Abstraction in
Early 20th Century
European Architecture
L’art nouveau
L’art nouveau or “the new art” swept Europe during the last
decade of the 19th century, lasting into the 20th century in
several locations. Almost every country in Europe had its own
term for this movement. The French and the Belgians called
it “L’art nouveau,” but the Germans called it “Judgendstil”
(style of Jugend) after the magazine of the same name while
the Austrians called is “Ze-Ze-Ze” after the “Sezession” (or
secession) of artists from the Vienna Academy of Art in protest
against the academic atmosphere there. The Italians called it
“Liberty” after the store Liberty of London; while the British
called it “Arts and Crafts”, a general term for resistance to
machine-made objects produced for everyday life.
In the majority of its manifestations, art nouveau was an effort
to accept new materials such as cast iron by casting them into
elegant, curvilinear forms based on vegetation: tendrils, plant
stems, buds and flowers, leaves, etc. In some cases, especially
in the Germanic countries, geometry played an important
role. In all cases, the forms were decorative and often used
structure as part of a decorative language that could be
applied to flat surfaces as well as to three-dimensional forms.
It is possible to argue that art nouveau was both an abstract
and a figural style: figural in that it drew on vegetation for
much of its ornamental qualities; abstract in its self-justifying
curvilinearity that often exceeded the notion of mere
representation.
Hector Guimard, house and studio,
Paris, 1909-10
Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow,
Scotland, 1895
Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
Glasgow School of Art,
1897-1909
Library wing, c. 1908
Futurism
Futurism was founded as a movement by Filippo Marinetti when
he published the Futurist Manifesto in 1909. The futurists
embraced the machine and industrial technology, calling for an
art of “violence, energy, and boldness” while dismissing all
traditional art as useless, out of date, and cultural deadweight.
The futurists were obsessed with movement and time (and most
especially speed). Their notion of modernism was centered on
science, new technology, and the destruction of the past in all
forms.
Umberto Boccioni, a futurist painter and sculptor,wrote his own
manifesto, in which he stated:
Everything moves, everything runs, everything turns
swiftly. The figure in front of us never is still, but
ceaselessly appears and disappears. Owing to the
Persistence of images on the retina, objects in
motion are multiplied and distorted, following
one another like waves through space. Thus a
galloping horse has not four legs; it has twenty,
and their movements are triangular.
These sorts of ideas can be perceived in Boccion’s work, such
as the painting The City Rises and in his sculptural works.
The statue called Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is well
known for its attempt to convey motion rather than position
only.
Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises, c1912
Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, c1913
Although there was no futurist architecture that was an exact
counterpart of futurist painting and sculpture, Antonio Sant’ Elia
provided a manifesto of futurist architecture to accompany an
exhibit of his drawings of the Citta Nuova or “new city” in
1914. It is assumed that Sant’ Elia wrote the manifesto with
Marinetti.
In it, he called for an architecture that would reinvent the city as
a “tumultuous shipyard, active, mobile, and everywhere
dynamic.” He envisioned tall buildings without stairways but
with elevators that would “swarm up the facades like serpents of
glass and iron.” He envisioned no conventional street, but a
street that would “plunge storeys deep into the earth, gathering
up the traffic of the metropolis, connected for necessary
transfers to metal catwalks and high-speed conveyor belts.”
Much of Sant’ Elia’s drawings suggest new building types such
as power stations, airports, airship hangars, multi-level stations,
and stepped apartment buildings. The futuristic qualities of the
drawings may have been inspired by 19th-century warehouses
and engineering accomplishments as well as by photographs of
New York City and its dense architectural massing at the turn of
the twentieth century.
However, futurist architecture asserted that “’real architecture’
transcends functionalism by being ‘synthesis and expression’;
with the suggestion that inspiration be found in ‘the new
mechanical world we have created, of which architecture must
be the fairest expression, the fullest synthesis, the most effective
artistic integration.”
Milan Railway Terminal
Constructivist Architecture
Post-revolutionary Russia was the social and cultural as well as
artistic context for contructivist architecture. Eschewing all
traditional or inherited forms, constructvists sought to produce an
architeture that was the equivalent of the social revolution that was
taking place.
Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-20),
for example, makes use of radical ideas never employed in largescale architecture before: assemblage, suspension, movement, and
asymmetrical composition based on a structural double helix.
Although never built for a variety of reasons, the form seems to
have been inspired by oil derricks, fairground constructions, and
futurist images. Yet, it may also be an emblem of Marxist
ideology and its principles of historic process of thesis, antithesis
and synthesis.
Konstantin Melnikov, Rusakov Workers Club, c 1927-28
Ivan Leonidov,
Commissaviat, c1927