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Modern architecture
The first steel-framed skyscraper, the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, rose in 1883, fundamentally altering the skyline of the world's fastest-growing cities. Before this structure, buildings were limited by the weight-bearing capacity of thick masonry walls, but William Le Baron Jenney's design utilized a metal skeleton to support the weight, allowing for taller, lighter, and more open structures. This innovation was made possible by the cast plate glass process invented in 1848, which allowed for the manufacture of very large windows, and the safety elevator demonstrated by Elisha Otis in 1854, which made tall office and apartment buildings practical. The revolution in materials extended to reinforced concrete, a technique pioneered by French industrialist François Coignet in 1853 when he built the first iron-reinforced concrete structure, a four-storey house in the suburbs of Paris. These technological leaps inspired architects to break away from the neoclassical and eclectic models that had dominated European and American architecture for centuries, setting the stage for a movement that would prioritize function over historical imitation. The Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton at the Great Exhibition of 1851 served as an early example of iron and plate glass construction, followed in 1864 by the first glass and metal curtain wall, proving that buildings could be transparent and lightweight rather than solid and opaque.
The Machine For Living
Charles-Édouard Jeanerette, who adopted the name Le Corbusier in 1920, became the dominant figure in the rise of modernism in France, promoting architecture that was functional, pure, and free of any decoration or historical associations. In 1923 he published 'Toward an Architecture', with his famous slogan, 'a house is a machine for living in', a phrase that encapsulated the movement's rejection of ornament in favor of utilitarian simplicity. Le Corbusier tirelessly promoted his ideas through slogans, articles, books, and conferences, and in the 1920s he built a series of houses and villas in and around Paris that were all built according to a common system based upon the use of reinforced concrete. The best-known of these houses 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 around on the façade, with living space that opened upon an interior garden and countryside around, raised up by a row of white pylons in the center of a large lawn. This structure became an icon of modernist architecture, demonstrating how glass curtain walls on the façade and open floor plans could be independent of the structure. Le Corbusier also designed modular houses, which would be mass-produced on the same plan and assembled into apartment blocks, neighborhoods, and cities, envisioning a new urbanism based on planned cities where inhabitants lived in identical sixty-story tall skyscrapers surrounded by open parkland.
When was the first steel-framed skyscraper built and who designed it?
The first steel-framed skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building, was built in 1883 and designed by William Le Baron Jenney. This ten-story structure in Chicago utilized a metal skeleton to support weight, allowing for taller and more open buildings than previous masonry walls.
What is the significance of the Villa Savoye in modernist architecture?
The Villa Savoye was built between 1928 and 1931 in the Paris suburb of Poissy by Le Corbusier. This white box structure wrapped with a ribbon of glass windows became an icon of modernist architecture by demonstrating how glass curtain walls and open floor plans could be independent of the structure.
When did the Nazis close the Bauhaus school and where did the founders go?
The Nazis closed the Bauhaus school in 1933 after viewing it as a training ground for communists. Founder Walter Gropius left for England and then the United States, where he and Marcel Breuer joined the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Which Russian architect built the Rusakov Workers Club and when was it constructed?
Konstantin Melnikov built the Rusakov Workers Club in 1928 in Moscow. He was one of the first prominent constructivist architects to emerge in Russia after the movement was launched in 1921 by a group of artists led by Aleksandr Rodchenko.
When was the city center of Le Havre declared a UNESCO World Heritage site?
The rebuilt city center of Le Havre was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. Architect Auguste Perret designed the new center after the city was destroyed by bombing in 1944, creating 133 hectares of new buildings and housing 40,000 homeless persons.
Which building was the tallest in the world from 1973 until 1998 and who designed it?
The Sears Tower, now renamed the Willis Tower, was the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998. It was designed by Fazlur Rahman Khan and was the first building to use the framed-tube design.
In Germany, two important modernist movements appeared after the first World War, with the Bauhaus school founded in Weimar in 1919 under the direction of Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus was a fusion of the prewar Academy of Arts and the school of technology, bringing together modernists in all fields, including painters Vasily Kandinsky, Joseph Albers, and Paul Klee, and the designer Marcel Breuer. Gropius became an important theorist of modernism, writing 'The Idea and Construction' in 1923, and was an advocate of standardization in architecture and the mass construction of rationally designed apartment blocks for factory workers. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they viewed the Bauhaus as a training ground for communists and closed the school in 1933, forcing Gropius to leave for England and then the United States, where he and Marcel Breuer both joined the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who became the head of the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, described his architecture with the famous saying, 'Less is more', and constructed new buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology in modernist style. His most famous modernist work was the German pavilion for the 1929 international exposition in Barcelona, a work of pure modernism with glass and concrete walls and clean, horizontal lines, which became, along with Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, one of the best-known landmarks of modernist architecture. Mies van der Rohe returned to the United States in 1937 and became one of the most famous designers of postwar American skyscrapers, constructing the Seagram Building in New York City, which set a new standard for purity and elegance with its granite pillars, smooth glass and steel walls, and bronze-toned I-beams.
The Concrete Utopia
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian avant-garde artists and architects began searching for a new Soviet style which could replace traditional neoclassicism, closely tied with the literary and artistic movements of the period, including the futurism of poet Vladimir Mayakovskiy and the Suprematism of painter Kasimir Malevich. The most startling design that emerged was the tower proposed by painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin for the Moscow meeting of the Third Communist International in 1920, a proposal for two interlaced towers of metal four hundred meters high, with four geometric volumes suspended from cables. The movement of Russian Constructivist architecture was launched in 1921 by a group of artists led by Aleksandr Rodchenko, whose manifesto proclaimed that their goal was to find the 'communist expression of material structures'. Soviet architects began to construct workers' clubs, communal apartment houses, and communal kitchens for feeding whole neighborhoods, with one of the first prominent constructivist architects to emerge in Moscow being Konstantin Melnikov, who built the Rusakov Workers' Club in 1928 and his own living house, the Melnikov House, in 1929 near Arbat Street in Moscow. Melnikov traveled to Paris in 1925 where he built the Soviet Pavilion for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, a highly geometric vertical construction of glass and steel crossed by a diagonal stairway, and crowned with a hammer and sickle. The style fell markedly out of favor in the 1930s, replaced by the more grandiose nationalist styles that Stalin favored, with the last major Russian constructivist building, by Boris Iofan, being built for the Paris World Exhibition in 1937, where it faced the pavilion of Nazi Germany by Hitler's architect Albert Speer.
The Postwar Rebirth
The unprecedented destruction caused by World War II was another factor in the rise of modern architecture, with large parts of major cities, from Berlin, Tokyo, and Dresden to Rotterdam and east London, all the port cities of France, particularly Le Havre, Brest, Marseille, and Cherbourg, having been destroyed by bombing. In the United States, little civilian construction had been done since the 1920s, and housing was needed for millions of American soldiers returning from the war, leading to the design and construction of enormous government-financed housing projects, usually in run-down center of American cities, and in the suburbs of Paris and other European cities. One of the largest reconstruction projects was that of the city center of Le Havre, destroyed by the Germans and by Allied bombing in 1944, where 133 hectares of buildings in the center were flattened, destroying 12,500 buildings and leaving 40,000 persons homeless. The architect Auguste Perret, a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete and prefabricated materials, designed and built an entirely new center to the city, with apartment blocks, cultural, commercial, and government buildings, and restored historic monuments when possible, building a new church, St. Joseph, with a lighthouse-like tower in the center to inspire hope. His rebuilt city was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005, and shortly after the War, Le Corbusier was commissioned by the French government to construct a new apartment block in Marseille, called Unité d'Habitation, which contained 337 duplex apartment units, fit into the framework like pieces of a puzzle, with interior 'streets' that had shops, a nursery school, and other services, and a flat terrace roof that had a running track, ventilation ducts, and a small theater.
The American Skyline
In the postwar years, notable modern buildings were produced by two architectural mega-agencies, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Wallace K. Harrison, which brought together large teams of designers for very complex projects. The firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was founded in Chicago in 1936 by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, and joined in 1939 by engineer John Merrill, and its first big project was Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the gigantic government installation that produced plutonium for the first nuclear weapons. The firm's style was largely inspired by the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and their buildings soon had a large place in the New York skyline, including the Manhattan House, Lever House, and the Manufacturers Trust Company Building, with later buildings including the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Willis Tower, formerly Sears Tower in Chicago, and One World Trade Center in New York City. Wallace Harrison played a major part in the modern architectural history of New York, as the architectural advisor of the Rockefeller Family, helping to design Rockefeller Center, and was supervising architect for the 1939 New York World's Fair, and, with his partner Max Abramowitz, was the builder and chief architect of the headquarters of the United Nations. Another major figure in the postwar years was Fazlur Rahman Khan, who introduced design methods and concepts for efficient use of material in building architecture, with his first building to employ the tube structure being the Chestnut De-Witt apartment building, and who became noted for his designs for Chicago's 100-story John Hancock Center, which was the first building to use the trussed-tube design, and 110-story Sears Tower, since renamed Willis Tower, the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998, which was the first building to use the framed-tube design.
The Sculptural Turn
Eero Saarinen, the son of Eliel Saarinen, the most famous Finnish architect of the Art Nouveau period, designed buildings that were more like enormous pieces of sculpture than traditional modern buildings, breaking away from the elegant boxes inspired by Mies van der Rohe and using instead sweeping curves and parabolas, like the wings of birds. In 1948 he conceived the idea of a monument in St. Louis, Missouri in the form of a parabolic arch 192 meters high, made of stainless steel, and then designed the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, a glass modernist box in the style of Mies van der Rohe, followed by the IBM Research Center in Yorktown, Virginia. His next works were a major departure in style, producing a particularly striking sculptural design for the Ingalls Rink in New Haven, Connecticut, an ice skiing rink with a parabolic roof suspended from cables, which served as a preliminary model for his next and most famous work, the TWA Terminal at JFK airport in New York, a structure separated into four white concrete parabolic vaults, which together resemble a bird on the ground perched for flight. Louis Kahn, another American architect who moved away from the Mies van der Rohe model of the glass box, borrowed from a wide variety of styles, including neoclassicism, and constructed mainly with concrete and brick, making his buildings look monumental and solid. Kahn's work and ideas influenced Philip Johnson, Minoru Yamasaki, and Edward Durell Stone as they moved toward a more neoclassical style, and his notable buildings in the United States include the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York, and the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, with his last work being the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban, the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, designed when that country won independence from Pakistan.
The End Of An Era
The 1939 New York World's Fair marked a turning point in architecture between Art Deco and modern architecture, with the theme of the Fair being the World of Tomorrow, and its symbols being the purely geometric trylon and periphery sculpture, including the new International Style that would replace Art Deco as the dominant style after the War. The pavilions of Finland, by Alvar Aalto, of Sweden by Sven Markelius, and of Brazil by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, looked forward to a new style, and became leaders in the postwar modernist movement. However, by the 1980s, modern architecture was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture, with Philip Johnson's AT&T Building, later known as the Sony Tower, in New York City, generally considered to mark the beginning of Postmodern architecture in the United States. This building was an essentially modernist skyscraper completely altered by the addition of broken pediment with a circular opening, signaling a decisive break with the orthodoxies of modern architecture. The movement, which had been dominant after World War II until the 1980s, had been based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, the principle of functionalism, an embrace of minimalism, and a rejection of ornament, but its rigid doctrines eventually gave way to a new era of historical reference and decorative complexity.