Modern architecture
What you're looking at and what it means
Most tourists go on holiday to see Roman ruins, medieval churches, baroque palaces - the work of the past. But increasingly, tourists are warming to the modern, visiting such sites as the new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao or the 'Ruta del modernisme' in Barcelona.
The first recognisably modern style is Art Nouveau, at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Together with modernisme in Barcelona, Jugendstil in Germany, Stile Liberty in Italy, and Secessionism in Austria, this style was a radical reaction against nineteenth-century 'progress'. It can be seen as the opposition to the Eiffel Tower, to factory manufactured components, to the standardisation that had come in with industrialisation. And yet it's often applied to buildings that serve that progress - the power station in Barcelona, the Metro system in Paris.
Modernism in Barcelona, and particularly the work of the architect Gaudi, is well known. But Domenech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch are also worth getting to know. Cadafalch's style is very eclectic, using forms from northern gothic as well as the Arab world and romanesque - he is almost, but not quite, Disneyland-on-Med! Montaner was more influenced by the Mozarabic style of medieval Spain. All three show the typical use of materials to make the architecture richer - brickwork, glazed ceramic tiles, and fine balconies. Gaudi goes the furthest towards the organic, plant-like forms of Art Nouveau décor with his architecture, even balconies becoming forms like hip bones or strange undersea creatures. It's a gaudy, raucous style in Barcelona, which draws attention to itself and luxuriates in its richness.
Arts and crafts in England always had a more typically British reticience to it. But the reaction against the factory-made standardised product was equally uncompromising - William Morris advised his readers to "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful". How many of us can say that today?
Morris's style is based at least partly on vernacular architecture, and other architects too around this time were designing in modes that reflected local vernacular buildings rather than 'architecture'. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, for example, was inspired by earlier Scottish buildings. This often creates a certain informality compared with the Renaissance and Gothic revival buildings of the previous generation. Morris, as a strong socialist, was also concerned with creating good living conditions - though his own work was too expensive for most working people. That's a tendency we find in Barcelona modernisme too - for instance Gaudi's Casa Mila manages to give all the corridors, as well as the flats, natural daylight, as well as providing underground car parking for the first time in the city.
In US, Frank Lloyd Wright has many of the same concerns though his style is more geometrical and rigorous, for instance in the huge spiral of the Guggenheim museum in New York. His houses introduce the open plan for the first time, and he plays with space in a new way. Like Gaudi and Morris, he didn't confine himself to architecture, but designed fittings and furniture for his projects.
In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a reaction against the excesses of the Art Nouveau style. The Bauhaus school, led by Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, prioritised the straight line, simplicity, and technology; the machine was no longer the enemy, as in Art Nouveau. The simple, linear forms of Bauhaus architecture are reminiscent of the work of Paul Klee and Kandisky, who taught at the Bauhaus, and Piet Mondrian.
After the Nazi takeover in Germany, many of the Bauhaus architects fled to other European countries or to the US, developing an 'international' style. Simple buildings, without ornament, use modern materials - steel, glass, concrete - to create stark, uncompromising statements. Perhaps it's not surprising that this style seems to have lent itself to the creation of skyscrapers.
These are very functional buildings - Le Corbusier, who was in s.jpg)
ympathy with the 'enlightenment' programme of the Bauhaus, pronounced that a building was a machine for living in. And yet he also believed that "Space and light and order" were "things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep." His architecture is stark, but not inhuman. His early 1950s Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, France, shows what he could do when not motivated by the need to provide massive office or residential space - its curved, upswept roof, and sloping walls, create a dramatic statement.
However, a reaction against the international modernist style was inevitable. Again the pendulum swung away from simplicity towards ornament, and at the same time from seriousness towards enjoyment. Postmodernism introducd wit, even jokes, into architecture alongside ornament and historical references. It's an aesthetic that enjoys diversity, a rebellion against uniformity and the structural rigours of modernism. It avoids right angles and straight lines, and at its best is a rich and complex style - at its worst it's a meretricious mix-up of historic gew-gaws and silly jokes.
Friedenriech Hundertwasser didn't belong to any movement but he can probably be placed along with the postmoderns. His Hundertwasserhaus, a low-income apartment block in Vienna, has undulating floors, a turf covered roof, and trees growing inside. His commitment to variety was absolute - he actually suggested all residents should be given tins of paint and allowed to paint anything they could reach from their windows.
Deconstructivism is another response to modernism and opposes its orderliness with an almost childish delight in breaking things. Walls, the very concept of 'architecture', or inside and outside, are broken down and put back together another way. It's architecture for a fragmented world. And it tries, like Hundertwasser's designs, to put back the richness and excitement of architecture, which modernism had taken out.
Breaking things might not sound like a recipe for poetry, but the very unpredictability of deconstructivism can create a highly stimulating building. For instance Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin blurs the distinction between architecture and sculpture; the space is no longer functional, but creates a sort of narrative. He makes entrance to the museum deliberately difficult, and underground, conveying a sense of the hardship and hiddenness of Jewish history in Germany. That's quite a poetic view of what architecture should do.
Frank Gehry's architecture creates fractured forms that have their own coherence, like the 'Dancing House' in Prague which seems almost to have melted into shape.
Where is architecture headed next? There seem to be a number of views. One is that global warming and greater understanding of ecological issues could lead to a dramatic breach with the past - new materials, new techniques, will create a new architecture. On the other hand 'trophy' architecture is now being seen by many cities as a way of spurring revival, and more innovative buildings are now being commissioned to lay claim to cultural pre-eminence.
But perhaps the really difficult problem to solve will be the split in the architectural world between prestige buildings, and the functional, cheap and soulless buildings which serve our everyday needs - supermarkets, suburban houses, and apartment buildings. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to visit a mid 1980s housing estate on an architectural tour. Perhaps a few of our big housebuilding companies ought to acquaint themselves with Hundertwasser's ideas?
Where to go?
- Bilbao for the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry, with its radically sculpted, curved contours and reflective surface, like a deconstructed ship or strange fish - appropriate concepts for this maritime city. Architect Santiago Calatrava designed the elegant Zubizuri Bridge and the city's Loiu airport.
- Vienna - the Hundertwasser house is just one of a number of modern sights in a city better known for its baroque and neoclassical architecture. Karl-Marx-Hof shows a quite different idea of how to house the masses from Hundertwasser's quirky tenement - at a kilometre in length, it's the longest residential building in the world. The Museumsquartier mixes baroque and modern architecture by Ortner & Ortner. And there's some fantastic Art Nouveau - Otto Wagner's Kirche am Steinhof and the Karlsplatz railway station.
- Barcelona, obviously - not just for its 'modernisme' architecture, but for the more recent development of Port Vell and the Olympic village.
- Helsinki, Finland - classicism of the eighteenth century is complemented by the modernist buildings of Aalvar Aalto
- In Paris, the Parc de la Villette contains deconstructionist architecture by Bernard Tschumi as well as a number of fine museum buildings. For those with a fine sense of contrast, it's not far from a fine set of nineteenth-century mill buildings. There's also La Defense, of course, with a vast selection of skyscrapers and the Grande Arche by Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen, an almost perfect empty cube which is intended to stand as a counterpart to the Arc de Triomphe, but symbolising humanitarian ideals rather than military victories. And there's the Centre Pompidou of course, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, like an urban version of an oil refinery or an inside-out building.
- London now has some fascinating sights. Tate Modern occupies a ziggurat-like early 20c power station, and is reached by the Millennium Bridge, renowned for its wobble (now fixed). Probably the best collection of Norman Foster projects in the world includes the City Hall, the 'Gherkin', and the new Great Court of the British Museum.
- A special mention is needed for London Zoo - where the animals inhabit 1930s modernist architecture by Berthold Lubetkin. Alas, the Penguin Pool is no longer considered suitable for penguins - it's now occupied by porcupines.
Credits: Picture of the Unite d'Habitation by Le Corbusier by Rightee