…concurrent developments

• Europe
• World War I
• Constructivism | Vladimir Tatlin
• Russian Revolution and Left wing views
• William Morris

“art should meet the needs of society and that there

should be no distinction between form and function”
Bauhaus
1919 to 1933
• innovative German school of art and design
• founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius
• the school uses a foundations course and workshop
experiences to train students in theory and form,
materials, and methods of fabrication.
• The Bauhaus was started in Weimar
• The German term Bauhaus—literally
"construction house"—was understood as
meaning "School of Building“
• The school existed in three German cities:
• Weimar from 1919 to 1925
• Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and
• Berlin from 1932 to 1933,
• Under three different architect-directors:
Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes
Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933
 The Brand
• Buildings are simple,
functional, and industrial
• Appear asymmetrical and
three dimensional
• Experience of the building
from all sides.
• Devoid of any applied
ornament
• The basic structure of the Bauhaus consists of a clear and carefully thought-out
system of connecting wings, which correspond to the internal operating system of
the school.
• Gropius' extensive facilities for the Bauhaus at Dessau combine teaching, student
and faculty members' housing, an auditorium, and office spaces.
• Instead of making the walls the element of support, as in a brick built house, our
new space-saving construction transfers the whole load of the structure to a steel or
concrete framework.
• School and workshop are connected through a two-story bridge, which spans the
approach road from Dessau
• The technical construction of the building is demonstrated by the latest
technological development of the time:
• A skeleton of reinforced concrete with brickwork, mushroom-shaped ceilings on
the lower level, and roofs covered with asphalt tile that can be walked upon,
Harvard Graduate
Center
• It was designed by The Architects’
Collaborative.
• The group of eight buildings arranged around
small and large courtyards has a good
community feel about it and is humanly
scaled.
• The dormitory blocks are constructed in
reinforced concrete with exterior walls of buff-
colored brick or limestone and the community
buildings are in steelwork.
• Block-mass buildings connected by flat-roof
canopies.
• No exterior or superficial
• Spaces took on a quality related to the abstract character of
the current painting and sculpture (Cubism and related
movements).
• Ornament came solely from the visual effects created by
combinations of materials.
• The Goal was to unify art and technology, creating an
aesthetic suited to the modern mechanistic world by relating
materials, form, and function in an abstract visual vocabulary
 Furniture
• Unornamented and radically different, Bauhaus furnishings suit
Bauhaus concepts of the modern home.
• Designs stress simplicity, functionality, excellent construction,
and hygienic industrial materials.
• Furniture is lightweight and space saving.
• Standardization of form and interchangeable parts are key
design considerations.
• Furnishings are movable to support flexible arrangements.
• Designs, of metal, are simple and functional with no applied
ornamentation.
 Design
• Building Types: schools, offices, and government buildings.
• Architects orient buildings so that they receive the most sun
exposure to take advantage of natural light.
• Structures sit on flat plains of grass.
• The most important construction materials include steel, glass,
and reinforced concrete, sometimes a brick masonry applied
on the face of the concrete.
• Exteriors are plain, simple, and unornamented.
• Windows were fixed in grid patterns.
 Walter Gropius
• Walter Gropius was born in Berlin in
1883. The son of an architect, he
studied at the Technical Universities in
Munich and Berlin.
• He joined the office of Peter Behrens
in 1910 and three years later
established a practice with Adolph
Meyer.
• Gropius is best known through the
influence of the German Design
school called the Bauhaus,
established under Gropius’s direction
at Weimar in 1919.
• After the closing of the Bauhaus in 1932, Gropius’s influence
continued through his work in England and subsequently, in
the United states, as well as through his leadership of the
architectural department at Harvard university from 1937.
• Under Gropius’s direction, Harvard became the first American
design school to accept the ideas of the modern movement.
• Gropius created innovative designs that borrowed materials
and methods of construction from modern technology. This
advocacy of industrialized building carried with it a belief in
team work and an acceptance of standardization and
prefabrication.
• Gropius is recognized as one of the four pioneers of modern
architecture, the others being Mies van der rohe, Frank lyod
wright and Le-corbusier.
• Gropius was a functionalist most of his buildings in Germany,
England and America are constructed that aim to be logical
interpretation of purpose for instance: Impington Vallage
school, Harvard graduate centre.
• Gropius was quick to see the advantages of economy in the
buildings.
• Being an educator his nature made him ready to listen to
others and give them their full due. He was always ready to
consult and learn from others.
• Bauhaus, at Dessau, Germany, 1919 to 1925.
• Gropius House, at Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1937.
• Harvard Graduate Center, at Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1950. MAJOR WORKS GROPIUS HOUSE
• Modest in scale, revolutionary in impact.
• Combined the traditional elements of New England
architecture — wood, brick, and fieldstone — with
innovative materials rarely used in domestic settings at
that time — glass block, acoustical plaster, and chrome
banisters, along with the latest technology in fixtures
FAGUS FACTORY
 FAGUS FACTORY
• The Fagus factory, a shoe last factory in Alfeld In
Germany, is an important example of early modern
architecture.
• It was built at Alfeld – An– Der – Leine in 1911.
• It was in collaboration with Adolf Meyer. It was his
first independent commission. Most striking thing:
simplicity and confidence of the architecture.
• Fagus building was the first to extract the full
aesthetically revolutionary impact from the
structural development.
• Fagus structure was actually a hybrid construction
of brick columns, steel beams and concrete floor
slabs and stairways.
• It was a steel frame supporting the floors, glass
screen external walls. Pillars are set behind the
façade so that its curtain character is fully
realized
• Glass screen was used all over the walls to have
proper view from inside.
• Walls are no longer supporters of the building but
simple curtain projecting against increment
weather.
• It was domination of voids over solids. Plane
surfaces predominate in this factory.
• The glass and walls are joined cleanly at the corners
without the intervention of piers.
• Although constructed with
different systems, all of the
buildings on the site give a
common image and appear as a
unified whole.
• The first one is the use of floor-to-
ceiling glass windows on steel
frames that go around the corners
of the buildings without a visible
(most of the time without any)
structural support.
• The other unifying element is the
use of brick.
• All buildings have a base of about 40 cm of black
brick and the rest is built of yellow bricks.
• In order to enhance this feeling of lightness, Gropius
and Meyer used a series of optical refinements like
greater horizontal than vertical elements on the
windows, longer windows on the corners and taller
windows on the last floor.
 MAJOR WORKS
• Gropius house, Lincoln, Massachuset
• Embassy of the United States, Athens
• MetLife Building, Park Avenue, New York
• Josephine M. Hagerty House,Cohasset, Massachuset
• Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago
• Harvard Graduate Center, U.S
• John F. Kennedy Federal Building, Boston, Massachusetts
 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• By emphasizing open space and revealing the industrial
materials used in construction, he helped define modern
architecture.
• 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
• The absence of any decorative treatment was
fundamental.
• His buildings radiate the confidence, rationality,
and elegance of their creator and,
• His buildings were free of ornamentation .
• Works confess the essential elements of our lives.
• He followed the reductionist approach.
• Less is more.
• Mies' architecture has been described as being expressive of
the industrial age, alike many of his post-World War I
contemporaries,
• He strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of
structural order balanced against the implied freedom of
unobstructed free-flowing open space.
• He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture.
• Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar
forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of
space around and beyond interior walls.
• Boldly abandoning ornament
altogether, Mies made a dramatic
modernist debut
• with his stunning competition
proposal for the faceted all-glass
Friedrichstraße skyscraper in 1921,
followed by a taller curved version
in 1922 named the Glass
Skyscraper.
• He selectively adopted theoretical ideas
such as the aesthetic credos of Russian
Constructivism with their ideology of
"efficient" sculptural assembly of modern
industrial materials.
• For Mies, structure was paramount,
hence his emphasis on the rectilinear
frame constructed of familiar building
elements, including most importantly the
wide-flange beam.
• Mies believed in creating friendly functional structures to serve
people, rather than decorative structures to serve historical
notions of artistic style.
• His focus on minimalism was expressed in his famous aphorism
“less is more.”

• By the late 1950s, the first signs of a Miesian school were

beginning to appear, most noticeably in Chicago.
• But within a decade, this "Miesian" school had expanded to
become a "Chicago" school in order to reflect the growing
body of Chicago architecture which was derivative but not
directly imitative of him.
• In the 1940s, a "Second Chicago
School" emerged from the work
of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
and his efforts of education at
the Illinois Institute of Technology
in Chicago.
• Its first and purest expression was
the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive
Apartments (1951) and thei
technological achievements.
THE BARCELONA PAVILION
• The German pavilion at the Barcelona exposition had
simplicity and clarity of means and intentions “everything is
open, nothing is clossed”
• of external ornament, the building was made of the most
luxurious materials. Walls were fashioned of thin plates of
luminous semi-precious stone, from green polished marble to
golden onyx.
S. R. CROWN HALL
• S.R. Crown Hall is
the home of the
College of
Architecture at the
Illinois Institute of
Technology in
Chicago, Illinois

• Mies refined the

basic steel and
glass construction
style, beautifully
capturing
simplicity and
openness.
Farnsworth House
• Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der
Rohe designed and built the
Farnsworth House.
• Mies explored the relationship
between people, shelter, and nature.
• The glass pavilion is raised six feet
above a floodplain next to the Fox
River, surrounded by forest and rural
prairies.
• He envisioned a “skin and bones”
architecture that separated the
structure from the free flowing space.
SEAGRAM BUILDING