+ United States – Wright – FallingWater 1937 / + Phillip Johnson – Johnson House 1949
+ Finland- Aalto – Aalto House & Studio 1936 / Villa Mairea 1939
+ Brazil / Niemeyer – Dance Hall, Belo Horizonte, Brazil 1942
+ Finland / Aalto – Saynatsalo Town Hall, Finland 1952
+ France / Le Corbuier – Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp 1955
+ Italy / Scarpa – Castelvecchio 1956-73

High-tech architecture, also known as Late Modernism or Structural Expressionism, is an architectural style that emerged in the 1970s, incorporating elements of high-tech industry and technology into building design. High-tech architecture appeared as a revamped modernism, an extension of those previous ideas aided by even more advances in technological achievements.

Wright designed it in 1935, at his professional nadir, as a mountain retreat for Pittsburgh retail mogul Edgar J. Kaufmann, who wanted a home near the waterfalls of Bear Run. Wright took that notion to its extreme. “I want you to live with the waterfall,” he is said to have told Kaufmann, “Not just to look at it.” Cantilevered concrete terraces hover some 30 feet above the falls. The incessant sound of rushing water permeates the home, yet never overwhelms. A boulder juts through the living room and doubles as a hearth. Low ceilings direct attention outside.

Together these elements create a building that’s timeless, organic and quintessentially American, says Franklin Toker, author of Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House. “You’ve never seen a building that fits with nature so tightly,” Toker says. “It’s not merely nature, it’s animated. You’ve seen Vegas and Times Square, but you’ve never seen a building that’s in constant motion.”

“This is a house that summed up the 20th century and then thrust it forward still further. Within this remarkable building Frank Lloyd Wright recapitulated themes that had preoccupied him since his career began a half-century earlier, but he did not reproduce them literally. Instead, he cast his net wider, integrating European modernism and his own love of nature and of structural daring, and pulled it all together into a brilliantly resolved totality. Fallingwater is Wright’s greatest essay in horizontal space; it is his most powerful piece of structural drama; it is his most sublime integration of man and nature.” (Written in 1986, by New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger)

The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a ‘total’ work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together.

The school existed in three German cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Hannes Meyer from 1927 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime.

“The Bauhaus building provides an important landmark of architectural history, even though it was dependent on earlier projects of the architect…as well as on the basic outlines and concepts of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“The basic structure of the Bauhaus consists of a clear and carefully thought-out system of connecting wings, which correspond to the internal operating system of the school. The technical construction of the building… is demonstrated by the latest technological development of the time: a skeleton of reinforced concrete with brickwork, mushroom-shaped ceilings on the lower level, and roofs covered with asphalt tile that can be walked upon. The construction area consisted of 42,445 [cubic yards] (32,450 [cubic meters]) and the total cost amounted to 902,500 marks. Such an economical achievement was possible only due to the assistance of the Bauhaus teachers and students, which at the same time, of course, could be viewed as an ideal means of education.”  (Udo Kultermann. Architecture in the 20th Century. P37-38)

Le Corbusier designed a series of houses before he developed his ‘Five Points of Architecture’ in 1926. They were all based on his Dom-ino housing scheme developed in the autumn of 1914 as a quick and inexpensive means of rebuilding devastated towns and villages. He described it as follows:

“So we designed a structural system, a frame, completely independent of the functions of the plan of the house: this frame simply supports the flooring and the staircase…”

This was the pioneering moment in the use of reinforced concrete, the one which from the outset was designed in the broadest perspective of architecture and town planning. From his repeated efforts to introduce the standardized house and standardized house features, he arrived at his most famous ‘Five Points of Architecture’:

1. Pilotis raising the house from the ground – to introduce more light and to free the ground space for parking or a garden.

They rise directly from the floor to 3, 4, 6, etc. metres and elevate the ground floor. The rooms are thereby removed from the dampness of the soil; they have light and air; the building plot is left to the garden, which consequently passes under the house. The same area is also gained on the flat roof.

2. A roof garden for private exterior space

Thus a latent humidity will remain continually on the roof skin. The roof gardens will display highly luxuriant vegetation. Shrubs and even small trees up to 3 or 4 metres tall can be planted.

3. The free plan, facilitated by the skeleton structure, allowing independent interior partitions

There are no longer any supporting walls but only membranes of any thickness required. The result of this is absolute freedom in designing the ground- plan; that is to say, free utilization of the available means, which makes it easy to offset the rather high cost of reinforced concrete construction.

4. Ribbon windows to improve lighting

Together with the intermediate ceilings the supports form rectangular openings in the facade through which light and air enter copiously. The window extends from support to support and thus becomes a horizontal window. Stilted vertical windows consequently disappear, as do unpleasant mullions. In this way, rooms are equably lit from wall to wall.

5. The free facade, free in the structural sense from the basic skeleton

By projecting the floor beyond the supporting pillars, like a balcony all round the building, the whole facade is extended beyond the supporting construction. It thereby loses its supportive quality and the windows may be extended to any length at will, without any direct relationship to the interior division.

• New graphic language for a new social situation
• El Littitzki
• Zaha, Frank Ghery
• Melnikov
• Vladimir Tatlin
• Labyrintische ruimte (Labyrinthine Space 1969)
• Sketch for a mobile labyrinth, Schetz voor een mobile labyrinh- The Activist Drawing

Constructivism architecture emerged from constructivist art, which initially grew from Russian Futurism.

Russian Constructivism was a movement that was active from 1913 to the 1940s. It was a movement created by the Russian avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest of the continent. Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity, where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional. Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. New media was often used in the creation of works, which helped to create a style of art that was orderly.

Two distinct threads emerged, the first was encapsulated in Antoine Pevsner‘s and Naum Gabo‘s Realist manifesto which was concerned with space and rhythm, the second represented a struggle within the Commissariat for Enlightenment between those who argued for pure art and the Productivists such as Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin, a more socially-oriented group who wanted this art to be absorbed in industrial production.

New Babylon (1956 – 1974). These drawings emerged out of his participation with the Situationists, and they represent a hybrid interest and practice situated between architecture, urbanism, utopian vision, fine art practice, and conceptual art. The images are beautiful in themselves on a purely formal level, but the conceptual and activist tendencies that drove them make them interesting on many levels. This first one is titled Labyrintische ruimte (Labyrinthine space) from 1969.

The German Werkbund was an association of artists, designers, and architects that prefigured the Bauhaus. Unveiled at the Werkbund’s 1914 exhibition in Cologne, Bruno Taut’s (1880-1938) Glass House was a successful amalgamation of aesthetic, technical, and commercial elements. The building was conceived by Taut and the poet Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915), whose verses adorned the exterior base of the dome. The house was an explosion of color. The interior was constructed of glass floors and walls and mosaic windows. It also included an exhibition of information on the project’s glass-industry sponsors.

He built it for the association of the German glass industry specifically for the 1914 exhibition. They financed the structure that was considered a house of art. The structure was made at the time when expressionism stood highest in Germany. There are only black and white photographs known of the building that were taken in 1914. The building was destroyed soon after the exhibition since it was an exhibition building only and not built for practical use.

…Reflections of light whose colors began at the base with a dark blue and rose up through moss green and golden yellow to culminate at the top in a luminous pale yellow…

*Adolf Loos (1870-1933) ranks as one of the most important pioneers of the modern movement in architecture. Ironically, his influence was based largely on a few interior designs and a body of controversial essays.

*Adolf Loos ‘s buildings were rigorous examples of austere beauty, ranging from conventional country cottages to planar compositions for storefronts and residences. His built compositions were little known outside his native Austria during his early years of practice.

Adolf Loos referred to the opposite, excessive ornamentation, as criminal – not for abstract moral reasons, but because of the economics of labor and wasted materials in modern industrial civilization. Adolf Loos argued that because ornament was no longer an important manifestation of culture, the worker dedicated to its production could not be paid a fair price for his labor. The essay rapidly became a theoretical manifesto and a key document in modernist literature and was widely circulated abroad. Le Corbusier later attributed “an Homeric cleansing” of architecture to the work.

In 1897, in the pages of The Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, Adolf Loos initiated a series of polemic articles that later established his international reputation. Adolf Loos did not directly address architecture in his writings. Instead, Adolf Loos examined a wide range of social ills, which Adolf Loos identified as the motivating factors behind the struggle for a transformation of everyday life.

Adolf Loos ‘s writings focused increasingly on what Adolf Loos regarded as the excess of decoration in both traditional Viennese design and in the more recent products of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte.

In 1898, in the pages of the review Ver Sacrum, which was an organ of the Wiener Secession, Adolf Loos published an essay that marked the beginning of a long theoretical opposition to the then popular art noveau movement. His theories culminated in a short essay entitled, “Ornament And Crime,” published in 1908. To Adolf Loos, the lack of ornament in architecture was a sign of spiritual strength.

Adolf Loos in his particular manifesto entitled Ornament and Crime, written in 1908, repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession. Loos was one of the most important and influential Austrian architects of the European Modern Architecture movement and also was Engelmann’s teacher in Vienna. His influence is remarkable during the decade of 1920, the same period the Wittgenstein House was designed. Then, it’s not a coincidence to find traces of Loos in the clarity, simplicity and weightlessness of the house.

In Spain, the movement was centered in Barcelona and was an essential element of the Catalan movement Modernisme. Architect Antoni Gaudí, whose decorative architectural style is so highly personal that he is sometimes seen as practicing an artistic language separate from Art Nouveau, is nonetheless united with the movement by his use of floral and organic forms. His designs from around 1903, the Casa Batlló (1904–1906) and Casa Milà (1906–1908), are most closely related to the stylistic elements of Art Nouveau. However, famous structures such as the Sagrada Familia characteristically contrast the modernizing Art Nouveau tendencies with revivalist Neo-Gothic. Besides the dominating presence of Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner also explored the Art Nouveau language in Barcelona in buildings such as the Casa Lleó Morera (1905). Another key figure is that of Josep Maria Jujol.

Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926)-Casa Batlló

Casa Batlló is one of the two great buildings designed by Antoni Gaudi on Passeig de Gracia, the other being La Pedrera

From the outside the façade of Casa Batlló looks like it has been made from skulls and bones. The “Skulls” are in fact balconies and the “bones” are supporting pillars.

Gaudi used colours and shapes found in marine life as inspiration for his creativity in this building e.g. the colours chosen for the façade are those found in natural coral.

The building was designed by Gaudi for Josep Batlló, a wealthy aristocrat, as an upmarket home. Señor Batlló lived in the lower two floors with his family and the upper floors were rented out as apartments.

The series covers the history of involvement in Interior Design, Architecture and Arts Practice from the 1900’s. Beginning from pre- World War 1 movements leading to Inter War and finally to the Post-War era.

Notes from lectures Introduction

• De Stijl movement- Holland
• 1905- Joseph Hoffman building “not just a building but a work of art”
• Roby house- Frank Lloyd Wright “not enough density, materiality…”
• Charles and Hibbs house- “Planarity, regularity, geometric sensibility”
• Barcelona Pavilion, Mies Van Der Rohe
• Villa Savoy, Le Corbusier
• The Glass House, Paris, Pier Sharon
• Geometric unfolding
• Technological ideas and their impact on architecture
• More interest in material qualities in relation to technology
• Minimalist practice 1960’s
• Positioning in landscapes
• Alvar Alto, Frank Lloyd Wright, pushing structural enforcements (cantilever over landscape)
• Pushing architecture- repositioning modernism, Los Angeles (Glass external enclosures)
• Phillip Johnson- Glass house
• Robert Venchuri
• Frank Ghery- Ghery house
• Daniel Leibskind
• “Carefully controlled light” entering the interior on integrated furniture within the space.
• Mobius house- acknowledging technological innovation

Rietveld designed his famous Red and Blue Chair in 1917. In 1918, he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair’s colors after becoming influenced by the ‘De Stijl‘ movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he became an architect.