Modern architecture

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Modern architecture rested on a single, radical conviction: that a building's shape should emerge from its purpose, not from the decorative traditions of the past. Between the end of the 19th century and the 1980s, this conviction reshaped cities on every continent. It gave us the glass-and-steel skyscraper, the open floor plan, and the concrete housing block. It produced some of the most celebrated structures ever built, from Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. And it was driven by a small cast of figures whose rivalries, ideals, and exiles spanned two world wars.

  How did a rejection of ornament become the defining architectural language of the 20th century? What new materials made it possible? And why did nationalists from Berlin to Moscow ultimately try to destroy it? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Materials That Changed Everything

  ›

  Cast plate glass was invented in 1848, and that single development opened a door that could never be closed again. For the first time, architects could manufacture very large windows. Joseph Paxton used the technology almost immediately, erecting the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 out of iron and plate glass. Within thirteen years, the first glass and metal curtain wall had followed.

  The next revolution came underground in France. In 1853, the French industrialist Francois Coignet built a four-story house in the suburbs of Paris using iron reinforced concrete, concrete strengthened with iron bars, which had never before been used to construct a building. The technique meant structures could be molded into any shape and could span enormous spaces without interior columns.

  Then came vertical ambition. Elisha Otis demonstrated his safety elevator at the New York Crystal Palace exposition in 1854, making tall office and apartment buildings genuinely practical. William Le Baron Jenney gathered all these threads together in 1884 when he completed the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the first steel-framed skyscraper, whose very existence would have been unimaginable thirty years earlier.

  Electric light rounded out the toolkit. By removing the threat of gas-flame fires, it made the interiors of large buildings far safer. Together, these four innovations, glass, reinforced concrete, the safety elevator, and electric light, handed architects a completely new palette.

• 3. The Theorists Who Started It

  ›

  Eugène Viollet-le-Duc issued the call to arms in his 1872 book Entretiens sur l'architecture. "Use the means and knowledge given to us by our times," he wrote, "without the intervening traditions which are no longer viable today, and in that way we can inaugurate a new architecture. For each function its material; for each material its form and its ornament." That book reached Louis Sullivan, Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, and Antoni Gaudí, a generation of architects primed to break from the Beaux-Arts and neoclassical models that had dominated Europe and America.

  In Vienna, Otto Wagner's 1895 book Moderne Architektur called for rationalist design based on what he termed "modern life". His own evolution illustrated the argument. He began with a stylized ornamental metro station at Karlsplatz in 1888-89, moved through an Art Nouveau residence in 1898, and then stripped everything away for the Austrian Postal Savings Bank in 1904-1906, where reinforced concrete was faced with marble held on by bolts of polished aluminum, and the interior was a single open space of steel, glass, and concrete whose only decoration was the structure itself.

  His student Josef Hoffmann took the lesson to Brussels. In 1906-1911 he built the Stoclet Palace there, a residence of brick covered with Norwegian marble composed entirely of geometric blocks, wings, and a tower. The interior was decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt. Hoffmann even designed clothing for the family to match the architecture of the rooms.

  Adolf Loos went further still. His Steiner House in Vienna, completed in 1910, had a simple stucco rectangular facade with square windows and no ornament at all. He called it rationalist architecture, and the description stuck.

• 4. Le Corbusier and the International Style

  ›

  Charles-Édouard Jeanerette, a Swiss-French architect, took the name Le Corbusier in 1920 and spent the next four decades making himself the movement's most tireless evangelist. He co-founded a journal called L'Esprit Nouveau, he lectured and wrote ceaselessly, and in 1922 he presented a design for a city of three million people whose inhabitants would live in identical sixty-story skyscrapers surrounded by parkland.

  In 1923 he published "Toward an Architecture" with the slogan that became the movement's battle cry: "a house is a machine for living in." His follow-up was practical. Through the 1920s he built a series of houses and villas in and around Paris, all constructed on the same system: reinforced concrete pylons in the interior supporting the structure, glass curtain walls on the facade, open floor plans, and always white, with no ornament inside or out.

  The best-known of them was the Villa Savoye, built in 1928-1931 in the Paris suburb of Poissy. An elegant white box wrapped with a ribbon of glass windows, raised up on white pylons over a large lawn, it became the icon the movement had been waiting for.

  The International Style took institutional form on the 26th to the 28th of June 1928, when the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne, known as CIAM, held its first meeting in a chateau on Lake Leman in Switzerland. The attendees included Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Erich Mendelsohn, Auguste Perret, and Adolf Loos, among others. No one attended from the United States. A text the group eventually drafted on board a cruise ship traveling between Marseille and Athens, called The Athens Charter, was published in 1957 and shaped city planning through the 1950s and 1960s.

• 5. Bauhaus, Expressionism, and the German Scene

  ›

  Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 as a fusion of the prewar Academy of Arts and the school of technology. The faculty he assembled was extraordinary: the painters Vasily Kandinsky, Joseph Albers, and Paul Klee all taught there alongside the designer Marcel Breuer. In 1926 the school moved to Dessau, where Gropius designed the new building in the purely functional modernist style he was promoting.

  While Gropius ran the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe led the modernist movement in Berlin. His most celebrated work of the period was the German pavilion for the 1929 international exposition in Barcelona, a composition of glass and concrete with clean horizontal lines that was torn down in 1930 after the exposition closed. A reconstructed version now stands on the original site.

  Running parallel to, and sometimes against, the Bauhaus was Expressionism. Its advocates, including Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, Fritz Höger, and Erich Mendelsohn, wanted architecture that was poetic rather than merely functional. Many had fought in the First World War, and the political turbulence of the German Revolution of 1919 pushed their outlook toward a utopian, romantic socialism. Economic conditions meant that many of the most ambitious expressionist projects, including Bruno Taut's Alpine Architecture, never got off the page.

  When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they closed the Bauhaus, declaring it a training ground for communists. Gropius left for England and then the United States, where he and Marcel Breuer joined the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and trained a generation of postwar American architects. In 1937 Mies van der Rohe also moved to the United States, where he became one of the most prominent designers of postwar skyscrapers.

• 6. Frank Lloyd Wright's Separate Path

  ›

  Frank Lloyd Wright worked alongside the modernist movement without ever belonging to it. He had no formal architectural training. From 1887 to 1893 he worked in the Chicago office of Louis Sullivan, who pioneered the tall steel-frame office building and coined the phrase form follows function. Wright's own direction was different from the start.

  His Prairie Houses, including the Robie House of 1909, were sprawling, geometric residences with strong horizontal lines and no decoration, designed to echo what he called the wide flat spaces of the American prairie. His Larkin Building in Buffalo, completed in 1906, and his Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, from the same period, had no connection to historical precedents at all.

  Between 1928 and 1935, as the Depression cut off wealthy clients, he built only two buildings. One was a hotel near Chandler, Arizona. The other was Fallingwater, a vacation house in Pennsylvania for Edgar J. Kaufman, completed between 1934 and 1937. It is a structure of concrete slabs suspended over a waterfall, uniting building and landscape in a way no modernist box could achieve.

  In 1943 Wright received the commission that would become his final masterpiece. The art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim asked him to design a museum for his collection of modern art. Wright's answer was a bowl-shaped building with a spiral ramp inside that led visitors upward through the collection. Work began in 1946 and the museum was not completed until 1959, the year Wright died.

• 7. Skyscrapers and the American Sky

  ›

  The Woolworth Building, designed by Cass Gilbert and completed in 1912, was the tallest building in the world until the Chrysler Building topped it in 1929. Its structure was entirely modern in its steel frame, but its exterior was covered in Neo-Gothic ornament: buttresses, arches, and spires that earned it the nickname "Cathedral of Commerce".

  The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building took a different approach. They combined modern materials, including stainless steel, aluminum, and chrome-plated steel, with Art Deco geometry. At the top of the Chrysler Building, stainless steel radiator ornaments served as Art Deco gargoyles. The Great Depression that began in 1929 brought this era to an end, halting skyscraper construction and giving way to the stripped-down Streamline Moderne style.

  Fazlur Rahman Khan, who joined Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago in 1955 and was made a partner in 1966, eventually changed the structural logic of tall buildings entirely. His 100-story John Hancock Center was the first building to use the trussed-tube design. The 110-story Sears Tower, later renamed Willis Tower, completed in 1973, was the first to use the framed-tube design and was the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998. Khan's insight was that the building's external envelope, given enough trussing, framing, and bracing, could be the structure itself, making buildings lighter and freeing them from the boxlike form that a conventional steel frame imposed. Tube structures he developed have since appeared in buildings including the Petronas Towers and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

  Minoru Yamasaki brought a different kind of ingenuity to height. Designing the two 1,360-foot towers of the World Trade Center, whose construction began on the 21st of March 1966, he confronted the problem of elevator shafts consuming floor space. His solution was the Skylobby system: three separate connected elevator systems serving different segments of each tower, saving approximately 70 percent of the space that a traditional shaft would have used.

• 8. Legacy and the Turn Away

  ›

  Philip Johnson, born in 1906, trained at Harvard with Walter Gropius, organized the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that gave the International Style its name and its reach in the United States, and for decades championed the movement he had helped define. His Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, completed in 1953, was modeled directly on Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. Then, beginning in 1955, he started moving away.

  His decisive break came with the AT&T Building in New York City, completed in 1979, a modernist skyscraper crowned with a broken pediment containing a circular opening. That addition alone was enough for architectural historians to mark the building as the beginning of Postmodern architecture in the United States.

  By then the wider movement was already retreating. Modern architecture had become dominant after World War II for institutional and corporate buildings, and was gradually replaced as the principal style for those buildings by postmodern architecture through the 1980s. The social ambitions of the movement had a mixed record. The Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project, designed by Yamasaki as the largest housing project ever built in the United States, was fully torn down in 1976. But Auguste Perret's reconstruction of Le Havre, which he rebuilt after 133 hectares of the city center were destroyed in 1944 by bombing, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. And the Modernist architecture of Kaunas, Lithuania, built during the interwar period when the city served as the country's temporary capital, received the same recognition in 2023.

  The structural ideas that Fazlur Khan developed remain the starting point for designers of every supertall building constructed today.