ARCHITECTURE IN THE MODERN ERA

 The Industrial Revolution (1768’s)

- directed toward the relevant and applied use of structures

 The Arts and Crafts Movement (early 19th Century)

- movement for aesthetic and moral crusade
- escape from the Industrial World
- John Ruskin(1819-1900) and William Morris(1834-1896) were the
key figures

 Eclecticism
- architecture of the borrowing and of free selection

 Joseph Paxton (1851) designed the Crystal Palace

 Elisha Graves Otis (1870, New York) developed the first safe
passenger elevator. In addition to this, was the development of
techniques for manufacturing rolled steel.

 The Great Chicago Fire (1870)

- Montauk Building by Daniel Burnham (1881)
- Home Insurance Company Building by William Le Baron Jenney
(1883) (first skyscraper free of the limitations of masonry)
- Auditorium Building by Adler and Sullivan (1889)
- Wainwright Building by Adler and Sullivan (1890)
- Guarranty Building by Adler and Sullivan (1894)
- Reliance Building by Burnham and Root (1894)

 The Chicago School (1880’s)

- concentration on high structures were built in Chicago
- William Le Baron Jenney
- Louis Sullivan
 born in Boston, 1856
 studied at Institute of Technology in Massachusetts
 Worked in the Chicago office of Jenney
 Studied 6 months at the Ecole des Beaux Arts
 Returned to Chicago after the great fire
 “Form Follows Function”
- Daniel Burnham
 Born in New York, 1846
 Educated at Chicago and also had his apprentiship at Loring and
Jenney office
 “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s
blood.”

 The World Columbian Exposition (1890)

- Jackson Park, Chicago
- Burnham was the chief of construction
- John W. Root was the consulting architect
- Frederick Law Olmsted was the landscape architect
- Birth of the Modern American City Planning
- Reversal of the direction in Sullivan’s vision. He had hardly any
commissions and died in 1924 a lonely and neglected figure.

 European Developments (1900’s)

- Otto Wagner
 Viennese architect
 Began eliminating Renaissance trappings from his buildings and
pursued the “more essential” architecture
- Adolf Loos
 Reacted against the excesses of Art Nuveau
 Published “Ornament and Verbrechen”
 “Ornament is a Crime”
- H.P. Berlage
 Dutch Architect
 Publicized the works of Frank Lloyd Wright in Europe
 “And thus in architecture, decoration and ornament are
quite essential while space-creation and the relationships of
masses are its true essentials.”

 Wright vs. Sullivan

- Frank Lloyd Wright began his architect’s career as an apprentice at
Louis Sullivan’s office
- Sullivan’s architecture was urban, restrained in character, and
classic in organization
- Sullivan wrote, “It is the very essence of every problem that it
contains and suggests its own solutions.” Thus Form follows
Function.
- Wright’s architecture developed into the expression of
asymmetrically composed masses and subtly interpenetrating
spaces more suited to stand alone, preferably in a natural rather
than an urban context.
- Wright wrote, “….as a physical raw materialism instead of the
spiritual thing it really is: the idea of Life itself, bodily and
spiritually, intrinsic organism. Form and Function as one.”

 The Office of Peter Behrens(1910’s)

- office at Berlin was the center of search and expression for new
principles
- Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
 (1908) Spent 3 years in this office
 “Less is More”
 Formulated “Cubism and Futurism
- Walter Gropius
 Behren’s chief designer
 The Creation of Space
- Lao Tze, a Chinese Philosopher, said, “The reality of the building
does not consist in the roof and walls, but in the space within to
be lived in.”
- Space has 3 Stages:
 Outer space - interplay and visual tension created in the
relationship of static volumes
 Inner Space - emphasis on the hollowed interior volume and the
continuity of interior space, where the exterior form was the
result of the defined space within
 Interpenetration of Space - the to former phases were
intermingled when a new period was initiated by the discovery
that sight is an organic process, one in which motion initiates a
way of seeing and recording phenomena that is more than a
passive transfer of images.
- By motion, time (the 4th dimension) was introduced

 The BAUHAUS (1920’s)

- Germany was the center of development and study
- “Art and Technology, the New Unity”
- Established by Walter Gropius
- “Functionalism”

 The International Style (1930’s)

- Frank Lloyd Wright (America)
- Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (Germany)
- Walter Gropius (Germany)
- Le Corbusier (France)
- Functional, Nontraditional, Nonregional

 Reassessment
- Universalism
 Mies Van Der Rohe’s work is more classical formal architectural
expression
 Functions are resolved within a minimum of larger elements
 Function is subject to an external order or discipline.
- Personalism
 Wright used the functional complexities of a building as the
integral means of form and expression.
- Brutalism
 Derived from “beton brut” (naked concrete)

 Postmodernism
- A trend away from the functional aesthetic of the International Style
and the severity of Brutalism.
- Favored the return to the historical references
- Robert Venturi
 “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”
 “Less is Bore”