LESSON 7.5 — Modern Architecture (1850–1960)

A. Standard Map

B. Mechanism in Words

1. Industrial Revolution creates the problem (c. 1850): Mass production degrades craftsmanship; new materials (iron, steel, glass, concrete) have no established architectural language; cities are functionally efficient but aesthetically incoherent
2. Arts and Crafts reacts (c. 1860): Ruskin and Morris argue that machine production is morally degrading; the response is the hand-made object, truth to materials, building integrated with landscape — a reform movement, not a technical one
3. Art Nouveau exploits the new materials expressively (c. 1890): Iron and glass are shown to be capable of organic, fluid form; the solution to industrial ugliness is not pre-industrial craft but a new organic aesthetic derived from nature using industrial means
4. Chicago School solves the tall-building problem structurally (c. 1880): Steel frame + elevator = the skyscraper; Sullivan argues that the building’s outer form must express its inner structural logic — function determines form
5. European avant-garde abstracts form to first principles (c. 1917–1933): De Stijl reduces architecture to orthogonal planes and primary colours; Bauhaus integrates art, craft, and industrial production in a new educational model; both strip architecture to its elemental spatial logic
6. International Style universalises the solution (c. 1920s–1960s): Le Corbusier’s 5 points and Mies’s structural purity provide a global template; Hitchcock and Johnson’s 1932 MoMA exhibition names and canonises it; the solution is replicable everywhere — which becomes its weakness
7. Wright resists universality throughout (c. 1900–1959): Organic architecture insists that every building must grow from its specific site, climate, and programme; horizontality instead of verticality; continuous space instead of discrete rooms; natural materials instead of industrial surfaces

C. Core Concept Explanations

C1. Arts and Crafts Movement (c. 1860–1910)

Intellectual Trigger

The Industrial Revolution produced two architectural problems simultaneously: machine manufacture could produce goods in quantities and at speeds unimaginable before, but the moral and aesthetic quality of those goods appeared to be collapsing. John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) provided the theoretical argument: the health of a society’s architecture reflects the conditions under which it was made. Gothic architecture was noble precisely because it preserved the freedom and individuality of the craftsman; machine production eliminated that freedom and produced, in Ruskin’s view, objects without soul. William Morris translated this argument into a practice: his firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. (founded 1861) produced textiles, wallpaper, stained glass, and furniture using traditional hand methods, rejecting machine production as a matter of principle.

Core Design Positions:

Key Figures and Works:

Arts and Crafts → Bauhaus Connection:

The Bauhaus directly inherited Arts and Crafts’ insistence on the dignity of making — its founder Gropius acknowledged Morris as a precursor. The critical difference: the Bauhaus embraced industrial production as the means to achieve the Arts and Crafts’ social goals (good design for everyone), while Morris rejected the machine as incompatible with those goals. The two movements share the diagnosis but prescribe opposite remedies.

Source: Pevsner, N. (1936/2005). Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. Yale University Press; Naylor, G. (1971). The Arts and Crafts Movement. Studio Vista.

C2. Art Nouveau (c. 1890–1910)

Trigger and Position

Art Nouveau rejected both the historical eclecticism of the nineteenth century and the moral austerity of Arts and Crafts, proposing a third path: an architecture derived from natural, organic forms — plant tendrils, insect wings, flowing water — executed in industrial materials (iron, glass) that had been liberated from their association with utilitarian engineering. The movement’s argument was that iron and glass were not inherently ugly; they were ugly only when forced into imitative classical or Gothic forms. Allowed to follow their own structural logic and shaped by a designer who drew from natural rather than historical models, these materials could produce an architecture of remarkable beauty.

Design Language:

Key Figures and Works:

Gaudí’s Structural Method — Catenary Models

Gaudí developed a design method using hanging chain models (funicular models): flexible chains hung from fixed points naturally assume the shape of a catenary — the form that places every element in pure tension. When this form is inverted, every element is in pure compression. Gaudí used this principle to design arches and vaulted spaces where every element is in compression, with no tensile bending stresses — a structurally ideal masonry system. His models for the Colònia Güell crypt (1898–1914) used weighted strings and mirrors to design a complex three-dimensional structure entirely in compression, without any formal structural analysis.

Source: Curtis, W.J.R. (1996). Modern Architecture Since 1900. 3rd ed. Phaidon.

C3. Chicago School (c. 1880–1910)

Trigger: The Great Chicago Fire and the Commercial Programme

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of the city’s downtown. The rebuilding coincided with rapidly rising land values, the availability of cheap Bessemer-process steel from Great Lakes mills, and the development of the safe passenger elevator by Elisha Otis (1852). These three conditions — cleared land, available structural material, vertical transport — enabled the tall commercial office building: a building type that had never existed before.

The Technical Revolution: Steel Frame + Curtain Wall + Elevator

Key Buildings and Architects:

Louis Sullivan and “Form Follows Function”

Sullivan’s 1896 essay “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine contains the famous dictum: “Form ever follows function.” (The word ever is almost always omitted in quotation, slightly altering the meaning.) Sullivan’s argument:

• The tall office building has a clear programmatic logic: commercial ground floor (shops, entrances); repeated identical office floors (the shaft); mechanical and services floor at top (the capital)
• This internal organisation should determine the building’s external form — as naturally as the form of a tree or an eagle is determined by what that organism does
• Applied historical ornament (Gothic arches, classical pilasters) bears no relationship to the building’s function and is therefore dishonest
• Sullivan did not mean ornament should be eliminated — his own buildings are densely ornamented; he meant ornament should arise from the building’s structural-functional logic, not be borrowed from another building type in another era

Tripartite Skyscraper Composition:

CAPITAL    ─── Top floor (mechanical, cornice)
SHAFT      ─── Repeated identical floors (office)
           ─── Repeated identical floors (office)
           ─── Repeated identical floors (office)
BASE       ─── Ground + mezzanine (shops, entrances)

This three-part composition is Sullivan’s analogy to the classical column — base, shaft, capital — applied to the tall building.

Source: Sullivan, L.H. (1896). “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; Frampton, K. (2007). Modern Architecture: A Critical History. 4th ed. Thames & Hudson.

C4. De Stijl (1917–1931)

Trigger and Manifesto

De Stijl (“The Style”) was founded in the Netherlands in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg (painter-theorist), alongside painter Piet Mondrian and architect J.J.P. Oud, through a journal also called De Stijl. The movement’s programme was to reduce all visual art and architecture to their most elemental components — the straight line, the right angle, and primary colours (red, yellow, blue) plus non-colours (black, white, grey) — as a way of creating a universal, internationally valid visual language stripped of all national, historical, and decorative associations.

This was an idealist project: Van Doesburg believed that if art achieved perfect abstraction — pure relationship of line, plane, and colour — it could express universal spiritual and rational truths. Architecture was the logical endpoint: the building that fully realised De Stijl principles would be an inhabited abstract composition.

Design Principles:

The Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht (1924)

Architect: Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964). Client: Truus Schröder-Schräder.

The Rietveld Schröder House is the only built building that fully realises the De Stijl programme in three dimensions:

Source: Frampton, K. (2007). Modern Architecture: A Critical History. Thames & Hudson; Overy, P. (1991). De Stijl. Thames & Hudson.

C5. Bauhaus (1919–1933)

Foundation and Context

The Staatliches Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, from the merger of the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. Its founding manifesto declared: “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is building.” The school sought to reunite the fine and applied arts under the roof of architecture — ending the nineteenth-century split between art (conceived as a spiritual activity untouched by commerce) and craft (conceived as manual labour beneath the dignity of the artist).

The Problem the Bauhaus Addressed

Arts and Crafts had correctly diagnosed that industrialisation was producing ugly, dehumanising objects. But its prescription — return to hand production — was economically impossible at the scale the modern world required. The Bauhaus’s answer: teach artists and designers to think through making, so that the forms they create are genuinely resolved to their material and constructional logic; then apply those resolved forms to industrial production. Good design need not be expensive or handmade; it can be produced by machines if the form itself is honest.

Pedagogical Structure:

Key Bauhaus Masters:

The Bauhaus Building, Dessau (1925–26) — Gropius

Bauhaus Diaspora (post-1933):

When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, its faculty scattered globally, distributing the school’s methods into new institutions:

Source: Gropius, W. (1935). The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Faber & Faber; Droste, M. (1990). Bauhaus. Taschen.

C6. International Style and Mies van der Rohe

Naming and Canonisation

The term International Style was coined by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson for the 1932 exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and its companion publication The International Style: Architecture Since 1922. The exhibition identified a formal vocabulary shared by architects in Europe and America that constituted, in Hitchcock and Johnson’s view, a new universal style — not a national style, not a period style, but an international one applicable anywhere.

Three Formal Principles (Hitchcock and Johnson, 1932):

Le Corbusier’s Five Points (1927)

Le Corbusier published his five points (cinq points d’une architecture nouvelle) in Towards a New Architecture (1923) and in the journal L’Esprit Nouveau. They are derived from the structural properties of the reinforced concrete pilotis-and-slab system and constitute both a technical manifesto and a design methodology:

Villa Savoye, Poissy (1929–31) — the canonical demonstration of all five points:

The Villa Savoye also demonstrates Le Corbusier’s concept of the promenade architecturale — the building is experienced as a sequential journey from car arrival, through the entry, up the internal ramp, through the first-floor living, up again to the roof terrace — a continuous spatial narrative from ground to sky.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — “Less Is More”

Mies’s architectural philosophy pursued the opposite of Baroque accumulation: reduction to the essential structural and spatial condition. “Less is more” — attributed to Mies — encapsulates this: by removing everything non-essential, the inherent qualities of structure, material, and proportion become more powerfully manifest.

Source: Hitchcock, H-R. & Johnson, P. (1932). The International Style. Norton; Le Corbusier. (1923/1927). Towards a New Architecture. Architectural Press.

C7. Organic Architecture — Frank Lloyd Wright

Position and Context

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) worked through seven decades and remained resolutely outside the European Modernist mainstream. He had trained under Louis Sullivan (absorbing the “form follows function” ethic) and developed his own theory of organic architecture: the idea that buildings should grow from their specific site, climate, and programme as naturally as a plant grows from its soil — not by following a universal stylistic template. This put Wright in direct opposition to the International Style’s claim to universality.

Wright’s Three Formative Influences: Japanese architecture (openness, the plan as flow, the roof as dominant horizontal plane); the horizontality of the Midwestern prairie; and Sullivan’s structural honesty — all of which reinforced each other in producing an architecture that was simultaneously of its place and of radical spatial originality.

Prairie Houses (c. 1900–1910)

The Prairie house is Wright’s first fully resolved spatial type, developed through dozens of commissions in Oak Park and the Chicago suburbs:

Robie House, Chicago (1908–10) — Canonical Prairie House:

• Cantilevered roof planes extending 1.8 m beyond the walls — unprecedented at the time
• Plan: two primary horizontal bands (living-dining on upper; billiard-children below) centred on the chimney mass
• Ribbon art-glass windows defining horizontal boundaries
• No fence — the low walls and plantings continue the building’s horizontal logic into the landscape

Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1936–39) — Organic Architecture at Its Zenith:

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1943–59, opened 1959):

Wright’s Key Design Principles Summarised:

Source: McCarter, R. (1997). Frank Lloyd Wright. Reaktion Books; Levine, N. (1996). The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Princeton University Press.

D. Movement Comparison Table

E. Common Confusions

F. Exam Traps

G. Answer-Writing Cues

MCQ attribution (Sullivan vs Wright):

Short-note opening (Bauhaus):

Le Corbusier five points attribution:

MSQ framing (movement identification):

H. PYQ Linkage Note

I. Mini-Check — Lesson 7.5

Q1 (MCQ — 1 mark)
“Form ever follows function” — this architectural dictum was articulated by:

(A) Walter Gropius, in the Bauhaus founding manifesto (1919)
(B) Frank Lloyd Wright, in his essay on organic architecture
(C) Louis Sullivan, in The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered (1896)
(D) Le Corbusier, in Towards a New Architecture (1923)

Answer: (C)
Solution: Sullivan wrote this in his 1896 essay published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, arguing that the tall office building’s external form should express its programmatic and structural logic. Gropius’s manifesto addressed craft + technology integration. Wright’s principle was “organic architecture,” not “form follows function.” Le Corbusier’s dictum was “a house is a machine for living in.”

Q2 (MCQ — 1 mark)
Which of the following correctly states Le Corbusier’s five points of a new architecture?

(A) Steel frame, curtain wall, ribbon windows, flat roof, open plan
(B) Pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, roof garden
(C) Pilotis, load-bearing walls, large windows, flat roof, open floor plate
(D) Free plan, exposed structure, no ornament, ribbon windows, roof garden

Answer: (B)
Solution: The five points precisely are: (1) pilotis, (2) free plan, (3) free façade, (4) ribbon windows (fenêtre en longueur), (5) roof garden. Option (A) describes Chicago School/International Style characteristics but omits pilotis and roof garden. Option (C) incorrectly includes load-bearing walls, which pilotis replace. Option (D) replaces pilotis with “exposed structure” and roof garden with “no ornament.”

Q3 (MSQ — 2 marks)
Which of the following correctly match an architect to their movement and a key work? Select all that apply.

(A) Victor Horta — Art Nouveau — Hôtel Tassel, Brussels (1893)
(B) Walter Gropius — Bauhaus — Bauhaus Building, Dessau (1926)
(C) Frank Lloyd Wright — International Style — Villa Savoye, Poissy (1931)
(D) Gerrit Rietveld — De Stijl — Schröder House, Utrecht (1924)
(E) Louis Sullivan — Arts and Crafts — Red House, Bexleyheath (1859)

Answer: (A), (B), (D)
Solution:
– (A) Correct — Horta: Art Nouveau; Hôtel Tassel (1893) = movement’s first building
– (B) Correct — Gropius: Bauhaus founder; Dessau building (1926) = school’s canonical building
– (C) Incorrect — Villa Savoye is Le Corbusier, International Style; Wright is Organic Architecture; Villa Savoye is not Wright’s
– (D) Correct — Rietveld: De Stijl; Schröder House (1924) = only fully realised De Stijl building
– (E) Incorrect — Red House is Philip Webb (Arts and Crafts architect); Sullivan is the Chicago School architect; these are completely different figures, movements, and countries

Q4 (MSQ — 2 marks)
Which of the following are features of the Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht (1924)? Select all that apply.

(A) An upper floor that can be converted from open space to subdivided rooms using sliding and folding panels
(B) Corner windows that meet without a corner post, visually dissolving the building’s solid edge
(C) Ribbon windows running continuously around the building’s façade on pilotis
(D) Primary colour accents (red, yellow, blue) on structural elements and window frames
(E) A central hearth anchoring an open plan with deep overhanging eaves

Answer: (A), (B), (D)
Solution:
– (A) Correct — the upper floor is the defining De Stijl spatial feature; sliding panels allow full flexibility
– (B) Correct — cornerless windows are key to dissolving the box
– (C) Incorrect — ribbon windows on pilotis are Le Corbusier’s International Style (Villa Savoye), not De Stijl
– (D) Correct — primary colour accents are the De Stijl colour programme
– (E) Incorrect — central hearth + deep eaves + open plan = Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses, not Rietveld

Q5 (MCQ — 2 marks)
The Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar. Which of the following correctly states the school’s subsequent history?

(A) Bauhaus moved to Frankfurt in 1925, then to Munich in 1932, and was closed by Allied forces in 1945
(B) Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, then to Berlin in 1932, and was closed under Nazi pressure in 1933
(C) Bauhaus remained in Weimar until 1933, when it was voluntarily dissolved after achieving its educational goals
(D) Bauhaus moved to Berlin in 1925 under Mies’s direction and continued until 1940

Answer: (B)
Solution: The precise sequence is Weimar (1919) → Dessau (1925, where Gropius designed the famous glass-curtained building) → Berlin (1932, under Mies van der Rohe) → closed 1933 under Nazi ideological pressure. Mies did not lead the Dessau phase; he led the final Berlin phase. The school was not in Frankfurt, Munich, or any other city; it was not dissolved voluntarily; it was not closed by Allied forces.

End of Lesson 7.5