A coinage of the early 1930s, this label recognized that modern architecture actually did have a “style” and was not, as many had argued, simply a force of nature. The movement’s major perpetrators tended to argue that their work was essentially “rational,” that what they did was as scientific as designing a dynamo or a can opener. Le Corbusier, the most vigorous polemicist of the time, promoted the gruesome slogan “A house is a machine for living.” Thanks to which analogy, machine imagery is one of the hallmarks of the style, especially anything with vaguely nautical overtones such as steel railings and shiny metal fittings. Also popular were glass-block-and-strip windows mounted flush with a facade. International Style buildings are almost invariably white and conceived in terms of planes—like houses of cards—rather than in terms of the solidity of neo-classical and Victorian architecture, against which many of these architects were reacting. (A sense of mass, it is often said, was replaced by one of volume.) Key monuments include Gropius’ buildings for the Dessau Bauhaus (1926), Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie (1929), and Aalto’s Paimio Sanitorium (1928). Fifty years later, the style would be much appropriated by restaurants: For a while there, it was next to impossible to dine out without staring at a wall of glass blocks from your Breuer chair.
The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany; Walter Gropius, architect
The Yale Art and Architecture Building; Paul Rudolph, architect Brutalism
The name, like so much in the modernist lexicon, comes from the French, in this case béton brut. Which is not, as you might suppose, an after-shave, but rather unfinished concrete, the kind that shows both the grain of the underlying wooden formwork and lots of rough edges. The French have a special genius for referring to the presumed ardors of the natural—“Eau Sauvage”—and nature has always emitted strong vibes, one way or the other, for modern architects. This is no doubt because the ideological basis for modern architecture (as for everything else worthwhile) comes from the Enlightenment and its problem child, Rationalism. On the one hand, it’s resulted in a lot of buildings that look like grids; on the other, in a preoccupation with a kind of architectural state of nature, like that which preoccupied Rousseau. (Perhaps this is why renderings of modern buildings so often feature lots of trees.) Brutalism represents a reaction to the flimsy precision of the International Style, a reversion to roughness and mass. Characteristics include large expanses of concrete, dungeonlike interiors, bad finishes, and a quality of military nostalgia, a sort of spirit-of-the-bunker that might have gone down happily on the Siegfried Line. The style—popular in the Sixties and early Seventies—has pretty much taken a powder, but it’s left behind the likes of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale University and Kallman and McKinnell’s Boston City Hall. Expressionism
A style whose day was, alas, brief. Concurrent with Expressionism’s flowering in the other arts, architects (mainly German, mainly in the Twenties), managed to get a number of projects built in a style that will be familiar to you from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. As you will recall, with Expressionism, things tend to get a little skewed, not to mention a little sinister, with materials often seeming to be on the point of melting. More than any other, this is the style that best embodies the kind of looney tunes sensibility, with its working out of the aberrations of the unconscious, that we all identify with the fun side of Twenties Berlin. The two greatest works in the genre are Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, an observatory in Potsdam that looks like a shoe, and Hans Poelzig’s interior for the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, an auditorium that looks like a cave. The latter was commissioned by theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt, no slouch when it came to the visual. Expressionism is easily the funkiest of the modern styles. Postmodernism
A kind of portmanteau term (no relation to John Portman, the architect of all those ghastly hotels with the giant atriums), meant to describe a condition as much as a style, the condition of not being “modernist.” As you have undoubtedly noticed, “modern architecture” in the 1980s came in for more than its share of lumps, with architects shamelessly scrambling to disavow what most of them only a few years before thought was the cat’s pajamas. Postmodernism’s most exemplary figure: Philip Johnson, the architect of the cocktail circuit and, until his death in 2005, the leading arbiter of architectural fashion. His premier contribution, as a postmodernist at least, was a New York skyscraper headquarters for American Telephone and Telegraph that looks a lot like a grandfather clock, or, according to some, a Chippendale highboy, allegedly the result of the postmodernist preoccupation with “history.” Look for Corinthian columns in the foyer of such extravaganzas, as well as dirty pastel colors and ornament and detailing out the wazoo.
The AT&T Building; Philip Johnson and John Burgee, architects
Just as postmodernism was beginning to seem really cloying, along came the deconstructivists, most of whom were into a deliberately chaotic, fractured, highly aggressive look: you know, skewed (not to mention windowless) walls, cantilevered beams and staggered ceilings, trapezoids where rectangles ought to be, slotted dining-room floors (one client actually got his foot stuck in his), a stone pillar in the bedroom, positioned so as to leave no room for a bed. Schizophrenic in those places where postmodernism had been merely hysterical, “deconstructivism”—a play on Russian constructivism and the largely French intellectual movement known as deconstruction—was nihilistic but preening, an all-out attack on architectural embellishment and couch-potato comfort. Most often cited as practitioners: California’s Frank Gehry, in his early days, and New York’s Peter Eisenman. The Chicago School
Not to be confused with the Chicago School of Criticism, which is known for its neo-Aristotelianism, or the Chicago School of Economics, which is known for its monetarism. The Chicago School of Architecture, which flourished around the turn of the century and comprised such immortals as William Le Baron Jenney, Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John W. Root, is widely touted as having been the source for modern architecture, American branch, and as having invented the skyscraper. Lecturers often show slides of the Monadnock Building (Burnham and Root, 1892) and the Seagram Building (Mies van der Rohe, 1958) side by side to demonstrate this lineage, citing such shared attributes as simplicity, regularity, and structural candor. This isn’t really wrong, but it’s not quite that simple, either. Most standard architectural historians take the technological determinist line with regard to the birth of the skyscraper. For them, the seminal event in the history of American architecture is the invention of cheap nails, which made possible the “balloon frame” (houses made of lightweight timber frameworks, nailed together and easy to erect), which in turn led—via the Bessemer steelmaking process and the Otis elevator—to the rigid steel frame, and thence to the profusion of tall buildings that sprang up in Chicago like mushrooms after a shower. This formulation may be too schematic, but there’s no doubt that the Chicago architects made the first concerted and systematic effort to find new forms for the new type of building, often with lovely results. FIVE MODERN ARCHITECTS
What would architecture be without architects? The five listed here, all dead, constitute the generally agreed-upon list of the modern immortals. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)