This could mean many different things: functionalism, a lack of ornament, or flat-roofed buildings with white walls. Above all, modernist architects used materials such as steel and glass to redesign not just individual buildings but also entire cities. Following the lead of Mies van der Rohe’s glass-clad Berlin tower (see Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper entry here), they used more and more glass, so that buildings became almost transparent, and the views out of them were broader than ever before.
Glass does not have the insulating qualities of a conventional masonry wall, but widespread mains electricity allowed architects not only to heat and air-condition interiors with ease, but also to light both buildings and city streets brightly. The glow of electric light was one thing that led Le Corbusier to name his most famous city plan Ville Radieuse (Radiant City). Architects also explored the sculptural qualities of glass – one result being the bizarre, flowing shapes of Hermann Finsterlin’s designs for glass houses.
Finsterlin’s plans for curious tubular glass structures might have proved impossible to realize, but many buildings of this period were highly practical and functional. Architects as different as the Modernist Walter Gropius and the pioneer of streamlining Norman Bel Geddes analysed how a building might be used and tried to develop forms that would give its occupants what they needed. Functional thinking like this lay behind both Gropius’s Total Theatre and Bel Geddes’s Aerial Restaurant for the Chicago exhibition. Both might well have been built if other people involved in these projects had been more supportive of their architects.
However, many of these designs, though justifiable functionally, proved impractical in terms of structure or, especially, cost. Two of the most revolutionary – the ‘horizontal skyscrapers’ or Cloud Irons devised for Moscow by the artist El Lissitzky and the Apartments on Bridges proposed around Manhattan in New York City by the illustrator Hugh Ferriss – failed to get off the drawing board mainly for these reasons. Cost also stymied more traditional buildings such as the grand plan of Edwin Lutyens for a Byzantine-style Catholic cathedral for Liverpool. It is part of the architect’s job to produce plans that work in terms of money as well as function. But it would still be wrong to dismiss the work of Lissitzky, Ferriss and Lutyens. Their bold designs, in the form of models, plans or atmospheric drawings, still provide ideas for other designers, and offer the rest of us something to marvel at.
