Less is more

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest architects, is also associated with the phrase ‘less is more’. He was not, however, the first to use it; credit for that goes to Peter Behrens, who employed young Mies to collaborate on the AEG turbine factory in Berlin (1907–10). According to Mies: ‘I heard it in Behrens’s office for the first time. I had to make a drawing for a façade for a factory … I showed him a bunch of drawings of what could be done and then he said, “Less is more,” but he meant it in another way than I use it.’ Mies used the phrase often, effectively making it his own, as he reduced and distilled buildings and their components into simple, integrated forms. Like several other contemporary architects, he sought to create a new architectural style to exemplify modern times, and his focus on simplified components and minimal ornamentation led to designs featuring multifaceted buildings of glass, steel and glazed curtain walls that blurred the boundaries between interiors and exteriors.

330 North Wabash in Chicago, Van der Rohe, 1969–73

Adolf Loos

Austrian–Czech architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was an influential theorist of modern design. After a conventional training and a three-year visit to the United States, he gave a lecture in Vienna in 1910 on ‘Ornament and Crime’, in which he attacked decoration in art, architecture and product design. His reputation grew with an essay in the magazine Cahiers d’Aujourd’hui in 1913: ‘The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects,’ he wrote, explaining that ornamentation – which he labelled ‘immoral’ and ‘degenerate’ – can effectively date buildings and objects. In its place, he advocated smooth and clear surfaces, free of the lavish decorations of art nouveau and the Vienna Secession. ‘Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength,’ he asserted. Loos’s uncompromising and austere buildings, such as the plain-faced Goldman & Salatsch Building in Vienna (opposite, 1910) – then derided by the staid Viennese as ‘the house without eyebrows’, but now acknowledged as a landmark in Wiener Moderne – reflected his pioneering approach.

Peter Behrens and the Deutscher Werkbund

Widely regarded as the first industrial designer, and one of the most important architects of his time, Peter Behrens (1868–1940) was an influence on Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (1881–1929). A pioneer of corporate design for AEG (Germany’s general electric company), he designed not only the factory and offices, but also the industrial products, stationery and company logo.

In 1907, seeking greater efficiency in the production of crafts, better design for industry and a more modern approach to architecture, Behrens helped establish the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation), at the proposal of architect Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927). A state-sponsored fusion of art and industry, the Werkbund was indebted to the ideas of William Morris, as members (who included Gropius and Mies) sought to improve the design of everyday objects. Its motto was Vom Sofakissen zum Stadtebau (‘from sofa cushions to urban construction’).

Futurism

The rationale of futurist architecture, an Italian movement of the early 20th century, is best represented in hundreds of drawings by the architects Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916) and Mario Chiattone (1891–1957). Futurism’s founder, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), produced its first manifesto in 1909. Inspired by the machine age and the glorification of war, futurists rejected the past in favour of radical new ideas, embodied in vast cities with soaring towers and megastructures. In 1914, Sant’Elia wrote the official Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, explaining how architecture should be meaningful and refined, and inspired by new materials and technology. ‘We must invent and rebuild our futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, active, mobile, and everywhere dynamic, and the futurist house like a gigantic machine.’ The movement attracted poets, musicians, artists and architects, until several were killed after enlisting in the First World War. Although few futurist buildings were constructed, the ideas behind them were genuinely ahead of their time.

Plans by Sant’Elia, 1914

Dutch and German expressionism

With parallels in German contemporary art, expressionist architecture emerged through the ideas of Bruno Taut (1880–1938) and Hans Poelzig (1869–1936) as a counter to the formalism, rational planning and pure geometries of the Deutscher Werkbund and modernism. The movement spread across Europe after being taken up by the Dutch, Austrian, Czech and Danish avant-garde from 1910 to 1930.

Characterized by distortion, emotional ideas, sculptural forms and organic or biomorphic shapes, expressionism also took inspiration from new technical possibilities offered by mass-produced brick, steel and glass. Taut’s Glass Pavilion (1914), a pointed dome of coloured panes, was a temporary construction for a Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. Economic constraints limited the number of commissions built between 1914 and 1925, and many expressionist works remained as drawings. The term now encompasses architecture of any date or location that exhibits qualities of the original movement.

Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) in Berlin, Taut, 1925–33

Erich Mendelsohn

The icon for expressionist architecture is the curvaceous and organic Einstein Tower in Potsdam (opposite), built by German Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953) in 1921. Aiming for a synthesis of functionalism with expressionism, Mendelsohn blends rationality with dynamism. Specially designed to test the theories of Albert Einstein, the building was constructed from brick, concrete and block render, and includes an underground laboratory with a vertical telescope and domed observatory roof. Outcroppings at each side provide stability for the squat tower, while round windows are recessed in niches.

Although he drew on elements of modernism, Mendelsohn’s architecture was individual, with curves, rhythmical forms and an imaginative use of glass, often emphasizing horizontals. Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he went to Brussels and then London. With Serge Chermayeff (1900–96), he designed the De La Warr Pavilion in East Sussex (1933–5), one of Britain’s first modernist buildings and a spectacular example of his style.

Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964) is remembered as much for his furniture as for his buildings; his simple chairs, now classics, were designed for mass production and affordability – ideas he would later carry into housing. Rietveld qualified as an architect in 1919 and joined De Stijl, a movement founded in 1917 by artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. De Stijl artists advocated pure abstraction: simplifying compositions to verticals and horizontals, and primary colours with black and white. In 1923, Gropius invited Rietveld to exhibit at the Bauhaus, the groundbreaking German school of arts and crafts, and in 1924 he designed the Schröder House in Utrecht (opposite), a 3D realization of a Mondrian painting. A blend of De Stijl and Bauhaus ideals, it comprises intersecting planes on the exterior and sliding walls inside to rearrange living spaces. In 1928, Rietveld broke with De Stijl in favour of a more functionalist architectural style, and in later decades pursued social housing projects, using inexpensive materials and innovative methods of prefabrication.

Walter Gropius

Gropius (1883–1969), a pivotal figure in modernism, exerted an influence matched by few of his peers in Germany – where he founded the Bauhaus – or in the United States, where he moved after the Nazis seized power. After travelling Europe to study its architecture, he worked from 1907 to 1910 for Behrens. Then in 1911–13, with Adolf Meyer, he designed the Fagus shoe last factory in Alfeld, Germany (opposite), inspired by Behrens’s AEG factory. Its glazed corners, hung daringly on a steel frame, convey a sense of lightness that contrasts with the solid brick entrance. His 1913 article ‘The Development of Industrial Buildings’ was influential, particularly on Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier. From 1919, Gropius served as master of the Weimar arts and crafts schools and turned them into the Bauhaus, employing some of the greatest artists and designers as teachers. His Bauhaus school complex at Dessau (1925) became a landmark in functionalism. Based in Massachusetts from the 1930s, he designed a series of striking homes that helped introduce modernism to America.

Bauhaus

The most influential modernist art school of the 20th century, the Bauhaus (‘house of building’) took a unique approach to teaching and exerted a global impact. Its leader, Gropius, blurring distinctions between fine and applied arts, and aiming to reunite creativity and manufacturing, began by the mid-1920s to switch the focus from crafts to industrial design. Leading artists and designers taught students a wide range of arts, crafts and methods of mass-production. The curriculum included printmaking, woodwork, metalwork, ceramics and architecture, and the focus on experimentation and problem-solving had a lasting influence on arts education. In 1925 the Bauhaus moved into Gropius’s purpose-built complex at Dessau, dominated by the three-storey workshop building with its full-width curtain glass wall. In 1928, the architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) took over from Gropius, but after incorporating his Marxist ideals, he was dismissed. In 1932, the school was moved to Berlin, under Mies van der Rohe, but it closed indefinitely when the Nazis took power in 1933.

Constructivism

Flourishing in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, constructivism was the means by which artists and architects intended to create a new Soviet Union, by exploiting modern materials such as steel, concrete and expanses of glass. Principles of constructivism emerged from suprematism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus. Their main aim was to bring the avant-garde into everyday life, but a shortage of funds after the Russian Revolution meant the movement remained more of an ideology than a practical movement, and few designs were built. Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), for instance, designed the Monument to the Third International, or ‘Tatlin’s Tower’, in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in 1919–20. Though never built, this glass and steel structure was to have been a fantastic, 400-metre (1,312-ft) double spiral with a revolving cone and cylinders, to serve as headquarters of the Comintern. Konstantin Melnikov (1890–1974) designed and built the Soviet Pavilion for the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris: a dynamic, cantilevered structure with rooms designed by Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956).

Mosselprom Building in Moscow, N.D. Strukov, 1917–25

Social housing

The cramped slum housing in Europe’s 19th-century cities, a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, led to generations of ill-health and high infant mortality in working families. In 1919 the British government, facing a severe housing shortage, passed an act to subsidize council building programmes. By 1921, some 170,000 low-density houses – with three bedrooms, indoor toilets and a garden – had been built for the better-off working classes. Across Europe, architects including Gropius, Taut and Martin Wagner (1885–1957) designed practical, low-cost housing solutions, with low-rise flats reaching Britain by the late 1920s. But the heavy bombing of the next war led to an even greater housing crisis. Britain’s response was to throw up some 156,000 ‘prefabs’ – short-lived, factory-built bungalows – followed by hardier homes of reinforced concrete. In the 1950s, with homes still scarce, architects now envisioned a new style of mass social housing: tower blocks, or ‘streets in the sky’, with communal facilities such as crèches and laundries. By the 1960s, more than 500,000 tower-block homes were built in London alone.

Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna, Karl Ehn, 1927–30

Rationalism

The rationalist movement, popular in early 20th-century Italy, arose out of a belief that successful architecture can be interpreted by reason. In 1926, a group of young architects including Guido Frette (1901–84) Adalberto Libera (1903–63) and Giuseppe Terragni (1904–43) founded Gruppo 7 and published a manifesto in the magazine Rassegna Italiana, declaring: ‘We do not intend to break with tradition … The new architecture, the true architecture, should be the result of a close association between logic and rationality.’ Spurning useless ornamentation, they embraced the machine age (albeit less violently than their futurist compatriots), and were inspired by the modernist essays of Le Corbusier and Gropius. They also, however, sought to create a timeless Italian architecture. The results could be jarring: the corner of Terragni’s Novocomum in Como (1927–9, opposite) featured a squared-off top floor atop a curved, glazed shaft. But they could also work effectively, as in Libera’s Trento Elementary School (1931–3), whose modern lines sat comfortably with the ancient city wall.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The German-born Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), who became one of America’s foremost practioners of modernism, began his career as an apprentice to Behrens in 1912 before opening his own practice in Berlin. His pioneering buildings made use of new materials, such as steel frames and glass, with extreme clarity; describing his style as ‘skin and bones’, he discarded ornament and opened up interior spaces. In his German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition of 1929, he created a geometric arrangement of green glass, chrome columns and marble, onyx and travertine planes. His two-storey Tugendhat House (1930) features a sweeping wall of glass and onyx and ebony screens. In 1927, Mies organized the exhibition Die Wohnung, which showcased the best modernist thinking on the problems of social housing. He directed the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, then emigrated in 1938 to the United States. His influential Seagram Building (1958) in New York helped to inaugurate a new era of simple, tall buildings that showed off their structural elements rather than camouflaging them with superfluous decoration.

Farnsworth House in Plano Illinois, Van der Rohe, 1945–51

Le Corbusier

Swiss artist, architect and urban planner Le Corbusier (1887–1965) blended modernism with bold expression. An early user of rough-cast concrete, he helped instigate the international style. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (the pseudonym came in 1920), he moved to Paris after the war and met the Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966). They created Purism, a new art movement, publishing a manifesto and a journal, L’Esprit Nouveau. In 1922, Le Corbusier opened a practice with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967), and they co-designed buildings and furniture for 40 years. The manifesto stated his ‘five points of architecture’ – supporting pilotis (piers), roof gardens, open-plan interiors, ornament-free façades, and full-length horizontal windows – and his designs bore them out. Following his own principle that ‘a house is a machine for living in’, he created fluent, light-filled interiors in such designs as Citrohan House in Stuttgart (1922) and Villa Savoye, Paris (opposite, 1928–31). His Marseille housing complex, Unité d’Habitation (1952), is a landmark in brutalist architecture.

Art deco

Derived from such diverse influences as African, Aztec, ancient Egyptian, futurism and cubism, art deco manifested in most fields of design. Taking its name from the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, held in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited, art deco was modern and opulent, and its geometric motifs contrasted sharply with the fluid signatures of art nouveau. Buildings are often embellished with hard-edged, low-relief designs in stepped patterns, chevrons and sunburst patterns; prominent materials include chrome, glass, lacquer and inlaid wood. The style endured throughout the Depression because it was practical, clean-cut and optimistic. Epitomizing the machine age, it appeared in streamline moderne designs (see here) including New York’s Chrysler Building (opposite, 1928–30 designed by William Van Alen (1883–1954) and the Empire State Building (1930) designed by William F. Lamb (1893–1952). In New Zealand, the coastal town of Napier, devasted by the 1931 earthquake, was largely rebuilt in the art deco style.

De Stijl

Originating in the Netherlands with Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and Theo Van Doesburg (1883–1931), De Stijl (‘the style’) sought to create the ideal fusion of form and function, a reduction of elements to create harmony and order, in the wake of the First World War. Adopting the visual elements of cubism and constructivism, as well as the mystical geometric principles of mathematician M.H.J. Schoenmaekers (1875–1944), it aimed for a new aesthetic that would encompass all the arts, including painting, architecture, urban planning, industrial design, typography, music and poetry. In architecture, De Stijl helped to instigate the international style of the 1920s and 1930s and had a marked influence on the more revolutionary architects, including Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Architect members of the group included Rietveld, whose Schröder House (opposite, 1924) in Utrecht was the only building completed to pure De Stijl principles, and J.J.P. Oud (1890–1963), whose 1925 Café De Unie in Rotterdam features rectangular planes in primary colours and white plaster, like a giant Mondrian painting.

Streamline moderne

Streamline moderne (also called art moderne) originated in the functional aesthetic of the Bauhaus, and rose to popularity in the 1930s, particularly in the US. It was in part a less decorative outgrowth of art deco, but was also a product of its time, fusing the pared-down austerity of the Depression with the efficiency, dynamism and speed embodied in the new machine age. Technological advances, smooth and powerful machines, high-speed transportation and innovative construction methods all filtered into the style, which went on show at the 1933 World Fair in Chicago and permeated all areas of design, from trains to toasters. Streamline moderne buildings have an aerodynamic look: rounded corners, often wrapped with strong horizontals and long bands of windows; ocean liner-type balconies; porthole windows. Eschewing the bright colours sometimes seen in art deco, most streamline moderne buildings have smooth white-plastered exteriors. Robert V. Derrah’s (1894–1946) Coca-Cola Building in Los Angeles (1939) resembles an ocean liner, set off with minimal red branding.

Hotel Normandie, Puerto Rico, Félix Benítez Rexach, 1938–42