Vers Une Dictionnaire by Heather Crabtree

VERS UN DICTIONNAIRE An Illustrated Guide to Modern Architecture

HEATHER CRABTREE JOSH BANKS KAYLEE BRUCE SHARON HUGHES

RHEN PUBLISHING FIRST EDITION, 2015 DUDLEY HALL AUBURN

Ideas

Movements

People

Contents

[[ Introduction A Alvar Aalto B Bauhaus C Cubism D Deconstructivism E Expressionism F Five Points of Architecture G GuadĂ, Antoni H High Modernism I International Style J Johnson, Philip K Koolhass, Rem L Loos, Adolf M Metabolism

01 02 04 06 08 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26

N Niemeyer, Oscar O Otto Wagner P Parametric Design Q Quonset Hut R Rietveld, Gerrit S Skyscraper T Taylorism U Urbanism V Venturi, Robert W Wright, Frank Lloyd X Xylotechnigraphy Y Yorke, F. R. S. Z Zaha Hadid ]] Index

28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54

Introduction

After the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, the world began to change. Mass production methods altered the way everything was created, particularly in architecture and product design. Together, new technologies and schools of thought drove design into the new era of Modernism. This dictionary of modern architecture seeks to highlight the main themes of Modernism as well as bring light to some of the lesser known elements of this period of design (Quonset Hut, Xylotechnigraphy). The accompanying visuals are original compositions or manipulated images that express the concepts described in the entries. Modernism is not simply about which buildings are classified as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;modernâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; or which architects altered the landscape of design. Modernism is a combination of ideas, movements, people, objects, and buildings. In light of this, each entry has been divided into one of three categories: ideas, movements, and people. Each category has a corresponding color to help identify each entry.

Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto, a Finnish architect, flourished after World War II. Prior to the war, he taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This connection allowed him to experiment with new curving forms that were made from traditional local materials. His designs explored connections to nature through curves, anthropomorphic forms, and attention to landscape layout. These ideas were key to modernism because they experimented with unprecedented forms. Aalto was fascinated with the topography in rural Finland because the massive scale of reconstruction provided a chance for him to merge landscapes with urbanity. He uses several methods to relate the building to the surrounding natural environment in his design for the S채yn채tsalo Town Hall (1949-1951). The weathered brick used on exterior walls allows for the building to blend in with its surrounding trees and gives the complex an aged appearance, making it more inviting to visitors. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the S채yn채tsalo Town Hall is its terraced courtyard, which brings nature into the heart of the complex through steps lush with grass. 1

Aalto was the first architect to document his designs based on personal experiences. He was often ill, which gave him an empathetic perspective when designing his sanatorium in Paimio, Finland (1928-1933). A cure for tuberculosis was not found until 1947. Before a vaccine was invented, the best treatment was thought to be fresh air. Therefore, The Paimio Sanatorium was located on a relaxing site away from the city and provided Aalto with an opportunity to design a program that was intimate with its natural surroundings. From his own experience in hospitals, Aalto knew that bright colors and daylight were essential for comfort. He included these features, as well as operable windows, in order to give patients maximum independence. Aalto also designed furniture for each patient room in the Sanatorium.2 Materials were chosen carefully so that cleaning would be easy but comfort would not be compromised. For example, one chair in the facility featured arm rests made from smooth native wood that was natural, yet easy to sterilize. Aalto designed several other pieces of furniture throughout his lifetime, including his famous Stool 60, which features his iconic curves.

1 Curtis, 456-458.

2 Aalto, 112.

Bauhaus

“All the arts – sculpture, painting, applied art and visual art – [are] the inseparable components of a new architecture.”1 Stattliches Bauhaus, (1919 — 1933) often shortened to Bauhaus, is the name of a design school in Germany founded by Walter Gropius. Based on the learning of industrial production and craftsmanship, this school was Gropius’ manifesto for a new discipline of design. The Bauhaus went through three different locations: Weimar with Gropius, Dessau with director Hannes Meyer, and Berlin with Mies van der Rohe. Initially started in Weimar, Gropius put into place the three-part system for the profession of architecture: apprentice, journeyman, and master. After being pushed out of the small town of Weimar due to political differences, Gropius designed the most iconic building of the school, the Dessau, based on the Werkbund theory. Everything in the building is built for the students: from the design of the windows opening like a factory, to the stairwell showing blue, red, and yellow as the primary colors in the color wheel, to the Wassily chairs that the students sat in. It also included the famous Bauhaus signage on the front, creating an identity for the movement to come. Later, the school moved to Berlin and was shut down due to Nazi tensions.

1 Wilkens.

The student’s education was based on an info graphic displaying the different levels of education. First, students started off with the “Basic Course”, learning about form and basic materials for half of a year. For the next three years, materials and craft would be further studied. Professors like Adolf Meyer and Johannes Itten designed and taught a twelve-part color wheel for Color Study; a study of Nature, Materials, and Tools all fall within the same period of time. Finally, in the last bit of school, students focus on actual building. This wellrounded curriculum changed the way that architecture schools are run today.2 While the school was the physical representation of the ideas developed between 1919 and 1933, the Bauhaus idea is not just a schooling philosophy but also a movement in design. “A building’s industrial production, function, and structure would determine its form, ‘unencumbered,’ Gropious said, ‘by lying facades and trickeries.’”3

2 Wilkens. 3 Strickland, 133.

Cubism

Cubism was an early twentieth century artistic movement that abandoned traditional perspective viewpoints and used abstract geometric shapes and interlocking planes to emphasize the two dimensionality of a painting. Started by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914, the artists drew inspiration from African art and Primitivism. Critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the movement’s name after seeing one of Braque’s paintings of a small French village in 1908. He described the geometric shapes of the artist’s landscape paintings as “cubes,” and the term stuck.1 Drawing inspiration from the African art at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris, Picasso and other Cubist painters such as sought to forsake the traditional, longstanding techniques of copying nature directly. Instead, they chose to embrace the two dimensionality of the canvas; taking three-dimensional objects and fracturing them into geometric forms.2 Cubism can be divided into three different movements: Analytic, Hermetic, and Synthetic. Analytic paintings, such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, took subjects such as women’s bodies and distorted them; however, the original intention is still clear despite the fragmented bodies. After 1910, during the Hermetic movement, the subjects became less discernable, featured less realism, and had more fragmented overlapping planes. One example of this is Picasso’s L’Arlésienne, pictured at left behind the Bauhaus building. Later, in 1912, Picasso began experimenting with paper collages. 1 Rewald. 2 Rewald.

During this Synthetic movement, he abandoned all traces of realism from his earlier pieces and used the negative space within the paper to create the subjects. The link between the Cubist artistic movement and architecture was first made popular by Sigfried Giedion in his book Space, Time and Architecture. He argued that Cubism was born from the “dissolution of perspective” and the classical thinking of three dimensional space was only “one sided.” While most painters that followed classical perspectival views only focused on one viewpoint, Cubists began to think of subjects from multiple perspectives, leading to the architectural expressions of inner and outer space.3 Giedion goes on to compare Picasso’s L’Arlésienne painting and the corner of the workshop wing at Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus in Dessau. He states that the Bauhaus is “the conscious realization of an artist’s intent” and “there is the extensive transparency that permits interior and exterior to be seen simultaneously, en face and en profile, like Picasso’s L’Alésienne”.4 The overlapping planes found in Cubism are present in the architecture of the building through the glass corner and the hovering of the interior floor plates not meeting the exterior wall.5

3 Giedion, 435-36. 4 Giedion, 493. 5 Giedion, 495.

Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism is a movement derived from Post-Modernism and Russian Constructivism which began to form in the early 1980s. The movement took hold within architecture in 1988, beginning with the Academy Forum at London’s Tate Gallery and a show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Deconstructivist Architecture. Architects who tout the ideas of deconstructivism speak about a level of disturbance created with elements that seem randomly stacked, bent, or tumbling. Practitioners of this style claimed it reflected the cultural chaos at the end of the millennium.1 Deconstructivism is easily recognized by projecting planes, crooked walls, asymmetry, and leaning columns. Vertigo and confusion are the desired response. Deconstruction itself evades a strict definition, however, constantly questioning and expanding through a critique of ideas, operating by dislocating meaning.2 There are several architects at the core of the deconstructivist work, including Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Günter Behnisch, and the Viennese group COOP Himmelblau. Peter Eisenman’s House VI (1978) is an early example of deconstructivist ideas. The master bedroom has a floor split by a fissure where the marital bed would go. For Eisenman, the void symbolizes the vacuity of contemporary culture. His Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio (1989) includes a tower sliced vertically, an arch that truncates halfway through, and permanent scaffolding over the walkway. The inside is 1 Strickland, 142. 2 Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, 7.

just as mystifying with columns that descend from the ceiling but never reach the ground.3 In 1983, Bernard Tschumi designed the Parc de la Villette in Paris as a prototypical urban park, aspiring to anti-classical architecture in unexpected configurations. He hoped that unplanned uses would arise out of the red constructivist pieces that punctuate the park regularly.4 The project had a specific aim of proving it was possible to construct a complex architectural system without resorting to traditional rules of composition, hierarchy, and order.5 The park became architecture against itself, pushing technocratic order beyond its rational limits. In the catalog for the 1988 MoMA show, Mark Wigley summarized the concepts he and other architects had been working with for the last decade: “The form is distorting itself. Yet this internal distortion does not destroy the form. In a strange way, the form remains intact. This is an architecture of disruption, dislocation, deflection, deviation and distortion, rather than one of demolition, dismantling, decay, decomposition and disintegration. It displaces structure instead of destroying it.”6 Deconstruction is an open-ended practice that does not look for reasoning and continues to be a testing ground for architectural ideas and experimentation.

3 4 5 6

Strickland, 156. Frampton, 313. Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, 177-180. Frampton, 313.

Expressionism

Expressionism was a movement in the early twentieth century that manipulated reality to evoke certain emotions. The movement originated in German poetry and painting, but soon spread to other disciplines. Expressionism is known for its irrational approach to industry and science, especially in architecture. Erich Mendelson’s Einstein Tower, designed in 1917 and constructed in 1921, is an icon of Expressionism. Located in Potsdam, the tower is a monument to Albert Einstein. Although the form is slightly exaggerated, it is based upon Einstein’s theory of relativity, which relates to speed. Movement is often depicted in expressionism because it is one factor that helps distort reality. Artists became fascinated with speed during the outbreak of the First World War. Wassily Kandinsky, a German Expressionist painter during the war, was an important precedent for Mendelsohn’s interest in depicting movement.1 Kandinsky’s Painting with a White Border influenced Mendelsohn’s graphic and architectural style.

Throughout the 1920s, the tower was at the center of architectural debates concerning the appropriate balance between function and individual expression of emotions. Mendelsohn sought to create an architectural equivalent that rivaled the expressionist painting and theater of his time. He used reinforced concrete due to encouragement from the Werkbund movement to embrace new technologies. The materiality of the Einstein Tower motivated other designers to leave behind traditional architecture and move towards expressive monumental forms. The tower was built during a pivotal point for designers. Prewar design aimed for monumentality, while postwar design was more concerned with technology. Mendelsohn was influenced by past monumentality, but drawn to futurism in order to celebrate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Radical and startling, the Einstein Tower would serve as an icon of Expressionism for decades and spark debates about what contemporary architecture should look like. 2

1 Gray.

2 James, 392 – 413.

Pilotis

Free Facade

Free Plan

Ribbon Windows

Roof Garden

Five Points

of Architecture

In 1926, Le Corbusier coined the term “Five Points of a New Architecture” to describe the most essential pieces of architecture: pilotis, roof garden, free plan, free façade, and ribbon windows.1 This solution to architecture was able to transcend particular cases and buildings and was able to address the problem he set himself early on in his life: to create an architectural vocabulary based on the new technology of the time. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye most clearly demonstrates the five points of architecture and is a culmination of his efforts to refine his ideas into a single language. The piloti is the lightweight column that lifts the building off of the ground and allowed Le Corbusier to invert the traditional expectations that came with masonry buildings. The underneath of the house is free, allowing for the ground plan to slip under and the house to sit lightly upon the landscape. The pilotis also provide the structural support for the house which allow Le Corbusier to make use of two of his other points: free facade and free plan. The free façade means that the exterior walls of the building are not structural, allowing for them to be designed in any way, independent of the regulating lines of the structure. Similarly, a free plan is an open floor plan that can also be arranged independent of structure. None of the interior walls need to act as supports and can therefore be placed in anyway to create a variety of rooms and spaces.

Because of the free facade, Le Corbusier was able to make use of ribbon windows that run horizontally across the façade of the building. These long strips of glazing allow unencumbered views of the surroundings and let in ample daylight. All four sides of Villa Savoye make use of this ribbon window, providing panoramic views of the large garden in which the building is placed. The roof garden allowed Le Corbusier to accommodate for the loss of green area that the building took up. The roof terrace was a method he chose to reintroduce nature into the city. It also provided other functions including insulation for the flat concrete roof2 and an accessible outdoor space that blurred the line of interior and exterior. Many architects and projects since his time have been clearly influenced by Le Corbusier’s Five Points, including the Avenue de Versailles apartments by Jean Ginsberg and Bertold Lubetkin and Villa dall’Ava by Rem Koolhaas.

1 Curtis, 176.

2 Curtis, 176.

Gaudí, Antoni

“Everything comes out of the great book of nature; anything created by humans is already there.” Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926) was a Catalan architect whose work is heavily influenced by the regional style of Barcelona and the nature surrounding him. Known around the world for his mosaics, curving walls, and unfinished La Sagrada Familia church, Gaudí took Art Nouveau to an entirely new level.1 Gaudí’s influences vary from a range of different sources. He was an ardent reader of Ruskin’s publications and his early designs are a reaction to neoGothic architecture. Although a fan of Ruskin, Gaudí also takes influences from medieval architecture, but then manipulates the form to create a unique personal and regional style.2 Without the help of computer engineering software and using solely counterweights and models, Gaudí designed the structure to a majority of the buildings himself. For example in Casa Batlló, or House of Bones, the structural columns lean inward. This move counteracts outward thrust and renders the use of buttresses, or “crutches”, unnecessary.

In the last years of his life, Antoni Gaudí was commissioned to design Barcelona’s crown jewel, the Church of La Sagrada Familia. Feeling that in his youth he had strayed from Catholocisim, he became deeply religious and gave up most of his material possessions. Taking residence in a small studio inside what was already built within the church, he devoted himself entirely to his work, even carving some of the details himself.3 While the forms for the church look arbitrary, Gaudí was taking influences from the area around him. The peaks of the grottos at Motserrat affect the shape of the spires in the sky; the strict rectangular gridlines of the Barcelona streets contrasting the unique geometric shapes of the building blocks; and the varying topography behind the city reflected in the varying tower heights.4

1 Strickland, 121. 2 Curtis, 59.

3 Strickland, 121. 4 Curtis, 60.

High Modernism

High modernism deviates from the umbrella term of modernism through the intensity of its values. Where modernism celebrated new technologies and formal experiments, high modernism completely shuns retrospection and places all of its faith in science and technology. It represents almost absolute abstraction and formal experimentation. The movement was not solely an architectural one; high modernism is also closely tied to art, literature, and even city planning. High modern architecture sought to completely conquer nature, including human nature. High modern architects of the time believed in a sort of controlling power of architecture over society. By changing how people interacted with the built environment they hoped to change their way of life and, ultimately, their attitudes.1 High modernism began to develop around the 1920s and can be directly correlated to the increase in industrialization and capitalist development; however, the idea seemed to be carried out best by a more authoritative government.2 Because of these ties, high modernism became painted with a negative connotation after World War II. High modernism can be found in the early works of Le Corbusier like the Stein House and Villa Savoye. These “machines for living” are essentially flat, white planes that give no connotation to space or time. Though high modernism has faded in the art world, instances can still be found in architecture. Peter Eisenman’s House VI is a good example. Eisenman seems to have taken this idea to the extreme. He separates every surface and blurs 1 Scott. 2 “Modernism - High Modernism And The Avant-garde, 1914–1930.”

the form of the building. The white surfaces collide and glass encloses the spaces they left open. It is obvious that the house is extremely uncomfortable. The architecture does not conform to its user; it decides how its user will live. It is as though the diagram of the house never quite progressed, but the house was realized nonetheless. High modernism made an impact on architecture through its extremes, and though they were not always successful, the experiments that were carried out were undeniably fascinating.

International Style

The International Style was an architectural movement that took place between the 1920s and 1930s. It began in Western Europe mainly by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius. Their goal was to start anew and create a modern architecture that was based on function. The International Style was in great contrast to the past styles because of its lack of decoration, lightness, modern materials, and modular parts; but International Style architecture set itself apart the most through its language of volume instead of mass. The density of brick was exchanged for hollow steel-frame construction.1 Although, this style did tend to adapt to the changes in culture and climate as it spread throughout the world. The name “International Style” was coined by American architects Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson. In fact, the two wrote a catalog entitled “The International Style” to accompany a rather famous MoMA exhibit on the subject.2 The International Style made its way to America in the late 1920s thanks to Swiss and Viennese immigrants, such as Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler. Works like the Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House and Schindler’s Lovell Beach House set great precedents for future American architects. Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian architect and immigrant to England, began to do similar things in Britain. He is responsible for the firm Tecton, which went on to influence London architecture for the next several decades. A phenomenon paralleling the spread of the International Style was the formation of modern architecture organizations, the first being CIAM, 1 “Modern Movements.” 2 Frampton, 248-261.

or the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, which began in 1928. Le Corbusier was one of its founders and it brought together many other European architects and designers. MARS, or Modern Architectural Research Group, was a similar organization in England. GATEPAC, Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea, was the Spanish version. Perhaps the most important thing about the International Style was not the stylistic choices, but why the style was international. It is easily understood how after World War I and amidst World War II designers would appreciate and strive for a unifying chord between countries. An architecture that emphasized similarities instead of cultural differences is the importance of this movement. Although the stylistic choices are no longer as relevant, the way of analyzing and seeing space developed here has persisted to modern day.3

3 Curtis, 257-273.

Johnson, Philip

Philip Cortelyou Johnson (1906 – 2005) was an American architect best known for his work promoting the International Style and for his contributions to postmodern design. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Johnson attended Harvard University where he majored in philosophy. Later, in 1932, he became head of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. While working at MoMA, Johnson paired with Henry-Russell Hitchcock to write The International Style: Architecture Since 1922. Initially conceived as a catalog of the International Style Exhibit held in the museum, Johnson and Hitchcock had created a guide to influential works by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius in the time after World War I. This influenced him to return to Harvard; earning his Bachelor’s degree in Architecture in 1943. Johnson had over sixty-three different pieces of architecture throughout the United States and even around the world. He had a few key buildings throughout his career, starting with the Glass House at New Canaan in 1949. Inspired by his mentor, Mies, he designed a glass envelope similar to the Farnsworth House, but with a cylindrical hearth towards the right of the home as an “anchor” for which pulled everything together from all parts of the house.1 Next, working directly with his mentor, Johnson helped design the Segram Building in New York City, specifically the Four Seasons Restaurant attached to the side. He even put Mies in contact with the Segram heir, Phillyis Lambert. Another significant work 1 “Philip C. Johnson: American Architect.”

he designed is the American Telephone and Telegraph building on Madison Avenue. Using precedents like Sullivan’s skyscrapers in the late 19th century and Brunelleschi’s work in Florence, the building was claimed by critics to be the formal rejection of modernist simplicity and the leap into postmodern design. Johnson received multiple awards, such as the American Institute of Architects Gold Metal in 1978 and the first ever Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. He died in his sleep in the Glass House at the age of 98.

Koolhaas, Rem

Rem Koolhaas was born in 1944 in Rotterdam and attended the Architectural Association School in London. In 1975, he founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), with several colleagues. He is currently a professor at Harvard University. He also contributes to the work of AMO, OMA’s research counterpart. He operates in areas that go beyond the typical range of architecture, including media, politics, renewable energy, and fashion. Koolhaas is known for a radical, idealistic style of design. His forward-thinking seems to suggest that modern architecture should be reduced to its most memorable images and moved towards a new style.1 The CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, China was completed in 2002. Although the structure is classified as a skyscraper, the design aims to unravel the typical definition of what a skyscraper is. The CCTV Headquarters building breaks through the typical two-dimensional verticality of towers and explores the design of a building in three dimensions. A 75-meter cantilever gives visitors a truly three-dimensional experience by allowing them to occupy the overhanging loop. The form of the structure follows the functions occurring inside. The CCTV production studio lives on the bottom platform. The two towers rising from the base serve two different functions. One tower hosts editing areas and offices, while the other is home to news broadcasting. The two towers are then reconnected at the top with the overhanging loop, which houses administration. Glass panels and steel structure create the façade of the building. A repeating diamond

pattern is created from the steel structure, which becomes more condensed in areas of higher structural stress. The CCTV Headquarters can be seen from almost anywhere in the city and is open to the public for tours, allowing access to views from the cantilevering loop.2 The CCTV Headquarters Building pushes the limits of what modern structural design can acheive. By redefining the skyscraper as a truly three dimensional form, OMA and Rem Koolhaas have challenged the designs of what future skylines of cities across the world will incorporate.

1 Koolhaas, OMA Rem Koolhaas: Living, Vivre, Leben, 9-21.

2 Koolhaas, “CCTV — Headquarters, China, Beijing, 2002.”

Loos, Adolf

Adolf Loos was an influential architect during the early twentieth century in Vienna, Austria. His most famous legacy was a lecture given in 1910, entitled “Ornament and Crime.” As a part of early modernism, his contemporaries were fascinated with organic decorations that were inspired by nature. Loos attacked these ideas of the Secessionism Movement. He associates architectural ornamentation with tattoos, and tattoos with degeneration and crime. In this lecture, he writes that “There are prisons where eighty percent of the inmates bare tattoos. Those who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder.”1 To Loos, decoration was the equivalent of a tattoo on a building. In his eyes, ornaments were quick to become outdated as styles change. By removing embellishment from buildings, Loos was aiming to create an immortal and moral style to contrast that of the popular Secessionism.

1 Schwartz, 437-457.

The Goldman and Salatsch Building (1910) serves as a store on the ground floor and residences on the upper four floors. The upper section of the building is completely devoid of ornamentation. A large public controversy surrounded the construction of the façade. At various stages of construction, Loos claimed that he would apply an organic pattern into the plain stucco façade upon completion. This never happened, and it is unclear as to whether this is what Loos intended. He claims that he could not decorate the upper façade until he found what materials were available to him. However, the plain white façade does align with the claims he made in “Ornament and Crime.”

“Unlike the architecture of the past, contemporary architecture must be changeable, movable and ... capable of meeting the changing requirements of the contemporary age. In order to reflect dynamic reality, what is needed is not a fixed, static function, but rather one which is capable of undergoing metabolic changes ... We must stop thinking in terms of cunction and form, and think instead in terms of space and changeable function.”

Habitat 67 Moshe Safdie

—Kiyonori Kikutake

Nakagin Capsule Tower Noriaki Kurokawa

Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Tower Kenzo Tange

scheme for a modern city Arata Isozaki

Metabolism

Japanese Metabolism is an architectural movement that came about in a post-World War II society. A group of young architects and designers, including Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, and Fuminhiko Maki, prepared a Metabolism manifesto for the 1960 Tokyo World Design Conference. In the opening statement of the manifesto, they wrote “Metabolism is the name of the group in which each member proposes further designs of our coming world through his concrete designs and illustrations. We regard human society as a vital process—a continuous development from atom to nebula. The reason why we use such a biological word, metabolism, is that we believe design and technology should be a denotation of human society. We are not going to accept metabolism as a natural process, but try to encourage active metabolic development of our society through our proposals.”1 They saw the ruined state of post-war Japan as an opportunity for radical re-building, much like Chicago had after the fire of 1871. At the time of this conference the ideas of the Metabolists were still largely theoretical and utopian, concerned with improving the social structure of society. They were reacting to pressures of overcrowding, proposing megastructures that were able to grow and adapt over time.2 These systems would be made with prefabricated pods that would ‘plug in’ to varying frameworks. The distinction between the fixed element and the changeable elements was important to the Metabolists. 1 Lin, 24. 2 Frampton, 282-283.

Very few Metabolic concepts were physically realized, though some smaller scale projects reached completion. The more well known completed projects include the Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Tower (1966), the Kuwait Embassy and Chancellery of Japan (1970), the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1971). The rhetoric was mechanistic but alluded to organic structures like cells and beehives.3 The movement began to decline in the early 1970s following the Osaka Exhibition of 1970 where it was realized that there was an evident ideological emptiness. Despite it’s eventual decline, Metabolism had a strong effect on other architects and can be seen in many of their designs. For the World’s Fair in 1967, Moshe Safdie designed Habitat 67, a housing complex in Montreal comprised of 354 prefabricated concrete forms arranged in various combinations. Though not a part of the Japanese Metabolist movement, this prefabricated concrete structure shows many of the same ideas and concepts about society and the way in which it was housed. In England at the same time, the group Archigram was using similar ideas of megastructures and cells, but were influenced more by mechanics, information, and electronic media. Often, Archigram and Metabolism are used interchangeably, but the English movement was less social and more utopian.

3 Curtis, 510-511.

Niemeyer, Oscar

Oscar Niemeyer was a prolific architect who acted as a key figure in laying out the terms of a modern Brazilian architectural language. Though a draftsman under Le Corbusier in Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer was skeptical of “form follows function,” leaning instead toward a more poetic, expressive art of architecture.1 Le Corbusier’s influence on Niemeyer is apparent, however, as much of his work interpreted the Five Points with a new level of fluidity. Along with other young Brazilian architects, he was a follower of Le Corbusier but transformed the purist components into “a highly sensuous native expression which echoed in its plastic exuberance the 18th-century Brazilian Baroque.”2 Under Le Corbusier, Niemeyer took part in devising the Ministry of Education and Health (1936-1943) which marked the first attempt in the history of modernist architecture to construct a large-scale government building.3 With his Brazilian Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, designed with Lúcio Costa and Paul Lester Wiener, Niemeyer was able to gain world recognition for this new Brazilian modernist movement. In his work, Oscar Niemeyer looked toward the natural architecture of Brazil as a source of new, more expressive forms that would allow for harmony between man’s creative impulses and his natural environment. While his best works make use of Corbusian theory, they also directly reference Brazilian landscapes and human forms.4 In his memoir, The Curves of Time, he wrote “Right angles created by man, hard and inflexible, do not attract 1 2 3 4

Andreas, 7. Frampton, 254. Andreas, 27. Underwood, 34-35.

me. What draws my attention are free, sensual curves... The whole universe is made of curves.” Niemeyer took typical architectural elements of the time and pulled them into sinuous forms with emotion and lyricism. In 1942, Niemeyer completed his first major work at the age of thirty-five: the Casino at Pampulha.5 This project greatly demonstrates the architectural promenade reminiscent of Le Corbusier but does so within a vibrant and remarkable composition. His most well-known work, however, is his collaboration with Costa on the capitol of Brasilia in the mid-1950s, which included the National Congress of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek bridge, Palácio da Alvorada, and the Cathedral of Brasilia. In Brazil, the state had adopted modern architecture in order to symbolize the forward-thinking policies of centralization and industrialization, and thus needed an entirely new capitol.6 Though aware of the limited social role played by architecture, Niemeyer looked to provide a positive collaboration between the architect and society. He saw architecture as unable to fundamentally change society, but found it the task of the architect to create works both beautiful and expressive. By bringing modern architecture to the capitol, Niemeyer added a new layer to the society of Brazil and gave modernist architecture a foothold in the world outside of Europe. At the age of 104, Oscar Niemeyer passed away a legend, having won the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architecture in 1970, the Pritzker Prize in 1988, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1998. 5 Frampton, 255. 6 Curtis, 389.

Otto Wagner

“We do not walk around in the costume of Louis XIV.”1 Born to a bourgeois background, Wagner’s father was a notary to the Royal Hungarian Court. He initially studied to be a lawyer at the Polytech Institute in Vienna but transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1861 to finish his studies. He graduated and studied under Ludwig von Förster, self publishing books as well as entering different competitions.2 One specific competition he won was for his “General Regulation Plan” of Vienna in 1892. His fascination with technology and the turn of the century traffic led him to design a grid system, with wide boulevards and straight lines.3 He adopted his lifelong motto at this point from Gottfried Semper, stating “Artis sola domina necessitas,” or “necessity is the only mistress of art.”4

1 2 3 4

Wagner, 1988. “Otto Wagner.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture. “Otto Wagner.”

After becoming a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna he published his most famous book, Moderne Architektur, in 1895. This manifesto aligns with the need for architecture to reflect the modern ideal, move towards simplicity, and have an expression of the original construction in the intention of the building.5 These ideals can clearly be seen in The Austrian Postal Savings Bank of 1904, pictured to the left. From construction detailing to interior decoration, each feature of the design was carefully thought to reflect the function of the building. On the exterior, for example, there are visible aluminum covered bolts that are both a technical requirement to hold up the panels, as well as showing the vault-like purpose of the building’s function. Wagner left Art Nuevo behind in his statement “what is impractical can never be beautiful”.6

5 Curtis, 66. 6 “Otto Wagner.”

drawing based on design by Peter Eisenman

Parametric Design

Parametric Design, in its simplest definition, means designing under a certain set of parameters, or rules. This type of design is not new; the work of Antoni GaudĂ or even the ancient Egyptians could be considered parametric. Yet, parametric design has quite recently taken the profession of architecture by storm and in some ways has polarized modern architectural theory. This is no doubt because of the invention and development of the computer. Architects began to be interested in the use of the computer in the aerospace industry during the midcentury. An interest in biological forms has increased, but it was not until the 1990s when developments in technology allowed designers to represent more complex organic forms through fractals that stretched almost to infinity1. Architects like Stan Allen begin to theorize on how this emerging tool of parametric design should be implemented. In his book, Practice: Architecture Technique + Representation, he writes about the difference between object and field2. When designing with parameters, one must primarily think about the part to part relationship. Traditional design would begin with an idea toward the whole. In other words, parametric design allows for a design field while traditional design is seen as a more top-down approach dependent on the overall proportion of a specific object. This way of designing using variables that began to help designers understand the city and how it works. People begin to look more and more like variables in a sophisticated network to large-scale 1 â&#x20AC;&#x153;Parametric Design: A Brief History - AIACC.â&#x20AC;? 2 Allen.

designers. However, this new architecture is not without its own set of issues. Rooted in math and science, parametric architecture tends to be non-compositional, nonrepresentational, and free from metaphor; these are all qualities that excite modern designers. But in a process based in the association between two parts based on rules, the question then becomes how one chooses from the thousands of options available. Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Morphosis, and Peter Eisenman are a few current architects setting the standard for parametric designs. They still are combating issues with constructability, durability, and thermal comfort. As parametric design continues to develop, perhaps it can begin to illustrate even more complex relationships that influence architecture, city planning, and a wide range of other disciplines.

Quonset Hut

Designed in 1941, the Quonset Hut was a portable shelter that housed soldiers throughout World War II. The Navy needed a prefabricated shelter which could be mass produced, transportable, easy to erect, and adaptable to any climate with the most comfort and protection possible. George A. Fuller Company and Merritt-Chapman & Scott Corporation met with Captain R.V. Miller to determine the parameters for the shelter. Titled “Temporary Aviation Facilities,” the project was given the go-ahead on March 30th, 1941.1 The production of these shelters was urgent and the Navy wasted no time. Fuller, in charge of production, said, “plans were quickly created, construction gangs were organized, production lines laid out, and storage areas developed. Within forty-eight hours, both equipment and material were rolling in to the site. Nine days later the first portion of the plant was put into operation.”2 The design team consisted of four members, with Otto Brandenberger as the leader and sole licensed architect. The design of the hut depended on two parameters: an arch shape to maintain strength and deflect shell fragments, and to be swiftly and simply assembled.3 Using the Nissen Hut from British troops in World War I as a precedent, Brandenberger and his team scrapped much of the design for new insulation and assembly. The final design was made from the inside out. A thin, lightweight, pressed wood interior was slid on to an T-ribbed arch frame design with wadded paper

insulation and a corrugated sheet metal exterior, forming a sixteen foot by thirty-six foot hut. There were forty-one different variations based purposes it could adapt as well as different climates. Although assembled quickly in the field by ten men, there were specific perameters about how it was to be built; such as burying the building to protect it from bomb blasts and only fitting ten soldiers or five to seven officers.4 Overall, they were lighter and used less space than the traditional canvas and wood flooring tents. By the end of World War II, the US had distributed over 120,000 Quonset Huts throughout the world. But these huts did not lose purpose after the war had ended as there was a great need for housing on Navy bases all throughout the country.5 From the Pacific coast to Alaska, this temporary housing movement has turned into businesses, permanent homes, and forms of shelter still used today.6

1 Decker, 3. 2 Decker, 4. 3 Decker, 6-7.

4 Decker, 14. 5 Decker, 24. 6 Decker, 134.

Rietveld, Gerrit

Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) was a Dutch architect and furniture designer who was responsible for launching the De Stijl movement into architecture. He began working in his father’s furniture shop at a young age which influenced his interest in furniture design as well as architecture. After breaking away from his father’s company, Rietveld became more interested in modern art and design. Rietveld opened his own furniture company in 1917, giving him the artistic freedom to express the ideas that he had been forming. It was also around this time period that Rietveld became involved with the De Stijl magazine and movement . His most famous chair design, the Red-Blue Chair, also came from this period of time1. This chair epitomizes many of Rietveld’s ideals and many ideals of the De Stijl movement. The chair is made of simple planes that seem to slide past one another. The joints are highlighted by the pieces that extend past the joint itself. The material is wood, but Rietveld has painted it the signature colors of the De Stijl movement: black, red, blue, and yellow. These colors are used to abstract the material and emphasize certain pieces. The Red-Blue Chair strictly follows the rules determined by the early De Stijl movement, but later Rietveld began to explore and study more specifically the space created by these shifting planes. Rietveld’s first extensive architectural commission came in 1924 when Mrs. Truus Schröder commissioned him to design a house for her and her children on the outskirts of Utrecht. This house can be called the first 1 “The Collection.”

manifestation of De Stijl ideas into architecture. Rietveld is obviously experimenting with this new-found medium: space. The house’s boundaries are blurred because of the layers of horizontal and vertical planes that extend and stretch to create a complex façade. The color palette of the house is more restrained, comprised mostly of grays and white with small pops of color that emphasize the lines of railings and mullions. The house seems to fold in on itself so many times that it becomes difficult to understand the interior from the exterior. Walls that actual allow the interior to be customized; these embody Rietveld’s design method of shifting planes. Gerrit Rietveld then moved on from De Stijl to the Functionalist Architecture movement and CIAM. He briefly focused on mass production of furniture and housing, then his career turned mostly to private villas. However, in the 1950s he turned to exhibition design. In the latter part of his career, Rietveld began to receive more substantial commissions, including a school that now bears his name. Gerrit Rietveld stands out as a designer that furthered the idea of space as the medium of the architect. His abstracted materials allowed one to fully realize the shifting planes that meet to create a space, an idea that helped establish early modern architecture.

Sears Tower Fazlur Rahman Khan, Bruce Graham Chicago, Illinois 1970-1973 Height: 1,451’ Seagram Building Ludwig Mies van der Rohe New York, New York 1958 Height: 515’ Reliance Building Daniel Burnham Chicago, Illinois 1894 Height: 202’

Monadnock Building Daniel Burnham Chicago, Illinois 1891 Height: 197’

Marina Towers Bertrand Goldberg Chicago, Illinois 1959-1964 Height: 587’

Trump Tower Adrian Smith Chicago, Illinois 2005 Height: 1,388’

IBM Plaza Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Chicago, Illinois 1973 Height: 695’

Aqua Tower Jeanne Gang Chicago, Illinois 2007 Height: 859’

Skyscraper

After the Great Fire in 1871, Chicago became the home of American architecture. The vast expanse of land destroyed by fire allowed for innovative reconstruction throughout the city. Technological innovations, such as the inventions of safety elevators, structural steel, and mass production, also assisted with the rise of tall buildings. Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Auditorium brought the World Fair to Chicago. The 1893 Columbian Exposition was meant to feature neo-classical buildings, but visitors were more amused with the city’s emerging skyscrapers. William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building, completed in 1891, gained attention because of its groundbreaking height of ten stories. In the same year, Burnham and Root completed their Monadnock Building, the tallest building constructed with load bearing masonry. The Wainwright Building in St. Louis was constructed only a year earlier (1890), but Sullivan’s use of the column as a precedent on verticality influenced future skyscrapers throughout the nation. The Reliance Building was the first steel skyscraper, completed in 1895. It stood at fifteen stories tall and was recognized for its detail and delicacy. The mass production of steel allowed for designers to develop a distinctly American style that focused on verticality. The desire for tall buildings expanded across the country. In 1928, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building competed to be the tallest building in New York City. The Empire State Building won with its height of 1,200 feet, versus the Chrysler’s height of 1000 feet.

Throughout the twentieth century, the design and construction of the Marina Towers (1959-1964), the Sears Tower (1970-1973), and the IBM Plaza (1973) show the continuous rise of buildings in Chicago. Even today, we see the desire to make buildings taller and more distinctive. The Trump Tower and the Aqua Tower both host condominiums and rival the height of groundbreaking skyscrapers from the twentieth century. The skyscraper is a truly American, modern icon of monumentality that we continue to see develop today. The skyscraper is a phenomenon that is spreading all over the world, to the point where it has become typical not just of American cities but of the architecture of our time.1

1 Gottman, 190-212.

Taylorism

Taylorism, also known as Scientific Management, is a concept developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the later part of the 19th century. He devised a method of labor discipline and plant organization based upon scientific investigations of labor efficiency and incentive systems in order to improve efficiency and expand production. The objective was to maximize the ratio of output to input, benefits to cost. Taylorism was all about optimal production. As a social movement, Taylorism offered an escape from ideological conflict and class divisions. In theory, traditional politics would be subsumed by a rational technology of political and economic choice. Le Corbusier also viewed the idea of Taylorism as a method of social renewal. While many of the aesthetics of standardization echoed his formal principles, he also saw the promise of industrial efficiency and greater productivity as a way to conceive of architecture as a social tool.1 In his studies, Taylor appears to have viewed factory workers as machines much in the same way Le Corbusier viewed buildings as machines. Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino system was one of the earliest applications of mass-production techniques to housing. His interest in prefabrication and industrial design production, as well as his design emphasis on speed, efficiency, and economy, owed a lot to the concepts developed and studied by Taylor. As a production movement, Taylorism altered the landscape of industry greatly. When it came to war-time production, particularly in France, Taylorized methods allowed production to meet the new demands of the war 1 McLeod, 135.

industry as well as the reconstruction that was necessary after the war. In factories, Taylor production methods greatly altered the way the facilities were designed. Concrete became the ideal material as it was able to accommodate the new techniques, was cheap, could be standardized, allowed for extensive ventilation, and was able to form unobstructed, flexible interiors through which the assembly line could be threaded.2 Fordism quickly followed Taylorism as a model of rationalization, creating the assembly line and the expansion of a mass market through higher wages and lower prices. Factories began to appear in force in America as well as Europe. Albert Kahn spent much of his career designing car factories in Detroit, producing a standard for factories that had learned much from the concepts of Taylorism. Though Kahn never saw his work as Architecture with a capital ‘A’, the factory buildings had a strong influence on European avant-garde and the German Werkbund.3 Taylorism, now no longer seen as the ideal method of production, had a major impact on society, architecture, and the economy that can still be seen today.

2 Curtis, 81. 3 Curtis, 81.

Urbanism

Cities have existed throughout the history of human civilization, and architects have traditionally taken charge of planning them. However, the idea of ‘urbanism’ didn’t take hold until fairly recent history, beginning in the late 19th century. After World War II, the profession of urban design first emerged, both in Europe and America. This was partly as a response to the need to address war damage and partly a result of new planning for the automobile, which had grown rapidly in popularity by the mid-century.1 Even before World War II, however, cities had begun to take on a new identity with the explosion of industrialization. The European metropolis had grown larger, and cities began to look at issues of circulation and hygiene. Le Corbusier was one of the architects of the time to take on the charge of a new urbanism, designing proposals such as Ville Contemporaine for Paris in 1922. He believed in order for a new, efficient city to be built, it had to occupy an existing urban center. He also believed this urban center first had to be destroyed to make way for the new. This urban plan made use of linear superblocks that would increase density and decrease the area covered by buildings. Work and domestic life would take place in the high-rise structures while the spirit and body could be cultivated at ground level in the park spaces.2 Though never constructed, Ville Contemporaine was a piece of the beginnings of modern urbanism.

In the time since Le Corbusier, urban density has increased even more rapidly, with fifty-four percent of the world’s population currently living in urban areas.3 This density has altered the way we look at cities. There is no longer a need for the imperial metropolis but instead the urban environment has shifted into the global megacity, a change that inevitably involved many innovations from both Europe and America.4 In the mid-20th century, cities, particularly in America, spread horizontally, forming suburbs and satellite urban sites. This change blurred the boundary between urban and rural, creating a modern urbanism characterized by networks and decentralization. These networks reach far beyond the boundaries of the city, across countries and across the globe. The role of the architect is no longer to design the city single-handedly, but instead to engage with this rapid urbanization and design within the context of the urban network.

1 Shane, 9. 2 Colquhoun, 149.

3 United Nations. 4 Shane, 12.

Venturi, Robert

Robert Venturi is an American architect known for his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. He coined the phrase “less is a bore” to contrast Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” mentality. Venturi and his wife, Denise Scott Brown, believe in designing radically for a person’s everyday needs. They encourage young architects to learn from the ordinary. Functionalism is at the core of their designs. The Vanna Venturi House, designed for Venturi’s mother, was an early project that made several design moves against modernist traits. For example, the roof is pitched instead of flat and there is no trace of a floating volume as seen with modern designs. The house is considered to be an early product of the postmodern period. In an interview with Museo Magazine in 2010, Venturi and Brown stated that “almost everything we’ve done is in embryo there,” referencing the Vanna Venturi House. Many of their later projects reference the house in some way. In later projects, the circulation spaces almost always double as a public space, similar to the program at the house. The house is very sculptural, and Brown says that the interior is strongly influenced by Le Corbusier’s style.1 He designed from the inside out, following examples from Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. The chimney and the stairs are sculptural artworks in themselves.

In Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi clearly states his manifesto: “I like elements which are hybrid rather than ‘pure,’ compromising rather than ‘clean,’ distorted rather than ‘straightforward,’ ambiguous rather than ‘articulated,’ perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as ‘interesting,’ conventional rather than ‘designed,’ accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear.”2 These descriptions summarize Venturi’s work, the end of modernism, and the beginning of postmodernism.

1 Marcus.

2 Venturi, 16.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Frank Lloyd Wright is almost undoubtedly the most influential American architect. His designs were the first to combine both the “machine” aesthetic and the nostalgic neo-medieval ideals of the Arts and Crafts. Yet, in doing so, Wright rejects them both. From an early age, Wright was exposed to pure forms through playing with Froebel Blocks that his mother bought for him from the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1879.1 The simple underlying geometries of Wright’s later work can be traced back to these toys. Wright eventually found himself under the instruction of Louis Sullivan, who was helping to invent the skyscraper and evolve the Chicago School. There, Wright was inspired by the possibilities of a new organic and strictly American architecture. After splitting from Sullivan’s studio in 1893, Wright established his own studio and was successful in designing mostly residential buildings in the burgeoning Chicago suburbs. It is during this time that Frank Lloyd Wright established some of his design principles, such as the hearth as the heart of the home. This seems to play a more symbolic role than a practical one. The circulation of the houses twist and turn almost dizzyingly around this core, leaving the visitor disoriented until it the space opens up into a main dwelling space where windows would orient them with views out onto the open prairie. The undeniable long and low horizontals that make up the planes of the houses were to mimic these vast, flat lands. The front doors often recede into a decidedly private distance from the street. His later experiments include his concrete block houses such as the John Storer House in California and his 1 Frampton, 57-63.

Usonian houses that offered cheaper solutions to single family living. 2 If you asked Frank Lloyd Wright he would probably say that nature is his one and only inspiration. No doubt Wright did conceive of many of his fundamentals by studying the formal qualities of a tree or the vast Midwest prairie. Indeed he developed a style that was later deemed the “Prairie House” thanks to the stretching horizontal planes. However, it is no secret that Wright also sought inspiration from Japanese architecture and its distinctly spiritual aura and human scale. To Wright, they stood in great contrast to Renaissance buildings that enclosed space with heavy walls covered in decoration. It was not until 1905 that Wright made the journey to Japan, but he had studied oriental architecture through books and Japanese prints that he began to collect. Frank Lloyd Wright is a pivotal modern architect because of his embrace of new building technologies and methodologies such as flat roofs, concrete, and affordable housing. He successfully created a unique style that paid close attention to a building’s environment and made use of simple forms to distill his architecture to a truly pure state. The organization of his plans underscored the importance of family and connection to the outdoors. Wright’s ability to realize his pioneering and idealistic ideas quite proficiently speaks to his caliber as a modern architect. 3

2 Curtis, 113-129. 3 Wright.

Xylotechnigraphy

Xylotechnigraphy can be defined as the staining, graining, and finishing of wood in order to make it look like a much finer wood.1 The process was patented in England in 1871 just a few years after John K. Mayo of New York was awarded a patent for what would later be called plywood.2 Plywood and xylotechnigraphy both play an important part in the beginnings of modern architecture. First, it is important to understand the reason these two inventions came to be. The Industrial Revolution had come to a close several decades prior, and resources were undoubtedly becoming more scarce. Plywood offered a more efficient and even stronger form of timber construction, while xylotechnigraphy represented the idea of increasing the quality of not only plywood, but of other woods available. Plastic, metal, and concrete were becoming more available as construction materials and finer materials like stone and hardwood were becoming precious. The ability to make wood look more expensive allowed it to be a much more feasible option for interior finishes. Sheets of plywood also could be molded into new forms thanks to industrial techniques like steaming. A good example would be Alvar Aalto and experimental bent plywood furniture. His Stool 60 could be stacked and featured bent plywood legs. Charles and Ray Eames were also interested in molded plywood. They began by designing a newly improved leg stint for military use in World War II. The stint was lighter and was also stackable. Resources are even scarcer 1 “Building Features: A-Z Glossary.” 2 “History of APA, Plywood, and Engineered Wood.”

now and engineered wood is very popular in all types of construction. Xylotechnicgraphy has taken on a new role in design. Some modern architects such as Rem Koohaus ironically try to emphasize the cheapness of construction. OMA’s Casa da Musica features plywood walls, but the grain has been extremely exaggerated. It appears several times the scale it should be. Similar contemporary architects seem to be more interested in the value of a material’s atmospheric effects and the flattening of surfaces. Xylotechnigraphy remains relevant because it is a process that develops a common surface into one with a variety of characteristics and effects.

Yorke, F. R. S.

Britain in the post-World War I era was relatively devoid of modern architecture. It had yet to quite reach the country. It was during this time that Francis Walter Bagnall Yorke (1906-1962) began his practice in London. He is later credited with being one of the first to establish a modern aesthetic in Britain and proliferate modern design throughout the country. Known professionally as F.R.S. Yorke, or Kay, he followed his fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s footsteps in becoming an architect and set up a practice in the early 1930s. It was a time of severe economic downturn, and Yorke worked mostly as an architectural journalist for the magazine the Architectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Journal. This job gave him the opportunity to travel across Europe and establish many connections with many modernists, especially in Germany and Czechoslovakia. These connections would later inspire him to write two books, The Modern House (1934) and The Modern House in England (1937). The latter contains one of Yorkeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first attempts at a modern house. This house, Torilla at Nast Hyde, is a small concrete house featuring flat roofs and characteristically white walls. A short partnership with Hungarian-born architect Marcel Breuer allowed even more modern architecture to be realized in Great Britain. During World War II, F.R.S. Yorke helped design mostly factories and hostels for the Ministry of Supply. He later moved on to study more technical matters for the Ministry of Works. Nearing the end of the war, Yorke along with Eugene Rosenberg, a Czech Jewish refugee, and Cyril Mardall, an Anglo-Finnish architect, began a firm later called YRM. The firm seemed to focus mostly on larger public buildings and efficiency of production

and prefabrication; they collaborated with modern artists and designers to create things like repeating tiles that would later be used in projects like the Susan Lawrence School. Later designs include the Gatwick Airport from 1955-8 and new offices for the firm at 1 Greystroke Place, London, completed in 1961. F.R.S. Yorke played a large role in bringing modern architecture to Britain. He also managed to mature and develop a uniquely British modern architecture that took advantage of prefabrication and other modern construction techniques, but also blended elements of the Arts and Crafts Movement through the use of warm materials like wood and brick. 1

1 Sheppard.

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid is an Iraqi-British architect known for her futuristic designs. She was the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.1 Her signature works include extravagant curves, sharp angles, and extreme cantilevers. One of her most famous projects, the Heydar Aliyev Center, is located in Baku, Azerbaijan. It is described as “abstract, liquid, and incandescent in the sun,” as well as something that seems to have “appeared after a magician rubbed a lamp.”2 The landmark functions as a national museum, auditorium, and gallery space. The building purposefully does not blend into its surroundings. “[Zaha] does not write manifestos. She builds them.”3 This building is a manifesto that speaks of a new, democratic state. The striking appearance may account for the center’s urban presence, but the abundance of public space accounts for a revolutionary social presence. Dynamic curves attract the eye and create thoughts that provoke change.

1 The Hyatt Foundation. 2 Hadid, 11. 3 Hadid, 34-35.

Other designs by Hadid include the Vitra Fire Station (Weil am Rhein, Germany), the MAXXI - National Museum of the 21st Century Arts (Rome, Italy), and the Mind Zone at the Millennium Dome (Greenwich, United Kingdom). Zaha Hadid’s extravagant designs have caused much controversy. Although appealing to the eye, they are expensive and difficult to build. Controversy is surrounding the construction of her proposal for the 2022 World Cup Stadium in Qatar. The heath of workers is being compromised and a large amount of migrant workers have died during construction. Although her work is controversial, she continues to push boundaries and design objects that serve as defining symbols of their respective communities.

Bibliographic Index A Aalto, Alvar. Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes

of Shigeru Ban. London: Black Dog Publishing in Association with Barbican Art Gallery, 2007.

Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.

B Strickland, Carol. The Annotated Arch: A

Crash Course in the History of Architecture. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001.

Wilkens, Danielle. “Week 5: Werkbund and the Bauhaus.” Lecture for Modern Architectural History, Auburn, AL, February 11, 2015.

C Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941.

Rewald, Sabine. “Cubism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Published October 2004, accessed April 15, 2015. http://www. metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube. htm.

D Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, Edited by

Papadakis, Andreas, Catherine Cook, and Andrew Benjamin. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.

Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 1992. Strickland, Carol. The Annotated Arch: A Crash Course in the History of Architecture. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001.

E Gray, Fiona. “The Synthesis of Empathy,

Abstraction, and Nature in the Work of Kandinsky, Steiner, and Mendelsohn.” Academia. Accessed April 4, 2015. https:// www.academia.edu/1169339/The_ synthesis_of_Empathy_Abstraction_and_ Nature_in_the_Work_of_Kandinsky_ Steiner_and_Mendeloshn.

James, Kathleen. “Expressionism, Relativity, and the Einstein Tower.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 4 (1994): 392-413.

F Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture.

London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.

Sbriglio, Jacques. Le Corbusier: The Villa Savoye. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 2008.

Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 1992.

G Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture.

“Modern Movements.” Modern Movements. Accessed April 10, 2015. http://www. portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/ community/modern_movements/2391/ international_style/408691.

London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.

Strickland, Carol. The Annotated Arch: A Crash Course in the History of Architecture. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001.

H “Modernism – High Modernism and

the Avant-Garde, 1914-1930.” Art, Social, World, and Einstein. Accessed April 10, 2015. http://science.jrank. org/pages/10255/Modernism-HighModernism-Avant-Garde-1914-1930.html.

Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.

Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996. “Philip C. Johnson: American Architect.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Published September 3, 2013. http://www. britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/30548/ Philip-C-Johnson.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Bibliographic Index K Koolhaas, Rem. “CCTV – Headquarters,

China, Beijing, 2002.” OMA. Accessed April 2, 2015. http://www.oma.eu/ projects/2002/cctv-%E2%80%93headquarters/

Koolhaau, Rem. OMA Rem Koolhaas: Living, Vivre, Leben, Edited by Michel Jacques. Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1999.

L Schwartz, Frederic J. “Architecture and

Crime: Adolf Loos and the Culture of the ‘Case’.” Art Bulletin 94, no. 3 (2012): 437-457. http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/ pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a076191b-ac284e78-9f55-a6ac93e36fd0%40sessionmgr11 1&vid=4&hid=121.

M Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture.

London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.

Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 1992.

Lin, Zhongjie. Kenzo Tonge and the Metabolist Movement: Utopias of Modern Japan. New York: Routledge, 2010.

N Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture.

London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.

Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 1992. Andreas, Paul, and Ingeborg Flagge. Oscar Niemeyer: Eine Legende Der Moderne | a Legend of Modernism. Frankfurt: Deutsches Architektur Museum, 2013. Underwood, David Kendrick. Oscar Niemeyer and Brazilian Free-form Modernism. New York: G. Braziller, 1994.

O The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture Edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996. “Otto Wagner.” Wagner:Werk - Museum Postsparkasse. Accessed April 8, 2015. http://www.ottowagner.com/ottowagner-en-US/.

Wagner, Otto. Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to This Field of Art. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1988.

T Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture.

London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996.

Derksund, Maarten. “Turning Men into Machines? Scientific Management, Industrial Psychology, and the ‘Human Factor.’” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 50, no. 2, 2014. http:// ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/ pdfviewer?sid=dee33bd9-2473-465a-b3f82aface74a330%40sessionmgr112&vid=4& hid=121.

P Allen, Stan. Practice: Architecture Technique +

Representation. London: Routledge, 2009.

“Parametric Design: A Brief History – AIACC.” AIACC. Published June 25, 2012. http://www.aiacc.org/2012/06/25/ parametric-design-a-brief-history/.

Q Decker, Julie and Chris Chiei. Quonset Hut:

Metal Living for a Modern Age. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

R “The Collection.” Museum of Modern Art.

Accessed March 12, 2015. http://www. moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_ id=4922.

S Gottman, Jean. “Why the Skyscraper?” Geographical Review 56, no. 2, 1966.

McLeod, Mary. “’Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change.” Art Journal 43, no.2, 1983. http:// ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/ pdfviewer?vid=7&sid=dee33bd9-2473465a-b3f8-2aface74a330%40sessionmgr11 2&hid=121. Colquhoun, Alan. Modern Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Dupuy, Gabriel. Urban Networks – Network Urbanism. Amsterdam: Techne Press, 2008.

Bibliographic Index Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Shane, David Grahame. Urban Design since 1945: A Global Perspective. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2011. “World’s population increasingly urban with more than half living in urban areas.” United Nations. July 10, 2014. http:// www.un.org/en/development/desa/ news/population/world-urbanizationprospects-2014.html.

V Marcus, Adam. “Denise Scott Brown and

Robert Venturi.” Museo Magazine, 2010. http://www.museomagazine.com/ SCOTT-BROWN-VENTURI.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977.

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