CULTURAL CONNECTIONS

MODERNISM
HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE
SEMESTER 6

LECTURE 2
• MODERNISM (1900-1940)

– A revolutionary movement encompassing all

DEFINITION
of the creative arts that had its roots in the
1890s, a transitional period during which
artists and writers sought to liberate
themselves from the constraints and polite
conventions we associate with Victorianism.
 FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS
• OPEN FORM

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on

the form growing out of the writing process, i.e.
the poems follow what the words and phrase
suggest during the composition process, rather
than being fitted into any pre-existing plan.
Some do employ vestiges of traditional devices
but most regard them as a hindrance to sincerity
or creativity.
 FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS
• Free Verse is a term describing various styles of poetry that
are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are
recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one
sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a
coherent whole

• Juxtaposition
When two images that are otherwise not commonly brought
together appear side by side or structurally close together,
thereby forcing the reader to stop and reconsider the
meaning of the text through the contrasting images, ideas,
motifs, etc. For example, "He was slouched gracefully" is a
juxtaposition.
 FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS
• Intertextuality
The shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an
author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a
reader’s referencing of one text in reading another.

• Classical Allusions

• A stylistic device or trope, in which one refers covertly or

indirectly to an object or circumstance that has occurred or existed
in an external context
• Allusion differs from the similar term intertextuality in that it is an
intentional effort.
 FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS
• Unconventional use of Metaphor
• Borrowing from other cultures and languages
• Discontinuous narrative
 THEMATIC CHARACTERISTICS
• Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
• Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal
context
• Valorization of the despairing individual in the face
of an unmanageable future
• Disillusionment
• Rejection of history and substitution of a mythical
past, borrowed without chronology
• Product of the metropolis of cities and urban scapes
• Stream of consciousness
 CANONICAL MODERNIST
• T.S. Eliot
• W.B. Yeats
• James Joyce
• Virginia Woolf

AUTHORS
• Ernest Hemingway
• Franz Kafka
• Gertrude Stein
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ezra Pound
 MODERN ARCHITECTURE
ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY
• High Modernism
• High Modernism: Early Le Corbusier

TOPICS
• High Modernism: Early Mies van der Rohe
• Late Modernism
• The Bauhaus

HIGH
– Considered the quintessential structure of
High Modernism

MODERNISM
– Designed by Walter Gropius in 1926 – 1927
– Located in Dessau, Germany
 HIGH
• The Bauhaus

– Workshop Wing
• Lifted above a setback half-basement zone

MODERNISM
• Appears as a pure quadratic volume of glass,
suspended weightlessly in midair
HIGH MODERNISM
HIGH MODERNISM
HIGH MODERNISM
 HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY LE
• Le Corbusier

– Rivaled in the early- and mid-twentieth

CORBUSIER
century only by Frank Lloyd Wright
– Believer in High Modernism
• Strong Classical idealism
– Designed the Villa Savoye
 HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY LE
• Villa Savoye

– Located outside of Paris

CORBUSIER
– Considered on of the major icons of 20th
century architecture
– A superb fusion of functionalism and dazzling
formal invention
HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY LE
CORBUSIER
HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY LE
CORBUSIER
HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY LE
CORBUSIER
 HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY
• Mies van der Rohe

MIES VAN DER ROHE

– Closely rivaled Le Corbusier and Wright as
form givers to 20th century architecture
– Was the leader of the Berlin School in
Germany
– Famous quotes
• “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good”
• “Less is more”
 HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY
• Barcelona Pavilion

MIES VAN DER ROHE

– Mies van der R`ohe
– Designed as the German Pavilion for the
Barcelona Exposition in 1929
HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY
MIES VAN DER ROHE
HIGH MODERNISM: EARLY
MIES VAN DER ROHE
• Sullivan, Mary; http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/
• http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/Cities/wld/wdpt1.html
• Trachtenburg/Hyman; Architecture: From Prehistory to

REFERENCES
Postmodernity
• Wodehouse/Moffett; A History of Western Architecture