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Charles Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, b. La Chaux-de-fonds,
Switzerland, Oct. 6, 1887, d. 1965, was a Swiss-French architect who
played a decisive role in the development of modern architecture. He
first studied (1908-10) in Paris with August Perret, and then worked
(1910) for several months in the Berlin studio of industrial designer
Peter Behrens, where he met the future Bauhaus leaders Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Shortly after World War I, Jeanneret turned
to painting and founded, with Amedee Ozenfant, the purist offshoot of
cubism. With the publication (1923) of his influential collection of
polemical essays, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture,
Eng. repr. 1970), he adopted the name Le Corbusier and devoted his full
energy and talent to creating a radically modern form of architectural
expression.
In the 1920s and 30s, Le Corbusier s most significant work was in urban
planning. In such published plans as La Ville Contemporaine (1922), the
Plan Voisin de Paris (1925), and the several Villes Radieuses (1930-36),
he advanced ideas dramatically different from the comfortable, low-rise
communities proposed by earlier garden city planners. During this
20-year span he also built many villas and several small apartment
complexes and office buildings. In these hard-edged, smooth-surfaced,
geometric volumes, he created a language of what he called "pure
prisms"--rectangular blocks of concrete, steel, and glass, usually
raised above the ground on stilts, or pilotis, and often endowed with
roof gardens intended to compensate for the loss of usable floor area at
ground level.
After World War II, Le Corbusier moved away from purism and toward the
so-called new brutalism, which utilized rough-hewn forms of concrete,
stone, stucco, and glass. Newly recognized in official art circles as an
important 20th-century innovator, he represented (1946) France on the
planning team for the United Nations Headquarters building in New York
City--a particularly satisfying honor for an architect whose
prize-winning design (1927) for the League of Nations headquarters had
been rejected. Simultaneously, he was commissioned by the French
government to plan and build his prototypical Vertical City in
Marseille. The result was the Unite d Habitation (1946-52)--a huge block
of 340 "superimposed villas" raised above the ground on massive pilotis,
laced with two elevated thoroughfares of shops and other services and
topped by a roof-garden gymnasium that contained, among other things, a
sculptured playground of concrete forms and a peripheral track for
joggers.
His worldwide reputation led to a commission from the Indian government
to plan the city of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab, and to
design and build the Government Center (1950-70) and several of the
city s other structures. These poetic, handcrafted buildings represented
a second, more humanistic phase in Le Corbusier s work that also was
reflected in his lyrical Pilgrim Church of Notre Dame du Haut at
Ronchamp (1951-55) in the Vosges Mountains of France; in his rugged
monastery of La Tourette, France (1954-59); and in the structures he
designed (from 1958) at Ahmedabad, in India. Le Corbusier accidentally
drowned in the Mediterranean on Aug. 27, 1965.
Frank Lloyd Wright, b. Richland Center, Wis., June 8, 1867, d. Apr. 9,
1959, was one of the most innovative and influential figures in modern
architecture. In his radically original designs as well as in his
prolific writings he championed the virtues of what he termed organic
architecture, a building style based on natural forms.
After briefly studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin,
Wright moved to Chicago, where he went to work (1887) as a draftsman in
the office of Adler and Sullivan. While working under Louis
Sullivan--whom Wright called "Lieber Meister"--he began designing and
building on his own a few private houses for some of Adler and
Sullivan s clients. These "bootlegged houses," as Wright called them,
soon revealed an independent talent quite distinct from that of
Sullivan. Wright s houses had low, sweeping rooflines hanging over
uninterrupted walls of windows; his plans were centered on massive brick
or stone fireplaces at the heart of the house; his rooms became
increasingly open to one another; and the overall configuration of his
plans became more and more asymmetrical, reaching out toward some real
or imagined prairie horizon.
In contrast to the expansive openness of those houses which inspired the
prairie school, Wright s urban buildings (unlike Sullivan s, for
instance) tended to be walled in, somewhat inhospitable to the city, and
lit primarily through skylights. Whereas two of the finest buildings of
Wright s early period--the Larkin Company Administration Building (1904;
demolished 1950) in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Unity Church (1906) in Oak
Park, Ill.--seemed to proclaim Wright s distaste for urban environments,
houses he designed in the same period (such as Buffalo s Martin House,
1904, and Chicago s Robie House, 1909) reached out into the landscape
with large, glazed walls, terraces, and low-slung roof overhangs.
Wright worked on his own after 1893, when the issue of his bootlegged
houses finally caused a break with Adler and Sullivan s office. During
the 20 years that followed he became one of the best-known (and, because
of a tempestuous personal life, one of the most notorious) architects in
the United States. Two editions of his work brought out (1910, 1911) by
the Berlin publisher Wasmuth, along with a parallel exhibition that
traveled throughout Europe, boosted Wright s fame in European
architectural circles and influenced such key figures in contemporary
architecture as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
His reputation assured on both sides of the Atlantic, Wright began to
reinforce the philosophical underpinnings of his innovative building
style. In keeping with his agrarian bias, Wright proclaimed that the
structural principles found in natural forms should guide modern
American architecture. He praised the virtues of an organic architecture
that would use reinforced concrete in the configurations found in
seashells and snails and would build skyscrapers the way trees were
"built"--that is, with a central "trunk" deeply rooted in the ground and
floors cantilevered from that trunk like branches. Spaces within such
buildings would be animated by natural light allowed to penetrate the
interiors and to travel across textured surfaces as the incidence of
sunlight and moonlight changed.
His view of architecture was essentially romantic. Although Wright often
paid lip service to the rational systems called for by mass-produced
building (modular planning and prefabrication), his efforts in those
directions seemed halfhearted at best. The most spectacular buildings of
his mature period--Tokyo s Imperial Hotel (1915-22; demolished 1968);
Fallingwater (Kaufmann House; 1936), Mill Run, Pa.; the S. C. Johnson
and Son Wax Company Administration Center (1936-50), Racine, Wis.;
Taliesin West (1938-59); and New York City s Guggenheim Museum
(completed 1959)--were based on forms borrowed from nature, and the
intentions were clearly romantic, poetic, and intensely personal. At his
death he left a rich heritage of completed buildings of almost uniform
splendor; few disciples, however, could match the special genius
reflected in his works. Unlike Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le
Corbusier, and other giants of modern architecture, Wright was, at
heart, an essentially idiosyncratic architect whose influence was
immense but whose pupils were few.
Modern architecture is a form of building design characterized by the
use of unornamented industrial materials--principally steel, glass, and
concrete--to make simple, geometric forms standing free in space. Such
buildings, which began to appear around 1922 in Germany, the
Netherlands, the USSR, and France, were first grouped together under a
single stylistic heading in a 1932 exhibition titled "Modern
Architecture" held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The
exhibition s organizers, the critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the
architect C. Philip Johnson, detected in a variety of post-World War I
buildings from several countries a shared emphasis on volume over form,
asymmetrical composition, and avoidance of ornamentation. These
elements, Hitchcock and Johnson proclaimed, constituted an International
Style--the result of a century-long search for a style suited to modern
materials and engineering techniques, freed from borrowed forms.
Some of the architects cited by Hitchcock and Johnson as exponents of
the International Style resisted this narrow, formal definition. The
dissenters asserted that their work was only the direct, logical
manifestation of contemporary science and society, that it would change
as its preconditions changed, and that architecture had in fact finally
escaped the limitations of stylistic fashions. The course of
architecture since 1932 has proved both camps correct: if the
International Style has been universally accepted as the symbolic
expression of modernity in building, it has also been shown to be
essentially an artificial construct that is neither the inevitable nor
necessarily the most logical reflection of 20th-century conditions.
The Bauhaus
Among the architects who developed the International Style, the Germans
formed the largest and initially the most important group. By 1918 a
group of radical designers, centered in Berlin, had emerged as the
champions of an architecture featuring simple shapes in steel and glass
and based on an industrial and socialist ethic that had as its primary
goal the overthrow of 19th-century eclecticism. The strong intuitive
flavor of this so-called expressionism in turn triggered a reaction led
by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who accepted
steel-and-glass construction and pure geometric forms as architectural
ideals.
The chief theorist of what its adherents called the Neue Sachlichkeit,
or the new factualism, was Gropius, who from 1919 served as director of
what had formerly been the Weimar Art School and was now called the
Bauhaus. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, Gropius implemented
his theories in the buildings that he designed for the new site. After
Gropius left the Bauhaus to go into private practice in 1928, the
leading light of the movement became Mies van der Rohe. In his German
Pavilion at the Barcelona Trade Fair of 1929, Mies carried the features
of the International Style to their furthest limit of abstraction.
Neoplasticism and Constructivism
The Bauhaus architects final step from expressionism to the Neue
Sachlichkeit is widely credited to the influence of two contemporary art
movements: Dutch neoplasticism, usually called de Stijl, and Soviet
constructivism. The neoplasticist group was assembled (1917) by the
poet-painter Theo van Doesburg. Van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren
outlined the neoplasticist ideal in a 1922 Paris exhibition of a series
of house projects whose arrangements of colored planes resembled the
paintings of abstract artist Piet Mondrian made three-dimensional.
Constructivism was initiated in the Soviet Union with the nonobjective
sculptor Vladimir Tatlin s execution (1918) of a model for a
hypothetical Monument to the Third International, in which a series of
glass volumes were to rotate within a spiraling steel tower meant to
express the triumph of the new technology over traditional masonry
construction. Once brought (1922) to Germany by emigres such as Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy, the constructivist concept of a building as a technical
mechanism in motion soon assumed a key role in European architectural
theory.
Le Corbusier
The contemporaneous work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, differed
in its premises, if not in its outward appearance, from that of the
Germans. His early buildings--for example, the Villa Savoye (1929-30) in
Poissy--resemble those of Gropius and Mies in their asymmetrical and
flowing spatial arrangements, as well as in their unornamented glass and
stucco planes.
Le Corbusier s explanation of his art in his immensely influential Vers
une Architecture (1923; trans. as Towards a New Architecture, 1927)
emphasized that a new and purer classical architecture of forms seen in
light could be created by following the logical conceptual processes of
the engineer. He also insisted that the reorganization of the city was
the first task of modern architecture. His 1922 exhibition entitled
"Modern City for Three Million Inhabitants" led eventually to a model
apartment tower that he called a Unite d Habitation, the first of which
was erected in Marseille in 1946-52. An overriding concern for urban
planning made him one of the key figures at a 1928 meeting of modern
architects that resulted in the formation of the Congres Internationaux
d Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Greatly influenced by Le Corbusier, the
CIAM architects overruled the aesthetic goals of the expressionists by
setting urbanism, rather than design, as the organization s chief
concern.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Also active at the time of the epochal "Modern Architecture" exhibition
was another leading exponent of modern architecture, the American Frank
Lloyd Wright. Although his work was recognized in the 1932 exhibition,
Wright was set apart from the practitioners of the International Style
because of his "individualism" and "romantic" attachment to nature. He
was also a generation older than his European counterparts and had
actually influenced some of their work through the publication (1910) in
Berlin of the Wasmuth Portfolio of his work. Wright accepted the machine
as an aid to architecture and made early use of such modern materials as
reinforced concrete in his compositions of cantilevered roof planes,
unornamented surfaces, and flowing spaces. On the other hand, he
believed in what he termed the "organic" use of building materials and
in the close relationship of a building to its site--19th-century ideas
rejected by his European contemporaries. His idea of modern organicism
is expressed in such works as the Johnson s Wax Company Headquarters
(1937-39) in Racine, Wis., a great space wrapped with brick and
fiberglass tubing whose roof is supported by slender, mushroom-shaped
columns; and in the dramatically cantilevered concrete-and-glass
Kaufmann House, "Fallingwater" (1936-37), at
Mill Run, Pa.
Triumph of the International Style
In 1932 the International Style embraced only a small proportion of
recent architecture; outside of private houses its influence was limited
to certain housing projects in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.
During the great Depression of the 1930s, however, the simplicity and
economy of the International Style posed a desirable alternative to the
extraneous ornamentation and lavish use of space inherent in eclectic
architecture, and only CIAM seemed to have any clear solutions to the
pressing problem of social housing. This new socioeconomic environment,
as much as the aesthetics of modern architecture, paved the way for the
triumph of the International Style in France, Great Britain, and the
United States, particularly after its German masters were forced into
exile by Hitler.
After World War II the International Style provided the basis for the
rebuilding of European cities--for example, van den Broek and Bakema s
Rotterdam rail terminal (1953-54). In the United States the architects
of the building boom of the 1950s and 1960s turned to the International
Style in designing technocratic office buildings such as New York City s
Lever House (1950-52), by Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore,
Owings, and Merrill (SOM).
Equally attracted to the philosophy and the aesthetics of the new
architecture were institutions that sought to project a modern image,
such as the Air Force Academy, whose Colorado Springs, Colo., campus was
designed (1954-57) and built (1956-62) by SOM. Even the New York City
headquarters of the United Nations (1947-50) was rendered in the
International Style by a team of architects that included Le Corbusier,
who had been passed over (1927) for the design of the
League of Nations building.
Limits of the International Style
If the term modern architecture is understood to consist of a particular
form-vocabulary (the International Style) embodying a certain philosophy
(functionalism), then the term cannot be used to signify all the
architecture produced in the modern epoch, but only one architectural
tradition extending backward and forward from an accepted year of
conception (1922). Frank Lloyd Wright s so-called Prairie style (from
c.1900; see prairie school) clearly foretells the International Style,
as do the contemporaneous concrete designs of Auguste Perret and Tony
Garnier in France.
In another vein the Art Nouveau movement of the 1890s also sought to
produce an innovative modern style using the industrial materials of
metal, glass, and concrete; only its sculptural, biological
form-vocabulary separates it from the buildings of 30 years later. Art
nouveau, in turn, represented the culmination of a search for a new
style adapted to new materials and new institutions that commenced
around 1830 with the work of European romantic rationalist architects.
Going back in time even further, direct expressions of materials and
function in works of engineering can be discerned in the mills and iron
bridges of England dating from the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution (1770s).
The fact that such pioneering movements of modern architecture can be
identified as much as two centuries ago indicates that modern
architecture did not primarily evolve out of the conditions and demands
of modern society. Its aesthetic and philosophical roots can actually be
traced back through a long line of artists and theorists.
Modern architecture claimed to be based on a logical expression of the
spatial and structural facts of building, yet its practitioners have
rarely approached the structural ingenuity of conceptual technicians
such as R. Buckminster Fuller. Similarly, although its apologists
claimed that modern architecture represented a democratic style
expressing the taste of the general public, its works often have been
seen as aloof and oversophisticated by their residents. Finally, modern
architecture s efficacy in solving the problems of redesigning cities
into finely tuned social organisms was questioned by those who saw it as
the destroyer of cohesive neighborhoods through wholesale urban renewal.
Modifying the International Style
As these contradictions in modern architecture began to emerge clearly
in the 1950s, many architects sought to modify the codes of the
International Style so as to create buildings at once modern and
monumental, as well as functional and responsive to the needs and
expectations of a wide audience. An international group of architects
formed (1953) under the name Team X succeeded in 1959 in dissolving CIAM
and setting its own goals for a new, more humane system of public
housing. Team X members such as Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van
Eyck, working from the aesthetic basis of the International Style,
evolved from it more visually complex, texturally rich, and physically
substantial buildings. Late in his career Le Corbusier himself became a
major figure in this development, particularly with his sculptural
concrete chapel at Ronchamp, France (1951-55). Another convert was
Philip Johnson, the theorist of the International Style, who executed a
number of monumental public buildings in rich materials.
If Eero Saarinen turned the International Style to expressionistic ends
in works such as his TWA Terminal (1956-62) at J. F. Kennedy Airport in
New York City, his buildings are scarcely more extraordinary than the
later works of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose spiraling, concrete Guggenheim
Museum was conceived in 1942 and completed in 1959. Finally, Louis I.
Kahn developed a new monumentality that was first expressed in his Yale
University Art Gallery (1951-53) and culminated in such buildings as the
Exeter Library (1967-72), a symmetrical, almost classical composition of
brick, wood, concrete, and glass. Kahn was perhaps the last of the great
modern architects. The full emergence of postmodern architecture took
place shortly after Kahn s death (1974), and many prominent architects
are now pursuing a variety of formal images beyond the doctrinal
limitations of the International Style.
Two opposite forces have coexisted in American art since the
establishment of the first colonies. On the one hand, American artists
have been aware of their European cultural heritage and of continuing
innovation in Europe; on the other hand, they have had to adapt European
forms to the exigencies of their native situation. This interaction
between rival forces is hardly unique to American art--all art grows
within a tradition--but what distinguishes the American experience is
the ambivalent attitudes brought to that tradition. To many of the early
settlers, the ambivalence was clear, since so many of them were
religious and political exiles. Yet despite the pressures of conscience
and conviction, the European traditions persisted in memory, so that the
first American art and architecture were adaptations of European styles
and modes, modified to suit the colonists urgent needs in a new and
often hostile world. The conflict, aroused by traditions at once
alienating and indispensable, has served as the underlying dynamic for
the rise and progress of art and architecture in the United States.
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE
In a virgin land the art form that developed most rapidly was the one
for which the need was most pressing--architecture. The earliest extant
buildings are the dwellings, meetinghouses, and churches that made up
the nuclei of the first colonial settlements in Virginia and
Massachusetts. The dwellings, simple in plan and elevation, like the
Adam Thoroughgood House, Princess Anne County, Va. (1936-40), resembled
English houses of the late medieval or Tudor style. The most innovative
in design were New England meetinghouses, because the separatists sought
to avoid any associations with the established church in England. These
handsome buildings, such as the Old Ship Meeting House, Hingham, Mass.
(1681), were either square or rectangular in plan and served as the
focal center for northern towns.
Colonial Buildings
As the colonies flourished, more and more elaborate structures were
required. By the end of the 17th century, most American public buildings
were derived from Sir Christopher Wren s designs for the rebuilding of
London after the Great Fire in 1666. The best were the so-called Wren
Building (1695-1702) of the College of William and Mary and the
Governor s Palace (1706-20), both at Williamsburg, Va. To stay the
random growth of cities, the concept of urban planning was introduced,
beginning with Thomas Holme s grid plan of 1682 for Philadelphia, then
second in population to London within the English-speaking world. By the
middle of the 18th century, architects were designing churches,
mansions, and public buildings in the current English Georgian style,
named for King George I.
Post-Revolutionary Architecture
After the Revolutionary War, the first attempt to create a style
expressive of the new republic was made by Thomas Jefferson. He based
the design of the new capitol building at Richmond, Va., on that of a
Roman temple, the Maison Carree at Nimes, France. In so doing he laid
down an American precedent of modifying an ancient building style for
modern use. The Virginia State Capitol (1785-96), both building and
symbol, was meant to house the kind of government envisioned by
Jefferson, and the Maison Carree became a paradigm for American public
structures.
Jefferson was influential in setting forth the style of monumental
neoclassicism that supplanted Georgian architecture with its taint of
monarchy and colonialism. Monumental neoclassicism came to represent the
new political and social entity that was the United States of America.
Architects committed to neoclassicism designed not only the new Capitol
of the United States in Washington, first designed (1792) by William
Thornton and Stephen Hallet, and other government buildings, but also
factories, schools, banks, railroad stations, and hospitals, modernized
by the frequent use of materials such as iron, concrete, and glass. The
English-born Benjamin Latrobe, who began his American employment working
with Jefferson on the Richmond Capitol, brought American neoclassicism
to maturity. Latrobe invented new formal configurations for buildings as
varied in function as the Bank of Pennsylvania (1798-1800) and the
Centre Square Pump House (1800; both in Philadelphia and both destroyed)
and Baltimore s Roman Catholic Cathedral (1806-21). Chosen in 1815 to
supervise the rebuilding of the Washington Capitol, gutted by fire
during the War of 1812, Latrobe set about producing a truly monumental
American architecture. In 1817 he procured the assistance of Charles
Bulfinch, who had just completed Boston s Massachusetts General
Hospital. Together the two men completed plans for the first major
building phase of the Capitol.
Revival Styles
Latrobe and Bulfinch were the preeminent architects in the neoclassical
mode. The generation following preferred Greek over Roman forms and
produced the Greek Revival. A principal contribution of this style was a
modification of the Greek prostyle temple (columns only across the front
portico) for domestic and public buildings; the style s influence was
rapidly extended north, south, and west. Major surviving examples are
William Strickland s Philadelphia Merchants Exchange (1832-34) and
Alexander Jackson Davis s La Grange (Lafayette) Terrace (1832-36) in New
York. Up to the 1850s classical revival styles led to a homogeneity in
American architecture that was never to prevail again.
Yet even before 1810, American architects, following the lead of their
English contemporaries, had begun to introduce a rival style on the
American scene--the Gothic Revival. It is appropriate that this
movement, which originated with the rise of romanticism in England,
should have been taken over in a country where romanticism constituted
the first intellectual flowering after the nation s founding. Not
surprisingly, the style lent itself most naturally to church
architecture. Richard Upjohn, a prolific ecclesiastical architect, made
his Trinity Church (1839-46) in New York the prototype for Gothic
Revival churches. The style was also widely applied to college
buildings, thus identifying those institutions with the prestigious
English universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Before the Civil War other revival styles such as the Romanesque, the
Egyptian, and the Italian villa style were introduced, but with less
applicability. More widespread was the cottage architecture for the
middle class advocated by Andrew Jackson Downing. Moderate in price and
well constructed, these Downing designs exploited the possibilities of
wood both as construction material and as decoration.
Cast-Iron Architecture
An important development was the proliferation of industrial and
commercial structures requiring extensive use of iron. At first
engineers rather than architects were responsible for buildings that
demanded advanced technical planning. Because cast- and wrought-iron
columns replaced heavier masonry construction, it became possible to
construct a lighter skeleton, use prefabricated modules, and introduce
more glass into the facade. James Bogardus, an inventor and manufacturer
of machinery, is generally credited with the development of cast-iron
architecture, as demonstrated in his "Cast Iron Building" (Laing Stores;
1848) in New York. In his proposed plan for the Industrial Palace of the
New York World s Fair (1853), also called the New York Crystal Palace,
and his Wanamaker Department Store in New York (c.1859; destroyed), he
pushed this type of engineered building to the limits then possible.
After the financial crash of 1857 and the Civil War, both of which had
temporarily halted building construction, Americans gravitated to a
style that demonstrably symbolized the nation s rapidly increasing
wealth. Mansions and government and civic buildings were designed in the
Second Empire style, promoted in France by Napoleon III to bolster his
imperial ambitions and exemplified by John McArthur s massive
Philadelphia City Hall (1874-1901). Also of great importance was the
extension of the Gothic Revival into its Victorian phase. This movement,
inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, emphasized craft and permitted
the manipulation of architectural detail to create bold new effects. Two
great architects, Frank Furness and Henry Hobson Richardson, emerged
from Victorian Gothic; Furness created works of idiosyncratic
originality, while Richardson created a new vision within a revival
style.
Richardson, the most independent and imaginative architect since
Latrobe, attained prominence when he gave a new Romanesque form to
Boston s Trinity Church (1872-77). Besides churches, Richardson designed
numerous residences, libraries, railroad stations, civic and commercial
buildings, and even a prison, achieving models of their kind for each
type. He favored the Romanesque because he believed it expressed the
pervasive energy and dynamism of the American scene. But it was his
Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885-87) in Chicago that was to prove
seminal. Its rusticated masonry and multistoried arrangement of arches,
reminiscent of Romanesque and expressive of Richardson s sense of
ordering masses on a large scale, would be applied by his successors in
Chicago to problems of skyscraper design.
Skyscraper Architecture
The skyscraper, defined here as a tall commercial structure, is
America s original contribution to the history of architecture.
Commercial buildings of several stories, constructed during the 1850s in
Philadelphia, anticipated the skyscraper. But before it could become a
reality, architects had to incorporate the elevator into the structure.
This was done, beginning in the 1850s in New York. Chicago, however, was
the city where skyscraper design soon attained a kind of canonical
perfection.
Since many of the city s commercial buildings needed to be replaced
after the great fire of 1871, Chicago served as an excellent testing
ground for architects. Preeminent among them was Louis Sullivan. He and
others working in teams evolved the glass cage that became the hallmark
of the Chicago school of architecture. William Holabird and Martin
Roche s Tacoma Building, Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root s
Reliance Building, and Sullivan s Gage Building are outstanding examples
of the progressive stages in the skyscraper s development.
Yet just at the time that an architecture of originality and daring was
emerging in Chicago, the New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White
successfully introduced a monumental Beaux-Arts style for impressive
public buildings such as the Boston Public Library (1887-98). This
preference for revival styles continued well into the 20th century, with
interesting variations. When, for instance, New York began its campaign
to raise the world s tallest buildings, their decorative systems were
adapted to revival styles, culminating in the best-known Gothic
skyscraper, Cass Gilbert s Woolworth Building (1913) in New York.
Modern Architecture
Far more significant than revival styles to modern architecture was, on
the one hand, the unfolding of the brilliant indigenous talent of Frank
Lloyd Wright and, on the other, the infusion of European modernism
through the work of the Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius, Marcel
Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the independent work of Eric
Mendelsohn and Eliel Saarinen. Wright, who early in his career worked
for Sullivan in Chicago, believed that the West and Midwest embodied the
"real American spirit." Acting on this belief, he designed the houses
that were to win him international renown. His "prairie houses" were
horizontal, often of one story, with rooms merging in a continuous open
space. Wright was a man of fertile imagination; before his long career
ended, he designed buildings as various as the Imperial Hotel (1916-22;
destroyed) in Tokyo; the Johnson Wax Company Building (1936-39) in
Racine, Wis.; and New York s Guggenheim Museum (1956-59).
Despite some native resistance--including Wright s objection that the
International Style of architecture exhibited at New York s Museum of
Modern Art in 1932 was "un-American"--the presence of European modernism
was felt in America s urban and industrial culture from the 1930s. After
Gropius was appointed chairman of architecture at Harvard s Graduate
School of Design in 1938, many young Americans were trained in the ideas
of the German Bauhaus.
Postwar Architecture
The stark, boxy forms of European modernism by way of the Bauhaus
dominated American cityscapes in the building boom following World War
II. Of special importance was the use of glass curtain-wall construction
for the design of large skyscrapers and other buildings, as in the
United Nations complex, erected in 1947-53 under the supervision of Le
Corbusier and Wallace K. Harrison, and the Seagram Building (1956-59) of
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.
By the mid-1970s, however, the reaction against the plain, unadorned
"glass box" of the International Style was well under way, carried forth
by Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, and Robert Venturi, among many
others, as well as by Philip Johnson, who had been the chief American
proponent of the International Style. These architects returned once
again to the use of color and decoration and revived such once-spurned
architectural devices as the column. Postmodern architecture may have
produced a few extreme statements, but the movement also brought
American architecture a new vitality.
Greek Architecture
Any consideration of Greek architecture must begin with mention of
Aegean civilization, typified by the great Minoan palaces on the island
of Crete, in particular the huge complex of Knossos and the
magnificently sited structures at Phaistos (both c.1700-c.1400 BC).
Constructed of massive masonry, they were several stories high and
incorporated large pillared halls, dozens of labyrinthine smaller rooms,
sweeping terraces looking to the sea, and plumbing arrangements of
astonishing modernity. The walls were decorated with brilliantly colored
frescoes (see fresco painting) and stucco bas-reliefs. The Minoans were
conquered by the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, whose architecture was
subsequently strongly influenced by Cretan prototypes.
This early Greek architecture (3000-700 BC) is characterized by the use
of massive stone blocks for walls and by the occasional use of corbeled
masonry to make primitive forms of vaults and domes, as in the Lion Gate
and so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae (1400-1200 BC). Columns
sometimes were also used to frame doors and gateways and to provide
internal colonnades for palaces, as in the courtyard at Tiryns. It was,
however, the column and the beam--post and lintel--that formed the basis
of classical Greek architecture and that give it the simple,
straightforward character that, together with its details, has led many
scholars to speculate on its origins in the construction of primitive
wooden huts.
The Greeks developed a vocabulary of architectural detail in stone that
was fundamental to European architecture for more than 2,000 years. The
Greek "language of architecture" reached its zenith during the 5th
century BC. Classical Greek architecture consisted of three orders--the
Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Each represented the assembly of the basic
components of a simple rectangular building with a pitched roof--that
is, column, capital (or column head), entablature (the "beam" connecting
the columns), and pediment the triangular gable of the roof). Different
proportions and decorative conventions imparted a distinctive character
to each order, regardless of the bright colors applied to the original
buildings or the subject matter of the sculptured decoration along the
frieze or in the triangular pediment (tympanum). The proportions of each
order were fixed within narrow limits, and, strictly speaking, the
components of each order could be correctly assembled in only one way.
The Greeks never mixed different orders on the same building. This, and
other rules, were modified in Roman architecture. The Romans created two
additional orders, the Tuscan and the Composite, and employed all five
orders as decoration for buildings constructed on principles different
from those the Greeks used.
The basic building material of the classical period was marble, a strong
stone that could be shaped to give great precision of line and detail.
The basic temple form was also very simple: a rectangular chamber with a
shallow-pitched gabled roof, surrounded by a row of columns (or fronted
by a columned porch), standing on a podium of three steps. Given the
simplicity of the construction system and the building form, the
essential achievement of the Greeks was the refinement of the building
and its components into an architectural system of proportion and
decoration--exemplified by the buildings on the Athens Acropolis, in
particular the Parthenon (447-432 BC)--that remained the basis of the
Western European architectural tradition until the mid-19th century.
Roman Architecture
During the 2d century BC the Romans, in conquering North Africa, Greece,
Anatolia, and Spain, absorbed the architectural traditions of those
areas (most significantly that of Greece), to which they added the
constructional skills of the Etruscans, their immediate neighbors in
central Italy (see Roman art and architecture). The most significant
achievements of the Romans were in their technology of building, their
use of a much wider range of materials (including concrete, terra-cotta,
and fired bricks), and their refinements of the arch and vault and the
dome--all of which had been pioneered by the Etruscans. Roman temples
generally remained modeled on those of Greece, with the common addition
of a high plinth (base or platform) and the frequent omission of the
side and rear columns, typified by the Maison Carree at Nimes, France.
Roman civic monuments included a number of building types of
unprecedented size and complexity, which could not have been built using
the Greek beam-and-column construction system. Aqueducts, thermae (such
as the Baths of Caracalla), basilicas (law courts), theaters, triumphal
arches, amphitheaters (such as the Colosseum), circuses, and palaces
involved enclosing much larger spaces or bridging much greater distances
than could be achieved by the use of timber or stone beams. The Roman
use of domed construction in mass concrete is best represented by the
well-preserved Pantheon in Rome (constructed AD 120-24), which
subsequently became a Christian church. Later Roman or Early Christian
churches, however, generally took their form from the basilica, whose
central nave, side aisles, triforium, and apse became characteristic
features of the Romanesque and Gothic church. Emperor Constantine I
built huge basilican churches at all the major Christian sites in the
Roman Empire in the 4th century, thus firmly establishing the basilica
as the predominant form of Christian church architecture (see Early
Christian art and architecture).
Byzantine Architecture
Byzantine art and architecture developed in the Eastern Roman Empire
founded by Constantine I when he moved the capital from Rome to
Byzantium (subsequently Constantinople--present-day Istanbul) in the 4th
century. In southern and eastern Europe, in particular in those parts of
Italy, Greece, and Anatolia that remained under the sway of the
Byzantine Empire, the continuity of Roman plans and techniques was
strong. Only slightly modified Roman basilican plans were used for such
Italian churches as Sant Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna (534-39); in
Constantinople itself huge domed churches, such as Hagia Sophia
(532-37), were built on a scale far larger than anything achieved by the
Western Roman Empire.
Romanesque Architecture
In northern Europe, where Roman remains were less frequently
encountered, greater freedom of experiment existed in Merovingian,
Carolingian, and Ottonian architecture, as the early periods are known.
From the mid-10th to the mid-12th century greater progress was made
toward the development of a successor style--the Gothic. The primary
characteristics of Romanesque architecture (or Norman architecture, as
northern Romanesque is often known) were Roman in origin, however: large
internal spaces were spanned by barrel vaults on thick, squat columns
and piers; windows and doors had round-headed arches; and most of the
major churches were laid out on the basilican plan, modified by the
addition of buttresses, transepts, and towers. The buildings are solid,
heavy, and, because of the comparatively small windows, dimly lighted,
exemplified by Durham Cathedral (begun 1023) in England. Portals,
capitals, and altars are embellished with sculpture of superlative skill
and powerful effect; stained glass first appeared in Europe, but on a
limited scale, because of the restricted size of window openings.
Gothic Architecture
From the mid-12th century to the 16th century northern European
architecture was characterized by the use of flying buttresses, pointed
arches, ribbed vaults, and traceried windows. The thin walls, slender
columns, and very large areas of glass in Gothic buildings gave an
impression of lightness that contrasted markedly with the Romanesque.
Gothic architecture originated at the royal abbey church of St. Denis,
built by Abbot Suger between 1137 and 1144. It was refined in the great
churches of northern and central France, such as Amiens
Cathedral(1220-70), notable for its great height and the slenderness of
its columns, and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1247-48), in which
exceptionally large wall areas were filled with glass and tracery.
Indeed, Gothic architecture was most fully developed in France and
England, where the style spread in the late 12th century. The spread of
Gothic to Germany was delayed until the mid-13th century, and in this
country only a few cathedrals, such as the one in Cologne (begun 1248),
approached the size and quality of the northern French prototypes. The
most thorough application of northern Gothic to Italy was in the Milan
Cathedral, built at the end of the 14th century by French and German
masons. In general, the Italians tended to use Gothic as a decorative
feature rather than as a total building system.
Many Gothic secular buildings survive, some of the finest examples being
the Bruges Town Hall (1376-1420) in Belgium, the Palazzo Pubblico (begun
1298) in Siena, Italy, and the Pont Valentre (early 14th century) in
Cahors, France. The greatest concentration of Gothic secular buildings
is in Belgium, then the most prosperous part of northwest Europe.
Renaissance Architecture
During the early 15th century European culture became inspired by the
rediscovery, known as the Renaissance, of classical literature, art, and
architecture. Italy was the center of this rebirth, and in Florence,
where the movement started, architecture was influenced by the use of
the orders, the round arch, the barrel vault, and the dome--all Roman
features. In northern Europe, where Gothic continued to flourish well
into the 16th century, the Renaissance at first made only a superficial
impact and was for a much longer time confined to decorative changes. In
both France and England a truly classical style was not established
until the first half of the 17th century: in France by Francois Mansart
and in England by Inigo Jones.
The Florentine Renaissance did not initially mean the complete break
with traditional practice that was implied in the Gothic north. For the
church of Santo Spirito (begun c.1436), Filippo Brunelleschi used a
basilican plan, round arches, and a flat ceiling; but these traditional
Italian Romanesque elements were combined with a new sense of
proportion, the use of Corinthian columns, and a dome over the crossing
of nave and transepts. Brunelleschi s later design for the vast, still
unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria degli Angeli (also called the Duomo
of Florence) took the form of a domed octagon with eight radiating
chapels, a centralized plan that became the ideal among his
contemporaries in Florence (Leon Battista Alberti and Michelozzo) and
his followers in Rome. There, during the 16th century, a more monumental
version of the style was developed by Donato Bramante, Raphael, and
Michelangelo, as in their various plans for Saint Peter s Basilica.
Baroque and Rococo Architecture
In the 15th century Florentine architecture relied for effect upon
proportion, simple straight lines, and the correct use of classical
details. During the 16th century, however, architects such as
Michelangelo and Giulio Romano abandoned this restraint for a more
exciting, idiosyncratic version of the style, now called Mannerism, in
which the classical rules were deliberately flouted for effect. Giovanni
Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini further developed the style by
introducing curvilinear forms and by incorporating sculpture and
painting in their buildings to give a rich and dynamic version, known as
baroque, which spread during the 17th and 18th centuries from Rome to
much of southern Europe and to South America.
In northern Europe, especially in Austria and Germany, baroque
architecture achieved an exuberance and freedom unmatched elsewhere,
climaxing in the rococo, as in Germany s Wurzburg Residenz. In France
baroque and rococo were tempered by neoclassicism, with a resultant
elegance and refinement in both architecture and decoration, exemplified
by the 18th-century sections of the Palace of Versailles. The spread of
neoclassical architecture during the 17th and 18th centuries was due in
no small measure to the illustrated books that brought it to the
attention of educated patrons. Although fine architecture has never been
created by untalented architects, the rules of the classical orders
enforced systematic convention in design that enabled many moderately
competent architects to produce well-proportioned and finely detailed
buildings. In part this explains the extraordinary success of the
Palladian (see Palladio, Andrea) interpretation of Romanized Greek
architecture. It was, for example, the source of almost all
country-house building in England during the 18th century, as well as of
numerous mansions, courthouses, state capitols, and universities along
the eastern seaboard of North America.
The Age of Revivals
During the late 18th and 19th centuries Europe and America witnessed a
series of stylistic revivals. The period was dominated by the proponents
of the classical (themselves split between "Greeks" and "Romans") and
the northern Gothic. Buildings were also designed in self-conscious
imitation of Byzantine, Oriental, Egyptian, Venetian Gothic, and
Florentine Renaissance architecture, however. This was not, of course,
the first time that ancient styles had been revived; the Italians of the
15th century and the architects of Charlemagne s court in the 9th
century had incorporated classical motifs in their buildings. Both the
revived classical and the Gothic Revival, however, were essentially
different from the architecture that inspired them.
The country mansion of England and colonial America bore a classical
portico, but it was attached to a type of building never seen in ancient
Rome or Greece. The revived Gothic applied during the 19th century to
private houses, office buildings, railroad stations, hospitals, and
waterworks was by no means the same as the Gothic architecture of the
northern medieval cathedrals. New engineering techniques and modern
materials--in particular in cast-iron architecture--removed many of the
age-old practical constraints on building design. Rapid urban growth
during the 19th century produced a great many fine and essentially
original buildings, the quality of which is only beginning to be
appreciated.
Modern Architecture
Contemporary architecture takes a bewildering variety of forms and makes
use of a far wider range of materials than ever before. The
International Style, promulgated by Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in theory and practice, dominated architecture
for most of the 20th century. Most of the earlier buildings by these
architects were small private houses, usually rectangular, with
undecorated walls, flat roofs, and large areas of glass set in metal
frames. Conscious avoidance of any previous styles or recognizable
antecedents was combined with highly sophisticated proportioning to
achieve sleek, elegant structures, such as Mies s German Pavilion for
the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition. To the dismay of its originators, the
International Style was enthusiastically adopted by far lesser talents
and profit-minded builders to produce numerous "modern" office
buildings, apartment complexes, hospitals, and motels all over the
world.
Not all contemporary architects subscribed to Mies s dictum of "less is
more," and hence their work is difficult to classify as "modern." Frank
Lloyd Wright, probably the outstanding native-born American architect of
the 20th century, Kenzo Tange of Japan, Alvar Aalto of Finland, and the
Finnish-Americans Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen produced many
buildings of great beauty and originality. Although some of their work
does reflect the International Style, most of their buildings are
instantly recognizable in their individuality, as were the great
buildings of the past. In short, these architects and others like them
seem to be part of a continuing architectural tradition rejected by the
practitioners of the International Style (see modern architecture).
The social turmoil of the 1960s was emphatically reflected in
architecture. Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture (1968)
by the architect Robert Venturi was a revolt against the ubiquitous
glass boxes of the modernists, and it signaled the emergence of
postmodern architecture. Since that time, architects have found new
strength in the traditions of the past, as well as in the vernacular
architecture seen all about them.
Stephen Bayley and Simon Pepper
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