evolution of modernism

1. Otto Wagner
• Otto Koloman Wagner was an Austro-Hungarian architect and urban planner,
known for his lasting impact on the appearance of his home town Vienna, to
which he contributed many landmarks.
• He started designing his first buildings in the historicist style.
• In the mid- and late-1880s, like many of his contemporaries in Germany,
Switzerland and France, Wagner became a proponent of Architectural Realism. It
was a theoretical position that enabled him to move away from the historical
forms
• In 1894, when he became Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts
Vienna.
• Wagner declared himself absolutely and without reservation in favour of a
modern architecture in response to modern needs and condemned all stylistic
imitation as false and inappropriate.

2. • Wagner was very interested in urban planning — in 1890 he designed a new
city plan for Vienna, but only his urban rail network, the Stadtbahn, was built.
• In 1896 he published a textbook entitled Modern Architecture in which he
expressed his ideas about the role of the architect.
• After the turn of the century, Wagner started throwing off the Art Nouveau
influence.
• Wagner facilitated greatly the reform of architectural practice and the
establishment of modern design principles, such as honest use of materials,
especially steel; rejection of historicist formal vocabulary; and preference for
simplicity and clarity of form.
• Among his works, the Vienna railroad with its stations and the Postal Savings
Bank provided exemplary solutions to contemporary and relatively new
architectural problems.

3. Works of Otto Wagner

4. Chicago School
Rectilinear Facades Height Cuboidal Forms

5. Chicago School
Classically derived decoration Cuboidal Forms
Stone Facing

6. Chicago School
• Chicago's architecture is famous throughout the world and one style is referred
to as the Chicago School.
• The style is also known as Commercial style. The Chicago School was
a school of architects active in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. They were
among the first to promote the new technologies of steel-frame construction in
commercial buildings, and developed a spatial aesthetic which co-evolved with,
and then came to influence, parallel developments in European Modernism.
• They are not usually thought of as Modernists. However if one considers the
essential problems posed by Modernism as of how to generate the appropriate
form for the buildings that would reflect both their modern construction and the
spirit of new age, then the Chicago School architects were among the first to
grapple with it.
• Contemporary publications used the phrase "Commercial Style" to describe the
innovative tall buildings of the era rather than proposing any sort of unified
"school“. Architects whose names are associated with the Chicago School
include Daniel Burnham, Solon S. Beman, and Louis Sullivan among others.

7. LOUIS SULLIVAN
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

8. Louis Sullivan
• Louis Henry Sullivan was an
American architect, and has
been called the "father of
skyscrapers“
• He is considered by many as
the creator of the modern
skyscraper, was an influential
architect and critic of
the Chicago School, was a
mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright.
• He foreshadowed modernism
with his famous phrase "form
follows function.“

9. Louis Sullivan
• He foreshadowed modernism with his famous phrase "form follows
function.“
• Sullivan worked at a variety of architecture firms in Chicago and quickly
gained fame as a forward-thinking designer.
• Chicago was the perfect city for young architects in the wake of the Great
Chicago Fire of 1871, one of the worst disasters of the 19th century, which
destroyed vast areas of the city.
• When Sullivan arrived in the in the mid-1870s, the city was enjoying a spirit
of rebirth and renewal, and architects were in high demand.
• He helped design new music halls, workers' buildings, apartments and
eventually, some of America's earliest skyscrapers.

10. Louis Sullivan
• 'Form follows function',
Sullivan said. By this he mean
that the form of a building,
such as its decoration, design
or style, should arise from the
function or purpose of a
building, not the other way
around.
• It was actually a
revolutionary idea for the
time. Prior to Sullivan's entry
into the field, American
architects tried to emulate
established ideas of design
and form.
• As a result, many buildings, particularly
those in cities, had European designs. But due
to Sullivan's influence, by the late 1800s and
into the early 1900s, American cities acquired
began to acquire a new and distinct look of
their own for the first time in history.

11. Louis Sullivan
• Sullivan neither thought nor designed along such dogmatic lines during the
peak of his career.
• He often took inspirations from Art Nouveau style and designed elements in
the elevations which are usually cast in iron or terra cotta, and ranging from
organic forms to more geometric designs.
• Such ornaments eventually would become Sullivan's trademark.
• Another signature element of Sullivan's work is the massive, semi-circular
arch. Sullivan employed such arches throughout his career—in shaping
entrances, in framing windows, or as interior design.

12. Louis Sullivan
Carson Pirie Scott building, Chicago
Prudential (Guaranty) Building

13. EXPRESSIONISM

14. Expressionism
•The political, economic and social upheavals that followed Germany’s defeat in
World War I resulted in an overturning of old certainties, notably those
embodied in the imperial order but also generally in assumptions about the
technological progress.
• Expressionism developed in Europe during the first decades of the 20th
century predominantly in Germany and Netherlands.
• Expressionism exhibits some of the qualities of the original movement such as;
distortion, fragmentation or the communication of violent or overstressed
emotion.
• The style was characterized by an early-modernist adoption of novel materials,
formal innovation, and very unusual massing, sometimes inspired by natural
biomorphic forms, sometimes by the new technical possibilities offered by the
mass production of brick, steel and especially glass.

15. Expressionism
• Economic conditions severely limited the number of built commissions
between 1914 and the mid-1920s resulting in many of the most important
expressionist works remaining as projects on paper, such as Bruno Taut's Alpine
Architecture and Hermann Finsterlin's Formspiels.
• Expressionist architecture became identified in the early 1920s with a number
of architects working in Netherlands- like Michel De Klark and Pieter Kramer-and
in Germany, notably Hans Poelzig, Fritz Hoger and Peter Behrens.
• Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, based on his ideas of ‘the new times
demand their own expression.’ Although he moved later on from Expressionism
to Modernism.

16. Though containing a great variety and differentiation, many points can be found as
recurring in works of Expressionist architecture, and are evident in some degree in
each of its works.
• Distortion of form for an emotional effect.
• Subordination of realism to symbolic or stylistic expression of inner experience.
• An underlying effort at achieving the new, original, and visionary.
• Profusion of works on paper, and models, with discovery and representations of
concepts more important than pragmatic finished products.
• Often hybrid solutions, irreducible to a single concept.
• Themes of natural romantic phenomena, such as caves, mountains, lightning,
crystal and rock formations. As such it is more mineral and elemental than florid
and organic which characterized its close contemporary art nouveau.
• Uses creative potential of artisan craftsmanship.
• Tendency more towards the gothic than the classical. Expressionist architecture
also tends more towards the romanesque and the rococo than the classical.
• Though a movement in Europe, expressionism is as eastern as western. It draws
as much from Moorish, Islamic, Egyptian, and Indian art and architecture as from
Roman or Greek.
• Conception of architecture as a work of art.

17. Expressionism
Expressive Forms
Dynamism

18. Expressionism
Modern Building Types
Naturalism
Monolithic Materials

19. MODERNISM

20. Modernism
• Modern architecture or modernist architecture is a term applied to a group of
styles of architecture which emerged in the first half of the 20th century and
became dominant after World War II.
• Rejecting ornament and embracing minimalism, Modernism became
the dominant global movement in 20th-century architecture and design.
• It was based upon new technologies of construction, particularly the use
of glass, steel and reinforced concrete.
• Notable architects important to the history and development of the modernist
movement include Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Louis Sullivan, Oscar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto.

21. Modernism
• It has also been called International Modern or International Style, after an
exhibition of modernist architecture in America in 1932 by Philip Johnson.
Modernism also encompasses Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl and Bauhaus.
• The style is characterised by:
i. asymmetrical compositions
ii. use of general cubic or cylindrical shapes
iii. flat roofs
iv. use of reinforced concrete
v. metal and glass frameworks often resulting in large windows in horizontal
bands
vi. an absence of ornament or mouldings
vii. a tendency for white or cream render, often emphasised by black and white
photography
• Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and Le Corbusier (1887-1965) were the leaders of
the movement.