TWENTIETH CENTURY: New problems are created by new technology, new
kinds of urban planning, and environmental issues. Architecture is
often designed by large firms for patron committees. A pluralistic
architecture leaves the architect with unlimited design possibilities.
Among the fascinations of the modern skyscraper is the fact that
modern technology gives it a completely artificial physical
environment: it need respond to none of the climatic parameters that
limited architecture in the past. Early 20th century architects built
on the functionalist tradition of the Chicago School, creating the
first genuinely new style in two hundred years. The "form follows
function" dictum of Sullivan was their motto and, like Sullivan, their
style was the result of the natural use of new materials and of the
function of their buildings. There was no reference to a historical
past. Modern architecture was almost born in late nineteenth-century
Chicago, particularly in the buildings of Louis Henry Sullivan. But
that movement lost its strength, partly because Sullivan's pupil Frank
Lloyd Wright took another direction.
Wright was the major precursor of Modernism. In his desire to relate
his buildings to their natural environment his architecture was
organic and more romantic than his intellectual European counterparts.
The roots of the modern architecture of the later twentieth century
are found more in France and Germany than in Wright, however. The
turning point came after World War I, in the work of LeCorbusier and
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Theirs was an abstract architecture of
simplified, geometric shapes. Known as the International Style, it
was characterized by a poetic minimalism. In his famous dictum of
"less is more," Mies stated his belief in a universal architecture in
which particulars of site, materials, etc., are meaningless. This
accounts for the austere perfection of Mies's Seagram Building.
It is ironic that a skyscraper erected on Park Avenue in New York less
than 40 years ago is today seen as "historic." But that is what the
Seagram Building is. The Seagram Building illustrates that no
building can ever be entirely "functional," and no building entirely
without function. The Seagram Building is the logical conclusion of a
set of architectural forces that had their roots in the mid-nineteenth
century, but at the same time it is an arbitrary creation of an
individual artist. One of the many ironies to the Seagram Building is
that a work in such a radical tradition became a great icon (along
with Elvis?) of the conformity of Late Capitalism in the Fifties.
Key works:
1. Antonio Gaudi: Casa Mila, Barcelona, 1905-10 [
130]; figs. 802,
803.
2. Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, Chicago, 1909; fig. 796, 798
3. Wright: Fallingwater, Bear Run, PA 1934-37 [
131 cutaway diagram];
fig. 853.
4. Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer: Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1925-26
[
132 main teaching building]; figs. 829-831
5. LeCorbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, France, 1929 [
176
plan]; fig. 842-845; colorplate 68
6. Mies van der Rohe: German Pavilion, Barcelona Exposition, 1929
[
133 interior, as rebuilt around 1980]; figs. 847--849.
7. Mies (with Philip Johnson): Seagram Building, New York City, 1957
[
312]; figs. 857--862
Works in context: