ARCHITECTURE IN THE MODERN ERA
buildings and pursued the “more essential”
 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
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
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 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”

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