Arts and Crafts

Spurred by a reaction against industrialization, 19th-century English reformers created a new movement, instigated by designer, artist, writer and manufacturer William Morris (1834–96). Arts and Crafts gathered momentum and spread across Europe and the United States. In the belief that machines and mass-production were lowering the quality of life, proponents revived ancient crafts, collaborating in medieval-style workshops to hand-produce furniture, books, ornaments, tiles and other objects. Although these smaller items were the main concern, architecture had a prominent role. During an apprenticeship with the architect G.E. Street, Morris befriended Philip Webb (1831–1915), who became a leading Arts and Crafts architect and designer. A key tenet was ‘truth to materials’: materials were usually locally sourced, and functions of buildings determined their design and construction, with no excessive ornament. Many Arts and Crafts buildings recalled Tudor or Elizabethan manors, or Gothic styling, such as Webb and Morris’s Red House (opposite, 1859) in Bexleyheath, Kent.

Orientalism

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, a fascination with ‘the Orient’ developed in the West. Although Eastern architecture was little understood by Western architects, many of its decorative stylings were adopted as exotic elements. In the 17th century, Dutch traders had brought Chinese mother-of-pearl, lacquer, silks and porcelain to Europe, and this led to a fashion during the rococo period for chinoiserie (a decorative style featuring Chinese motifs) and to increased imports of Chinese porcelain. In his book Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1658), Sir William Temple (1628–99) used the term ‘sharawaggi’, from the Japanese shara’aji, meaning ‘symbolism in design’, to describe a pleasing irregularity in landscape design or town planning. In 1757, Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712–86) had a ‘Chinese teahouse’ built in the grounds of his palace in Potsdam, featuring palm-tree-shaped columns, a curving roof and statues of Chinese figures (opposite). The publication of architectural pattern books, such as Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste (1750–2) by William Halfpenny, fuelled the fashion further.

The Royal Pavilion

In the 1780s, England’s Prince George rented a lodging house in Brighton, then a fishing village. He hired architect Henry Holland (1745–1806) to extend the house into a modest villa and, fascinated by Eastern designs, furnished and decorated it lavishly with imported Chinese furniture and wallpapers.

In 1815, by now Prince Regent, George commissioned John Nash to rebuild his villa and convert it into a magnificent Oriental-style palace. With William Porden (c.1755–1822) and Humphry Repton (1752–1818) working on aspects of it, it became an eclectic blend of Indian and Chinese influences, although Nash remained the chief architect. By 1821, the building was complete, with picturesque turban domes, minarets, moulded plaster and copper palm-leaf decorations. The domes were covered in sheet iron and the sumptuous hall was based on an illustration of one at Allahabad in India. In 1820, Frederick Crace (1779–1859) and Robert Jones (dates unknown) were employed to create the exotic Chinese-style interior decoration.

Haussmann’s Paris

In 1853, Emperor Napoleon III (1808–73) made lawyer Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91) Prefect of the Seine Department, and he began renovating the unhealthy, congested streets of Paris. In 1850, most of the city was still as it was in the medieval period, with narrow, winding streets and open sewers, but its population had doubled since 1800 to over one million. The severe overcrowding bred disease and unrest, and the streets were confusing and congested. Haussmann demolished slums and designed a new, airy, open city of gaslit streets. Although he had no previous experience as an architect or an urban planner, he hired tens of thousands of workers to improve the city’s sanitation, water supply and traffic circulation, and build wide avenues, parks and squares, sewers, fountains and aqueducts. Paris was divided into arrondissements (municipal districts), and many of the straight, wide boulevards intentionally created vistas of monuments or monumental buildings, such as the Arc de Triomphe and the Opéra, while buildings also had new, uniform façades.

Regency, Empire and Federal styles

Despite the advent of new movements in the 19th century, such as Arts and Crafts and Orientalism, neoclassicism endured as a popular architectural style. In Britain, where it was characterized by elegance and simplicity, it became known as the Regency style after George, Prince Regent from 1811–20, who commissioned John Nash to lay out some of the best-known areas of central London. Regency coincides with the Biedermeier style (1815–48) in German-speaking lands. In France, neoclassicism became known as Empire style, taking its name from Napoleon I’s Empire of 1800 to 1815, and following his orders to uphold the standards of Republican Rome. (A neoclassical aesthetic had also pervaded France’s Directoire style of the 1790s.) Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre Fontaine (1762–1853) were prominent architects of the Empire style. The Empire and Georgian styles strongly influenced the Federal style that emerged in the United States between c.1780 and 1830, often called ‘Adam style’ after the Scottish brothers Robert (1728–92) and James (1732–94) Adam.

Brunswick Terrace, Brighton, built in the Regency Style around 1825.

Charles Garnier and Henri Labrouste

Charles Garnier (1925–98) studied in Rome in 1848 and absorbed the Byzantine style of Turkey and Greece. He also studied with the neoclassical architect L.H. Lebas (1782–1867) and worked briefly with Viollet-le-Duc. Garnier mixed industrial structural materials with flamboyant but controlled décor to produce such glamorous buildings as the Paris Opéra and the Monte-Carlo Casino in Monaco (opposite), which epitomize the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852–70).

Henri Labrouste (1801–75) was a leading architect of 19th-century France. On leaving the École des Beaux-Arts, he spent six years in Rome (1825–30). One of the first architects to use iron-frame construction, he also believed that architecture should reflect society. His Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (1843–50) sensitively exposes iron structural elements of columns and arches, while his reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale (1860–7) comprises nine decorated metal domes supported by slim cast-iron columns.

Baroque Revival

By the late 19th century, students of architecture flocked to the École des Beaux-Arts from all over the world. The first American to attend was Richard Morris Hunt (1827–95), who helped found the American Institute of Architects in 1857. One of his many designs was the façade and Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (opposite, opened in 1902) and the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (1882–4). His grand mansions became identified with America’s Gilded Age and demonstrate what became variously known as the baroque revival, neo-baroque, Imperial style or, in France, Second Empire architecture (and in Britain, Edwardian baroque). In France, the baroque was an essential part of architects’ learning at the École des Beaux-Arts, and aspects of the style emerged in buildings around Europe. These include: City Hall in Belfast (1898–1906), designed by Alfred Brumwell Thomas (1866–1948); the Reichstag (Parliament) Building in Berlin (1889–98), designed by Paul Wallot (1841–1912); and the Piccadilly Hotel in London (1905–8), designed by Norman Shaw (1831–1912).

Art Nouveau

Spanning the quarter-century from 1890 until the outbreak of war, art nouveau was arguably the first avant-garde architectural style, and it manifested in all areas of design, from architecture to the fine and decorative arts. Art nouveau architects rejected revivalism and historicism, and instead embraced a completely new aesthetic that featured asymmetry, flowing lines, whiplash curves, organic forms, symbolism and new materials such as iron and glass. Architectural interpretations include the Hôtel Tassel (completed in 1893) in Belgium, designed by Victor Horta (1861–1947), designs for entrances to the Paris Métro (1899–1905) by Hector Guimard, the Secession House in Vienna (1896) by Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908), the Glasgow School of Art (1897–1909) in Scotland by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and La Sagrada Familia (begun 1882) in Spain, designed by Antoni Gaudí. Art nouveau came under a range of names, from Jugendstil (Germany) to stile floreale or stile liberte (Italy) and modernismo (Spain).

Majolikahaus in Vienna, Wagner, 1898

Victor Horta and Hector Guimard

The townhouse Hôtel Tassel in Brussels was the first building conceived fully in the art nouveau style. Rather than hide structural elements, Belgian Victor Horta (1861–1947) used them as decoration; cast iron, for instance, appears in the form of plant-like tendrils snaking through the building. Horta was influenced by Viollet-le-Duc’s maxim that machine-made materials be used to create ‘architectural forms adapted to our time’. He exploited iron’s load-bearing strength to make wide spans, maximising internal space as well as daylight.

Hector Guimard (1867–1942) designed his Métro entrances to coincide with the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Built in iron, glass and green steel, they are filled with light, and stress organic, asymmetrical, delicate decoration. Such was their impact, art nouveau in France was sometimes called Guimard style or style Métro – even though they were criticized at the time. His own Paris home, Hôtel Guimard (1912), stands on a triangular plot and features curved walls and flowing forms.

Hotel Tassel in Brussels, Horta, 1893

Antoni Gaudí

The unique style of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) blends art nouveau and modernism with myriad other elements and influences, including Catalan and Moorish traditions, the Gothic revival and his own devout Catholic beliefs. His fluid lines and asymmetrical shapes convey a focus on natural motifs, with textured and undulating forms that recall the sea, coral, fish, dragons and lizards, as well as sinuous curves designed to glitter in the sun as the day passes. Structures such as Casa Mila (1906–10), Casa Batlló (1904, opposite) and Parc Güell (established 1914) feature unusual tracery, few straight lines, irregularly shaped windows and façades made of trencardís: a mosaic of colourful ceramic tile pieces. Casa Batlló’s roof, for instance, resembles the back of a dragon, with balcony balustrades shaped like eye masks, and ‘scales’ of glistening trencardís; Parc Güell features colourful mosaic surfaces and a Doric colonnade. Gaudí’s approach to architecture was always sculptural, with a perpetual dynamism deriving from his endlessly curving lines.

La Sagrada Familia

In his unfinished basilica of La Sagrada Familia (begun 1882), Gaudí replaced Gothic buttresses with slanted columns and added soaring pinnacles, expressive sculpture and dramatic façades. The spires, steeples and entrance portals, built on a massive scale, evince both Gothic and Spanish baroque styling. One of the few conventions he adhered to was the Latin cross format, but little else complies with tradition. Three façades illustrate scenes from the Bible – the Nativity, the Passion and the Glory, with sculptures of holy figures modelled from ordinary citizens of Barcelona – while towers represent the Evangelists and the Apostles. Multicoloured mosaics and ‘pompom’ finishes on some pinnacles symbolize the mitre, ring and staff of Catholic bishops. Although he followed a mathematical structure for the building, Gaudí drew few plans, working more with models and his own impromptu ideas. During his lifetime, Gaudí completed only 4 of the 18 towers he had planned. Nonetheless, La Sagrada Familia presents a unique, unified and astonishing interpretation of art nouveau.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Scots designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) mixed art nouveau with Scottish Baronial ideas, the interlacing of Celtic art and design and the elegant simplicity of Japanese forms. He applied his unique linear style of right angles and ornate curves to all aspects of building and interior design. Between 1896 and 1906 he undertook major commissions for private homes, commercial buildings, interior renovations and churches, notably the Glasgow School of Art, of which the central and eastern parts were constructed first, and the second phase eight years later. Overall, the building appears to fuse medieval fortifications with industrial architecture and light, airy art nouveau elements. The Hill House in Helensburgh (opposite, 1902–3) is an extraordinary mixture of art nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Scottish Baronial and Japanese styles. In keeping with the art nouveau style, and all Mackintosh’s buildings, the house is asymmetrical: roofs pitch and rise at different angles and heights, chimneys and turrets add to the irregular exterior, while the building itself evolved its shape from the interior plan.

Vienna Secession

Art nouveau in Austria and Germany was sometimes called Sezessionstil (Secession style) after the Vienna Secession, a group of painters, sculptors and architects who opposed the conservatism of the Künstlerhaus (home to the Association of Austrian Artists), and who took inspiration instead from the linear style of Mackintosh. In 1897, led by Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), they broke away from the Künstlerhaus and formed their own group. They put on exhibitions and produced a magazine, Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), extolling their beliefs and aims.

Architects in the group were Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) and Joseph Maria Olbrich. Mixing industrial materials with ornamentation, Secession architecture was often strongly rectilinear, based on clean and simple geometric forms with decorated façades, commonly featuring curving lines and shapes (Horta’s whiplash or ‘eel’ line was popular). Wagner, the eldest of the group’s architects, declared: ‘Nothing that is not practical can be beautiful.’

Karlsplatz Station in Vienna, Wagner, 1899

Otto Wagner and Joseph Maria Olbrich

Wagner (1841–1918), who served as Professor of Architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, was initially a proponent of neoclassicism, later adopting more modernist ideas. From 1894 to 1910, he designed bridges and stations for the Stadtbahn (Viennese subway system). His restrained, geometric entrance to the Karlsplatz Station was a steel frame with marble slabs in the Stadtbahn colours of green, gold and white. Wagner also created the Austrian Postal Savings Bank, using aluminium, glass and marble in an airy and elegant structure.

Wagner’s student Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908) became the leading architect of the Vienna Secession and was chosen to design the group’s exhibition hall (opposite, 1897). Loosely following the rectilinear style of Mackintosh, the hall is bold and simple, comprising large white rectilinear forms topped by a golden metal cupola of floral openwork. The building won much acclaim, and Olbrich was commissioned to help design the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in Hesse, Germany in 1899–1901.