MODERNIST /

INTERNATIONAL
ARCHITECTURE
LECTURE 3
ZSB 2012 - HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE II
(SEJARAH SENI BINA II)

Modernism in the 1930s
Europe and the Americas
During the 1930s, modernism and its practices were disseminated widely in
the western world. This was due in part to the fact that architects and clients
often felt that modernism responded to the needs of post-WWI social and
economic circumstances. Often the introduction of modernism was
accomplished by governmental agencies who commissioned new buildings to
house social and economic programs.
The spread of modernism was also accomplished by increased attention to
its accomplishments. One of the most important ways that such attention was
given was an exhibit held by the then new Museum of Modern Art in New York in
1932. Modern Architecture: International Exhibition was a show researched and
organized by two architectural historians: Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell
Hitchcock. Their fundamental position was that modernism had coalesced into
an identifiable and international expression by 1922 and that it was clear by
1932 that this was the style of the new age.
Hitchcock and Johnson posited that there had been an early period of
preparation for the advent of modernism. This early period was characterized by
qualities still representative of the 19th century and earlier traditions of European
architecture. It was evidenced in the work of such designers as Peter Behrens,
Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
This early formative period, they argued, was followed by the great
modernists: Gropius, Breuer, LeCorbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, George
Howe, William Lescaze, and others whose designs followed the general
principles laid out by the Bauhaus and by LeCorbusier in his writings.
Hitchcock and Johnson further argued that the new modern style was
international and could not be mistaken for idiosyncratic personal expressions. It
consisted of several identifiable qualities, including volumetricity, asymmetry, a
sense of machine production, the absence of applied ornament, and a clear
interest in functionalism.
The argument put forth by Hitchcock and Johnson gained many adherents
in the United States where a debate had been waged for over ten years about
the definition of modernism. There was no general agreement about what
should be considered authentically modern; and for many people, the definition
offered by the exhibit at the MOMA was a relief. It seemed plausible.
Finally, modernism also spread during the 1930s because of the oppression
suffered by modern artists and architects under National Socialism in Germany.
The Bauhaus had suffered political criticism in the 1920s in Weimar. It continued
to be the object of political assault after it moved to Dessau. In 1930, the
Bauhaus moved to Berlin and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became the director.
However, despite the efforts of the Bauhaus to be viewed as an art academy with
no political ambitions, the Nazis finally closed it. Most of the faculty left Germany
and settled elsewhere. Gropius became the head of the Graduate School of
Design at Havard; and Mies founded IIT in Chicago.
Gropius House in Lincoln,
Massachusetts, c.1938-40
Lovell House by Richard Neutra,
Griffith Park, CA, 1929
Research House by Richard
Neutra, Los Angeles, CA, 1932-33
In Italy, the Gruppo 7 organized itself in 1926. Its members included Luigi
Figini, Guido Frette, Sebastiano Larco, Gino p;ollini, Carlo Enrico Rava,
Giuseppe Terragni, and Ubaldo Catagnoli (later replaced by Adalberto Libera).
They intended to create an architettura Razionale (rational architecture) and
their early work clearly reflected the influence of the Bauhaus, Russian
constructivism, the modernism of other European countries along with memories
of Futurism.
Probably the most important of all the modernists working in Italy in the
1930s was Giuseppe Terragni. Admiring the new modernism of northern
Europe, he worked to preserve a certain classical figuration within the matrix of
new building techniques and abstract form. He admired LeCorbusier more than
any of the other modernists and felt an affinity for Corbus ingrained love of the
classical tradition. This made Terragni particularly well suited to create an
architectural setting for Fascisms program of propaganda and mythology.
Giuseppe Terragni, Apartment house in
Como, Italy, c1936
Casa del Fascio (Headquarters of the Fascist Party), Como, Italy,1932-36
In his design for the local headquarters of the Fascist party, Terragni referred
to Mussolins definition of the Fascism as a glasshouse into which everyone can
peer. His metaphor for this is found in his redefinition of the grid on the faade as
a clearly articulated between support, opening and enclosure. The Corbusian
sources of this are abundant, but the building also recalls a classical palazzo in its
clearly described proportions and its conversion of a central cortile into a public
meeting space reflective of the adjacent outdoor piazza.
The Casa del Fascio is full of contradictory and productive tensions. For
example, the faade is both symmetrical and asymmetrical. It is both open frame
and closed volume. The building is self-contained but projects a strong axial
relationship between internal space and the surrounding urban space. It is both
fragile and strong.
One of Terragnis most interesting projects is his design for a monument to the
great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The building was to be called the Danteum and
would have stood near the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine in the Forum, a
monument to the continuity of classical culture and the renewed empire of the
fascist dictator Mussolini. It was to contain a Dante study center as well as serve
as a commemorative structure.
The building was based on Dantes great poem The Divine Comedy in which
Dante visits the three realms of Paradise, Purgatory, and Inferno. Spaces
representing these three stages of the Divine Comedy were arranged
processionally and each had a different mood or character based on formal
elements of walls and cylindrical columns on a complicated proportional system.
The complexity was based on a relationship between the Golden Section, the
dimensions of the Basilica of Maxentius, and a symbolic numerology devised by
Terragni.
Danteum project, 1938,
by Giuseppe Terragni with Pietro Lingeri
Terragnis design was further involved with his ideas about the origins of
architecture and what he perceived to be archetypal forms (cylinders,
rectangles), archetypal relationships (rows, grids), basic types (free-standing
columns, porticoes, hypostyles) and institutional typologies (temple, palace).
The building thus amalgamates sources as remote as Egyptian temple design
(hypostyle halls), the vocabulary of modern architecture, the abstract qualities of
modern painting, and elements of the nearby Roman buildings.
The Danteum and, for that matter, much of Terragnis other work suggests
that modernism--even European modernism with sympathies for Bauhaus and
Corbusian ideas--was not always based on liberal viewpoints but could serve just
as easily a conservative fascist regime handsomely. Is this due to Terragnis
talents as a designer or to an inherent flexibility within the modernist style?
Purgatory
Inferno
Paradise
If Terragnis work represents the sublime end of the spectrum of
conservative architecture in the early 20th century, the architecture
commissioned by and produced for the Nazi regime in Germany represents the
banal. When Hitler first came to power, he used Paul Ludwig Troost as his
architect. Troost and Hitler both admired Karl Friedrich Schinkel and shared
other views about the need for an updated classicism to express the values of
the German Volk and the Nazi myth of Arianism.
When Troost died in 1934, he was succeeded by Albert Speer who was
more theatrical and interested in quick effect and rhetorical power. His designs
for individual monuments were usually conceived in over-simplified and over-
scaled classicism. His concepts for a new Berlin were as megalomaniacal as
Hitlers. His most successful design was probably his use of 1,000 airplane
headlights to create a cathedral of light for a rally at the Zeppelin Field in
Nuremburg in 1934.
German Pavilion, International
Exposition, Paris, by Albert Speer,
1937
Salzburg-Munich Autobahn
Propyleum, by Albert Speer,
1937
Wehrmacht High Command, Berlin, by
Albert Speer, 1940
Great Plaza Complex, Berlin, by
Albert Speer, 1937
Great hall with Brandenburg Gate, Berlin,
by Albert Speer, 1937-43
Zeppelin Field,
Nuremburg, by Albert
Speer, 1934
Expressionism in Modern &
Contemporary Architecture
What role does it play?
Expressionism is a term that arises in the early 20th century around a group of
painters, mainly German and centered in Munich, who sought to convey deep
emotional content using significant amounts of abstraction but without losing figural
subject matter. Color played a major role in their work. They also sought to convey
a new and different kind of emotional content, often verging on complex psychology
and psychic struggle. It is important to remember that during this same time, the
work of Sigmund Freud was very new and ground-breaking, suggesting that many
undercurrents in the personality determine human emotional and psychological
reaction in a variety of situational archetypes.
While expressionism in architecture may not have quite so much Freudian
content, there is abundant evidence that many architects at least went through a
period in which they hoped to make architecture more emotionally expressive than a
machine or industrial aesthetic would permit.
Expressionism is not a clearly defined term and may have more than one
definition. It can often overlap other kinds of content and formal choices.
Nevertheless, there is a certain quality about it that usually allows us to recognize it.
Expressionist forms are often sculptural, sometimes irrational, usually personal and
idiosyncratic. But they are also often distorted. The notion of identifying expressive
qualities in a building is not necessarily the same as identifying expressionistic
qualities. A building may convey some intentional meaning through its form
(expressive); or the stamp of the personality, individuality, identity, or even the
pathology of the architect (expressionistic). This may not always be easy to
distinguish. A wildly sculptural form may not always be the evidence of
expressionism. Expressionistic form can also convey spirituality as well as
psychology and it is important to evaluate a potentially expressionist form carefully
before pronouncing a verdict.
In 1914, Bruno Taut built his Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.
The phrase above the elevation drawing says in German The Gothic Cathedral is the
prelude to glass architecture. Tauts building was meant to be an experience of light
afforded by a combination of glass and skeletal metal structure.
Interior of the Glass Pavilion by
Bruno Taut at the Cologne
Werkbund Exhibition, 1914.
One of the most important of the architects who are considered to be expressionists
is Erich Mendelsohn who turned out countless drawings that are essentially
thumbnail sketches of buildings based on the expressive capacity of form.
Enveloping Structure, 1914-15
Mendelsohn also found music to be a major
source of inspiration for his work and made
drawings that in essence expressed the
content of specific musical works. He may
well have taken the words of the poet
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quite literally:
Architecture is frozen music.
These sketches were executed at various
times from 1917 to 1936.
One of Mendelsohns most celebrated buildings in the expressionist mode is the
Einstein Tower, located in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, in 1920-24. This is an
observatory named in honor of Albert Einstein and originally intended for reinforced
concrete construction. It was actually built in brick masony.
General view from the SE
Mendelsohns studies for the Einstein
Tower indicate the dynamism of the
forms he was envisioning; but a
comparison with the built structure
indicates how difficult it is to translate
that form into solid materials. These
drawings were executed in 1919.
Mendelsohn was also fascinated by the power of light in
architecture. This sweeping curve is the faade of a
department store in Chemnitz, Germany. Its modernist
composition is very interesting, but its effects at night are
quite stunning.
One of the most fascinating and important of the architects who are usually named as
expressionists is Rudolf Steiner (1862-1925), a man who called himself a spiritual
scientist. Steiner was born in Austria-Hungary and was educated at the University of
Vienna. He edited the scientific works of the German Romantic poet Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe. In his research on Goethe, he became aware of Goethes
theory of color and his plant studies leading to the concept of metamorphosis.
While some scientists believed that Goethes color theory was unscientific, especially
compared to the theory of color as refracted light, Steiner argued that the poetic truth
of Goethes ideas held up under laboratory conditions and thus have a compelling
value that supersedes initial impression. Similarly, the theory of plant metamorphosis,
which has generally had more credibility with botanists, is, according to Steiner, more
reliable because it deals with both the physical and the metaphysical aspect of plant
growth.
Goethes ideas about metamorphosis was that each stage in the growth of a plant
proceeded out of the previous and into the next according to principles that suggest
that the seed contains its own history and its own future. The form is not haphazard
but obeys laws of development that are both inherent and universal.
Steiner was also fascinated by the relationship between mathematics and spirituality.
He taught that the visible world was the densest and most material realm of a much
larger spiritual world and that any human being who chose could have access to the
larger spiritual world through a process of meditation, spiritual discipline, and will
power. He taught that just as we do not presume that someone somewhere earlier in
history invented mathematics but rather we accept mathematics as self-justifying
facts or truths, the spiritual world could be perceived in the same way. We learn
mathematics by beginning with simple concepts and moving into much more complex
levels. The same is true of the spiritual world.
He also taught that human life is metamorphic, much like that of the natural world,
and that the greatest effort of the time was to acquire deeper knowledge of human
relationships to the spiritual world. This eventually became known as
Anthroposophy (anthropos=man, sophia=knowledge or wisdom).
Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, Steiner founded the Anthroposophical Society
in Berlin. Before the outbreak of World War I, he moved the headquarters of the
society to Dornach, a village outside of Basel, Switzerland. There he began
construction of a building which would house his School of Spiritual Science. The
sectional model above shows the main auditorium and stage where lectures and
performances would be held.
Constructed between 1918 and 1922, the Goetheanum (a building dedicated to
Goethe), was conceived as a double domed structure in which the larger dome housed
the audience and the smaller dome covered the stage. The domes intersect, however,
and their intersection formed the proscenium arch. The entire superstructure was
wood.
The model shows the north side of
the building, and the columns and
architrave above them express the
idea of metamorphosis. Each
capital and its section of the
architrave bear the effects of the
previous one and affect the
succeeding one. The ceiling was
painted in deeply saturated colors
that represent the spiritual world.
Interior of the Great Hall during construction
The entire building was hand-carved--in effect, a monumental piece of sculpture.
Here we see the capitals of two of the columns.
Exterior of the first Goetheanum. On
New Years Eve 1922, a madman set
fire to the estremely flammable
building and burned it to the ground.
Witnesses reported seeing the
conflagration and then watching as
the fire changed color as the copper
and tin organ pipes were consumed
in the blaze and shot colored flames
into the sky.

A second Goetheanum was planned
immediately, this time in reinfored
concrete.
The sculptural quality of the form is
immediately apparent and quite
dramatic. The formal quality seems
organic and is produced by form work
that depends largely on non-Euclidean
geometry.
A number of architects and artists practicing just after World War I went through
periods in which their work has retrospectively been defined as expressionistic.
One of those was the otherwise very rational and often prosaic Mies van der
Rohe. Fascinated by Frank Lloyd Wright and a by-product of the studio of Peter
Behrens in Berlin, most of Miess early work seemed to be in line with the general
direction of de Stijl and functionalist architecture.

The exceptions to this took place at the turn of the decade into the 1920s and in
the 1920s: the glass skyscrapers that he designed for the site on Friedrichstrasse
in Berlin (1921-1922) and the Monument to the Communist martyrs Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926). These works venture into an area that
stands apart from other work that Mies did before and even during as well as after
this period.
The abstract quality of the form is balanced by the symbolic use of material. The
bricks employed in the monument are klinkers, i.e. bricks that warped and cracked
during the firing process in the kiln and were rejected (like the two martyrs) as being
useless.
During the Great Depression, the
controversial radio priest. Father
Charles Coughlin, built a huge church in
Royal Oak, MI, a suburb of Detroit, for
the ostensible purpose of propagating
tolerance. He turned to a little known
firm in Brooklyn, McGill & Hamlin, to
design the work. After several earlier
schemes, the final scheme was agreed
upon in 1929 and went into construction
almost immediately.
The Shrine of St. Teresa of Lisieux was principally built with contributions of poor
people who listened to Fr. Coughlins radio sermons every Sunday on a huge
syndicated network that stretched from Kansas City to Bangor, Maine. Fr. Couglins
rhetoric was very powerful and he had thousands, if not a million supporters. His work
became very political and he was eventually silenced by the Archbishop of Detroit.
The main worship space of the Shrine
is octagonal, one of the first modern
uses of a centralized worship space
and forty years in advance of Vatican II,
the Roman Catholic reform council of
the 1960s that stressed the use of a
central altar rather than a wall-mounted
altar at the end of a long processional
axis.
The tower was the location of Fr.
Coughlins broadcasting studio, giving a
new meaning to the original drawing of
the light emanating from the tower at
night.
The Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd
Wright in NYC has been called by some
expressionistic. Its wide variance from the
standard footprint and organization coupled
with its unusual conceptual basis are
reasons for this label. Is it a building that is
expressionistic or is it a rational expression
that uses a geometric basis for form?
The Guggenheim from Fifth
Avenue with the Gwathmey-
Siegel addition behind it.
Some people would argue that the work of Santiago Calatrava is expressionistic.
The addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum is an example of a Calatrava design that
is arguably expressionistic in form and feeling.
THANK YOU
ASSIGNMENT
INDIVIDUAL
Please provide the difference of architectural elements and design of these Architectural Era:
Modern
Post-modern
Hi-tech
Please provide in report format and to be submitted by the end of the semester.
GROUP
Please do a study on Architects of these Era :
Le Corbusier: Concept and Idea (Functionalist Architecture)
Mies Van Der Rohe: Concept and Idea (Minimalist Architecture)
Frank Lloyd Wright: Concept and Idea (Organic Architecture)
Regional Modern Architecture: Contexts of East and America (Alvar Aalto, Jorn Utzon, Louis Kahn, Luis
Baragan ).
Regional Modern Architecture: Contexts of Asia (Tadao Ando, Geoffrey Bawa,
Charles Correa, Hassan Fathy).
Students are to produce a presentation on their studies in power point format and to present weekly
according to group starting in 3 weeks time.

GOOD LUCK