Charles Edouard Jeanneret, Known As Le Corbusier, B. La Chaux-De-Fonds
Charles Edouard Jeanneret, Known As Le Corbusier, B. La Chaux-De-Fonds
Charles Edouard Jeanneret, Known As Le Corbusier, B. La Chaux-De-Fonds
La Chaux-de-fonds,
Switzerland, Oct. 6, 1887, d. 1965, was a Swiss-French architect who played a
decisive role in the development of modern architecture. He first studied (1908-
10) in Paris with August Perret, and then worked (1910) for several months in
the Berlin studio of industrial designer Peter Behrens, where he met the future
Bauhaus leaders Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Shortly after
World War I, Jeanneret turned to painting and founded, with Amedee Ozenfant,
the purist offshoot of cubism. With the publication (1923) of his influential
collection of polemical essays, Vers une architecture (Towards a New
Architecture, Eng. repr. 1970), he adopted the name Le Corbusier and devoted
his full energy and talent to creating a radically modern form of architectural
expression.
In the 1920s and '30s, Le Corbusier's most significant work was in urban
planning. In such published plans as La Ville Contemporaine (1922), the Plan
Voisin de Paris (1925), and the several Villes Radieuses (1930-36), he advanced
ideas dramatically different from the comfortable, low-rise communities proposed
by earlier garden city planners. During this 20-year span he also built many villas
and several small apartment complexes and office buildings. In these hard-
edged, smooth-surfaced, geometric volumes, he created a language of what he
called "pure prisms"--rectangular blocks of concrete, steel, and glass, usually
raised above the ground on stilts, or pilotis, and often endowed with roof
gardens intended to compensate for the loss of usable floor area at ground level.
After World War II, Le Corbusier moved away from purism and toward the so-
called new brutalism, which utilized rough-hewn forms of concrete, stone,
stucco, and glass. Newly recognized in official art circles as an important 20th-
century innovator, he represented (1946) France on the planning team for the
United Nations Headquarters building in New York City--a particularly satisfying
honor for an architect whose prize-winning design (1927) for the League of
Nations headquarters had been rejected. Simultaneously, he was commissioned
by the French government to plan and build his prototypical Vertical City in
Marseille. The result was the Unite d'Habitation (1946-52)--a huge block of 340
"superimposed villas" raised above the ground on massive pilotis, laced with two
elevated thoroughfares of shops and other services and topped by a roof-garden
gymnasium that contained, among other things, a sculptured playground of
concrete forms and a peripheral track for joggers.
His worldwide reputation led to a commission from the Indian government to
plan the city of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab, and to design and
build the Government Center (1950-70) and several of the city's other structures.
These poetic, handcrafted buildings represented a second, more humanistic
phase in Le Corbusier's work that also was reflected in his lyrical Pilgrim Church
of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1951-55) in the Vosges Mountains of
France; in his rugged monastery of La Tourette, France (1954-59); and in the
structures he designed (from 1958) at Ahmedabad, in India. Le Corbusier
accidentally drowned in the Mediterranean on Aug. 27, 1965.
Frank Lloyd Wright, b. Richland Center, Wis., June 8, 1867, d. Apr. 9, 1959,
was one of the most innovative and influential figures in modern architecture. In
his radically original designs as well as in his prolific writings he championed the
virtues of what he termed organic architecture, a building style based on natural
forms.
After briefly studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Wright
moved to Chicago, where he went to work (1887) as a draftsman in the office of
Adler and Sullivan. While working under Louis Sullivan--whom Wright called
"Lieber Meister"--he began designing and building on his own a few private
houses for some of Adler and Sullivan's clients. These "bootlegged houses," as
Wright called them, soon revealed an independent talent quite distinct from that
of Sullivan. Wright's houses had low, sweeping rooflines hanging over
uninterrupted walls of windows; his plans were centered on massive brick or
stone fireplaces at the heart of the house; his rooms became increasingly open
to one another; and the overall configuration of his plans became more and
more asymmetrical, reaching out toward some real or imagined prairie horizon.
In contrast to the expansive openness of those houses which inspired the prairie
school, Wright's urban buildings (unlike Sullivan's, for instance) tended to be
walled in, somewhat inhospitable to the city, and lit primarily through skylights.
Whereas two of the finest buildings of Wright's early period--the Larkin Company
Administration Building (1904; demolished 1950) in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Unity
Church (1906) in Oak Park, Ill.--seemed to proclaim Wright's distaste for urban
environments, houses he designed in the same period (such as Buffalo's Martin
House, 1904, and Chicago's Robie House, 1909) reached out into the landscape
with large, glazed walls, terraces, and low-slung roof overhangs.
Wright worked on his own after 1893, when the issue of his bootlegged houses
finally caused a break with Adler and Sullivan's office. During the 20 years that
followed he became one of the best-known (and, because of a tempestuous
personal life, one of the most notorious) architects in the United States. Two
editions of his work brought out (1910, 1911) by the Berlin publisher Wasmuth,
along with a parallel exhibition that traveled throughout Europe, boosted
Wright's fame in European architectural circles and influenced such key figures in
contemporary architecture as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
His reputation assured on both sides of the Atlantic, Wright began to reinforce
the philosophical underpinnings of his innovative building style. In keeping with
his agrarian bias, Wright proclaimed that the structural principles found in natural
forms should guide modern American architecture. He praised the virtues of an
organic architecture that would use reinforced concrete in the configurations
found in seashells and snails and would build skyscrapers the way trees were
"built"--that is, with a central "trunk" deeply rooted in the ground and floors
cantilevered from that trunk like branches. Spaces within such buildings would
be animated by natural light allowed to penetrate the interiors and to travel
across textured surfaces as the incidence of sunlight and moonlight changed.
His view of architecture was essentially romantic. Although Wright often paid lip
service to the rational systems called for by mass-produced building (modular
planning and prefabrication), his efforts in those directions seemed halfhearted
at best. The most spectacular buildings of his mature period--Tokyo's Imperial
Hotel (1915-22; demolished 1968); Fallingwater (Kaufmann House; 1936), Mill
Run, Pa.; the S. C. Johnson and Son Wax Company Administration Center (1936-
50), Racine, Wis.; Taliesin West (1938-59); and New York City's Guggenheim
Museum (completed 1959)--were based on forms borrowed from nature, and the
intentions were clearly romantic, poetic, and intensely personal. At his death he
left a rich heritage of completed buildings of almost uniform splendor; few
disciples, however, could match the special genius reflected in his works. Unlike
Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and other giants of modern
architecture, Wright was, at heart, an essentially idiosyncratic architect whose
influence was immense but whose pupils were few.
The Bauhaus
Among the architects who developed the International Style, the Germans
formed the largest and initially the most important group. By 1918 a group of
radical designers, centered in Berlin, had emerged as the champions of an
architecture featuring simple shapes in steel and glass and based on an industrial
and socialist ethic that had as its primary goal the overthrow of 19th-century
eclecticism. The strong intuitive flavor of this so-called expressionism in turn
triggered a reaction led by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who
accepted steel-and-glass construction and pure geometric forms as architectural
ideals.
The chief theorist of what its adherents called the Neue Sachlichkeit, or the new
factualism, was Gropius, who from 1919 served as director of what had formerly
been the Weimar Art School and was now called the Bauhaus. When the
Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, Gropius implemented his theories in the
buildings that he designed for the new site. After Gropius left the Bauhaus to go
into private practice in 1928, the leading light of the movement became Mies van
der Rohe. In his German Pavilion at the Barcelona Trade Fair of 1929, Mies
carried the features of the International Style to their furthest limit of
abstraction.
Le Corbusier
Also active at the time of the epochal "Modern Architecture" exhibition was
another leading exponent of modern architecture, the American Frank Lloyd
Wright. Although his work was recognized in the 1932 exhibition, Wright was set
apart from the practitioners of the International Style because of his
"individualism" and "romantic" attachment to nature. He was also a generation
older than his European counterparts and had actually influenced some of their
work through the publication (1910) in Berlin of the Wasmuth Portfolio of his
work. Wright accepted the machine as an aid to architecture and made early use
of such modern materials as reinforced concrete in his compositions of
cantilevered roof planes, unornamented surfaces, and flowing spaces. On the
other hand, he believed in what he termed the "organic" use of building
materials and in the close relationship of a building to its site--19th-century ideas
rejected by his European contemporaries. His idea of modern organicism is
expressed in such works as the Johnson's Wax Company Headquarters (1937-39)
in Racine, Wis., a great space wrapped with brick and fiberglass tubing whose
roof is supported by slender, mushroom-shaped columns; and in the dramatically
cantilevered concrete-and-glass Kaufmann House, "Fallingwater" (1936-37), at
Garnier in France.
In another vein the Art Nouveau movement of the 1890s also sought to produce
an innovative modern style using the industrial materials of metal, glass, and
concrete; only its sculptural, biological form-vocabulary separates it from the
buildings of 30 years later. Art nouveau, in turn, represented the culmination of a
search for a new style adapted to new materials and new institutions that
commenced around 1830 with the work of European romantic rationalist
architects. Going back in time even further, direct expressions of materials and
function in works of engineering can be discerned in the mills and iron bridges of
England dating from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1770s).
The fact that such pioneering movements of modern architecture can be
identified as much as two centuries ago indicates that modern architecture did
not primarily evolve out of the conditions and demands of modern society. Its
aesthetic and philosophical roots can actually be traced back through a long line
of artists and theorists.
Modern architecture claimed to be based on a logical expression of the spatial
and structural facts of building, yet its practitioners have rarely approached the
structural ingenuity of conceptual technicians such as R. Buckminster Fuller.
Similarly, although its apologists claimed that modern architecture represented a
democratic style expressing the taste of the general public, its works often have
been seen as aloof and oversophisticated by their residents. Finally, modern
architecture's efficacy in solving the problems of redesigning cities into finely
tuned social organisms was questioned by those who saw it as the destroyer of
cohesive neighborhoods through wholesale urban renewal.
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE
In a virgin land the art form that developed most rapidly was the one for which
the need was most pressing--architecture. The earliest extant buildings are the
dwellings, meetinghouses, and churches that made up the nuclei of the first
colonial settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts. The dwellings, simple in plan
and elevation, like the Adam Thoroughgood House, Princess Anne County, Va.
(1936-40), resembled English houses of the late medieval or Tudor style. The
most innovative in design were New England meetinghouses, because the
separatists sought to avoid any associations with the established church in
England. These handsome buildings, such as the Old Ship Meeting House,
Hingham, Mass. (1681), were either square or rectangular in plan and served as
the focal center for northern towns.
Colonial Buildings
As the colonies flourished, more and more elaborate structures were required. By
the end of the 17th century, most American public buildings were derived from
Sir Christopher Wren's designs for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire
in 1666. The best were the so-called Wren Building (1695-1702) of the College of
William and Mary and the Governor's Palace (1706-20), both at Williamsburg, Va.
To stay the random growth of cities, the concept of urban planning was
introduced, beginning with Thomas Holme's grid plan of 1682 for Philadelphia,
then second in population to London within the English-speaking world. By the
middle of the 18th century, architects were designing churches, mansions, and
public buildings in the current English Georgian style, named for King George I.
Post-Revolutionary Architecture
After the Revolutionary War, the first attempt to create a style expressive of the
new republic was made by Thomas Jefferson. He based the design of the new
capitol building at Richmond, Va., on that of a Roman temple, the Maison Carree
at Nimes, France. In so doing he laid down an American precedent of modifying
an ancient building style for modern use. The Virginia State Capitol (1785-96),
both building and symbol, was meant to house the kind of government
envisioned by Jefferson, and the Maison Carree became a paradigm for American
public structures.
Jefferson was influential in setting forth the style of monumental neoclassicism
that supplanted Georgian architecture with its taint of monarchy and colonialism.
Monumental neoclassicism came to represent the new political and social entity
that was the United States of America. Architects committed to neoclassicism
designed not only the new Capitol of the United States in Washington, first
designed (1792) by William Thornton and Stephen Hallet, and other government
buildings, but also factories, schools, banks, railroad stations, and hospitals,
modernized by the frequent use of materials such as iron, concrete, and glass.
The English-born Benjamin Latrobe, who began his American employment
working with Jefferson on the Richmond Capitol, brought American neoclassicism
to maturity. Latrobe invented new formal configurations for buildings as varied in
function as the Bank of Pennsylvania (1798-1800) and the Centre Square Pump
House (1800; both in Philadelphia and both destroyed) and Baltimore's Roman
Catholic Cathedral (1806-21). Chosen in 1815 to supervise the rebuilding of the
Washington Capitol, gutted by fire during the War of 1812, Latrobe set about
producing a truly monumental American architecture. In 1817 he procured the
assistance of Charles Bulfinch, who had just completed Boston's Massachusetts
General Hospital. Together the two men completed plans for the first major
building phase of the Capitol.
Revival Styles
Latrobe and Bulfinch were the preeminent architects in the neoclassical mode.
The generation following preferred Greek over Roman forms and produced the
Greek Revival. A principal contribution of this style was a modification of the
Greek prostyle temple (columns only across the front portico) for domestic and
public buildings; the style's influence was rapidly extended north, south, and
west. Major surviving examples are William Strickland's Philadelphia Merchants'
Exchange (1832-34) and Alexander Jackson Davis's La Grange (Lafayette)
Terrace (1832-36) in New York. Up to the 1850s classical revival styles led to a
homogeneity in American architecture that was never to prevail again.
Yet even before 1810, American architects, following the lead of their English
contemporaries, had begun to introduce a rival style on the American scene--the
Gothic Revival. It is appropriate that this movement, which originated with the
rise of romanticism in England, should have been taken over in a country where
romanticism constituted the first intellectual flowering after the nation's founding.
Not surprisingly, the style lent itself most naturally to church architecture.
Richard Upjohn, a prolific ecclesiastical architect, made his Trinity Church (1839-
46) in New York the prototype for Gothic Revival churches. The style was also
widely applied to college buildings, thus identifying those institutions with the
prestigious English universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Before the Civil War other revival styles such as the Romanesque, the Egyptian,
and the Italian villa style were introduced, but with less applicability. More
widespread was the cottage architecture for the middle class advocated by
Andrew Jackson Downing. Moderate in price and well constructed, these
Downing designs exploited the possibilities of wood both as construction material
and as decoration.
Cast-Iron Architecture
Skyscraper Architecture
The skyscraper, defined here as a tall commercial structure, is America's original
contribution to the history of architecture. Commercial buildings of several
stories, constructed during the 1850s in Philadelphia, anticipated the skyscraper.
But before it could become a reality, architects had to incorporate the elevator
into the structure. This was done, beginning in the 1850s in New York. Chicago,
however, was the city where skyscraper design soon attained a kind of canonical
perfection.
Since many of the city's commercial buildings needed to be replaced after the
great fire of 1871, Chicago served as an excellent testing ground for architects.
Preeminent among them was Louis Sullivan. He and others working in teams
evolved the glass cage that became the hallmark of the Chicago school of
architecture. William Holabird and Martin Roche's Tacoma Building, Daniel H.
Burnham and John Wellborn Root's Reliance Building, and Sullivan's Gage
Building are outstanding examples of the progressive stages in the skyscraper's
development.
Yet just at the time that an architecture of originality and daring was emerging in
Chicago, the New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White successfully introduced a
monumental Beaux-Arts style for impressive public buildings such as the Boston
Public Library (1887-98). This preference for revival styles continued well into the
20th century, with interesting variations. When, for instance, New York began its
campaign to raise the world's tallest buildings, their decorative systems were
adapted to revival styles, culminating in the best-known Gothic skyscraper, Cass
Gilbert's Woolworth Building (1913) in New York.
Modern Architecture
Far more significant than revival styles to modern architecture was, on the one
hand, the unfolding of the brilliant indigenous talent of Frank Lloyd Wright and,
on the other, the infusion of European modernism through the work of the
Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, and the independent work of Eric Mendelsohn and Eliel Saarinen. Wright,
who early in his career worked for Sullivan in Chicago, believed that the West
and Midwest embodied the "real American spirit." Acting on this belief, he
designed the houses that were to win him international renown. His "prairie
houses" were horizontal, often of one story, with rooms merging in a continuous
open space. Wright was a man of fertile imagination; before his long career
ended, he designed buildings as various as the Imperial Hotel (1916-22;
destroyed) in Tokyo; the Johnson Wax Company Building (1936-39) in Racine,
Wis.; and New York's Guggenheim Museum (1956-59).
Despite some native resistance--including Wright's objection that the
International Style of architecture exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art
in 1932 was "un-American"--the presence of European modernism was felt in
America's urban and industrial culture from the 1930s. After Gropius was
appointed chairman of architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in
1938, many young Americans were trained in the ideas of the German Bauhaus.
Postwar Architecture
The stark, boxy forms of European modernism by way of the Bauhaus dominated
American cityscapes in the building boom following World War II. Of special
importance was the use of glass curtain-wall construction for the design of large
skyscrapers and other buildings, as in the United Nations complex, erected in
1947-53 under the supervision of Le Corbusier and Wallace K. Harrison, and the
Seagram Building (1956-59) of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.
By the mid-1970s, however, the reaction against the plain, unadorned "glass
box" of the International Style was well under way, carried forth by Michael
Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, and Robert Venturi, among many others, as well as
by Philip Johnson, who had been the chief American proponent of the
International Style. These architects returned once again to the use of color and
decoration and revived such once-spurned architectural devices as the column.
Postmodern architecture may have produced a few extreme statements, but the
movement also brought American architecture a new vitality.
Greek Architecture
Byzantine Architecture
Byzantine art and architecture developed in the Eastern Roman Empire founded
by Constantine I when he moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium
(subsequently Constantinople--present-day Istanbul) in the 4th century. In
southern and eastern Europe, in particular in those parts of Italy, Greece, and
Anatolia that remained under the sway of the Byzantine Empire, the continuity of
Roman plans and techniques was strong. Only slightly modified Roman basilican
plans were used for such Italian churches as Sant'Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna
(534-39); in Constantinople itself huge domed churches, such as Hagia Sophia
(532-37), were built on a scale far larger than anything achieved by the Western
Roman Empire.
Romanesque Architecture
Gothic Architecture
From the mid-12th century to the 16th century northern European architecture
was characterized by the use of flying buttresses, pointed arches, ribbed vaults,
and traceried windows. The thin walls, slender columns, and very large areas of
glass in Gothic buildings gave an impression of lightness that contrasted
markedly with the Romanesque. Gothic architecture originated at the royal abbey
church of St. Denis, built by Abbot Suger between 1137 and 1144. It was refined
in the great churches of northern and central France, such as Amiens
Cathedral(1220-70), notable for its great height and the slenderness of its
columns, and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1247-48), in which exceptionally large
wall areas were filled with glass and tracery. Indeed, Gothic architecture was
most fully developed in France and England, where the style spread in the late
12th century. The spread of Gothic to Germany was delayed until the mid-13th
century, and in this country only a few cathedrals, such as the one in Cologne
(begun 1248), approached the size and quality of the northern French
prototypes. The most thorough application of northern Gothic to Italy was in the
Milan Cathedral, built at the end of the 14th century by French and German
masons. In general, the Italians tended to use Gothic as a decorative feature
rather than as a total building system.
Many Gothic secular buildings survive, some of the finest examples being the
Bruges Town Hall (1376-1420) in Belgium, the Palazzo Pubblico (begun 1298) in
Siena, Italy, and the Pont Valentre (early 14th century) in Cahors, France. The
greatest concentration of Gothic secular buildings is in Belgium, then the most
prosperous part of northwest Europe.
Renaissance Architecture
During the early 15th century European culture became inspired by the
rediscovery, known as the Renaissance, of classical literature, art, and
architecture. Italy was the center of this rebirth, and in Florence, where the
movement started, architecture was influenced by the use of the orders, the
round arch, the barrel vault, and the dome--all Roman features. In northern
Europe, where Gothic continued to flourish well into the 16th century, the
Renaissance at first made only a superficial impact and was for a much longer
time confined to decorative changes. In both France and England a truly classical
style was not established until the first half of the 17th century: in France by
Francois Mansart and in England by Inigo Jones.
The Florentine Renaissance did not initially mean the complete break with
traditional practice that was implied in the Gothic north. For the church of Santo
Spirito (begun c.1436), Filippo Brunelleschi used a basilican plan, round arches,
and a flat ceiling; but these traditional Italian Romanesque elements were
combined with a new sense of proportion, the use of Corinthian columns, and a
dome over the crossing of nave and transepts. Brunelleschi's later design for the
vast, still unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria degli Angeli (also called the Duomo
of Florence) took the form of a domed octagon with eight radiating chapels, a
centralized plan that became the ideal among his contemporaries in Florence
(Leon Battista Alberti and Michelozzo) and his followers in Rome. There, during
the 16th century, a more monumental version of the style was developed by
Donato Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as in their various plans for Saint
Peter's Basilica.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries Europe and America witnessed a series
of stylistic revivals. The period was dominated by the proponents of the classical
(themselves split between "Greeks" and "Romans") and the northern Gothic.
Buildings were also designed in self-conscious imitation of Byzantine, Oriental,
Egyptian, Venetian Gothic, and Florentine Renaissance architecture, however.
This was not, of course, the first time that ancient styles had been revived; the
Italians of the 15th century and the architects of Charlemagne's court in the 9th
century had incorporated classical motifs in their buildings. Both the revived
classical and the Gothic Revival, however, were essentially different from the
architecture that inspired them.
The country mansion of England and colonial America bore a classical portico,
but it was attached to a type of building never seen in ancient Rome or Greece.
The revived Gothic applied during the 19th century to private houses, office
buildings, railroad stations, hospitals, and waterworks was by no means the
same as the Gothic architecture of the northern medieval cathedrals. New
engineering techniques and modern materials--in particular in cast-iron
architecture--removed many of the age-old practical constraints on building
design. Rapid urban growth during the 19th century produced a great many fine
and essentially original buildings, the quality of which is only beginning to be
appreciated.
Modern Architecture