The Story of Architecture

Chapter 20: Designing for a New Society: The International Style

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Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM)

(or International Congress of Modern Architecture)

• organized in 1928 by Le Corbusier; lasted until 1959; a series of international conferences of modern architects

• “Saw architecture as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning.”1

• The ideology of modern architecture has insisted upon its universal and international character – derived both from its exploitation of industrial methods of construction, and from its embrace of the new social patterns of an industrialized society ... “a mass culture of production, consumption and communication.”

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congr%C3%A8s_International_d%27Architecture_Moderne

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1st International Exhibition of Modern Architecture

at the Museum of Modern Art, New York• It has come to represent the mainstream of modern

architecture from the 1920s to the end of the 1950s and possibly the 1970s

• “a single body of discipline, fixed enough to integrate contemporary style as a reality yet elastic enough to permit individual interpretation ... 1st, a new conception of architecture as volume rather than mass; 2nd, regularity rather than axial symmetry as the chief means of ordering design”1

1 Nuttgens, p266 quoting the book produced for the exhibition

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CIAM Internationalism led

to Brutalism in England & Structuralism in Holland

• “Western conceptions of architecture, beginning with the ancient world, have embedded in them a tension between universalism and localism. Since the Renaissance rediscovery of Vitruvius, Western architects have conceived of classicism as a unified set of elements, with the orders as the grammar of this ‘classical language.’” See John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: 1963).

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“Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Scandinavia and Britain” by Alan Powers

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Architecture: creating a brave new world

• Disruption of Europe’s internal order:– World War I ; the Russian Revolution of 1917; the

rise of authoritarian socialist and fascist states; the Depression; and finally World War II

• Architects and planners saw themselves as part of a social revolution where “efficacious production is derived from rationalization and standardization”; where architecture and they, as designers, took part in the creation of a new society; housing for the ordinary man and woman

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Charles-Edouard Jeanneret: Le Corbusier

• The pervasive influence of the movement, he was wrote a stream of ideas about architecture and town planning in his book, Towards a New Architecture: ‘the five points of architecture’– free-standing supports (pilotis)– the roof garden– the free plan– the ribbon window and – the freely composed façade

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Le Corbusier, Ville Savoye Poissy, France 1928-31

• An elevated white concrete box cut open horizontally and vertically; sometimes solid and sometimes transparent

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Le Corbusier, Ville Savoye

The pilotis frees the ground; the roof garden recreates the land lost below

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Le Corbusier, Dom-ino House, 1914

• A frame consisting of two concrete slabs kept apart by columns and linked only by an open stair. Plan is independent of the structure. The walls and windows can be put anywhere. – Historically, the walls held up the floors and the roof.

This affected the whole future of architecture.

A simple but profoundly influential diagram

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Le Corbusier, Modulor Man

• Renaissance architects had worked out a system of proportions, a working set of dimensions.

• The Modulor was a scale of architectural proportions based on the human body and the golden section, that was flexible and provided a whole range of usable dimensions related to the human body and to each other to provide a precise formula for satisfactory proportions.

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Le Corbusier, Pavillon Suisse, Cité Universitaire, Paris 1930-32

· Used pilotis and ribbon windows.

• Introduced the idea of a hierarchy of functions: bedrooms on slabs above ground; communal areas at ground level that flow freely enclosed by a wall of random stonework

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Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles 1946-52

• 337 split-level apartments in 23 types on 18 floors with massive pilotis showing timber formwork; a 3rd of the way up is a two-storey shopping mall

• Wide Corridors lead to apartments that have internal stairs

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Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation• The roof garden is a fantastic landscape with a

gymnasium, a running track, a nursery school, a swimming pool, a restaurant, seats, tunnels and caves for children to play in draped around huge tapering funnels to catch the wind.

“the house is a machine for living in”

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Le Corbusier, Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp 1950-55

A visual echo of the landscape and a study in light. The plan was based on a mathematically proportioned Modulor grid incised in the floor

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Notre-Dame du Haut, Interior

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Le Corbusier, La Tourette, near

Lyons 1957

La Tourette became the model for many buildings in other countries

Boston City Hall, Massachusetts

St. Peter’s College in Cardross, Scotland 1964 now abandoned

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Le Corbusier, Legislative Assembly Building,

Chandigarh, India 1956• Truncated cooling tower

[“swamp cooling”] in raw concrete; gargantuan umbrella of shallow vaults; monolithic ‘brise-soleil’ allowing passage of breezes but providing sun shelter

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Le Corbusier, Legislative Assembly Building, Chandigarh, Punjab, India 1956 .

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Designed as an astronomical laboratory, it enabled the architect to make an expressive statement about science in flowing sculptural forms.

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Erich Mendelsohn, Einstein Tower, Potsdam, near Berlin, 1917-21

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Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, Fagus Factory, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany 1911-12

They interpreted the walls as a smooth glass and steel membrane barely interrupted by structural piers.

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Bauhaus, Weimar 1919-25 Dessau 1925-33, Germany Founded by Gropius, it had the most far reaching effects upon architectural education especially in the U.S.

It insisted on the fundamental unity underlying all branches of design

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Bauhaus is a German expression meaning house for building.

• “In 1919, the economy in Germany was collapsing after a crushing war. Architect Walter Gropius was appointed to head a new institution, The Bauhaus, that would help rebuild the country and form a new social order.

• The Institution called for new "rational" social housing for the workers. Bauhaus architects rejected "bourgeois" details such as cornices, eaves, and decorative details. They wanted to use principles of Classical architecture in their most pure form: without ornamentation of any kind.”1 1_http://architecture.about.com/od/20thcenturytrends/ig/Modern-Architecture/Bauhaus.htm

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and systematic analysis as the start of any programme for building. “Bauhaus buildings have flat roofs, smooth facades, and cubic shapes. Colors are white, gray, beige, or black. Floor plans are open and furniture is functional.”1

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BauHaus• The buildings for the Bauhaus demonstrated

these principles and were composed of simple elemental shapes, articulated according to their function, arranged on a pin-wheel plan with

glass corners,

presenting an ever-changing sequence of

solid and transparent.

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The influence of one of the BauHaus’ teachers, Mies van der Rohe, was world-wide.

The Weissenhofsiedlung was one of the pioneer terraces of flat-roofed housing which had a crucial effect on the development of domestic architecture.

1927 Stuttgart

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Mies van der Rohe, German Pavilion,

Barcelona, Spain 1929

The most pure and elemental example of the free plan under a flat roof, which influenced architects everywhere.

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Mies van der Rohe, German Pavilion

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De Stijl (the Style), NetherlandsIn 1917, a group of artists and architects, were inspired by artist Mondrian who used interlocking geometric forms, smooth surfaces and primary colours.

The Schröder House, by Gerrit Rietveld, is a cubist construction, an abstract sculpture of smooth planes at right-angles, articulated by primary colours. Inside, the walls slide away to make a large uninterrupted space. 1923-4

UtrechtNeed Mondrian

painting here

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Rietveld Schröder House Gerrit Rietveld 1923-24

“Modernism was an adventure in self-discovery. This house was commissioned by Truus Schröder, the radical young widow of a conventional middle-class Dutch lawyer, who wanted a design to express her new-found freedom. Her architect and lover, Gerrit Rietveld, was a member of the avant garde group De Stijl. The Schröder house is an immaculate cubist construction of lines, planes and strong primary colours, rising on its urban site like a three-dimensional version of a painting by Piet Mondrian. The first time I saw the Rietveld Schröder House, I keeled over and broke an ankle in excitement. It is not a sterile exercise in anti-bourgeois living but a poetic and engaging work of art.”http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/mar/20/architecture.communities1

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Willem Dudok, Town Hall, Hilversum, Netherlands 1927-31

A dignified civic building in brick, deceptively simple appearance. This blend of the conservative and radical, influenced British architects

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High and Over, Amersham by Amyas

Connell 1929-30

He learned about the work of Le Corbusier in the British School in Rome and designed this house to the great disgust of the local residents

Before going to the U.S., Gropius worked with Maxwell Fry. This was one of the outstanding examples of International Modern before

WW2.

Sunhouse, Hampstead by Maxwell Fry 1936

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Penguin Pool, London Zoo by Berthold Lubetkin 1934

He made the most dramatic impact with his astonishingly simple spirals of concrete descending to the water

Tall, clean-lined and very expensively finished in reinforced concrete

Tecton (Lubetkin’s firm) Highpoint 1 and 2, Highgate, London 1933-38

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The Royal Festival Hall, by Robert Matthew

London 1951

First, it was the first public building in England in the new style. Second, it had a magnificent sequence of flowing interior spaces wholly characteristic of the Modern Movement; and third, it was the first building comprehensively to demonstrate the application of advanced acoustics.

The leaders in the use the International Style after the second World War was by public architect’s offices. This was a key building in three ways.

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London County Council, Housing at Roehampton,

London 1952-5

It became internationally famous, and was a modification of Le Corbusier’s theories fused with lessons learned from Scandinavia. In its day, it seemed a heroic image of a post-war society housed on a massive scale. Today, the estate looks less attractive given the inadequacies of high-rise living.

Mixed Housing Development. A mixture of slab and point blocks of eleven storeys along with single-, two- and four-storey blocks

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Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex, Saint Louis, Missouri

By contrast, this housing complex was a demonstration

of the highest ideal of modern architecture in the service of social engineering that had to be destroyed

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Forest Crematorium, Stockholm by Gunnar Asplund, 1935-40 The International Style had been accepted in Scandinavia before WW2.

“Asplund's Woodland Crematorium on the outer edge of Stockholm is a cubist abstract assemblage of rectangular low buildings. There is that deep green forest in the background. You walk towards the crematorium up a gentle hillside bordered by a low white wall, arriving in a great white polished marble loggia, a rectilinear building of purist dignity. The bodies slide into the cremation ovens through expressionist arches like the entrance to a cavern.

A big flight of steps leads the mourners upwards to the "meditation grove" set on a grassy knoll. The spirit of the place is both primitive and rational. was like no other.”

“The modernist way with death was like no other.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/mar/20/architecture.communities1

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Paimo Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Finland 1929-33 by Alvar Aalto who was a public figure and national hero

and who combined romance with technology. His buildings

are both practical and intensely personal.

another and connected at the center. The first bar contained patient housing and nursing facilities, the second a cafeteria, and

the third services.

The basic layout of the building is of three bars, splayed out at angles to one

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Alvar Aalto, Paimo Sanatorium

• “Paimio’s design stands apart from that of many other medical institutions due to Aalto’s attention to detail and his considerations of how the space would be used by its occupants. This is one of the first examples of environments being shaped by the user, architects and planners for years to come will use this technique to create environments which the user can react to, spend time in and most importantly feel comfortable in.”

http://sparkitecture.blogspot.com/2009/05/paimio-tuberculosis-sanitorium-alvar.html

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Alvar Aalto, Civic Centre, Säynätsalo 1950-52

A small collection of pitched-roof buildings in

red brick, wood and copper with all the spaces .

grouped around a raised green courtyard in a picturesque composition

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Lovell Beach House, Newport Beach, California 1925-26 by Rudolf Schindler

The U.S., with its remarkable lack of public control and lots of available money, provided the opportunity for spectacular achievements in the modern movement.

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Art Deco Chrysler Building, New York by William Van Alen

1928-30

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Rockefeller Center, New York by Reinhard and Hofmeister 1930-40

A group of office and leisure building on a 12-acre site that is a stylish composition that exploits the lines and planes of vertical movement.

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Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1937-8

Gropius and Marcel Breuer brought the tenets of the BauHaus to the U.S. in this modest house.

Applying American timber building techniques to the massing of European Modern.

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Philip Johnson, Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut 1949

• Johnson took up Mies’s themes of steel and glass in his BauHaus project for an exquisite group of buildings which are a rigorous exercise in transparency, using the outside view as the walls.

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Skidmore Owens Merrill, Lever House New York 1951-2• Mies van der Rohe’s projects

for glass skyscrapers in 1923 saw their first actual realization in Lever House which became the model for tall buildings: curtain wall of blue-green glass in light steel sections wrapped around the main structure, the technology of the services, and the basic arrangement of a tall, thin slab above a low podium containing the entrances and larger social areas.

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Mies van der Rohe 1951

Lake Shore Drive, Chicago

The 16-storey blocks have an exacting discipline, extended to the tenants, who have to keep their standard-coloured blinds in the right position so the elevation looks properly ordered.

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Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building, New York 1954-8

The Seagram building was set back from the street for a full view of the 38-storey block, and to create a new civic space. It was an advance on

the Lever building with brown glass andbronze surface beams, monumental in some of its detail and rich in its finishing materials. It was difficult to see what more could be done in the way of refinements and the next generation began to look for something more personal(Nuttgens, p282)

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Ministry of Education Building, Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, (+Le Corbusier), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1936-43

As a design consultant, Le Corbusier used one of his typically influential designs, brise-soleil screen shading the glass wall with a system of movable sun-shade louvers. The building is elevated 3 feet above the sidewalk on pilotis; has a roof garden, and mural on end wall.

After WW2, Brazil exploded in a stunning architecture of its own

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Lucio Costa won the 1957 competition for the design of Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia

“... Sometimes the "invisible hands“ that passively grow livable cities are smacked aside and the all- too-visible hands of planners manufacture urban horrors like

Brasilia. The capital was designed in the shape of an airplane because the then-president

thought airplanes symbolized modernity. In the design, the Congress, the Presidential Palace, and the Cathedral are all near the "cockpit" and the military headquarters are consigned to the "tail." The residents get to live in "superblocks" in the "wings."

http://reason.com/blog/2009/09/04/ant-hills-brains-cities

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Oscar Niemeyer, 1957 President’s Palace, Brasilia, It’s a pretentious version of a house on pilotis, which expresses his

flamboyant personality and something

of Brazil’s pride in its new capital

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The Plaza of the Three Powers 1958-60This complex defines the separate functions of government in different elementary geometric shapes. There is something almost unreal about the pure geometry of Brasilia

Assembly

Administrative Offices

Senate

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Plaza of the Three Powers, BrasiliaThe three smooth basic solids hold the power of Boullée’s visionary geometric schemes. The twin towers house the administrative offices, the dome holds the Senate Chamber and the saucer the Assembly Hall. Brasilia is generally unpopular nowadays – an architect’s dream, it is said, that paid little attention to the needs of the people.

Cathedral

AssemblySenate

Administrative Offices

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Felix Candela: Development of the Hyperbolic Paraboloid (HP)

• The HP is a warped surface which is generated by straight lines and can be economical to construct. Candela had a rare understanding of three-dimensional geometry and of the properties of materials. He was influenced by Antonio Gaudi.

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Felix Candela, Church of the Miraculous Virgin, Mexico City 1954Its structure consists of a series of folded plates that are hyperbolic paraboloids resting on dramatic twisted columns

http://mcis2.princeton.edu/candela/MilagrosaImages.html

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Designing for a New Society: The International Style

• International Modernism was based on a number of fundamental fallacies:– Function in architecture was simple and could be

as easily analyzed as in an industrial process– Ambiguity, surprise and delight were disregarded

as irrelevant– Circulation as a primary social function was

undervalued– Insistence on a direct relationship between

function and beauty

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Designing for a New Society: The International Style

• International Modernism failed in significant ways: – As an iconoclastic image of the modern age– Rooted in ideas that had nothing to do with

architecture– Notion that lean and maximum efficiency was

always best