Canonization of the Modern Movement
Movimiento moderno, en arquitectura, es el conjunto de tendencias surgidas en las primeras décadas del siglo , marcando una ruptura con la tradicional configuración de espacios, formas compositivas y estéticas. Sus ideas superaron el ámbito arquitectónico influyendo en el mundo del arte y del diseño.
El movimiento moderno aprovechó las posibilidades de los nuevos materiales industriales como el hormigón armado, el acero laminado y el vidrio plano en grandes dimensiones.
Se caracterizó por plantas y secciones ortogonales, generalmente asimétricas, ausencia de decoración en las fachadas y grandes ventanales horizontales conformados por perfiles de acero. Los espacios interiores son luminosos y diáfanos.
Aunque los orígenes de este movimiento pueden buscarse ya a finales del siglo , con figuras como Peter Behrens, sus mejores ejemplos se construyeron a partir de la década de 1920, de ideados por arquitectos como Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe y Le Corbusier.
La llegada de Hitler al poder en 1933, provocó la salida del país de numerosos arquitectos y creadores que habrían de extender los principios de este movimiento a otros países.
The "International Style"
• - Weissenhofsiedlung, Le Corbusier's building, in Stuttgart (1927).
• - Citrohan House in Weissenhof, Stuttgart, by Le Corbusier (1927).
• - Villa Paul Poiret, by Robert Mallet-Stevens (1921–1925).
• - The Villa Noailles in Hyères, by Robert Mallet-Stevens (1923).
• - Hôtel Martel, by Robert Mallet-Stevens (1926–1927).
The name International Style "International Style (architecture)") began to become widespread in the United States after the exhibition of modern architecture held in 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on the occasion of which Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson wrote the book International Style: Architecture since 1922.
Although after the Second World War there were still important constructions within this style, the last decades of the century have been dominated by other critical movements, heirs in any case of the modern movement.
Mid-20th century: Reconstruction of Europe
The Modern Movement continued to develop in Europe during the second post-war period, driven by the tasks of reconstruction. On a theoretical level, the contributions of the so-called organic architecture, a trend inspired by the work of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto as prominent representatives, were opposed to the so-called "International Style" inspired by the work of Le Corbusier, which postulated a "functionalist" orthodoxy reflected in the "Letter of Athens" (and the famous quote from Sullivan) as well as the absolute purity of the composition and details, inspired in turn by the work of Mies. The quote from Taut at the beginning of this article constitutes a theoretical synthesis of the "International Style", which was widely disseminated in the United States, Europe and South America.
The Modern Movement entered into crisis at the end of the 1950s, when a series of very severe criticisms were made of the excesses of the "International style" and the urbanism derived from the "Charter of Athens". A set of trends that claim to be continuators of the Modern Movement, are the protagonists of architecture from the 1960s to the present.
Outstanding designers of the Modern Movement
In the 1920s, the most important figures of modern architecture already had great reputations. The most recognized were Le Corbusier in France, Arne Jacobsen, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, the latter two were directors of the Bauhaus in Germany. The Bauhaus was one of the most important European schools, and its greatest concern was experimentation with new industrial technologies.
The career of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright developed parallel to that of European 'modern architects'; However, Wright refused to be categorized alongside them, developing both the theory and formal precepts of organic architecture.
In 1932, the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture was held), curated by Philip Johnson; together with his collaborator, the critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Johnson managed to bring together very diverse currents and trends, showing that they were stylistically similar and shared a general purpose, and consolidated them into what came to be called the International Style. It was an important milestone.
• - Bauhaus School in Dessau, by Walter Gropius (1926).
• - Workers' apartment according to the Bauhaus, by Walter Gropius (1928-30).
• - The German Pavilion (Barcelona) "German Pavilion (Barcelona)") (reconstruction), by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1929).
• - The Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition in Stuttgart, held by the Deutscher Werkbund (1927).
In the 1930s, under pressure from Nazism, which closed the Bauhaus, the main figures moved to the United States: to Chicago, to the Harvard design school and to Black Mountain College. This International Style became the only acceptable stylistic solution from the 1930s to the 1960s.
The architects who developed the International Style wanted to break with architectural tradition, designing functional buildings without ornament. They commonly used glass for facades, and steel and concrete for slabs and structural supports. The style became more evident in the design of skyscrapers. Perhaps its most notable exponents are: the United Nations building, the Seagram Building and the Lever House, all of them in New York.
Detractors of the International Style criticize its rigid, rectangular geometry as being "dehumanizing." Le Corbusier described buildings as "machines for living", but people reacted against this uniformity and rigidity. Even the architect - and personal friend of Mies van der Rohe - Philip Johnson admitted to being "bored of boxes". Since the early 1980s, many architects have deliberately sought to move away from geometric designs.
Although there is much debate regarding the fall or death of Modern Architecture, criticism of it began in the 1960s with the arguments that it was universal, sterile, elitist and meaningless. The emergence of postmodernism is attributed to widespread disenchantment with Modern Architecture.
Formal characteristics
Rejection of historical or traditional styles as a source of inspiration for architectural form or as a stylistic resource (historicism). However, the architecture of antiquity, especially classical architecture, is often reflected in both the functional schemes and the resulting volumetric compositions, in:.
• - Adoption of the principle that materials and functional requirements determine the result: form follows function.
• - Adoption of the machine's aesthetics, as a consequence of the above.
• - Newly invented materials and techniques, such as reinforced concrete.
• - Rejection of ornament as an accessory; The aesthetics result from the expressive purpose of the building, the materials used and its own characteristics;
• - Simplification of form and elimination of unnecessary details, taken to the extreme in the works of Mies van der Rohe.
Theoretical foundations
[3]
“Positive – says Comte – is inseparable from relative, from organic, from precise, from certain, from real.” Human thought passes, according to Comte, through three phases: theological, metaphysical and positive. The last, which is that of complete maturity of human thought, is characterized by the volitional renunciation of the first two stages through strict adherence to the methodologies of science.
Comte's positive thinking adopts the methods of mathematical sciences as its own, with which he can boast of being systematic and precise. Since “all positive science is nothing other than a transformation of observation and experience,” it is by avoiding all disquisition on the absolute and renouncing ontologies that Comte can define his method as “common sense.” In this regard, Littré"), one of Comte's intellectual heirs, stated that "those who believe that positive philosophy denies or affirms something about final or first causes are deceived; it denies or affirms nothing, since to affirm or deny would be to declare that one has some knowledge of the origin and end of beings."
Positive thinking will come to have undeniable influences on the creed of modern architects: the apology of progress, order and science (the metaphor of the machine, modern efficiency and hygiene), the abstraction of the individual in favor of the mythification of Humanity converted into the ultimate goal (universality, the typical man), the biological and evolutionary metaphors (the typical family and the housing block conceived as a cell / organism).
The daily life of the human being, analyzed with adherence to the methods of science, will be categorized and classified in the first Letter of Athens (1932, by Le Corbusier) into the elementary functions of Living, Working, Circulating and Spreading. Modern life, converted into a mathematical-statistical model, can now manifest itself, tectonic and spatially, in mass-produced housing. The housing block, which finds its most illustrious prototype in the Unité d'Habitation, is an invention of modernity; the denial of personal individuality is materialized in a house/hive.
"Man properly speaking, he says, is basically nothing more than an abstraction; the only real thing is Humanity, especially in the intellectual and moral order."[4] This reduction of the human being to number, - to the mathematical formulation that is the methodological basis of Comte's positivism - finds its reflection in the search for the existenceminimun, for the minimum housing. Abstract human life in a network of functions, relationships, processes, quantifications: “this subject is none other than the Lecorbusian type-man, the statistical type family, that mental construct that allowed orthodox architects to objectify their social behavior and quantify it in that almost delirious experience that was the existentzminimun.”[5].