The Seagram Building; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect
Mies van der Rohe (always referred to simply as “Mies”) is the one behind all those glass buildings, most famously the Seagram Building in New York. Although Mies is hardly to blame for it, one of the big problems with this kind of architecture is that it is fairly easy to copy, and that while one such building on a street may be stunning, fifty of them are Alphaville. The reason for the ease of imitation is that Mies was essentially a classical architect. That is, like the Greeks, he invented a vocabulary (cognoscenti use linguistics jargon as often as possible when talking about architecture) of forms and certain rules about how those forms could be combined, all of which he then proceeded to drive into the ground. Although his early work was influenced by Expressionism (as with the famous glass skyscraper project of 1921) and de Stijl (the brick houses of the Twenties), projects after the early Thirties were more and more marked by precision, simplicity, and rectilinearity Prime among these is the campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, first laid out in 1939, on which Mies continued to work through the Fifties. To sound knowledgeable about Mies, you might admire the way in which he solved that perennial architectural problem, the corner. Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
Le Corbusier (a.k.a. “Corb” or “Corbu,” depending on where you went to school) is a self-appropriated pseudonym of obscure meaning, like “RuPaul” or “Bono.” His real name was Charles Édouard Jeanneret. Like so many architects, Le Corbusier was something of a megalomaniac, who, perhaps because he was Swiss, thought that unhygienic old cities like Paris would be better off if they were bulldozed and replaced by dozens of sparkling high-rises. Fortunately, Parisians ignored this idea, although it did achieve enormous popularity in the United States, where it was called “urban renewal.” On the other hand, Corb’s buildings were superb. His early houses, including one for Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo at Garches, outside Paris, are legendary, supreme examples of the International Style, the most definitive of which is the Villa Savoie of 1929 (a big year indeed for modern architecture). Later in life, Corb discovered Cubism and concrete, and things began to change noticeably. Instead of thin planes and relatively simple geometries, Corb got into thick walls and sensuous, plastic shapes. Of this later work the best known is Notre Dame en Haut, a church whose form was inspired by the kind of headgear Sally Field wore as the Flying Nun. Toward the end of his life Corb did get to do an entire city: Chandigarh, in India. Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
To be perfectly frank, Gropius was not really such a hot designer. He was, however, the presiding genius of the Bauhaus School, which, you scarcely need to be told, was the Shangri-la of modern architecture. Which makes Gropius, we guess, its high lama. The Bauhaus building—bauen (to build) plus haus (just what you’d imagine)—was designed by Gropius and is his most memorable work, the epitome of the International Style. During its brief life, before it was closed by Hitler (whose views on modern art and architecture we won’t go into here), the Bauhaus was a virtual Who’s Who of the modern movement, a home to everyone from Marcel Breuer to László Moholy-Nagy Its curriculum, which was ordered along medieval master-apprentice lines, embraced the whole range of the practical arts, and its output was staggering in both quality and quantity. After it was shut down, Gropius (and most everyone else associated with it) came to the United States, bringing modern European architecture with them. This was either an intensely important or utterly dreadful development, depending on where you went to architecture school and when. Gropius was married to a woman named Alma, who was also married to Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel, although not concurrently, and who is sometimes described as the first groupie.
By his own admission, Wright was the greatest architect of all time. More than any other modernist, he went through several distinct stylistic phases. The conventional view is that the initial, so called Prairie style was his best. A college dropout, he worked for a time in the office of the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan before setting up on his own in Oak Park, a town he proceeded to carpet with his work. This early output—mainly houses but including such gems as the Unity Temple (1906) and the Larkin Building (1904)—was, despite European as well as Japanese influences, at once very modern and very American, deriving its essence from Wright’s near-mystical sense of the plains. Unique in proportion, detail, and decoration, these projects also “articulated” space in a new way. Rather than thinking of architecture as segmented, Wright perceived it as continuous and flowing, not as so many rooms added together but as a sculptable whole. Wright’s later houses preserve this spatial sensibility but come in a welter of styles, ranging from zonked-out International to Mayan. The best-known house from Wright’s middle period is Fallingwater (1936), built over a waterfall in Pennsylvania and designed, according to legend, in less than an hour. Many people, confused by the disparity between the prairie houses and something like the Guggenheim Museum or the Marin County Civic Center, find late Wright perplexing. Although Wright was, like Le Corbusier, a power freak, his version of utopia—which he called Broad-acre City—was somewhat less threatening, resembling, as it does, the suburbs. Wright ran his office, which still exists, along feudal lines. His successor was married to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana.
Aalto, the hardest drinker among the twentieth-century masters, came from Finland, where dipsomania is the national pastime, and which has, unaccountably, produced more modern architects per capita than any other country. After the customary neoclassicist dalliance, Aalto took up the International Style and produced a number of masterpieces in a personalized version of same. The most important of these are the legendary Viipuri Library and the Paimio Sanitorium, both dating from the late Twenties. The Viipuri Library, now in the Russian Federation and undergoing restoration, had an auditorium with a beautifully undulating (and acoustically sound) wooden ceiling—the first instance of an Aalto trademark. No discussion of Aalto can omit mention of the tremendous responsiveness of his buildings to their particular (generally cold) environments, especially the way they introduce and modulate natural light. Of the five immortals, Aalto is the most unabashedly sensuous and tactile, full of swell textures and gorgeous forms. Aalto’s best formal move was probably a fan shape, which allowed him to orient various rooms for best exposure to the sun over the course of the day; to illustrate this form in conversation, hold your hand parallel to the ground and stretch the fingers. As who wouldn’t be, coming from Finland, Aalto was big on the use of wood both in his buildings and in his famous bentwood furniture. Unfortunately, most of Aalto’s work—like the great Saynatsalo Town Hall (1952)—is located in places whose names are completely unpronounceable. This forces people to refer constantly to the several projects (e.g., the Imatra Church) that they can pronounce. FIVE MODERN BUILDINGS The Barcelona Pavilion
Built for an exposition in 1929, this is modern architecture’s holy of holies, a status further enhanced by the fact that the pavilion was torn down shortly after it was built; such are the rules of expositions. What this means is that everything everyone knows about it must be received from photographs, the preferred medium of architectural communication. The Barcelona Pavilion—did we mention that it’s by Mies?—is one of the most distinguished examples of a “free plan,” that is, a plan not primarily based on the symmetrical imperative but rather on a sensibility derived from Suprematism and de Stijl, yielding something rather like a collage. The result: spaces that flow and eddy, moving through large openings and expanses of glass into the out-of-doors and right on down the street. The Barcelona Pavilion is also remembered for its modern attitude toward materials. While retaining the International Style’s predilection for crisp lines and planes, Mies enriches their formal potential by the use of a variety of posh materials, including chrome, green glass, polished green marble and onyx, and travertine. Many conclusions to be drawn here. First, the building affirms the displacement of craft (the hand) by precision (the machine); instead of carving the stone, Mies polished it. Second, Mies treats the surfaces of planes not as deep and solid (like a Gothic church) or as smooth and white (as in so much International Style shtik) but as highly reflective, like glass; in the Barcelona Pavilion, everything either reflects or gets reflected, then gets reflected again in two shallow pools, one inside and one out. Finally, this was the occasion for the design of the famous Barcelona chair, the most definitively upscale piece of furniture ever.