The Story of Architecture
Chapter 20: Designing for a New Society:
The International Style
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
2
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
3
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).
4
“Romanticism
and Modern
Architecture
in Scandinavia
and Britain”
by Alan
Powers
5
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
6
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
7
Le Corbusier, Ville Savoye
Poissy, France 1928-31
• An elevated white concrete
box cut open horizontally and
vertically; sometimes solid
and sometimes transparent
8
Le Corbusier, Ville Savoye
The pilotis frees
the ground;
the roof garden
recreates the
land lost below
9
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
10
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.
11
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
12
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
13
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”
14
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
15
Notre-Dame du Haut, Interior
16
Le Corbusier,
La Tourette,
near Lyons 1957
La Tourette became
the model for many
buildings in other
countries
St. Peter’s College
in Cardross,
Scotland 1964
now abandoned
Boston City Hall, Massachusetts
17
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
18
Le Corbusier, Legislative Assembly Building, Chandigarh,
Punjab, India 1956
.
19
Erich Mendelsohn,
Einstein Tower
Designed as an astronomical
laboratory, it enabled the
architect to make an expressive
statement about science in
flowing sculptural forms.
20
Erich Mendelsohn,
Einstein Tower,
Potsdam, near
Berlin, 1917-21
21
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.
22
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
23
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
24
1_http://architecture.about.com/od/20thcentur
ytrends/ig/Modern-Architecture/Bauhaus.htm
Workshop Wing, Bauhaus 1925
The Bauhaus emphasized the necessity for a rational
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
25
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 everchanging sequence of
solid and transparent.
26
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
27
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.
28
Mies van der Rohe,
German Pavilion
29
De Stijl (the Style), Netherlands
In 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
Utrecht
Need Mondrian
painting here
30
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 antibourgeois living but a poetic and engaging work of art.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/mar/20/architecture.communities1
31
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
32
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
Sunhouse, Hampstead
by Maxwell Fry 1936
Before going to the
U.S., Gropius worked
with Maxwell Fry. This
was one of the outstanding
examples of International Modern
before
WW2.
33
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
Tecton (Lubetkin’s firm)
Highpoint 1 and 2,
Highgate, London 1933-38
Tall, clean-lined and very
expensively finished in
reinforced concrete
34
The Royal Festival Hall,
by Robert Matthew
London 1951
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.
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.
35
London County Council,
Housing at Roehampton,
London 1952-5
Mixed Housing Development.
A mixture of slab and point blocks
of eleven storeys along with single-,
two- and four-storey blocks
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.
36
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
37
to be destroyed
Forest Crematorium, Stockholm by Gunnar Asplund, 1935-40
The International Style had been accepted in Scandinavia before WW2.
“The modernist way with
death was like no other.”
“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.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesig
n/2006/mar/20/architecture.communities1 38
Paimo Tuberculosis Sanatorium,
Finland 1929-33 by Alvar Aalto who
was a
The basic layout
of the building is
of three bars,
splayed out at
angles to one
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.
39
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
40
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
41
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.
42
Art Deco Chrysler Building,
New York by William Van Alen
1928-30
43
44
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.
45
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.
46
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.
47
•
Skidmore Owens Merrill, Lever House
Mies van der Rohe’s projects New York 1951-2
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.
48
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.
49
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 and
bronze 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)
50
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
51
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 alltoo-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
52
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
53
The Plaza of the Three Powers 1958-60
This complex defines the separate
functions of government in different
elementary geometric shapes. There is
something almost unreal about Senate
the pure geometry of Brasilia
Administrative
Offices
Assembly
54
Plaza of the Three Powers, Brasilia
The 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.
Administrative
Offices
Senate
Cathedral
Assembly
55
Felix Candela: Development of
the Hyperbolic Paraboloid (HP)
• The HP is a warped surface
generated by straight lines
economical to construct.
had a rare understanding of
three-dimensional geometry
and of the properties of
materials. He was influenced
by Antonio Gaudi.
which is
and can be
Candela
56
Felix Candela, Church of the
Miraculous Virgin, Mexico City 1954
Its structure consists of a series of folded
plates that are hyperbolic paraboloids
resting on dramatic twisted columns
http://mcis2.princeton.edu/ca
ndela/MilagrosaImages.html
57
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
58
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
59