than the train sheds
was the Crystal Palace, the building housing Londons Great
Exposition of 1851, the first worlds fair. Its designer, Pax-
ton, had planned a number of greenhouses as a gardener
for the Duke of Devonshire for which he invented a system
of machine-made, standardized parts. He used the same
techniques to build the immense (1,851 feet long) exhibi-
tion building. The glass and iron structure was planned and
erected in a mere 39 weeks. Paxton had not only introduced
the all-glass building, he had also virtually invented the as-sembly-line technique of using prefabricated (factory-made
parts) to do it. Though roundly criticized by contemporary
architects (The Crystal Humbug, Pugin called it), the Crys-
tal Palace was a popular success and has influenced archi-
tects to the present, for example, Phillip Johnsons Crystal
Cathedral (1980) in California.
ROMANTICISM
From its very beginnings, the side effects of industrialization
(destruction of the agrarian economy) had disturbed many:
the creation of huge, dirty, ugly, industrial cities with horrible
slums and despicable sanitation; decreasing life expectancy;
and increasing crime rates. Read Charles Dickenss novels.
One reaction was Romanticism, the escape to the distant
in time or space. Romantic literature described the mythi-
cal, the exotic, and the medieval (Sir Walter Scotts Ivanhoe,
among others). There were many architectural manifesta-
tions. James Wyatt, for example, built Fonthill Abbey, animmense evocation of a Gothic monastery where the eccen-
tric Englishman William Beckford could have parties. John
Nash built the Brighton Pavilion, a fantastic concoction of
architectural motifs from India and Arabia, for the Prince Re-
gent. Ancient Greece also appealed. Leo von Klenze built
Valhalla, a romantic copy of a Greek temple, on the hills
near Regensburg, Germany.Brighton Pa
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132 m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT
Only aristocrats and the newly rich industrialists who were
causing the social problems could afford Romantic escapes
from the ugly side of the Industrial Revolution into an archi-tectural fantasy world of Gothic castles, Greek temples, and
Palladian villas. But the attention that Romantic literature
and architecture gave to the Middle Ages led another group
of artists and writers to attack the Industrial Revolution in a
different way. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin published
an effective assault on the evils of industrialism in a series
of satirical drawings, which showed the same town as it had
been during the Middle Ages and as it had become. The
medieval cities were beautiful and the people were shown
as happy and healthy, whereas the modern cities were ugly
and polluted, and the people were illustrated as starving
and miserable. His point, expanded by John Ruskin (themost famous art critic of the Victorian Age), was that indus-
trialization had destroyed society; that the sheer mindless-
ness of the assembly line and division of labor in factories
intrinsically reduced men (and women and children) to ma-
chines, destroying their pride and individuality in the pro-
cess. He argued that to recover artistic integrity, craftsmen
should return to the medieval handicraft practices. He wen
farther; he argued that the dishonesty and mindlessness of
industrial production corrupted not only the worker, but also
society as a whole.
As examples of dishonesty in architecture, Ruskin and his
followers, especially the great artist and craftsman William
Morris, pointed to brick buildings that were covered in plas-
ter that was scored and painted to make it look like stone
and to cast-iron columns and cornices that lookedsor
ofas if they had been carved by hand out of stone. (Wha
would Ruskin and Morris think of wood-grained plastic?)
They also condemned rug and wallpaper patterns, decora-
tions for flat surfaces, that looked three-dimensional, that
gave the illusion of depth. Morris felt that designs for flat sur-
faces should have flat patterns. One of Pugin, Ruskin, and
Morriss most influential conclusions was that buildings, es-pecially houses, should be developed from a functional plan
rather than having functions crammed into a preconceived
outer form, as was (and still is) commonly done. In sum
materials and designs should be "fit for their purpose." Or
as Modern architects phrased this approach: form should
follow function.
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133m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
Ruskin and Morriss conclusions that artists and architects
should return to medieval handcrafts were unrealistic and
influenced few peopleonly the wealthy could afford Mor-
riss handmade products. It was obvious to most people
that industrialization was inevitable. Soon the productionof household machines (which could not be simultaneous-
ly mass-produced and handcrafted) made the return to a
medieval culture seem even ridiculous. But the other con-
clusions of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as Ruskin and
Morriss followers called their approach, were widely influ-
ential, particularly the concepts of fitness for purpose and
of developing a building from a functional plan, from the
inside out, as Frank Lloyd Wright liked to say. Their pre-
cept that art and architecture were not only an expression of
the moral values of a society but also could actually shape
those values was one of the most potent artistic theories in-
troduced in the 19th century. (See Churchills observationsthat once we shape our buildings, they shape us, quoted at
the beginning of this book.)
Ruskin, Morris, and their followers were discussing the so-
cial responsibilities of artists, craftspeople, and architects at
the same time that Karl Marx was writing the Communist
Manifesto. Indeed Morris was an avid and active support-
er of the socialist movement for a while. He declared that
there shouldnt be art for the few any more than freedom for
the few, and proposed an art for the masses. Unfortunately
for him, he never could reconcile this declaration with the
fact that the handcrafting process he advocated was prohib-
itively expensive, and that consequently, only the rich bour-
geoisie could afford his creations. However, he was wealthy
enough to put his theories into practice in his own house,
the Red House at Bexleyheath (near London). Its plain red
brick construction and an exterior form that corresponded
exactly to the functional plan demonstrated his principles
of honesty in design. The furnishings of the house were
all designed and fabricated by Morris and his friends and
were paragons of the Arts and Crafts ideal of fitness for
purpose. Aspects of the Red House were emulated by
many architects in England, Europe, and the United States.The Red House also marked the beginning of architects
interest in the design of the upper-middle-class house and
eventually in low-cost housing. Before this, architects had
designed housingvillas, palaces, and manorsonly for
the aristocracy and the very rich. Morris was also one of the
founders of the historic preservation movement.
Red H
Red House
ground floor upper floo
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134 m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
ECLECTICISM, EVOLUTION, AND ARCHI-
TECTURE
Romanticism (escape from the Industrial Age) and the Arts
and Crafts Movement (opposition to it) represent only two ofthe several directions architecture took in the 19th century
Historicism (replication of past styles) and engineers (em-
bracing of industrialization) represent two more directions
As you may well imagine, these are the extreme approach-
es; most of the architecture built lay somewhere between or
among them. Most architecture used some details of build-
ings from the past, some engineering details, and some
handcrafted decorations or furnishings. Most buildings were
a mixture of styles combining, for example, Gothic win-
dows in facades that looked Byzantine or Romanesque but
used iron and glass construction for skylights and attached
greenhouses. This mixture of details from various periods is
called Eclecticism and was, in fact, the dominant mode o
architectural design in the 19th century. It was considered
modern by most. After all, it showed that the modern ar-
chitect was aware of all the past styles andengineering ad-
vances and was sophisticated enough to choose the most
appropriate details, structure, and techniques for the task at
hand.
Some architects were not content merely to copy the ar-
chitecture of the past, whether in detail or wholesale. They
argued that a totally new architectural expression, indepen-dent of the past, should be developed for the industrial age
They argued that the styles of the past had been developed
without the advantage of iron, glass, and the other modern
materials and techniques. They argued that the past had
never had to design most of the types of buildings that ex-
isted in the present and that past forms were therefore in-
appropriate. Until the end of the 19th century, however, no
critic or architect could propose a satisfactory new style for
the modern age. In practice, architects tended to design in
one sort of eclectic style or another.
Nonetheless, the demands for a new style were buttressedby scientific developments, notably Darwins theory of evo-
lution, which he published in his 1859 Origin of the Species
Architectural theorists, following upon the evolutionists, ar-
gued that if plants and animals had evolved, then architec-
ture, as a reflection of society, should also evolve. The New
Architecture should not look like the historical styles and
should be superior to them.
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135m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
Viollet-le-Duc, a French medieval scholar, restoration archi-
tect, and probably the most influential architectural theorist of
the 19th century, offered a counter-argument in his Lectures
on Architecture (Entretiens sur I Architecture). He pointed
out that he, like most of hiscontemporaries, believed thatthe Parthenon had never been excelled as a piece of archi-
tecture and that the Gothiccathedrals were, on the whole,
better buildings than virtually anything built in modern times.
Thus, whilenot necessarily arguing against the theories of
evolution as they applied to organic life,he concluded that
the analogy between architecture and evolution was neither
valid nor reasonable: architecture had, demonstrably, not
evolved during the history of man. What was common to
great monuments of the past, like the Parthenon or Chartres
Cathedral, was the clear reason for being of every element
in them. The greatest buildings of the past, regardless of pe-
riod, had responded to site, climate, society, and the highestlevel of technology available to their architects. On the basis
of this reasoning Viollet, too, argued for a RATIONALIST
New Architecture, one that respected the principles of his-
tory without copying details; one in whicheach detail was
the evident and logical result of an analysis of the build-
ing program. He said that architectural forms should be de-
termined by their functionsanother architect who thought
that form follows functionwithout preconception or preju-
dice on the part of the architect. It was obvious to Viollet that
a modern architect would use the latest engineering meth-
ods and the most recently developed building materials to
achieve this end. Therefore, Viollet concluded, the New Ar-
chitecture would be architecture of iron construction (neither
reinforced concrete nor steel construction had been devel-
oped when he wrote) that was openly expressed, and took
forms that expressed irons strength. Viollet realized that he
had studied and restored too many medieval buildings to be
able to find the appropriate newforms for iron construction;
that would require a younger architect, one with a fresher
point of view.
ART NOUVEAU
Viollets theories managed to transcend the questions that
had divided architecture into so many different stylistic
streams by concluding that style would inevitably result
from analysis of the architectural program if the architect
had no preconceptions. Viollets theories respected and took
into account the principles of the great architecture of the
past, but he was opposed to copying historic details. At the
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136 m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
same time, he reconciled engineering advances with tradi-
tional views on architecture. Most of the recognized masters
of Modern architecture, such as Frank Lloyd Wright in the
US, Gaudi in Spain, and Le Corbusier in France, based thei
theories in greater or lesser degree on Viollets. But it was ayoung Belgian architect, Victor Horta, who first put Viollets
theories into practice. His planning innovations revolution-
ized domestic architecture, and the style of architectureo
rather the style of decoration, Art Nouveauthat he origi-
nated swept Europe for a short while.
In the Tassel House in Brussels in the late 19th century
Horta radically reorganized the townhouse and opened the
interior by using an exposed iron skeleton. It allowed him
to create the open plan (plan libre) by eliminating mos
of the interior partitions and replacing others with movable
non-bearing glass doors. This made the house, which wasbuilt on a very narrow deep city lot, flexible. It also made i
seem larger than it was, and allowed natural light and ven-
tilation to penetrate into the center of the house through a
large, sky-lit conservatory-stairhall. As more middle-class
people built houses, and clients gradually rejected the dark
Victorian house cut up into discrete rooms, the open plan
became common.
Horta created decoration for the house derived from the
plants in the conservatory (greenhouse), rather than histori-
cal examples. As a contemporary critic (Ludwig Hevesi) re-
marked, No detail derives from anything at all in existence.
Horta translated the plant forms into curvilinear, whiplash
vegetal decorations at the tops of the iron columns, which
were in turn reflected in paintings on walls and ceilings, mo-
saics on the floor, and stained glass in windows and doors
Similar to details in Viollet-le-Ducs work and some wallpa-
per patterns, the Tassel House decorations immediately be-
came popular even among those who ignored the houses
structural and spatial innovations. In the hands of many ar-
chitects and decorators, Art Nouveau (New Art), as the
new style was known, became merely a new and fashion-
able decorative vocabulary applied to otherwise traditionabuildings.
Even though it was not copied from historical examples
Hortas ornament still seemed somehow tied to the past to
some architects. An architecture that was entirely new, both
in concept and in attitude towards decoration appeared in
Vienna and Paris in the years just before the outbreak o
World War I. It was mostly an outgrowth of European de-Tassel House
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137m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
velopments, but it was also inspired in important ways by
developments in the United States.
THE UNITED STATES
COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE
When Europeans arrived in the new world, they found cul-
tures and architecture that bore little resemblance to those
they had left. The colonists considered the indigenous peo-
ples culturally inferior and their architecture either some-
thing to be ignored or, in the case of the Aztec, Mayan, and
Incan architecture of Central and South America, to be de-
stroyed. In North America, by contrast, the Europeans found
relatively little permanent architecture or architecture they
were interested in.
Early European settlers, therefore, modeled their buildings
on familiar European models. From time to time European
architects were asked to send designs to the Colonies for
important buildings. There were no trained architects among
the colonists at first, mostly because the population was too
dispersed to support or need them. Architecture that is not
designed by architects and is based on the traditions of
its people, in this case, traditions in Europe, is referred to
as vernacular. Beginning in the early 19th century, a few
Americans, like Thomas Jefferson, had studied architecture
in Europe. Not surprisingly, then, until the latter half of the
19th century (there werent even schools of architecture un-
til the 1860s) architecture in the United States largely paral-
leled developments in Europe.
In the absence of trained architects, craftsmen (such as car-
penters or masons), who frequently based their designs on
illustrated books of the latest European buildings, designed
most structures. They unconsciously created a recogniz-
able and unique body of architecture quite different from the
European prototypes: a church designed to be built of stone
looks quite different when built from wood by local crafts-
men and workers.
Thomas Jefferson was instrumental in trying to find a style
of architecture less dependent on European traditions and
more expressive of the ideals of the new republic. He was
a genuine Renaissance man, a talented architect as well
as a great writer, philosopher, inventor, and politician. His
early training had been informal, chiefly through Palladios
Four Books on Architecture and engravings of buildings Mont
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138 m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
by English architects. In its original form, Jeffersons own
house, Monticello, was based on Palladios Villa Cornaro
He utterly transformed it after receiving architectural train-
ing during the years he was the American ambassador to
France. Jefferson was particularly impressed by the Enlight-enment buildings hed seen and architects hed met. When
he returned to this country, relying on what he had seen and
learned abroad, he designed some of the finest buildings
in the United States. These are the Capitolat Richmond
Virginia, and in collaboration with other architects, the Uni-
versity of Virginia, as well as several houses that continued
to be inspired by Palladios villas. Like many contemporary
French architects, he admired Republican Roman archi-
tecture and thought it should be the model for monumenta
civic American buildings. In fact, Jefferson based hisdesign
for the capitol of Virginia very closely on the Maison Carre
at Nmes(which he believed to be a Republican Temple).
WASHINGTON, D. C.
Jefferson also profoundly influenced the planning of the new
capital of the United States, to be constructed on a sitecho-
sen by George Washington. Washington and a French en-
gineer, Pierre LEnfant, proposed a city plan thatwas an ad-
aptation of Le Notres gardens at Versailles where LEnfan
had grown up. He located the Capitol and Presidents House
(later called the White House) on the most prominent hills, on
sites corresponding respectively to those of the palace andthe Grand Trianon at Versailles. Foreign embassieswere to
linea mall directly analogous to the main axis of the garden
at Versailles. From these features, LEnfant and Washing-
ton proposed axes and radiating street patterns that would
define the location of other major public buildings. Jefferson
on the other hand, wanted the plan of the new Capitalto be
a Cartesian grid. The final plan was a compromisebetween
Jefferson and LEnfants ideas.
Washington, D. C., was planned on a monumental scale
that did not correspond to the actual size of the new country
but demonstrated the optimism and vision of the founders. I
grew very slowly, and LEnfant, Washington, and Jeffersons
plan was often ignored in the 19th century. It was returned to
only early in the 20th century. I. M. Peis East Wing addition
to the National Gallery and HOKs Air and Space Museum
are examples of contemporary buildings whose forms and
locations were inspired by LEnfants original plan, though
on sites originally proposed for embassies.
Washington D.C. plan
National Gallery East Wing
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139m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
The first two public buildings for the new city were designed
through competitions. James Hoban, an amateur architect,
won the competition for the Presidents House. His simple,
handsome scheme strongly resembled contemporary Euro-
pean Neo-Classical buildings, but Jefferson criticized it astoo ostentatious. (His anonymous competition entry, based
on the Villa Rotonda had been rejected.) Another amateur,
a physician, Dr. Thornton, designed the Capitol. His project
incorporated references to the Pantheon for the central part
of the building and to several modern French and English
buildings for the Senate and House of Representative ex-
tensions to each side. Thorntons original design has been
drastically modified over the years to accommodate the vast
expansion of the country from the original 13 states. Most
significant were the additions by Bulfinch early in the 19th
century, and the enormous extensions (including the pres-
ent cast-iron dome) that were made during the Civil War byThomas U. Walter. (Both of these men were professionally
trained architects.)
AMERICAN INNOVATIONS
The Neo-Classical architecture of the Capitol and White
House, replete with classical Orders and other motifs from
ancient Greece and Rome and from the Renaissance, did
establish an official American style. It was emulated in
capitol and courthouse buildings across the United States.
As the century wore on, this style was supplemented by the
eclectic approach popular at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in
Paris (the most influential school of architecture in the 19th
century). For religious buildings, however, architects often
turned to the revival of medieval architecture then fashion-
able in Britain and on the Continent.
American domestic architecture showed more originality
than government buildings and churches. In the established
Eastern cities, the more pretentious upper class houses
resembled their European counterparts, but in the rapidly
expanding frontier towns, unique problems evolved a more
purely American architecture: a house needed to be builtquickly; brick and stone were often in short supply whereas
wood was plentiful; and building sites were much larger than
in the cities. The frontier builders were usually less learned
and concerned with European trends and precedents than
their urban colleagues and more willing to solve problems
on their own merit.
The invention of the balloon-frame construction technique,
National Gallery East Wing roof
Balloon-f
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a system using small, standardized pieces of factory-sawn
wood addressed most of these problems and suggested
new forms and decorations. As take-off points, carpenters
used houses from pattern books developed by designers
(such as Downing). One consequently finds variations of thesame basic design all over the Midwest, elaborated or sim-
plified according to wealth and the skill and imagination of
the carpenter-builder.
These variations depended upon the fact that balloon-frame
construction is much more adaptable (and cheaper) than
masonry construction and much easier for untrained work-
ers to construct; its structure is much less critical. Conse-
quently the plan of a house could be modified at will; rooms
made larger or smaller, windows and doors could be en-
larged or grouped together; towers and gables could eas-
ily be added. In the extreme cases, houses became gin-gerbread castles"carpenter gothic," as it was sometimes
called.
Influenced by his teacher Louis Sullivan, the writings of Vio-
llet-le-Duc, and such American philosophers as Emerson
Wright made his Prairie Houses, for example the Robie
House (1909), seem to belong to their sites. These Prairie
houses expressed the flat farmland around Chicago with
low, horizontal lines and shallow, spreading roofs anchored
to the ground by a central hearth and chimney. Like Horta
in the Tassel House, Wright removed as many of the in-
terior partitions as possible so that rooms flow from one
into another. Often the only distinction between one major
area and another was a difference in floor or ceiling heigh
or both. Wright used strips of windows on the exterior of
his buildings and banks of floor-to-ceiling glass doors tha
opened onto porches and patios under the hovering roofs
Interior and exterior flow into one another in a Wright house
just as one room flows into the next.
Wright also designed brilliantly innovative office buildings
for example, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York, and
churches, most significant among them Unity Temple in OakPark, a suburb of Chicago. The Larkin Building, which un-
fortunately has been demolished, pioneered advanced sys-
tems of ventilations in addition to seeming to be without his-
torical precedent. In Unity Temple, Wright used reinforced
concrete, the first time anyone had used it in a building that
was internationally recognized as a major architectural ac-
complishment.
Stick Style
Robie House
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Wright called his architecture ORGANIC ARCHITEC-
TURE, a concept that even he had a difficult time explain-
ing clearly. He meant that every aspect of a building relates
to the next larger in a way analogous to Gothic architecture
or Michelangelos design for St. Peters. The same analogyto a tree holds: each part flows into the next much in the
way that the trunk of a tree flows into a branch, the branch
into a twig, and the twig into a leaf. As one of Wrights many
admirers, the architect Fay Jones, put it succinctly: Part is
to part as part is to whole. Wright meant for the analogy to
living things to be taken poetically. The way in which spaces
in Wrights buildings are shaped, not contained, by vertical
planes seemed radically new to American and European ar-
chitects alike. Wrights ideas proved crucial to the develop-
ment of architecture on the Continent; and in America; sim-
plified and modified by contractors everywhere, it developed
into the split-level and ranch house designs of todayssuburbs.
American architectures other great innovation that altered
the direction of world architecture, the very tall building,
or skyscraper, was also largely a contribution of Chicago.
Three inventions were required to make the skyscraper pos-
sible: the steel skeleton (skyscraper construction), a safe
elevator, and mechanical systems, particularly plumbing,
that could reach great heights. The height of masonry build-
ings with load-bearing walls is limited since, for structural
reasons, ground-floor walls become increasingly thicker as
the building gets higher. They take up much of the ground-
floor area in a really tall building. But if an iron, steel, or
reinforced-concrete skeleton is substituted for the masonry,
a building may become very tall, with columns no larger at
their base than they are on the top floor.
William LeBaron Jenney built the first tall building with a me-
tallic frame in Chicago in 1886 (the Home Insurance Com-
pany). He said he got the idea from the writings of Viollet-
le-Duc. It and many of the early skyscrapers did not look
tall, however. They looked like stacks of lower buildings. In
1889, beginning with the Wainwright Building in St. Louis,Louis Sullivan, aided by Wright, designed tall buildings that
did look tall. In them, Sullivan expressed the columns of
steel that held them up with uninterrupted vertical lines, and
he clearly differentiated the base, with its show windows,
from the main part of the building, with its many floors of
identical offices; and he gave the mechanical penthouse on
the top floor its own unique appearance. This change of the
appearance of the different parts of the building illustrated Wainwright Bu
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Sullivans famous dictum that Form follows Function. Sul-
livan and his colleagues in Chicago, the so-called Chicago
School, explored these and similar new ideas in many build-
ings, and like Wright, influenced not only other architects in
the United States, but also those in Europe.
THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE
THE FIRST GENERATION
At the time the Chicago School was flowering, the cente
of AVANT-GARDE architecture in Europe was Vienna (the
Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris was relatively conservative by
comparison). In addition to a style comparable to Art Nou-
veau called Secession, Otto Wagner and his students were
experimenting with glass, steel, and aluminum in buildings
that appear strikingly modern. Another Viennese, a writeand architect named Adolf Loos, thought architects of his
time (including Wagner) were too preoccupied with decora-
tion to produce a really modern, 20th century architecture
In 1908, after his return from a trip to Chicago, he published
an article titled Ornament and Crime in which he equated
ornamentation with decadence and depravity. He conclud-
ed that the progress of a society could be measured by the
degree to which it has eliminated decoration. This article
was widely read by young architects who saw it as a way to
answer the critics of Art Nouveau.
At about the same time in Paris, Braque and Picasso were
revolutionizing painting. They rejected realistic, illusionis-
tic paintingphotography could better record realityand
following the lead of Cezanne (a brilliant late 19th century
French painter), they analyzed nature into its most charac-
teristic shapes, reduced these to planes, and rearranged
these planes onto their canvases. The result was called
Cubism. Since Cubists frequently superimposed severa
different views of the same object on their canvases, re-
jecting perspective, some critics saw in the paintings the
representation of a 4th dimension, a concept that con-
temporary scientists and mathematicians were investigat-ing. Einstein was working out his theories of Relativity a
roughly the same time Braque and Picasso created Cub-
ism, but there is no evidence the painters were aware of his
theories. The impersonal, objective, hard-edged shapes in
the Cubistpaintings alsoappealedto contemporary critics
They lookedmodern; they looked machine-made.
The Steiner House
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The Italian Futuristswere among those influencedby the
revolutionarynew art. They were fascinated with the Ma-
chine Age, modern science and technology; they were ob-
sessed with speed and change and spoke eloquentlyof the
motor car and electricpower stations. The brilliantyoungarchitect SantElia wrote a manifesto of Futurist architecture
in which he asserted that to be reallymodern, architecture
shouldreject everything of the past. The architectureof the
future should:
1.have no decoration(as Loos had alreadysaid);
2. make no reference to historyor historical styles;
3. use onlynew, industrial, materialsand technologies (no
natural materials likewood, stone and brick); and
4. use dynamic forms and shapes which derived from or
resembled machines. SantElia was killed inWorld War I
before he could build any of his designs, which still look likecities of the future from science-fiction magazines and mov-
ies.
It was natural, then, that the factory shouldbecome an ideal
prototype for Machine-age architects. The German architect
Walter Gropius designed the most famous of these Early
Modern buildings inspired by factories, an office building
(the Faguswerk) in1911 and a schoolof architecture(the
Bauhaus) in1925. In both buildings, sheer glasswallspass
in front of the floor slabs; inthe Bauhaus, even the columns
are behindthe glass walls. In effect, at least poetically, the
traditional ideaof carrier and carriedhas been negated:
the exterior wallno longer holdsup the building in appear-
ance or in reality. The variable reflectivity/transparencyof
the glass walls superimposed views into the buildings with
reflections of the outside in a fashion directly recalling Cub-
ist painting. These buildings introduced the glass box so
characteristic of 20th century architecture.
As important as the Bauhaus building itself was, the cur-
riculum that Gropius designed for the school it housed was
probably even more influential. Gropius patterned the cur-
riculum on the writings of Ruskin and the practices of Morris.Each student was required to learn one or more handicrafts
from a combination of an artisan and an artist. Gradually
the emphasis shifted from pure handcrafts to products that
could be mass-produced by industry. Strictly speaking, no
courses in architecture were taught at the school; it was as-
sumed that the basic design principles taught in the school
were sufficient training for an architect. With some modi-
fications, the basic design courses at many schools of ar-
Airship Ha
Fagus
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chitecture throughout the world are based on those of the
Bauhaus. Many of the furnishings, especially furniture and
fabrics, designed by the faculty and students of the Bau-
haus are still sold in stores all over the world.
No one has ever fully and convincingly explained why Gro-
pius, though he retained their ideas that architecture could
shape society, turned from Ruskin and Morriss total rejec-
tion of industrial manufacture to an emphasis on mass-pro-
duction in his school, but the impact of the Dutch de Stij
group on Gropius and his students was one factor.
De Stijl (Dutch for The Style) was the name of a group of
artists and architects in Amsterdam that included the painte
Mondrian and the architect, Rietveld. They were inspired by
Cubism, by Frank Lloyd Wrights buildings, and by other
avant-garde theories. De Stijl artists and architects wishedto produce a universal art; they thought of space as a grid
extending infinitely in all directions and considered paintings
and buildings to be just parts of that grid. Rietvelds Schro-
eder House in Utrecht was conceived as a series of vertica
and horizontal planes floating in the universal grid. It is no
longer tied to the idea of a specific site, nor are all of the
walls permanently fixed. At least some of them can be slid
or folded to change the interior of the house at will, making
it even more universal. It adapts to the changing needs of
the inhabitant.
Like Gropius, Mies van der Rohe was influenced by Wright
and the de Stijl group. In plan, his Barcelona Pavilion, de-
signed for the 1929 Worlds Fair in Barcelona, Spain, looks
like a de Stijl painting; its floating horizontal and vertica
planes remind one of a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie House
Mies manipulated plane and space in this building in such a
way that distinctions between interior and exterior seems
entirely arbitrary, and the space implied by the planes be-
comes as real and important as the solid elements. The
materials, proportions, and details of this building were so
elegant and carefully considered that many consider it a
masterpiece on a par with the Parthenon. It was disassem-bled after the end of the fair, but it inexplicably disappeared
during its transport back to Germany. (It was made of rather
expensive marbles that probably ended up in the villa of
some Nazi official.) Almost universally considered a master-
piece, it was reconstructed in Barcelona in 1983-86.
Mies projects for all-glass skyscrapers were among the
most influential architectural designs of the 1920s. The
Schroeder House
Barcelona Pavilion
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aesthetic effect of these buildings depends on the play of
light and reflection on their sheer glass facades and irregu-
lar or curvilinear plans. The Depression and World War II
prevented Mies or anyone else from constructing them, but
after the war, SOM (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, an ar-chitectural firm based in Chicago) designed Lever House in
New York (1951). It was a rectangular box, rather than the
irregular shapes, similar to contemporary German Expres-
sionist paintings, that Mies had projected, but the idea of
an all-glass skyscraper is the same. By this time, Mies had
moved to Chicago. He had headed the Bauhaus after Gro-
pius left Nazi Germany until he, too, was forced into exile.
Mies himself designed the most elegant of the glass-box
skyscraper, the Seagrams Building in New York City. Its
bronze and glass curtain wall is so beautifully proportioned,
using the systems of the Renaissance that Bramante him-
self might have approved.
Soon after he arrived in Chicago, Mies was made head of
the school of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology
and was commissioned to design a master plan for the cam-
pus as well as several of its most important buildings. De
Stijl influence is evident in his attempts to create simple,
universal buildings on a universal grid. Some people have
criticized this approach by saying that at IlT its hard to know
which building is the architecture building, which the chapel,
and which the power plant. Indeed, in following his famous
dictum Less is more, Mies was forced to sacrifice the natu-
rally complicated functions of a building to simplicity. None-
theless, Mies designed some of the most elegant buildings
in history, and his glass-and-steel boxes became the arche-
typical urban buildingthough frequently cheapenedof
the 20th century.
The fourth great master in the First Generation of Modern
Architecture (after Wright, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe)
was Le Corbusier, born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) in
Switzerland. A painter as well as an architect, he spent most
of his active life in Paris. As a young man, he had spent
weeks on the Acropolis in Athens and had studied Greek,Turkish, and Mediterranean vernacular architecture. He had
also assimilated the ideas of Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc, Horta,
the Vienna Secession, the Cubists, Loos, and Auguste Per-
ret, among many others. Perret was especially important.
He had pioneered the use of reinforced concrete (concrete
with steel bars that resist tension). Corbu, as many refer to
him, designed most of his structures for this new material.
Lever H
Seagram T
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If the reinforcing bars are cleverly placed, reinforced con-
crete can be molded into almost any form. Perret had rec-
reated a sort of classicist, trabeated architecture with it. Le
Corbusier, however, created buildings that looked as if they
had been produced by a machine. His most famous housethe Villa Savoye (1929) in Poissy, a town west of Paris,
uses sleek surfaces that appear stretched over a frame
curves which match the turning radius of the automobiles
that dropped guests off at the front door; ramps like those
in parking garages; exposed heating pipes and lighting fix-
tures; and windows similar to industrial windows used in
factories. A house, wrote Le Corbusier, is a machine for
living. The Villa Savoye looks like a machine for living. I
is still somewhat shocking today, but once accustomed to
it, most visitors find it exciting and strangely beautiful in a
classical way.
Nothing about the Villa Savoyeor Gropiuss or Miess
buildings for that mattersuggests where they were built
They could as easily be in Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, or
Los Angeles as Paris or Dessau or Tokyo or Chicago
Critics have often applied the term International Style to
these buildings. It refers more to buildings nearly univer-
sal appropriatenessor inappropriatenessthan to the se
of common decorative or formal features that we normally
mean when we use the word "style."
At its best, the masterpieces of the International Style are
buildings of great refinement and technological beauty
which places them alongside the great monuments of the
past. At their worst, International Style buildings are inhu-
mane and crushingly boring. Simple elegance becomes ag-
gressively commonplace when clients are interested only
about profit and their architects only in the size of fees.
Some architects and critics criticized International Style ar-
chitecture because it did not relate to or reflect local cus-
toms, materials, and climates. Frank Lloyd Wright, who had
passed into a period of relative obscurity after the success
of the Prairie Style, was one of them. His practice revived inthe late 1930s, and he flashed into a new period of creativity
Although he condemned the International Style as soulless
and inhumane, counter to his principles of organic architec-
ture, he was quite evidently influenced by it. Fallingwater, the
house in Pennsylvania which he designed in 1936, is a bril-
liant synthesis of the best qualities of the International Style
and Wrights genius for wedding a building to its site through
forms and materials. Its smooth concrete cantilevers recre-
Villa Savoye
allingwater
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ate in man-made forms the rock layers under the waterfall
over which the house is built. Wrights Guggenheim Muse-
um in New York is a late, if controversial, masterpiecehe
was 92 when he died during its constructionbut it has ev-
ery characteristic except simplicity of an International Stylebuilding.
THE SECOND GENERATION
Very few examples of International Style architecture can be
found in the United States prior to World War II. Even in Eu-
rope, the general public and many architects were opposed,
often violently, to the International Style. Mies, Le Corbusier,
and other members of the avant-garde had built mostly rela-
tively small, private structures, and the Great Depression
and the rise of Nazi Germany, which considered Modern
art and architecture decadent, had put an end to even thatmuch. The post-war recovery period brought new economic
conditions, a different generation of client, and a changed
public attitude. A steadily increasing proportion of buildings
began to be built in the Modern style that Mies, Gropius,
and Le Corbusier had pioneered in the teens, 20s and early
30s. Most new Modern architecture was built in the United
States, to which Mies and Gropius had emigrated and which
had suffered less physically and economically than Europe,
and then in Western Europe as it recovered from the war.
Ironically, by this time, several of the leading pre-war design-
ers had already begun to reject their earlier projects. Some
were bored with simple geometry and bare, often austere
forms. Some were committed to the avant-garde principle of
rejecting anything that the public acceptedincluding their
own projects. Le Corbusier began to speak ill of his designs
of the 1920s, including the Villa Savoye. He turned away
from the industrial, highly-machined look of the International
Style to a more personal architecture. He combined natural
materials with reinforced concrete that showed the marks
of the rough-sawn boards used for formwork. Most of his
buildings from this period also have brightly colored parts
and handcrafted elements. In effect, he returned to aspectsof architecture that Ruskin, whose writings he had admired
as a young man, proposed. His chapel of Notre Dame at
Ronchamp, France, (1950-55) startled and confused his
admirers. It is very irregular in plan and volume; its roof is
of rough-formed concrete and its extremely thick walls are
coated in coarsely textured plaster. Nothing about it seems
to refer to the machine-age ideals of the First Generation,
nor does Ronchamp seem to refer to any buildings of the
Ronch
Ronchamp
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past. However strange and puzzling the pilgrimage church
seems at first sight, almost everyone who visits it, peasan
and architect alike, are won over by its profoundly religious
feeling.
Le Corbusier designed another religious building, the mon-
astery of La Tourette near Lyon, France. It, too, shows no
trace of the high technology that had originally excited the
First Generation, and Le Corbusier violates another of the
premises of the early Modernists when he defers to historica
precedent. He has brilliantly evoked the medieval monas-
tery, several of which he studied in preparation for designing
La Tourette, but it must be stressed, with uncompromisingly
original forms and details. It took a while for younger archi-
tects to assimilate these new directions, but many did, espe-
cially in Japan, South America, and the Indian subcontinent
where Le Corbusiers influence was even greater than inEurope or the United Statesexcept as a city planner.
Le Corbusier was probably more influential as a city plan-
ner than as an architect, especially in Europe and the Unit-
ed States, for better or worse. He hated low, dense cities
like Paris and conceived the ideal city as a series of widely
spaced skyscrapers, set up on freestanding columns in a
landscaped park. Published as a series of projects in the
1920s and modified over the following decades, Corbu first
had the opportunity to try out in practice his ideal "city in
a park" just after World War II with the Unit dHabitation
(1952) in Marseilles, the only completed unit of a projected
group of residential high-rise buildings. In it, he replaced the
old city street with a shopping floor half way up the build-
ing, and he designed the roof as a school, playground, and
garden. Le Corbusiers ideas on city planninghe wrote
several books and articles on the subjectwere especially
influential in designing post-World War II urban renewal and
mass housing projects. Too often, the worst aspects of Cor-
bu's ideas were copied and the better ideas misunderstood
Isolated towers and the elimination of the street destroyed
the close-knit social patterns of the neighborhoods they re-
placed. These tower-apartment blocks were unmitigated di-sasters when used for low-cost housing. Correspondingly
low budgets eliminated amenities like the roof terraces and
landscaping around the blocks, elevators frequently broke
down; parents found it impossible to look after children on
the ground from a 12th-floor apartment window. The Pruitt-
Igoe (1952-55) housing project in St. Louis proved so crime-
ridden and detested by its inhabitants that the city was forced
to dynamite most of it in 1972. Other cities have followed
a Tourette plan
a Tourette
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suit, replacing the towers in a park with more traditional low-
rise townhouses on streets.
Commercial success turned the once-shocking aspects of
the International Style into cheap clichs. Less is More re-sulted in elegant, extremely expensive buildings when the
architect was someone like Mies van der Rohe, but many
developers found that Less could be Cheap. Simple el-
egance became simplistic, banal, and monotonous in their
hands. The leading younger architects (the Second Gener-
ation) began to reject the very notion of a universal style of
architecture, suggesting instead that each building should
have its own, special identity that varied with client, site, and
context (the immediate physical surroundings). The Second
Generation Modern architects used the International Style
predominantly for utilitarian or commercial types of build-
ings. The Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, for ex-ample, used a Mies-Iike aesthetic for the General Motors
Technical Center where a machine-age image was appro-
priate, but he used more decorative and sculptural forms
(much as Le Corbusier at Ronchamp) for others. In the ter-
minal for Trans World Airlines at Kennedy Airport in New
York, Saarinen created non-functional but soaring shapes
expressive of flight in concrete; and in a series of dormi-
tories at Yale University, he, as Corbu had at La Tourette,
turned to the Middle Ages for inspiration.
Paul Rudolph, another leader of the Second Generation,
developed sculptural towers to fit the Arts and Architec-
ture Building at Yale into its Neo-gothic context and make
it stand out on a prominent corner. Widely admired for its
spatial complexity when it was built, it was soon criticized
for being too self-conscious and for ignoring the needs of
the people who used the building. It burned in the late 60s,
perhaps set on fire as a protest by the students who used it.
(The fire may have been an accident, but student protestors
used it as an excuse to criticize the building, in any case.)
The more orthodox Modern architects (who considered
themselves Functionalists) criticized these Second Gen-eration architects for sacrificing function to form and for not
clearly expressing the structure of the building on its exte-
rior. This was, for the most part, a revival of the old Ratio-
nalist versus Formalist controversy.
Some of the structural-engineer/architects of the period,
such as the Italian Nervi (Rome Olympic Stadium), the Ger-
man Frei Otto (German Pavilion at the Montreal Worlds Unit dHabit
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Fair andas consultantthe Munich Olympic pavilions)
the American Buckminster Fuller (the GEODESIC DOME)
and the Spanish-Mexican Felix Candela (thin-shell concrete
vaults), experimented with new structural systems that ren-
dered the Rationalist/Formalist controversy irrelevant. Intheir buildings, carrier and carried are one and the same
thing. The structure is the form of the building.
The most avant-garde of the Second Generation also avoid-
ed the Rationalist/Formalist controversies. They took forms
from a non-architectural context and turned them into build-
ings. The Archigram group from London used comic book
illustrations, oil refineries, and even insects as sources for
their buildings. They also declared that process and change
should be substituted for delight in the Vitruvian triad be-
cause modern society changes so rapidly and is so mobile
parts of their buildings were designed to move or changewith the needs of the inhabitants (the plug-in city). One Ar-
chigram project was for an entire city that moved wherever
its inhabitants wanted to go. Most of this type of architec-
ture, like the earlier and comparable Futurist architecture
remained on paper, but Piano and Rogers used Archigram
imagery in their design for a cultural center incorporating
the museum of modern art in Paris (the Centre Pompidou
or Pompidou Center), which was built in 1972. The Metabo-
lists in Japan also pursued directions parallel to the Archi-
gram group. Although these buildings look very functiona
and technological, in many cases they arent: technology is
used for sensational effect.
These are only several of the directions explored by Sec-
ond Generation architects in an attempt to find a modern
style to replace the International Style of the First Genera-
tion. There were many others. The unprecedented wealth in
the West and Japan during this period permitted architects
and engineers to experiment with an astonishing variety
of forms and structural techniques. Typically, little concern
was given either to the context of the buildings or to their
energy consumption in the headlong search for something
new and different. James Stirling of England created a num-ber of striking buildings by combining references to Futur-
ist architecture with Archigram-Iike ideas and references to
such 19th century buildings as the Crystal Palace. In the
US, Richard Meier was one of several architects who re-
vived the aesthetic of the early Le Corbusier. John Hejduk
experimented with de Stijl forms. Only their dissatisfaction
with the limitations of the First Generation ties these Second
Generation architects together. They all reacted to one o
Rome Olympic Stadium
German Pavilion
Meiers Hanselman House
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151m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e
more of the characteristics of the International Style. In hind-
sight, we can see references to the near and far historical
past begin to creep into architecturein contrast to the First
Generation who wished to start each project with a clean
slate, free of historical references.
Louis Kahn also reacted to First Generation forms and prin-
ciples, but he was more immediately influential than most of
the other Second Generation. His philosophies and buildings
assimilated and synthesized so many (sometimes appar-
ently conflicting) ideas that they served as the springboard
for widely divergent approaches in others. He is the only
American architect of his generation whose worldwide repu-
tation and influence has not only remained undiminished,
but has actually increased since his death. Kahn rejected
the less is more approach to architecture and interpreted
the dictum form follows function in a poetic, metaphysicalway (What does this building want to be?). He included
forms and compositional techniques, for example, those of
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts that had been avoided as messy
or impure in the First Generation. His buildings were rich
in allusions to many periods of history, especially to those
where the play of light over form and through space was as
masterful as in his structures. Kahn reemphasized the Ra-
tionalist theory that decoration should derive from the pat-
terns left by the construction of the building.
The Richards Medical Center for the University of Penn-
sylvania was Kahns first famous structure. It gave poetic
feeling to the expression of the different functional areas of
the plan and was one of the most imitated buildings of the
mid-century. Kahn separates the laboratories (the served
spaces) into one set of blocks and the services (stairs, air-
ducts, etc.)the "servant" spacesinto another set. The
resulting building looks both modern and like a medieval
castle. The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California and the Kim-
bell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, are both examples of
his later work. Serene, they are rare examples of buildings
that justify the adjective sublime. For many, they, like Mies
van der Rohes Barcelona Pavilion, can be placed in thesame category as the Parthenon.
Robert Venturi, one of Kahns followers and the author of
an immensely controversial and influential book on architec-
ture, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, devel-
oped one aspect of Kahns philosophies, the willingness to
include more than one type of form or compositional device
in the same building (the inclusivist approach). He argued
Richards Medical C
Kimbell Art Mus
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that less is a bore and that buildings should reflect the
natural complexity of life. According to Venturi, the simple
minimalist forms of the First Generation were possible only
because they excluded the expression of functions that
would complicate plans and elevations (the exclusivist ap-proach).
Even more controversial among architects was his demand
that they respond to what the average person builds and
likes rather than try to impose sophisticated architectura
theories and forms. Main Street is almost all right, wrote
Venturi. He meant that the neon signs, commercial architec-
ture, and billboards that line most main streets in America
are the real modern American vernacular architecture and
should be the source of the architects design vocabulary
He designed buildings along highways that resembled ab-
stracted billboards, which he called Build-ing boards.
In effect Venturi has rejected any traditional concept of
beauty. His Guild House (1960-65) makes no attempt to be
attractive; rather, it is intentionally made to resemble the ba-
nal, speculative apartment buildings in the neighborhood
its major piece of decoration is a television antenna - not be-
cause TV antennas are beautiful but (says Venturi) because
television is the most meaningful part of life for the elderly
who live in the building.
POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE
A very curious thing happened as a result of the Enlighten-
ment obsession with classification: people became aware
of their place in history. Until that time, people and societies
had a rather hazy notion of what had happened in the pas
and when it had occurredif they were at all concerned
"History" meant stories that pointed out some useful moral
When an event happened (and, in fact, ifan event actu-
ally happened) was of little importance. For the people o
the Renaissance, for example, the Roman Empire had oc-
curred a long time ago. Everything in between was bar-
baric. None of these cultures was aware of producing art orarchitecture of a certain style; that is, it would never have
occurred to Bramante that he was designing buildings in the
High Renaissance style.
The concept of style, like the classification systems of biol-
ogy and zoology, was introduced in an attempt to find pat-
terns in the phenomena of the world, to find universal laws
Guild House
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that explained where wed been, and, by extension, where
we were going. As strange as it sounds to us today, such
questions were of no interest to anyone before the Renais-
sance and of very little interest before the Enlightenment.
Newton, however, found that three statements could groupand explain what had seemed to be a number of unrelated
physical events. Linnaeus discovered that there were not
a vast number of individual plants and animals, but that
they could be arranged in a few related families. In the
same way, scholars grouped art and architecture chrono-
logically according to style: families of attitudes toward
structure, decoration, compositional devices, etc. Architects
were made aware of and attempted to produce buildings
in a certain style: a Romanesque style, a Gothic style,
andeventuallya "Modern" style.
Strictly speaking, "modern" means what is being done atthe moment. In 1889, the Eiffel Tower was "modern." But
we have come, with respect to architecture, to use the term
"Modern" to refer to the architecture of the First and Sec-
ond Generations as we have described it. Postmodern,
the next period after Modernism, is less coherent than
Modern. It is a period of architectural pluralism, with many
different directions; there is no prevailing theory, no singu-
larly accepted approach. We were starting to see different
directions emerging after the Industrial Revolution, and in
the Postmodern period, the approach to architecture is even
more eclectic. One characteristic that separates Modern
from Postmodern architecture is that history is embraced; it
is just interpreted in a variety of ways.
The basic tenet of Modern architecture is the rejection of
any specific references to the historical past. A building
was not considered Modern if it used the Greek Orders; or
if Gothic decorative motifs were used; or if anything that a
critic could directly associate with a building of the past was
used. Indeed all decorative features were avoided if possi-
ble because most buildings of the past had been decorated.
Modern architects tried to produce something entirely new
for what they felt was an entirely new age.
As we have seen, starting in the 1950s, architects gradu-
ally began to accept references to history in their architec-
ture. Le Corbusier based La Tourette on a study of medieval
monasteries. Saarinen studied the plans of medieval towns
when he was designing dormitories at Yale. This practice
was criticized to varying degrees, but it was generally ac-
cepted among Modernists as long as the references to the
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past were not explicit and as long as the architects were us-
ing the principles of historical buildings but not the specific
forms or details.
Later, rebellious leaders of early Postmodernism took a di-rect stance against the Modernists rejection of history and
began to introduce historical details and imagery, even that
of the Orders. Some Postmodern architects such as Thom-
as Gordon Smith revived historical styles (in his case Clas-
sicism), but most Postmodern architects did not revive his-
torical styles as the 19th century Eclectics (or in the sense
the Renaissance architects) did. They took isolated histori-
cal details and transformed them into something "new" by
changing their original function, size, or scale or by parody-
ing them: setting a keystone on top of a column, for exam-
ple; or making an Ionic capital out of stainless steel. There is
something Mannerist about this, something like what GiulioRomano had done with High Renaissance architecture. Bu
in several respects their approaches were still Modernist
Firstly, the Postmodernists were still trying to shocka top
priority of the First Generation. In the second place, they
were, ironically, rejecting history; however, they rejected re
centhistory. They rejected the First Generations rejection
of history, a neat little paradox much appreciated by many
of the Postmodernists.
Phillip Johnson, for example, annoyed most Modern archi-
tects when he designed the AT&T (now Sony) Building in
New York City, one of the first important Postmodern build-
ings with obvious historical reference. An elder statesmen
of the American architectural profession, he had been Mies
van der Rohes collaborator on the Parthenon of the Modern
skyscrapers, the Seagrams Building, as well as one of the
leading architects of the Second Generation. He had also
first used the term International Style in the 1930s. These
credentials as a Modernist made his use of a classical pedi-
ment on top of the AT&T skyscraper and a motif borrowed
from Brunelleschi for the entrance especially surprising. I
was, for many of the more established architects, as if the
pope had suddenly declared he was an atheist.
In addition toand related totheir rejection of historica
architecture, Modern architects typically rejected the idea o
applied decoration or superficial ornamentation. In a Modern
building, form, textures of the construction materials, and the
joints between those construction materials were the deco
ration. Postmodernists embraced the idea of applied orna-
ment, often exaggerating its decorative character. RobertAT&T Building
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Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used plywood silhouettes
of the Doric Order and pre-cast concrete moldings and Or-
ders. Michael Graves (probably the most fashionable of the
early Postmodern architects) stirred great controversy with
his Portland Office Building with super-scaled keystone mo-tifs, details from neo-classical architecture and buildings of
the 1930s, and applied decoration, including a large statue.
As many of the Postmodernists themselves have observed,
these non-traditional historical decorations are illusions no
deeper than a layer of paint or an appliqu of plywood or
cardboard. It is no wonder that many Postmodern architects
have been hired to design buildings with oversized swan ac-
roteria or miniaturized European cities within the fabricated
fantasy world of Walt Disney.
Postmodernists use of applied ornament was entirely dif-
ferent from the Modernists reductivist philosophy of lessis more, in which architecture strives to be efficient, sim-
ple, and pure. Venturis Postmodern less is a bore phi-
losophy encourages what he calls messy vitality that can
be achieved through decoration. According to Venturi, it is
okay, for example, to attach a plywood portico onto the front
of a prefabricated metal building intended for industrial use
and call it a banquet hall. This is acceptance of what a non-
architect builder might typically do.
A Postmodern architect can also be inspired by local tradi-
tions, culture, climate, and materials, unlike the many ma-
chined Modernist buildings that could just as well sit in In-
dia as they would in Boston. Many Modernist buildings are
made of steel, glass, and concrete, and can be mass pro-
duced in any industrialized society. However, some Post-
modern architects have chosen to reflect regional or vernac-
ular character by using a variety of material palettes while
showing a Modernist influence. Architect Antoine Predock,
preceded by architects like Luis Barragn in Mexico and
Carlos Scarpa in Italy (each of these Modernists adopted
techniques and traditions of their respective countries), is
well known for architecture that reflects the character of the
Southwestern American desert. His Nelson Fine Arts Cen-ter in Tempe, Arizona, features strong sculptural forms that
mimic Native American colonies nestled in the cliffs. The
building is covered in smooth, colored stucco, made pink to
match the nearby desert earth. This project and many of his
others literally and metaphorically reveal the character of
their specific locations.
Another group of Postmodern architects has continued
Portland Office Bu
Hotel at Disney W
Nelson Fine Arts Ce
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to explore the machine aesthetic of Modernism. These
high-tech architects who try to give their buildings space
age/computer age imagery (much as the First Generation
used machine-age imagery) by emphasizing technical com-
ponents: heating and air-conditioning ducts, elevators andescalators, and highly machined, polished, and industrially
produced surfaces. They expose structural and mechani-
cal systems, which the Modernists had hidden, and they
become a primary aspect of a buildings aesthetic appeal
These buildings are influenced by Piano and Rogers previ-
ously mentioned Pompidou Center, which, in essence, is a
museum turned inside-out so that its systems and structure
are on the exterior to make room for flexible and large open
spaces on the interior. Other high-tech buildings feature un-
usual elements. In Jean Nouvels Arab World Institute, also
in Paris, metal panels, aesthetically designed to incorporate
traditional Islamic ornamentation, cover the windows andrespond to light like our eyes pupil, mechanically opening
with cloud cover and closing with sunlight.
As you can imagine, high-tech architecture can require so-
phisticated engineering and custom fabrication. Not only
are these buildings expensive to build, they are expensive
to maintain. Ironically, a high-tech architect was initially in-
terested in designing a building that could be built from an
inexpensive kit-of-parts, an inherently Modern idea. None-
theless, these architects have responded to our cultures
fascination with technology and delighted users, as in Nor-
man Fosters high-rise Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. For
the building, he designed a large-scale exterior truss struc-
tural system within which he suspended the floors. Interio
offices open onto a light-filled atrium. High-tech architecture
is rationalist in the sense that it exposes the structure of the
building, so it becomes one of the branches of Postmodern-
ism that isnt easily classified as simply anti-Modern.
Another architect who has maintained a Modern aesthetic in
his architecture is Richard Meier, known for his trademark
gleaming white buildings with abundant glass. As previous-
ly mentioned, he has been heavily influenced by the earlyarchitecture and ideas of Le Corbusier, making his archi-
tecture neo-Modern, another branch of Postmodernism
His recent Getty Center Museum is an impressive museum
complex (with its own tram) whose strong geometric forms
stretch across a hilltop overlooking Los Angeles. In the Get-
ty Center, as in his houses, schools, and other museums
he uses a Modernist language of pure geometries.Getty Center Museum plan
Pompidou Center
romA Global History of Architecture by Francis D. K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek and Vikra-
aditya Prakash, by permission from John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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The Getty Center was a big undertaking for Los Angeles.
Museums and concert halls have become the most promi-
nent building types for many American and international
cities, serving as statements of societal values. To a cer-
tain degree, the museum is to our cities what the cathedralchurch was to medieval towns, or what the skyscraper
the cathedral to commerce, previously a distinctly American
preoccupationis to developing cities like Dubai. Often the
most elaborate and expensive materials and most sophisti-
cated engineering are used in museums, which can become
artistic statements as strong as the art or artifacts they pro-
tect. Two architects who have successfully designed mu-
seums as cultural statements as well as provided pleas-
ant and effective places to view art are I.M. Pei and Renzo
Piano.
I.M. Peis masterpieces like the National Gallery in Washing-ton, D. C. and his Louvre Museum renovation and Pyramid
in Paris are of Modernist influence, and they have helped
make museum going more popular among the masses.
Again, like many medieval towns that built cathedrals to at-
tract pilgrims, many cities have picked up on this and are
building museums to attract tourists.
Bilbao, Spain, was little visited by tourists before Los An-
geles architect Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim
Museum on its riverbank. The brilliant building contrasts its
dense, traditional surroundings with a series of complex and
sculptural titanium forms that come together to create the
dramatic, even baroque, entry. It is the focal point, the com-
manding symbol of the city, and has created a revival for
Bilbao by attracting tourists who would otherwise have not
ventured there. It works because its site on the river calls
for a focal point object that contrasts with its otherwise quiet