Lecture - 9 International Style

Lecture 9 Notes - International Style
Le Corbusier - was born Charles Edouard Jeanneret in Chaux au Fonds

Switzerland in 1887. As part of the French speaking Hugenots who left
France in the 16th century his family was involved in the plastic arts and were
engravers of Swiss watches and this sort of thing.
He was known primarily as an architect but was also quite adept at painting
and sketching and spent a great deal of his free time throughout his career
practicing this expression. (As students of architecture not only is this
creative outlet but it is also a source of inspiration and way to inform you as to
how you may want to proceed in a given project.) He is also noted for his
urbanism which was based on mass, transportation and nature. His urbanism
is seen as bold extension of the machine as a generator.
As a theorist he proposed many ideas. Through his writings one can get a
sense of how his architectural theory worked when put into real buildings.
Books Written by Corbusier
Towards a New Architecture (Vers une Architecture)
Corbusier was also known for his theoretical writings about architecture. He
wrote Towards a New Architecture (Vers une Architecture) in 1923 (translated
to English in 1927). This book contains seven essays. Each essay dismisses
the contemporary trends of eclecticism and art deco, replacing them with
architecture that was meant to be more than a stylistic experiment; rather, an
architecture that would fundamentally change how humans interacted with
buildings. This new mode of living derived from a new spirit defining the
industrial age, demanding a rebirth of architecture based on function and a
new aesthetic based on pure form. It is his opinion that the aesthetic needs
to be derived from the engineering and reflect the modern age.
In this collection of essays there are 7 points that he makes regarding
architecture in the 20th century.
1.The Aesthetic of the Engineer
2.Three Reminders to Architects
A) Mass - use of primary forms and geometries
B) Surface - contains the mass
C) Plan - The plan is the generator
3. Regulating Lines
4. Eyes that Do not See Reflecting the invention of new modes of

transportation (Planes, Liners, and Cars)
5. Architecture
The Lessons of Rome
The Illusion of the Plan
Pure Creation of the Mind
6.Mass Production Housing
7. Architecture or Revolution
5 Points of Architecture
1. Buildings should be on pilotis to separate the mass from nature
2. A free facade that is separate from the mass
3. An Open floor plan
4. Strip windows
5. Roof Gardens
The Modulator
Le Corbusier explicitly used the golden ratio in his Modulor system for the
scale of architectural proportion. He saw this system as a continuation of the
long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man", the work of
Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body
to improve the appearance and function of architecture. In addition to the
golden ratio, Le Corbusier based the system on human measurements,
Fibonacci numbers, and the double unit.
He took Leonardo's suggestion of the golden ratio in human proportions to an
extreme: he sectioned his model human body's height at the navel with the
two sections in golden ratio, then subdivided those sections in golden ratio at
the knees and throat; he used these golden ratio proportions in the Modulor
system.
Le Corbusier placed systems of harmony and proportion at the centre of his
design philosophy, and his faith in the mathematical order of the universe was
closely bound to the golden section and the Fibonacci series, which he
described as "rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with
one another. And these rhythms are at the very root of human activities. They
resound in Man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which
causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages,
and the learned.
Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him,
became an architect. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on
collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career. In school he
hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found
employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the
utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks.
In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee
Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for
one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period: the
Faguswerk in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last factory. Although
Gropius and Meyer only designed the facade, the glass curtain walls of this
building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function
and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the working
class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building
for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.
In 1913, Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial
Buildings," which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain
elevators in North America. A very influential text, this article had a strong
influence on other European modernists, including Le Corbusier and Erich
Mendelsohn, both of whom reprinted Gropius's grain elevator pictures
between 1920 and 1930.[2
Gropius's career advanced in the postwar period. Henry van de Velde, the
master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was
asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His
recommendation for Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius's
appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which
Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty that
included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Lszl
Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky. One example product of
the Bauhaus was the armchair F 51, designed for the Bauhaus's directors
room in 1920 - nowadays a re-edition in the market, manufactured by the
German company TECTA/Lauenfoerde.
In 1919, Gropius was involved in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist
correspondence under the pseudonym "Mass." Usually more notable for his
functionalist approach, the "Monument to the March Dead," designed in 1919
and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him
at that time.
In 1923, Gropius designed his famous door handles, now considered an icon
of 20th-century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs
to emerge from Bauhaus. He also designed large-scale housing projects in
Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau in 1926-32 that were major contributions to the
New Objectivity movement, including a contribution to the Siemensstadt
project in Berlin.
Post Bauhaus (1933-1945)
With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to leave
Nazi Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain.
He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and
others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States. The house he built
for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, (now known as Gropius House) was
influential in bringing International Modernism to the U.S. but Gropius disliked
the term: "I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features
of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and
adequate."[4]
Mies van der Rohe

Mies, like many of his post-World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a
new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical
and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential twentieth century
architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature
buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate
glass to define interior spaces. He strived towards an architecture with a
minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom
of free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones"
architecture. He sought a rational approach that would guide the creative
process of architectural design. He is often associated with the aphorisms
"less is more" and "God is in the details".
Mies worked in his father's stone-carving shop and at several local design
firms before he moved to Berlin, where he joined the office of interior
designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at
the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the
current design theories and to progressive German culture, working
alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who were later also involved in
the development of the Bauhaus. Mies served as construction manager of the
Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens.[2]
His talent was quickly recognized and he soon began independent
commissions, despite his lack of a formal college-level education. A physically
imposing, deliberative, and reticent man, Ludwig Mies renamed himself as
part of his rapid transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect
working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding "van der" and his mother's surname
"Rohe",[3] using the Dutch "van der", rather than the German form "von"
which was legally restricted to those of genuine aristocratic lineage.[4]
He began his independent professional career designing upper-class homes,
joining the movement seeking a return to the purity of early nineteenth
century Germanic domestic styles. He admired the broad proportions,
regularity of rhythmic elements, attention to the relationship of the man-made
to nature, and compositions using simple cubic forms of the early nineteenth
century Prussian Neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He rejected
the eclectic and cluttered classical styles so common at the turn of the
twentieth century as irrelevant to the modern times.
Mies pursued an ambitious lifelong mission to create a new architectural

language that could be used to represent the new era of technology and
production. He saw a need for an architecture expressive of and in harmony

with his epoch, just as Gothic architecture was for an era of spiritualism. He
applied a disciplined design process using rational thought to achieve his
spiritual goals. He believed that the configuration and arrangement of every
architectural element, particularly including the character of enclosed space,
must contribute to a unified expression.
The self-educated Mies painstakingly studied the great philosophers and
thinkers, past and present, to enhance his own understanding of the
character and essential qualities of the technological times he lived in. More
than perhaps any other practising pioneer of modernism, Mies mined the
writings of philosophers and thinkers for ideas that were relevant to his
architectural mission. Mies' architecture was guided by principles at a high
level of abstraction, and his own generalized descriptions of those principles
intentionally leave much room for interpretation. Yet his buildings are
executed as objects of beauty and craftsmanship, and seem very direct and
simple when viewed in person.
Every aspect of his architecture, from overall concept to the smallest detail,
supports his effort to express the modern age. The depth of meaning
conveyed by his work, beyond its aesthetic qualities, has drawn many
contemporary philosophers and theoretical thinkers to continue to further
explore and speculate about his architecture.
Alvar Aalto
Early career: classicism
Although he is sometimes regarded as among the first and most influential
architects of Nordic modernism, a closer examination of the historical facts
reveals that Aalto (while a pioneer in Finland) closely followed and had
personal contacts with other pioneers in Sweden, in particular Gunnar
Asplund and Sven Markelius. What they and many others of that generation
in the Nordic countries had in common was that they started off from a
classical education and were first designing in the so-called Nordic
Classicism style a style that had been a reaction to the previous dominant
style of National Romanticism before moving, in the late 1920s, towards
Modernism.
Early career: functionalism
The shift in Aalto's design approach from classicism to modernism is
epitomised by the Viipuri Library (192735), which went through a
transformation from an originally classical competition entry proposal to the
completed high-modernist building. Yet his humanistic approach is in full
evidence in the library: the interior displays natural materials, warm colours,
and undulating lines. Due to problems over financing and a change of site,
the Viipuri Library project lasted eight years,
It could be said that Aalto's international reputation was sealed with his
inclusion in the second edition of Sigfried Giedion's influential book on
Modernist architecture, Space, Time and Architecture: The growth of a new
tradition (1949), in which Aalto received more attention than any other
Modernist architect, including Le Corbusier. In his analysis of Aalto, Giedion
gave primacy to qualities that depart from direct functionality, such as mood,
atmosphere, intensity of life and even national characteristics, declaring that
"Finland is with Aalto wherever he goes".
Mid career: experimentation
Aalto's early experiments with wood and his move away from a purist
modernism would be tested in built form with the commission to design Villa
Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku, the luxury home of the young industrialist
couple Harry and Maire Gullichsen. The building forms a U-shape around a
central inner "garden" the central feature of which is a kidney-shaped
swimming pool. Adjacent to the pool is a sauna executed in a rustic style,
alluding to both Finnish and Japanese precedents. The design of the house is
a synthesis of numerous stylistic influences, from traditional Finnish
vernacular to purist modernism, as well as influences from English and
Japanese architecture. While the house is clearly intended for a wealthy
family, Aalto nevertheless argued that it was also an experiment that would
prove useful in the design of mass housing.[7]
Mature career: monumentalism
The early 1960s and 1970s (up until his death in 1976) were marked by key
works in Helsinki, in particular the huge town plan for the void in centre of
Helsinki adjacent to Tl Bay and the vast railway yards, and marked on the
edges by significant buildings such as the National Museum and the main
railway station, both by Eliel Saarinen. In his town plan Aalto proposed a line
of separate marble-clad buildings fronting the bay which would house various
cultural institutions, including a concert hall, opera, museum of architecture
and headquarters for the Finnish Academy. The scheme also extended into
the Kamppi district with a series of tall office blocks. Aalto first presented his
scheme in 1961, but it went through various modifications during the early
1960s. Only two fragments of the overall plan were ever realized: the
Finlandia Hall concert hall (1976) fronting Tl Bay, and an office building in
the Kamppi district for the Helsinki Electricity Company (1975). The Miesian
formal language of geometric grids employed in the buildings was also used
by Aalto for other sites in Helsinki, including the Enso-Gutzeit building (1962),
the Academic Bookstore (1962) and the SYP Bank building (1969).
Architecture in
English II
Lecture 9: International Style
Fall 2012
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Lecture 9: The International Style
Mies van der Rohe

Walter Gropius
Le Corbusier
Alvar Aalto
Influences and Developments
Art Nouveaux
Peter Behrens
Influence of the Chicago School
Key Buildings
Barcelona Pavilion
Seagram Building
Fagus Shoe Factory
Bauhaus
Villa Savoye
Unite dHabitation
Viipuri Library
Villa Mariea
Secession House - Vienna

Date: 1897 - 98 AD Architect: Joseph Maria Olbrich
AEG Turbine Factory - Berlin, Germany

Date: 1909 Architect - Peter Behrens
Utilitarian Objects
11
Date: 1891 AD Architect: Louis
Sullivan ( Adler and Sullivan)
W.W. Willits House - Highland Park, Illinois

Date: 1901 - 02 AD Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Robie House - Oak Park, Illinois

Date: 1906 -10 AD Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Robie House - Oak Park, Illinois

Date: 1906 -10 AD Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
AEG Flammeco-Lampen Brochure

Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project - Berlin, Germany

Date: 1921 Architect: Mies van der Rohe
Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project - Berlin, Germany

Date: 1921 Architect: Mies van der Rohe
Brick Country House - Potsdam, Germany

Date: 1925 AD Architect: Mies van der Rohe
Brick Country House - Potsdam, Germany

Date: 1925 AD Architect: Mies van der Rohe
Weissenhof Housing Colony Master Plan

Date: 1925 -27 Architect: Mies van der Rohe
Weissenhof Housing Colony Master Plan

Weissenhof Housing Colony - Stuttgart, Germany

Barcelona Pavilion - Barcelona

Date: 1928-29 Architect: Mies van der Rohe
Barcelona Pavilion - Barcelona Chair




Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Date: 1928 - 30 Architect: Mies van der Rohe






Farnsworth House - Plano, Illinois





Lake Shore Drive Apartments - Chicago, Illinois





Seagrams Building - New York, New York





Fagus Shoe Factory - Alfeld, Germany

Date: 1911 - 13 Architect: Walter Gropius
Fagus Shoe Factory - Alfeld, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany








Feder Company - Modular Furniture

Date: 1920s Architect: Walter Gropius
Towards a New Architecture

Date: 1923 Architect: Le Corbusier
Towards a New Architecture

Modular Man Diagram

Date: 1943 - 47 Architect: Le Corbusier
Villa Savoye - Poissy, France










Unite d'Habitation Marseille - Marseille, France

Date: 1946 - 52 AD Architect: Le Corbusier








Notre Dame du Haut - Ronchamp, France






Viipuri Library, Vyborg, Russia

Date: 1927 Architect: Alvar Aalto






Villa Mariea - Noormarkku, Finland








Glass House - New Canaan, Connecticut

Date: 1949 Architect: Phillip Johnson





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Lecture 9 Notes - International Style

Le Corbusier - was born Charles Edouard Jeanneret in Chaux au Fonds

4. Eyes that Do not See Reflecting the invention of new modes of

Mies van der Rohe

Mies pursued an ambitious lifelong mission to create a new architectural

production. He saw a need for an architecture expressive of and in harmony

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Lecture 9: The International Style

Mies van der Rohe

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Influences and Developments

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Secession House - Vienna

AEG Turbine Factory - Berlin, Germany

Sullivan ( Adler and Sullivan)

W.W. Willits House - Highland Park, Illinois

Robie House - Oak Park, Illinois

Robie House - Oak Park, Illinois

AEG Flammeco-Lampen Brochure

Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project - Berlin, Germany

Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project - Berlin, Germany

Brick Country House - Potsdam, Germany

Brick Country House - Potsdam, Germany

Weissenhof Housing Colony Master Plan

Weissenhof Housing Colony Master Plan

Weissenhof Housing Colony - Stuttgart, Germany

Barcelona Pavilion - Barcelona

Barcelona Pavilion - Barcelona Chair

Barcelona Pavilion - Barcelona

Barcelona Pavilion - Barcelona

Barcelona Pavilion - Barcelona

Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Tugendhat House - Brno, Czech Republic

Farnsworth House - Plano, Illinois

Farnsworth House - Plano, Illinois

Farnsworth House - Plano, Illinois

Farnsworth House - Plano, Illinois

Farnsworth House - Plano, Illinois

Lake Shore Drive Apartments - Chicago, Illinois

Lake Shore Drive Apartments - Chicago, Illinois

Lake Shore Drive Apartments - Chicago, Illinois

Lake Shore Drive Apartments - Chicago, Illinois

Lake Shore Drive Apartments - Chicago, Illinois

Seagrams Building - New York, New York

Seagrams Building - New York, New York

Seagrams Building - New York, New York

Seagrams Building - New York, New York

Seagrams Building - New York, New York

Fagus Shoe Factory - Alfeld, Germany

Fagus Shoe Factory - Alfeld, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany

Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany