VII.

The Industrial Age

The Industrial Revolution, which began in England about 1760, led to radical changes at every level of civilization throughout the world. The growth of heavy industry brought a flood of new building materials—such as cast iron, steel, and glass—with which architects and engineers devised structures hitherto undreamed of either in function, size, and form.

A.

Eclectic Revivals

In the late 18th century, the Baroque, the Rococo, and neo-Palladianism fell from favour. Patrons and designers turned instead to genuine Greek and Roman prototypes. Selective borrowing from another time and place became fashionable. The preoccupation with ancient Greece was particularly strong in the young United States from the early years of the 19th century until about 1850. New settlements were given Greek names—Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy—and Doric and Ionic columns, entablatures, and pediments, mostly transmuted into white-painted wood, were applied to public buildings and important town houses in the style called Greek Revival.

In France, the imperial cult of Napoleon steered architecture in a more Roman direction, as seen in the church of La Madeleine (1807-1842), a huge Roman temple in Paris. French architectural thought had been jolted at the turn of the century by the highly imaginative published projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicholas Ledoux. These men were inspired by the massive aspects of Egyptian and Roman work, but their monumental (and often impractical) compositions were innovative, and they are admired today as visionary architects.

The most original architect in England at the time was Sir John Soane; the museum he built (1812-1813) as his own London house still excites astonishment for its inventive romantic virtuosity. Late English Neo-Classicism came to be seen as élitist; thus, for the new Houses of Parliament the authorities insisted on Gothic or Tudor Revival. The appointed architect, Sir Charles Barry called into consultation A. W. N. Pugin, champion of the Gothic Revival. Pugin took responsibility for the details of this vast monument (begun 1836). In a short and contentious career, he made a moral issue out of a return to the Gothic style. Other architects, however, felt free to select whatever elements from past cultures best fitted their projects—Gothic for Protestant churches, Baroque for Roman Catholic churches, early Greek for banks, Palladian for institutions, early Renaissance for libraries, and Egyptian for cemeteries.

In the second half of the 19th century developments brought about by the Industrial Revolution became overwhelming. Many were shocked by the sprawling and unsightly urban districts that resulted from the proliferation of factories and workers’ housing and by the deterioration of taste among the newly rich. For all that architects were employed on the construction of canals, tunnels, bridges, and railway stations—the new modes of transport at the time—they contributed only a veneer of culture.

The Crystal Palace (1850-1851; reconstructed 1852-1854) in London, a vast but ephemeral exhibition hall, was the work of Sir Joseph Paxton, a man who had learned how to put iron and glass together in the design of large greenhouses. It demonstrated a hitherto undreamed-of kind of spatial beauty, and in its carefully planned building process, which included prefabricated standard parts, it foreshadowed industrialized building and the widespread use of cast iron and steel.

Also important in its innovative use of metal was the great tower (1887-1889) of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel in Paris. In general, however, the most gifted architects of the time sought escape from their increasingly industrialized environment by further development of traditional themes and eclectic styles. Two contrasting but equally brilliantly conceived examples are Charles Garnier’s sumptuous Paris Opéra (1861-1875) and Henry Hobson Richardson’s grandiose Trinity Church (1872-1877) in Boston.

B.

Modern Architecture

At the turn of the century, designers sought to break away completely from borrowed styles. Antoni Gaudí, who worked in Barcelona, Spain, was the most original; his sinuous Casa Milá (1905-1907) and the unfinished Iglesia di Sagrada Familia (Church of the Holy Family, 1883-1926) exhibit a search for new organic structural forms. His work has some affinity with Art Nouveau, a style that had developed contemporaneously in Brussels and Paris. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose masterpiece is the Glasgow School of Art (1898-1899), espoused a more austere version of Art Nouveau.

B.1.

The Skyscraper

In the Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St Louis, Missouri, the Guaranty Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York, and the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store (1899-1904) in Chicago, the architect Louis Sullivan gave new expressive form to urban commercial buildings. His career converges with the so-called Chicago School of architects, whose challenge was to invent the skyscraper or high-rise building, facilitated by the introduction of the electric lift and the sudden abundance of steel. They made a successful transition from the masonry bearing wall to the steel frame, which assumed all the load-bearing functions. The structure’s skeleton could be erected quickly and the remaining components hung on it to complete the building, an immense advantage for high-rise buildings on busy city streets. Sullivan is memorable not only for his own work but for having provided the apprenticeship of Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century. See American Art and Architecture.

B.2.

Reinforced Concrete

In France attention centred on reinforced concrete. Auguste Perret’s apartment building (1902-1903) in the Rue Franklin and his Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (1911-1912), both in Paris, were early successes. Tony Garnier had, during his studies in Rome, created a detailed design for an imaginary city with many buildings, all in concrete; plans of the city were published in 1917 as La cité industrielle. In Vienna Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos worked in severe linear forms and proclaimed that “ornament is a crime”. Peter Behrens, a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Craft Alliance), is revered as a German precursor of modern architecture.

B.3.

The Bauhaus

When the Bauhaus opened, the modern movement in architecture began to coalesce. The Bauhaus school (Weimar, 1919-1925; Dessau, 1926-1933) brought together architects, painters, and designers from several countries, whose common desire was to formulate goals for the visual arts in the modern age. Its first director was Walter Gropius, who designed the innovative buildings for the move to Dessau; its second was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The new architecture demonstrated its virtues in new Siedlungen (low-cost housing) in Berlin and Frankfurt. An exhibition of housing types, the Weissenhof Siedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, brought together works by Mies, Gropius, J. J. P. Oud, and Le Corbusier; this milestone identified the movement with a better life for the common man. The chastely elegant German Pavilion (1929) by Mies for the Barcelona Exhibition, executed in such lavish materials as travertine, marble, onyx, and chrome-plated steel, asserted a strong, formal argument independent of any social goals. Gropius, his disciple Marcel Breuer, and Mies eventually established themselves in the United States, where they enjoyed productive and influential decades—extending through the 1970s for Breuer—as architects and teachers.

Le Corbusier, over a long career, exerted immense influence. His early publications championed a machine aesthetic and urged the abandonment of traditional cities in favour of life and work in skyscrapers arranged regimentally in vast parks. His Villa Savoie (1929-1930) in the French countryside plays down a sense of structure and materials in order to dramatize the complexity of spacial organization and allow a subtle ambiguity between interior and exterior space. In the 1950s, with Jawaharlal Nehru as client, he laid out the new capital city of the Punjab, Chandīgarh, and designed for it three monumental concrete government edifices standing in a vast plaza. In France he produced two unique religious buildings, the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp (1950-1955) and the Dominican monastery of La Tourette (1957-1961), both built in concrete. Having abandoned the extreme rationalism of his early career, in these extraordinary structures he manipulated form and light for emotional response and dramatic effect.

B.4.

Innovative Architecture

Such structural engineers as Robert Maillart, Eugène Freyssinet, and Pier Luigi Nervi produced works in reinforced concrete that combined imagination with rationality to achieve aesthetic impact. Among architects Jørn Utzon, in Australia’s Sydney Opera House (1957-1973), and Eero Saarinen, in Dulles Airport (1960-1962) near Washington, D.C., employed unusual structural solutions. Based in Helsinki, Alvar Aalto extended his oeuvre through more than four decades, refusing to celebrate the industrialized repetition of steel, concrete, glass, and aluminium, but moulding space with utmost sophistication, great care in the distribution of light, and the use of materials—stone, wood, and copper—with familiar and sympathetic tactile qualities. In the United States Louis I. Kahn infused his designs with a transcendent monumentality recalling Roman classicism, as in his Kimbell Art Museum (1972), located in Fort Worth, Texas, where tunnel vaults are transformed into light-modulating girders.

B.5.

The International Style

Despite these noteworthy exceptions—including such later works of Wright as New York’s Guggenheim Museum (completed 1959)—the style initiated by the Bauhaus architects and termed the International Style gradually prevailed after the 1930s. The theory and practice of the new style was introduced in the United States largely through the efforts of Philip Johnson, one of Gropius’s students at Harvard University. In the hands of its most gifted exponents, such as Mies, the International Style was particularly well suited to large metropolitan apartment and office towers. The chaste elegance and subtle proportions of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) in Chicago and (with Philip Johnson) his Seagram Building (1958) in New York represent Modernism at its finest. Many of his imitators, however, seized on its commercial potential; it proved extremely efficient for large-scale construction, in which the same module could be repeated indefinitely. Inner spaces became standardized, predictable, and profitable, and exteriors reflected the monotony of the interiors; the blank glass box became ubiquitous.

Assessing Modernism after the half century in which it was dominant, commentators pointed out that even though it was embraced by big business and big government, the general public never grew fond of it. At most an austere classicism was conceded to it, but this was achieved in a coldly impersonal and often overwhelming way. By about 1930, Modernism had severed architecture’s links with the past. Suddenly it became incorrect for a new building to make any reference to previous styles; and for a period of time the study of historical styles almost disappeared from professional schools.

B.6.

Postmodern Architecture

Between about 1965 and 1980 architects and critics began to espouse tendencies resulting in a style that is loosely called postmodern. Although Postmodernism is not a cohesive movement based on a distinct set of principles, as was modernism, in general it can be said that the Postmodernists value individuality, intimacy, complexity, and occasionally even humour.

Postmodern tendencies were given early expression in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; revised ed. 1977) by the American architect Robert Venturi. In this provocative work he defended vernacular architecture—for example, filling stations and fast-food restaurants—and attacked the modernist establishment with such satirical comments as “Less is a bore” (a play on Mies’s well-known dictum “Less is more”). By the early 1980s, Postmodernism had become the dominant trend in American architecture and an important phenomenon in Europe as well. Its success in the United States owed much to the influence of Philip Johnson, who had performed the same service for Modernism 50 years earlier. His AT&T Building (1984) in New York, with its Renaissance allusions and its pediment evoking Chippendale furniture, immediately became a landmark of Postmodern design.

Other Postmodern office towers built during the 1980s aspired to a similar high stylistic profile, recalling the great Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s or striving for an eccentric flamboyance of their own. Vivid colour and other decorative elements were effectively used by Michael Graves in several notable buildings, while Richard Meier developed a more austere version of Postmodernism, influenced by Le Corbusier, in his designs for museums and private houses. Outstanding American practitioners of Postmodernism, in addition to Venturi, Johnson, Graves, and Meier, are Helmut Jahn, Charles Gwathmey, Charles Willard Moore, and Robert A. M. Stern.

Closely related to the Postmodernist interest in historical styles was the historic preservation movement, which during the 1970s and 1980s led to the renovation of many older landmark buildings and to a tendency to resist new architecture that seemed to threaten the scale or stylistic integrity of existing structures. The stark, confrontational approach of modernism has been replaced by a more inclusive sense of the architectural heritage that acknowledges and seeks to preserve the very finest achievements of every period.

See also African Art and Architecture; Canadian Art and Architecture; Interior Design; Oceanian Art and Architecture; Seven Wonders of the World.