ARCHITECTURE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

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1 ABSTRACT EXPPRESSIONISM SURREALISM CONSTRUCTIVISM PRECISIONISM EXPRESSIONISM LATE CUBISM FUTURISM HIGH CUBISM FAUVISM EARLY CUBISM ARCHITECTURE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Mies in USA Week 12.2 WORLD HISTORY ART HISTORY ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY Wrights flight airplane Machintosh builds Hill House 1903 announces relativity theory 1905 Einstein First Fauve exhibit, Die Brücke founded Earthquake shakes San Francisco 1906 Gaudi starts building Casa Mila 1907 Brancusi carves first abstract sculpture 1908 Picasso and Braque found Cubism Ash Can painters introduced realism Wright invents Prairie House 1910 Kandinsky paints first abstract canvas Adolf Loos builds Steiner house Der Blaue Reiter formed Henry Ford develops assembly line 1913 Armory Show shakes up American art World War I declared Dada begins Lenin leads Russian revolution 1917 De Stijl founded 1918 Bauhaus formed 1920s Mexican muralists active U.S. Women win vote 1920 Soviets suppress Constructivism Hitler writes Mein Kampf 1924 Surrealists issue manifesto Gropius builds Bauhaus in Dessau Lindbergh flies solo across Atlantic 1927 Buckminister Fuller designs Dymaxian House Fleming discovers penicillin 1928 Stock Market crashes 1929 Le Corbusier s Villa Savoy sets style for Modernism 1930s Empire State Building opens American scene painters popular, Social Realists paint political art 1933 FDR becomes President Commercial television begins 1939 U.S: enters WWII 1941 First digital computer developed 1944 Pope s National Gallery is last major Classical building in U.S. Hiroshima hit with atom bomb 1945 Dubuffet coins term L Art Brut Mahatma Gandhi assasinated, Israel founded 1948 People s Republic of China founded 1949 Oral Contraceptive invented 1950 Abstract expressionism recognized 1952 Harold Rosenberg coins term Action Painting DNA structure discovered, Mt. Everest scaled 1953 Supreme Court outlaws segregation 1954 Salk invents polio vaccine 1955 Elvis sings rock n roll 1956 Wright builds Guggenheim 1

2 moma.org Mies after USA In 1938 Mies van der Rohe settled in Chicago and took up an appointment as Director of the Architecture Department of Armour Institute, which in 1940 became the College of Architecture, Planning and Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. He also re-established his architectural practice and for the next 20 years he divided his time between it and his teaching duties. Mıes s first high-rise building...the design principles first expressed in Lake Shore Drive were copied extensively, and are now considered characteristic of the modern International Style. The towers were not entirely admired at the time they were built, yet they went on to be the prototype for steel and glass skyscrapers worldwide Lake Shore Drive Apartments embody a Modernistic tone with their verticality, grids of steel and glass curtain walls (a hallmark of Mies skyscrapers), and complete lack of ornamentation. Since Mies was a master of minimalist composition, his principle was less is more as it is demonstrated in his self-proclaimed skin and bones architecture Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, Illinois,

3 moma.org moma.org These buildings show clearly Mies van der Rohe s development and refinement of a structural aesthetic based on an open flexible plan. I n contrast to many of his contemporaries, Mies van der Rohe profoundly questioned the concept form follows function because he recognized that functional requirements often change. He believed that building solutions should allow for an optimum degree of flexibility in order to accommodate economically the frequent need to revise the arrangement of living and working spaces. Thus, within a concept of overall size and complexity of function taken in generalized terms, he chose to develop and work within three building types: the low-rise skeleton frame building, the high-rise skeleton frame building, and the single-storey clearspan building. In all these types those functions not requiring daylight, such as lecture theatres and law courtrooms, and the fixed core accommodating lifts, stairs, toilets and service ducts, are located within the interior spaces of the plan, leaving the peripheral areas available for the flexible arrangement of classrooms, workshops, laboratories, offices, flats or exhibition spaces as the particular building s function required. Seagram Building 1958 reinforced concrete structural frame or fireproofed steel structural frame 3

4 Following a number of unrealized projects, the first built example of Mies van der Rohe s single-storey clear-span building was the Farnsworth House, Plano, IL one of the best-known houses of the 20th century. The house, which is raised above the ground against the Fox River s spring flooding, comprises a classically proportioned and finely crafted white steel structure with rectangular floor and roof planes cantilevering beyond externally positioned I section columns the space between being subdivided into interior and exterior living areas. Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, The house has a distinctly independent personality, yet also evokes strong feelings of a connection to the land. The levels of the platforms restate the multiple levels of the site, in a kind of poetic architectural rhyme, not unlike the horizontal balconies and rocks do at Wright's Fallingwater. **** The house is anchored to the site in the cooling shadow of a large and majestic black maple tree. As Mies often did, the entrance is located on the sunny side, facing the river instead of the street, moving visitors around corners and revealing views of the house and site from various angles as they approach the front door. The simple elongated cubic form of the house is parallel to the flow of the river, and the terrace platform is slipped downstream in relation to the elevated porch and living platform. Outdoor living spaces are extensions of the indoor space, with a screened porch (screens now gone) and open terrace. Yet the man made always remains clearly distinct from the natural by its geometric forms, highlighted by the choice of white as its primary color. 4

5 Reconnecting the individual with nature is one of the great challenges of an urbanized society. The 60-acre (240,000 m2) rural site offered Mies an opportunity to bring man's relationship to nature into the forefront. Here he highlights the individual's connection to nature through the medium of a man-made shelter. Mies said: "We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and the human being to a higher unity". Glass walls and open interior space are the features that create an intense connection with the outdoor environment, while the exposed structure provides a framework that reduces opaque exterior walls to a minimum. The careful site design and integration of the exterior environment represents a concerted effort to achieve an architecture wedded to its natural context. Mies conceived the building as an indooroutdoor architectural shelter simultaneously independent of and intertwined with the domain of nature. In the interior area (enclosed by large sheets of plate-glass and paved with Roman Travertine marble), living, sleeping and kitchen spaces are subtly defined around a free-standing wood-panelled core housing bathrooms and services. The exterior area, also paved with Travertine, forms a protected terrace, and this is connected by a flight of steps to a lower open floating terrace and similar steps to the ground. There is no suggestion of a contrived (zoraki) formal relationship between the house and its natural surroundings, and the building s occurrence in the landscape would seem almost fortuitous (şans eseri) were it not for the harmony achieved between it and the terrain. Its independence of, and at the same time interdependence with, its surroundings creates a convincing and moving image in a technological era and is prophetic of the handling of the relationships of buildings to context in many future projects. 5

6 As a microcosm of the mature work of Mies van der Rohe the Farnsworth House has all the elements of the developed clear-span single-storey building type as exemplified by the larger Crown Hall (College of Architecture, ) at IIT and the new Nationalgalerie (1962 8), Tiergarten, Berlin. The former has a rectangular steel roof structure carried by external steel plate girder (putrel/ kiriş) portal frames; the latter has a square steel roof structure supported in a cantilevered manner by eight peripherally located steel cruciform columns. Centrally located on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, four miles south of downtown Chicago, Illinois, the building houses the architecture school: The two level building is configured as a pure rectangular form, enclosing a column free interior space on the upper level sitting above a sunken lower level. The roof is supported by exposed steel columns supporting exterior steel girders (putrel/ kiriş) visible above the roof. Crown Hall is characterized by an aesthetic of industrial simplicity, with clearly articulated exposed steel frame construction. The steel frame is infilled with large sheets of glass of varying qualities of transparency, resulting in a light and delicate steel and glass facade wrapping (covering) the open plan, free flowing interior of the upper level. While the lower level consists of compartmentalized rooms, the high upper floor level, occupying almost 50% of the total area of the building, is dedicated to a single glass-enclosed architecture studio space. Mies called it a "universal space", intended to be entirely flexible in use. 6

7 Moma.org In many of Mies van der Rohe s buildings his introduction of externally projecting steel, aluminium or bronze I -shaped mullions, the projection of structure is said to be a modern interpretation of the Greek, Roman and Gothic principle of manifest structural order. As in classical buildings, Mies s designs stands out with a greater perfection succeeded by subtle improvements in proportion and detailing rather than by radical changes in overall expression. This is what we called an immediately recognizable Miesian look. Because Mies van der Rohe developed his concept of architecture in a logical manner from one building to another, his work as a whole is endowed with a unity of purpose and expression. Regardless of magnitude (büyüklük) or function the works belong together as a coherent group and speak with a single architectural language. This consanguinity (kandaşlık) is due to a number of factors: structural systems have been selected in accordance with the overall requirements of the building s functions, and their components are revealed, either actually or symbolically: non-load-bearing external skins and interior space-defining divisions are articulated separately from stressed members, leaving no doubt as to what is structural and what is not; materials, whether natural or industrially produced, are used in such a way as to acknowledge the nature of each; visible modules represent subdivisions of the structural bays in relation to function and provide a tool for internal planning and a practical inducement to flexibility in use; careful and thorough detailing exemplifies to the user the visual refinement called for in the further division of space; subtle proportions result from visual judgments, not systems; provisions are made for expressive response to changing conditions of light and weather. In Mies van der Rohe s hands the critical interaction between building function, construction and structure, which is at the heart of architecture, frequently touched true poetic expression. 7

8 One cannot deny Mies s influence on the architects practising after World War II. He believed architecture to be a historical process, and that in consequence architects should recognize relationships between the significant facts of their own epoch and the ideas that are capable of guiding these facts in a direction beneficial to society in general. In his own work he tried to reach a practical synthesis of this ideal with the disciplines set by the principle of structure: he tried to evolve a truly contemporary language for architecture, a language that comes from the past yet is open to the future. 8