The Modern Movement

The nineteenth century built in every style it knew. Railway stations were Gothic, banks were Roman, town halls Renaissance, and a single street might hold all three. Behind the historical fronts, however, lay iron frames, plate glass, steam heating, elevators and a new kind of client: the company, the municipality, the mass of urban tenants. The architects who founded the modern movement argued that this contradiction could not last: the age of the machine, like the ages of Pericles and of the cathedrals, must find an architecture of its own, derived not from precedent but from its materials, its methods of production and the needs of its people.

This chapter follows that argument from its beginnings in Chicago, London, Brussels and Vienna around 1890, through the heroic decade of the 1920s, to its worldwide success after 1945 and its crisis in the 1960s. Its rules are stated by the architects themselves (Sullivan, Loos, Wright, Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies), and each can be tried on the models. The structural story told in Frame and Skin is taken for granted here: the question now is what architects made of it.

Chicago: the tall building

The first building type with no historical precedent was the office tower. In Chicago in the 1880s and 90s, the steel frame and the elevator produced buildings of ten, fifteen, twenty storeys, and their architects (Jenney, Burnham and Root, Holabird and Roche, Adler and Sullivan) had to decide what they should look like. Some piled up classical orders storey upon storey; the best, collectively called the Chicago School, looked for a form that followed from the building itself.

Louis Sullivan gave the answer in an essay of 1896, The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered. The tall building has three parts because its uses are three: shops and entrance at street level, open and generous; above them an unlimited stack of offices, all alike, to be expressed as a single unbroken shaft; and at the top an attic for machinery, which closes the composition as the capital closes a column (The tall building has three parts). From this he drew a general law, that form ever follows function (Form follows function). His own buildings (the Wainwright in St Louis, the Guaranty in Buffalo) are wrapped in terracotta ornament of great delicacy; the slogan, stripped of its poetry, became the creed of functionalism.

Notice the piers in the shaft. Only every other one stands in front of a steel column; the intermediate piers were added by Sullivan to make the building look taller, and they carry nothing. Even the founder of functionalism allowed expression to override literal truth. That tension runs through the whole modern movement.

Craft, the new art, and the war on ornament

In England the reaction against historical styles began from the opposite direction: not from industry but against it. John Ruskin and William Morris condemned machine-made ornament and sham materials, and the Arts and Crafts movement set out to build honestly, in local materials, with plans shaped by use (Truth to materials). Philip Webb’s Red House for Morris (1859–60) is plain red brick under steep tiled roofs, with windows of every size placed where the rooms need them.

In the 1890s the search for a style of the age produced Art Nouveau (in Brussels, Paris, Barcelona, Vienna and Glasgow), which drew its forms from plants and the flowing whiplash line and, following Viollet-le-Duc, showed its iron frankly and bent it into ornament (Let the structure become the ornament). Its brilliance was brief. In Vienna, the architect Adolf Loos attacked the new decorators in a lecture of 1910, Ornament and Crime: applied ornament, he argued, was wasted labour and money, went out of fashion quickly, and belonged to an earlier stage of culture (Ornament is wasted labour). His plain-fronted building on the Michaelerplatz (1909–11) scandalised the city.

Wright and the organic house

Sullivan’s draughtsman Frank Lloyd Wright set up on his own in 1893 and, in the suburbs of Chicago, invented a new house. His Prairie houses are low and spreading, with hipped roofs of gentle pitch, eaves projecting far beyond the walls, continuous bands of windows under them, and terraces and planters that tie the house to the ground (Emphasise the horizontal). The plan is a cross or a pinwheel of wings around a massive central fireplace (The hearth at the centre). Wright called the result organic architecture: a building that grows from its site as a plant does, in which every part belongs to the whole (A building should grow from its site).

Wright’s work was published in Berlin in 1910–11 and deeply impressed the young Europeans. He himself went his own way. Fallingwater (1936–39), built over a waterfall in Pennsylvania, anchors its concrete terraces to a core of local stone and thrusts them out over the stream. It was Wright’s demonstration that the box of four walls could be dissolved (Destroy the box). The organic strand of modern architecture, continued by Alvar Aalto and Hans Scharoun, remained the movement’s conscience against mechanism.

The machine age

The decisive decade was the 1920s, and its most forceful voice belonged to Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who called himself Le Corbusier. His book Vers une architecture (1923) set photographs of ocean liners, aircraft and motor cars beside the Parthenon and argued that the engineer, obeying economy and calculation, was producing the true architecture of the age. A house should be as well designed as a car: a machine for living in.

His architecture rested on the concrete frame of the Dom-ino and on the five points that follow from it (The five points of a new architecture): pilotis that lift the house and free the ground; a free plan whose partitions ignore the columns; a free façade set in front of them; the ribbon window running across the whole elevation; and the roof garden. The Villa Savoye at Poissy (1928–31) combines them all, with a ramp that rises through the house from the car’s arrival to the sun terrace on the roof. In the figure at the head of this chapter each point can be switched off; with all five off, what remains is a solid, symmetrical house on the ground with bearing walls, punched windows and a pitched roof, the house the modernists set out to replace.

In Germany, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 to unite the arts and crafts in the service of building (All the arts serve the building); within a few years the school was designing prototypes for industry, and its new building at Dessau (1925–26) wrapped its workshops in a glass curtain wall. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the most rigorous of the three, pursued the free plan to its limit. In his pavilion for the Barcelona exhibition of 1929, a thin roof rests on eight cruciform steel columns; beneath it, freestanding planes of onyx, marble and glass guide the visitor through a space that never quite becomes a room (Less is more).

In 1932 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited the new European work and gave it a name: the International Style. Its curators, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, reduced it to three principles: volume rather than mass, regularity rather than axial symmetry, and no applied ornament (Volume, regularity, no ornament). The label ignored the movement’s social program, its housing estates and its politics, but it made the look of modernism recognisable everywhere.

The skyscraper city: zoning and Art Deco

While Europe debated, New York built. After the sheer Equitable Building of 1915 darkened its neighbours, the city passed the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States, the Zoning Resolution of 1916. In each district a building could rise at the street line to a multiple of the street’s width; above that it had to stay behind a plane sloping back from the centre of the street, so that it stepped back as it rose (Setbacks behind a sloping plane). On a quarter of the lot a tower could rise without limit (A tower on a quarter of the lot).

The law produced a new silhouette: a broad stepped base (the wedding cake) from which a slender tower rose to a crown. The draughtsman Hugh Ferriss drew the permitted envelopes as mountains of shadow, and the architects of the 1920s filled them with the setbacks, piers and glittering crowns of Art Deco: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, Rockefeller Center. Art Deco is modern in its massing and its materials, historical in its love of ornament: a style of the city rather than of the manifesto.

Measure: regulating lines and the Modulor

The modernists abandoned the classical orders but not the ambition of the orders: a system of proportion that would relate every part of a building to every other. Le Corbusier checked his façades with regulating lines (Regulating lines), and after the Second World War he published the Modulor, a scale of measures in two interlocking series. The red series grows by the golden ratio from a man 183 cm tall, whose navel is at 113 cm; the blue series doubles it, hinging on his raised hand at 226 cm (The Modulor: two golden series). The Modulor was meant for industry as much as for architects: a single scale for bricks, furniture, rooms and buildings.

After 1945: triumph and rawness

The Second World War dispersed the leaders of the movement (Gropius to Harvard, Mies to Chicago) and made their architecture the official language of reconstruction. In America it became the style of corporate power: the glass tower on its plaza, the curtain wall of Lever House and the Seagram Building (The curtain wall). In Europe it rebuilt cities and housed millions. Brasília and Chandigarh were new capitals designed on modernist principles from the ground up.

Le Corbusier’s own post-war work took a different turn. The Unité d’habitation at Marseille (1947–52) is a “vertical village” of 337 flats in a single slab on massive pilotis, with a shopping street halfway up and a gymnasium, nursery and running track on the roof (The vertical village). Built with the Modulor throughout, it was cast in rough concrete, béton brut, whose board-marked surface Le Corbusier treated as a natural material like stone. The English critic Reyner Banham named the architecture that followed Brutalism: memorable as an image, frank in its structure, and valuing its materials as found (Béton brut: concrete as found).

The crisis of the modern

By the 1960s the movement’s victories had become its liabilities. Office towers repeated the glass box without the refinement of Mies; housing estates of standardised slabs, cut off by motorways from the streets around them, proved hard to maintain and unpopular with their tenants. In 1961 Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities defended the dense, mixed, untidy street against the modernist plan. In 1966 Robert Venturi answered Mies’s “less is more” with “less is a bore”. In 1972 the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe blocks in St Louis, barely twenty years old, was presented by the critic Charles Jencks as the death of modern architecture.

The obituary was premature. The frame, the free plan, the curtain wall and the ideal of good building for everyone are still the ground on which almost all architecture stands. What ended in the 1960s was the belief that a single set of rules, deduced from function and technique, could settle every question. The next chapter follows the several ways architects have tried since then to put back what that belief left out: meaning, technology made visible, new forms, and the climate.