Rationalism (architecture)
Rationalism, also called the International Style or Modern Movement, was an architectural style that developed around the world between 1925 and 1965, approximately. It is usually considered the main architectural trend of the first half of the XX century. It was a movement of wide international scope, which developed throughout Europe, the United States and many countries in the rest of the world. Among his outstanding figures are: Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, Richard Neutra, Rudolf Schindler, Philip Johnson, Alvar Aalto, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Erik Gunnar Asplund, Josep Lluís Sert, Louis Kahn, Pier Luigi Nervi, Gio Ponti, Kenzō Tange, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.
This movement does not have a homogeneous designation in all countries. In Spanish, the term "rationalism" is more often used, although in other countries —especially in the Anglo-Saxon world— this term is usually limited to the Italian sphere, to the rationalism practiced by the Gruppo 7 and the M.I.A.R. In contrast, in these other countries the term "International Style" (in English: International style) is more frequently used, which originates from the exhibition organized by Henry- Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932 and in the book published by both The International Style: Architecture since 1922. A synonymous term is "Modern Movement" (in English: Modern Movement), from the book Pioneers of Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), by Nikolaus Pevsner. The latter has a broader meaning and would include, in addition to rationalism or International Style, the avant-garde movements of the first two decades of the XX century. , such as expressionism, cubism, futurism, neoplasticism and constructivism, sometimes considered generically as "pre-rationalism" or "pro-rationalism".
This current sought an architecture based on reason, with simple and functional lines, based on simple geometric shapes and materials of an industrial order (steel, concrete, glass), while renouncing excessive ornamentation and giving great importance to the design, which was equally simple and functional. Rationalist architecture had a close relationship with technological advances and industrial production, especially due to the staunch defense of said relationship advocated by Walter Gropius since the founding of the Bauhaus in 1919. He also advocated the use of prefabricated elements and removable modules. Its formal language was based on a geometry of simple lines, such as the cube, the cone, the cylinder and the sphere, and it defended the use of a free plan and façade and the projection of the building from the inside out. One of its main premises was functionalism, a theory that postulated the subordination of architectural language to its function, without considering its aesthetic aspect or any other secondary premise.
As indicated by its name «Modern Movement», it was a style committed to the values of modernity, in parallel to the so-called «artistic avant-garde» that was developing at that time in plastic arts. It was a movement concerned with the improvement of society, with influencing the improvement of people's lives, through an innovative language that meant a break with tradition in search of a new way of building, of a new way of interpreting the relationship of the human being with his environment and to look for new solutions that would solve the problem of the increase of the population in the big cities. To do this, he used not only theoretical contributions, new ways of conceiving spaces and using design as a tool to combine functionality and aesthetics, but also technical and industrial advances, the use of new techniques and new materials..
In addition to architecture, this movement was interested in urban planning and design. He also promoted architectural theory and the organization of congresses and conferences for the dissemination of the new movement, which materialized in the constitution in 1928 of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), as well as its executive body, the International Committee for the Resolution of Contemporary Architecture Problems (CIRPAC).
Terminology
First of all, it is convenient to analyze the terminology applied to this movement. Except for small nuances, in general it can be considered that rationalism, the International Style and the Modern Movement are synonymous concepts. As its etymology indicates, rationalism comes from reason and has its origin in the claim of the new architecture to rationalize the construction processes. Rationalism was heir to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the culmination of a long process of application in architecture of the new mechanization processes initiated with the industrial era. This process evolved in parallel to social advances, with a certain utopian component of applying the values of architecture and urbanism to the improvement of society: industrialization, used in a "rational" way, would serve, according to the theorists of the movement, to solve social injustices and create an urban environment that optimally encompasses the majority of the population. Some historians point to the origin of the term in this phrase by Erwin Piscator:
The new architecture should no longer influence the spectator by merely sentimental means, should not speculate more about its emotive availability, but should turn, in a totally conscious way, to its reason.Erwin Piscator, Das politische TheaterBerlin, 1929.
The term «International Style» (in English: International style) comes from the exhibition Modern Architecture - International Exhibition organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1932 and in the book published by both The International Style: Architecture since 1922. Despite its ambiguity, the term made a fortune and is the most widely used in the Anglo-Saxon sphere to designate the most orthodox phase of rationalism. For Hitchcock and Johnson, the International Style encompassed the most symptomatic productions of both rationalism and neoplasticism, characterized by a rational language based on industrial production. Sometimes the term rationalism is circumscribed to Europe, while the International style would describe it globally. Another term used in this context is "internationalism", from the book Internationale Architektur by Walter Gropius (1925).
The term «Modern Movement» (in English: Modern Movement) comes from the book Pioneers of Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), by Nikolaus Pevsner, and would be more inclusive, since it would bring together rationalism with expressionism, cubism, futurism, neoplasticism and constructivism, considered generically as a "pre-rationalism" (or "pro-rationalism"). The author's intention was to point out the convergence of various stylistic currents towards a new way of conceiving architecture during the first decades of the XX century. According to Pevsner, “it is essential to understand the Modern Movement as a synthesis of the Morris movement (Arts & Crafts), the development of steel construction and art nouveau”. It is interesting to note that as early as 1902 the architect Otto Wagner had used the same term in the preface to his book Moderne Architektur. However, in recent times some historians have criticized some of Pevsner's formulations, especially regarding the alleged loss of historical roots in modern architects, noting for example that Le Corbusier was largely inspired by classical Greco-Roman architecture and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe by the work of neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Another of the premises put in doubt has been that of a common supranational style, against which a wide divergence of national-based criteria has been pointed out in each of the countries where the movement developed, although on numerous occasions they converged on criteria common. Thus, in contrast to the initial postulates of Pevsner and Siegfried Giedion, from the 1970s various historians criticized the concept of the Modern Movement, such as Reyner Banham, Bruno Zevi or Manfredo Tafuri, while Charles Jencks went on to speak of "modern movements". in the plural.
It should be noted that in some countries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, the term «modernism» is used as a synonym for the Modern Movement. However, in Spanish that term is used for the artistic style developed between the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the xx also known as art nouveau in France, Modern Style in the UK, Jugendstil > in Germany, Sezession in Austria, Nieuwe Kunst in the Netherlands or Liberty in Italy.
Finally, it should be noted that the Modern Movement is not the same concept as modern architecture, which is the architecture of modernity, a cultural process that began with the Enlightenment in the XVIII based on science and progress, linked to philosophical positivism. It therefore includes the centuries xix, xx and xxi, that is, up to the present day, because although since the 1980s postmodern art has questioned the validity of modernity, historians disagree, and there are even experts —such as Valeriano Bozal— who point out that postmodernity is just one more phase of modernity, precisely the one in which it reflects on itself.
History
The origins of rationalism are diffuse and come from a slow evolution from the middle of the XIX century until the 1920s, in that a new generation of architects, critics and architecture scholars began to realize that the achievements of that time shared some common stylistic traits and a modern and dynamic program for the construction and urban processes. In the genesis of rationalism are the technological advances that led to the architecture of glass and iron in the second half of the XIX century, the Arts & Crafts, the construction of the first skyscrapers promoted by the Chicago School, the formulation of functionalist theory by Louis Sullivan, some postulates of modernist architecture —especially the Viennese Sezession— and the work of various individual architects —in especially Frank Lloyd Wright—until leading to the avant-garde currents of the early XX century, which are usually considered as pre-rationalism.
It must also be considered as the driving force behind the new architecture in the transition between the 19th century and xx the technological changes produced in the so-called Second Industrial Revolution, such as the invention of reinforced concrete (1854), the Bessemer process for making steel (1856), the invention of the dynamo to generate electricity as driving force (1869), the telephone (1876), Galileo Ferraris's experiments on the rotating magnetic field that allow the remote transport of hydraulic energy (1883), the electric light bulb (1879), the internal combustion engine (1885), etc. All these factors helped the construction industry and launched architecture into a new way of building with multiple possibilities.
A first determining factor in the appearance of rationalism was the opening in 1919 of the Bauhaus, a school of architecture, art and design directed by Walter Gropius that advocated a functionalist style of simple lines and based on industrial production. During the years after the end of the First World War, several architects who promoted rationalist premises in their works began to stand out, such as Gropius himself, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, considered the greatest exponents of this movement, who helped to its international diffusion. Little by little, the new style spread thanks to competitions, congresses and exhibitions: in 1922, the competition for the new headquarters of the Chicago Tribune revealed proposals by Gropius, Adolf Meyer, Max Taut and Hans Scharoun; in 1925, Le Corbusier built for the Exposition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industries in Paris the pavilion of L & # 39; Esprit Nouveau , in which he exposed his new urban planning theories; in 1927, the exclusion of Le Corbusier from the competition for the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva caused a great scandal, a fact that had repercussions in giving him more fame; Also in 1927, Mies van der Rohe organized an architecture exhibition dedicated to housing (Die Wohnung) in Stuttgart, which promoted the construction of thirty-two houses —the Weißenhofsiedlung development—, including buildings and single-family homes., which was a major milestone for the new style: the internationality of the project led Professor Paul Schmitthenner to state that "we are reaching the international style formula of the century XX». Other exhibitions in which rationalist architects participated were: the International Exhibition of Barcelona (1929); the Hall of Decorating Artists of the Grand Palais in Paris (1930); and the Baauausstellung (Construction Fair) in Berlin (1931).
The biggest event that led to the officialization of rationalism was the founding in 1928 in La Sarraz (Switzerland) of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), an international association of architects in charge of holding congresses to debate the new principles of architecture and help its international diffusion.
Another major event that helped spread the new style was the Modern Architecture - International Exhibition exhibition, organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson at the MoMA in New York in 1932, of which also gave rise to the book published by both, The International Style: Architecture since 1922, which contributed the term International Style to designate the movement. These authors focused more on the formal aspects that united the various manifestations of this movement than on its theoretical and even utopian premises. They pointed out as the main characteristics of this style the rejection of historicist eclecticism, the use of materials such as steel, glass and concrete, the use of the open plan and the "conception of architecture as volume rather than mass".
Rationalism spread rapidly throughout Europe and took root especially in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom —thanks especially to German architects who fled Nazism—, Italy and Spain. In the 1930s, rationalism had a new dissemination center in the United States, where numerous European architects exiled because of German Nazism, Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism arrived. However, in that decade the movement entered a phase of certain doubts and criticism of his excessive formalism and his cold mechanism, far removed from human needs. Le Corbusier himself distanced himself from his initial purism and began to consider the machine as a tool and not an end in itself. Despite everything, rationalism continued to be the hegemonic style at the international level until practically the 1960s.
After World War II the movement began to decline, but it continued to be built in a rationalist style until the 1960s and even 1970s, in coexistence with other new styles that were emerging. In fact, in the postwar period the urgency of Reconstructing the cities devastated in the conflict contributed to the survival of the style, since in the face of the search for new styles, an already consolidated one was preferred. This occurred in parallel to the definitive universalization of the rationalist language, since its greatest diffusion in those years occurred in emerging countries such as Brazil, India, Mexico and Venezuela. This globalization of the movement led to its diversification, since it had to adapt to the different construction traditions of countries with very diverse cultures, as well as to different climatic, economic, and social conditions. Even in the United States, the International Style gradually became regionalized, as demonstrated by the substitution in numerous cases of the skeletons of steel for wood, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses.
The spread of internationalism after the war was mainly carried out by the International Union of Architects (Union Internationale des Architectes, UIA), founded by the Frenchman Pierre Vago in collaboration with the Englishman Patrick Abercrombie, the Italian Saverio Muratori, the Portuguese Carlos João Chambers Ramos and the Russian Viacheslav Popov; Vago was its general secretary between 1948 and 1968. The first congress was held in Paris in 1948 and since then every three years in a different country. Another source of dissemination was the Architectural Review magazine, as well as institutions such as Harvard University, the Ulm Bauhaus and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in the United Kingdom, and other newly created ones such as the Middle East Technical Ankara University and the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok.
However, after the world war, the International Style gradually became a method of systematic construction and lost some of its initial essence and its utopian component of an art at the service of society. Confidence in the new technologies, in art as an educational instrument for the people, in a universal aesthetic that entailed a universal ethic, were gradually diluted, and the movement was reduced to a regulated style, which left no room for innovation. nor individual creation, for subjectivity or the relationship with nature. His stylistic evolution was towards a certain eclecticism —according to Jürgen Joedicke— or mannerism —according to Josep Maria Sostres—, with two possible ways of realization: “mechanical imitation and impersonal of great examples» (Sostres) or regionalist contextualization, such as that practiced by Scandinavian neoempiricism, British brutalism, Italian neorealism and neoliberty or the Barcelona School in Spain.
The beginning of the end of this movement was staged in the IX CIAM congress, in which a group of dissident architects organized themselves into the so-called Team X, which advocated an evolution towards a more realistic and socially useful style, which it materialized in a new style called brutalism. This group accused CIAM of having sponsored the International Style by imposing «mechanical concepts of order», without taking into account the emotional needs of the human being or the territorial specificities of the various countries in which the style was developed. Philip Johnson himself confessed in 1996 that "our so-called modern architecture was too old, icy and flat".
Although the end of rationalism as a style can be placed in the first five years of the 1960s, it should be noted that until the 1970s and early 1980s this style was still built —in a more or less orthodox way— in many parts of the world, especially in emerging countries that had arrived with some delay to modernity. The decolonization process that began in Africa and Asia after the Second World War led to the construction boom in these new countries, which needed new infrastructures and government buildings, and which adopted the International Style as a way of equating the construction of a new state with a modern image. and progressive. In many cases, this architecture turned out to be stereotyped and out of context, with a certain appearance of transplanting Western typologies to countries with different cultural traditions, without taking into account the social, geographical and economic conditions of these countries.
CIAM
The International Congress of Modern Architecture (in French: Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne) was founded in La Sarraz (Switzerland) in 1928 to foster interrelation between architects and urban planners from all over the world in order to exchange ideas and compare the styles and techniques used in different parts of the world. Originally, the meeting was motivated as a reply to the postponement of the Modern Movement in the competition for the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva, against which the architects of the new movement wanted to offer a common front. CIAM's founders included Le Corbusier, and Siegfried Giedion was its first secretary until 1956. CIAM's executive body was instituted CIRPAC, the International Committee for the Resolution of Problems in Contemporary Architecture (French: Comité International pour la Résolution des Problèmes de l'Architecture Contemporaine). In 1959 its definitive dissolution took place; by then the congress had more than thirty affiliated countries and some three thousand members.
Four phases are usually pointed out in the history of CIAM: the founding cycle of congresses (1928-1933), the crisis caused by Nazism and the series of emigrations of numerous architects (1934-1945), the refounding and expansion of the congress (1945-1953) and the process of agony of the movement motivated by the protest process of the youngest architects (1953-1959).
In their first meeting, Le Corbusier was in charge of drafting the agenda to be discussed, which included the following topics: modern technology and its consequences; standardization; the economy; the urban; youth education; realization: architecture and the state. A statement was drafted which argued that "in order to benefit a country, architecture must be intimately related to the general economy. The true performance will be the result of rationalization and normalization, and sufficient production to fully satisfy human demands." Three functions were also identified as primary objectives of urban planning: living, working, entertaining.
In 1929 the second congress met in Frankfurt (Germany), focused on the question of «minimum housing». CIAM III took place in 1930 in Brussels (Belgium), on the "rational urbanization" of space. The fourth congress, dedicated to the "functional city", was to be held in Moscow, but for political reasons it was finally held in Athens (Greece) in 1933, aboard the yacht Patris II; in it the so-called Athens Charter was agreed upon. In 1937, CIAM V was held in Paris (France), under the premise of "housing and leisure". World War II paralyzed the congresses and fostered the rise of the American group; Josep Lluís Sert, exiled in that country, published in 1943 the book Can Our Cities Survive? , where he collected the postulates of CIAM and became the reference work of rationalism in the Anglo-Saxon sphere. After the war CIAM expanded to Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the Le Corbusier-Gropius-Giedion trio began to lose influence. In 1947 CIAM VI took place in Bridgwater (England), focused on the reconstruction of cities devastated by war. CIAM VII took place in Bergamo (Italy) in 1949, on architecture as art. In 1951, CIAM VIII was housed in Hoddesdon (England) and dealt with the center of the city, with a first split between orthodox and renovating positions due to the approach of new concepts such as the symbolic dimension and the human scale. CIAM IX took place in 1953 in Aix-en-Provence (France) and focused again on generational disputes and the founding of Team X by Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis, Aldo Van Eyck and Alison and Peter Smithson.. In 1956 CIAM X was held in Dubrovnik (Yugoslavia), focused on the Habitat Charter as an alternative to the Athens Charter. In 1957 the national groups were dissolved and Jaap Bakema was elected General Secretary. The last congress, CIAM XI, took place in 1959 in Otterlo (The Netherlands) and meant the dissolution of CIAM.
The 1932 MoMA Exhibition
The exhibition Modern Architecture - International Exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from February 9 to March 23, 1932. It subsequently toured the United States for six years. Its curators were the critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the architect Philip Johnson, who chose the most representative works of the new style in Europe and the United States —with the only exception outside these continents of the building of the electricity laboratory of the ministry of Public Works in Tokyo, by Mamoru Yamada. The selection criteria were basically aesthetic, which is why they left aside the more programmatic aspects of the new architecture, especially its social and economic dimensions, a fact for which Hitchcock and Johnson's proposal was criticized. According to the curators, the works included in the new trend had to meet a series of parameters, such as the absence of ornamentation, the composition in terms of volume and not mass, modular regularity and not axial symmetry. As for architects, they left out the work of the movement's pioneers, such as Peter Behrens, Auguste Perret, Adolf Loos, Antonio Sant'Elia and Frank Lloyd Wright, and established Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, as paradigms of the new movement. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, Gerrit Rietveld and Richard Neutra.
The work of sixty-seven architects was exhibited. Most of the projects on display came from Germany, followed by the United States. By architects, the majority were projects by Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. The selection was made by the curators themselves, whether they were projects that were familiar with both or one of them, with few exceptions from recommendations from other people they trusted, such as Richard Neutra, who recommended Mamoru Yamada's Tokyo electrical laboratory, or Bruno Taut., who advised the Moscow electrophysical laboratory, Ivan Nikolayev and Anatoli Fisenko.
With the same premises as the exhibition, Hitchcock and Johnson published the same year the book The International Style: Architecture since 1922, which gave its name to the movement in the Anglo-Saxon world. In the book they analyzed the work of seventy-two architects from fifteen countries, with the premise that they represented a new international architectural style. In the foreword, MoMA director Alfred Barr noted that the authors had shown that "today there is a modern style as original, consistent, logical and international as any of the past".
In 1951, Hitchcock made the following retrospective analysis of the parameters used for exposure:
Too few in number and too narrow, I would say in 1951 that they are the principles that we so firmly stated in 1932. Today it would add a third principle: the articulation of the structure and omit the reference to the decoration, which constitutes a more than formal aesthetic issue. The concept of regularity is too negative to explain the best contemporary design, although I cannot find a phrase that explains globally the most positive qualities of modern design.
Philip Johnson also revised the parameters of the exhibition in the 1960s and pointed out as the main characteristics of the International Style the structural honesty, the repetitive modular rhythms, the flat ceilings, the clarity expressed by the glass surfaces, the box as a container and the absence of decoration.
General characteristics
Rationalism was a heterogeneous movement with both geographical and chronological origins difficult to pin down. It could be said that it was rather a confluence of different styles that converged on common characteristics, which became more clearly evident after the First World War. Its general characteristics were forged little by little in the work and contributions of all the movements and architects that are considered precedents of this style. When these characteristics were more thoroughly analyzed, it was possible to determine that the majority of the creations of this new style were based on several main points: use of a functionalist language, use of simple geometric shapes and regular structures, a tendency towards a vertical-horizontal arrangement, resignation to the ornamentation and use of industrial-type materials (concrete, steel, glass). Despite this, it is difficult to speak of a homogeneous style and, in fact, many rationalist architects affirmed that they did not have a style, but that theirs was "a purely rational form of design".
The ideological postulates of rationalism were based on progress and modernity, with a firm commitment to industrial and mechanized production, as well as a rational organization of work. With a tendency towards a progressive and egalitarian political ideology, they wanted to develop a new constructive language that would serve to renew society, which was especially reflected in their interest in urban planning and social housing. Thus, it could be said that the foundations of rationalism are found in the "reconciliation between technological progress and social commitment", according to Jeremy Melvin.
One of the main premises of the Modern Movement was functionalism, the subordination of architectural language to its function, leaving aside any aesthetic or accessory consideration for the main objective of construction: "form follows function", according to Louis Sullivan's words. Thus, any constructive form must be a reflection of the use for which it has been conceived. According to this theory, even the construction elements —such as beams and pillars— must be left in sight, since they are part of the formal design according to which a structure is planned. For this, industrial production and technological advances must contribute, which are tools made available to the architect to optimize his constructive work.
In the heart of industrial society and the capitalist economy, the rationalist architect was required to achieve maximum functionality and optimization of resources, to elaborate the best designs with the most economical industrial criteria; he had to consider all the components of life in society, for which he had to take responsibility "from the spoon to the city", as they used to say at the time. In general, most rationalist architects had social concerns and considered it a duty of the State to guarantee minimum living conditions (Existenzminimum) to the population. In rationalism, all the constituent elements of the architectural work were subordinated to function, so function and style are equated.
Among the main stylistic features of rationalism are: rectilinear and orthogonal forms, composition in volume rather than mass, uniform and visible structures, absence of axial symmetry, the use of pilitis as support of the structure, flat roofs, empty central patios, open plan indoors, use of overhangs —especially on balconies and terraces—, facades without decorations, white walls and rectangular windows, linked in an elongated band running along the plane of the facade. The use —especially in skyscrapers— of the curtain wall (curtain wall), a type of self-supporting glazed façade, independent of the resistant structure of the building, generally built by repeating a pattern, is also characteristic. modulated prefabricated element, which is usually composed of an extruded aluminum frame and a glass panel. Another commonly used element is the brise soleil, a type of sun protection for windows and balconies, as a blind or lattice, which can be made of various materials, from wood to the concrete commonly used by Le Corbusier. It should be noted that rationalist architecture received a certain influence from nautical design, and even Le Corbusier added numerous photographs of ships and ocean liners in his book Vers une Architecture (1923).
The main aesthetic factor of the new style was the absence of applied decoration, conceived as a way of eliminating superficiality. The new premise was simplicity, based mainly on industrial materials, a structural order based on regularity versus angularity and a harmony based on proportion and geometry, and a design centered on a skeleton of columns (concrete pillars or metal) instead of a mass structure, with a smooth and seamless surface, made of smooth materials —preferably metal and glass—, with windows that do not interrupt the perfection of the façade, preferably with light metal frames, and a Chromatism focused on the natural color of the material. They also considered relevant the choice of the place to be built and its relationship with the environment, within which the external walls of the building —such as terraces and pergolas— are considered extensions of it, as well as the walls and paths of the gardens, whose rectilinear planimetry contrasted with the work of nature. On the other hand, within the ornamental aspect, they considered the inclusion in the building of paintings and sculptures as independent elements that should not degenerate into simple decoration, but should embellish independently. In this sense, Hitchcock and Johnson pointed out abstract wall paintings as the ideal complement to modern architecture.
Rationalist architecture —especially design— maintained close contacts and influences with the rest of the arts, especially painting, and within this the vanguards such as neoplasticism, suprematism and constructivism, all of them with an abstract trend, from which they took some of their designs and the preference for primary colors, as well as experimentation with various materials and a design based on basic and proportionate forms. Some of the painters who most influenced the movement were professors at the Bauhaus or had contacts with this institution, such as El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, Wassily Kandinski, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy.
Theory and criticism
Rationalism was nourished by an extensive theoretical corpus prepared by some of its most prominent representatives, such as Gropius and Le Corbusier. In 1925, Gropius published Internationale Architektur, where he related his work to that of other architects such as Le Corbusier, Oud and Wright, noting that they all shared a functional vision of architecture, with a logical conception of architecture. work and an economic planning of optimization of money, materials, time and space. He also noted that "the uniformity of appearance of modern buildings, born of world travel and technology, overcomes the natural boundaries that continue to isolate individuals and peoples, creating a bridge between all cultural regions."
Le Corbusier published several books on art and architecture, such as Vers une Architecture (1923), L'Art Décoratif d'Aujourd'hui (1926) and Urbanisme (1925), in addition to publishing the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau (1920-1925) with Amédée Ozenfant. In his 1923 book he presented his theoretical principles in a series of texts with a somewhat provocative tone, with the aim of opening "unseeing eyes" towards modern architecture. He uses a concise style, with short and simple sentences, to establish clear premises that serve as a guide for the architect, with poetic similes and abundant graphic material. The content focuses on the aesthetic reform of architecture produced since the mid-XIX century, as well as concepts such as functionalism and industrial design; he speaks of the hygienic and moral qualities of architecture, which he symbolizes in an ocean liner: "a pure, clean, clear, neat and healthy architecture." However, he believes that the styles are "a lie", although he recognizes the artistic nature of architecture, since beyond the simple rational function the architect configures an aesthetic to the building. Regarding his treatise on urban planning, he analyzes it from a functional perspective, in which the city is a work tool, and defends some general lines based on order and linearity, which will be specified in the Charter of Athens (1943).
Critics and art historians such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Siegfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner also contributed to the movement's theoretical corpus. Hitchcock made his first contribution to the International Style in an article in the magazine Hound and Horn in 1928, which was followed by the book Modern Architecture, Romanticism and Reintegration (1929), where he stated that the new style was "a distinct branch of modern architecture influenced by cubist and neoplastic painting." But his most relevant work was The International Style: Architecture since 1922 , prepared with Philip Johnson for the 1932 MoMA exhibition. In it they established the defining parameters of the movement, noting that:
Today a modern style has been born... This contemporary style, which exists worldwide, is unitary and inclusive... The concept of style as a potential development framework has emerged from the recognition of underlying principles... In enunciating the general principles of contemporary style, as in analyzing its structural origin and its modification due to function, it is difficult to avoid a certain appearance of dogmatism. Against those who claim that a new architectural style is something impossible or undesirable, it is necessary to insist on the coherence of the results obtained within the spectrum of possibilities so far explored. And it is that the International Style already exists at the present time; it is not simply something that the future may depart from us. Architecture is always a set of real monuments, not an imprecise theoretical body.
The book about the exhibition contains a short text and abundant illustrations. It was written entirely by Hitchcock, since Johnson's participation consisted only in its correction. His thesis focuses on the verification of a new architectural style contemporary to the date of the exhibition, with Gropius, Oud, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Rietveld and Mendelsohn as main representatives. He establishes the beginnings of this style after the First World War and points to architects such as Peter Behrens, Otto Wagner, Auguste Perret and Frank Lloyd Wright as precedents, whom he describes as "semi-modern".
Giedion presented his ideas preferably in Space, Time and Architecture. The Growth of a New Tradition (1941), which marked the historical image of modern architecture in Europe and the United States. It is a compendium of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard University between 1938 and 1939. Giedion's main goal was to integrate modern architecture into art history, as well as establish its theoretical bases in a scientific context. He pointed to modern art and architecture as interdependent units and considered the opposition between science and art to be over. Just as Hitchcock established the aesthetic principles of rationalism, Giedion also sought to establish the structural principles of it, analyzing the formal qualities of the movement to find the underlying ideas. He points to the birth of modern architecture in industrialization and advances in engineering, and as pioneers to Victor Horta, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Otto Wagner, Auguste Perret, and the Chicago School. He recognizes a fundamental role for Frank Lloyd Wright, but reserves the role of "heroes" of modern architecture for Gropius and Le Corbusier - Mies van der Rohe did not cite him until a reissue in 1954 -. Giedion's work was the basic manual of modern architecture until practically the 1980s and marked the conscience of two generations of architects.
Pevsner was a German historian and critic based in the UK from 1935. In Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936, later titled The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design), introduced the term "Modern Movement", which he considered the "proper" style for the 20th century, a style functional that responds to the new needs of the masses. Pevsner advocated a strict, anonymous, impersonal internationalism that leaves "less room for self-expression" and that adapts to the new "basic social conditions." Throughout his literary production, he elaborated a history of global, social and cultural architecture, detached from personalities and focused on the notion of style, with the intention of differentiating "true styles" from "transitory fashions".
Other books on the modern Movement were: Internationale neue baukunst by Ludwig Hilberseimer (1926), Die Baukunst der neuesten Zeit by Gustav Adolf Platz (1927), Moderne Architektur und Tradition by Peter Meyer (1928), Die neue Baukunst in Europa und Amerika by Bruno Taut (1929), Les tendances de l'architecture contemporaine by Myron Malkiel-Jirmounsky (1930), The New World Architecture by Sheldon Cheney (1930), La nuova architettura by Fillia (pen name of Luigi Colombo, 1931), Gli elementi dell'architettura razionale by Alberto Sartoris (1932), etc. It is also worth noting the magazines that spread the new style, such as Die Form, Das neue Frankfurt, L'architecture d'aujourd'hui , The Beautiful House, Moderne Bauformen, Wasmuth Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau and The Architectural Review.
The first voices critical of the Modern Movement arose from brutalism in the 1950s and developed in the 1960s with the work of historians and critics such as Reyner Banham and Manfredo Tafuri. Banham was a student of Giedion and Pevsner and, with a view to his doctoral thesis, was invited by the latter to analyze the Modern Movement from where he had left it, of the pioneers who laid the foundations of this style between the end of the century XIX and early xx. Banham carried out this exercise (Theorie and Design in the First Machine Age, 1960), but he did it from a critical, demystifying perspective; Comparing modern theories with practical achievements to check if they actually met the premises, he nevertheless showed that in most cases the supposed functionalism defended by rationalist architecture was instead translated into a certain formalism. Faced with this, he advocated a "second age" dominated by the machine and mass consumption, and became the main defender of the style heir to rationalism: brutalism. Tafuri, a disciple of Giulio Carlo Argan and influenced by Marxism, structuralism, semiology and psychoanalysis, conceived architecture as a part of the history of work, of production mechanisms. In Teorie e storia dell'architettura (1968) he criticizes the optimism typical of avant-garde architecture and offers a more pessimistic vision, in which architecture is an ambiguous and changing process, “a perpetual contestation of the present». Also in Progetto e utopia (1973) he again criticizes modern architecture and points out the need to “destroy the powerful and ineffective myths that still fascinate architects”.
Background
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The architecture of the early 20th century was born with a willingness to break with the past, especially as opposed to the historicism that practiced since the middle of the XIX century, an academic style based on classical premises and on the reinterpretation of styles from the past: neo-Romanesque, neo-Gothic, neo-baroque, etc. An early influence of the new movement was that of modernism—known as art nouveau in France, Modern Style in the UK, Jugendstil in Germany, or Jugendstil in Germany. i>Sezession in Austria—, a style that sought to renew the architectural language and that provided some of the initial premises of the Modern Movement, although its excessive decorativeness was rejected by the rationalists. The artistic avant-gardes prior to the First World War, such as expressionism and futurism, were nourished from this style, movements that have sometimes been described as pre-rationalism. After the world war ended and until the mid-1920s, movements such as neoplasticism (De Stijl), the expressionism of the New Objectivity or constructivism evolved from those initial premises towards a greater formalism that already pointed to the International style, which was forged in the Bauhaus School and in the foundation in 1928 of CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture).
First of all, it should be noted as an immediate antecedent of rationalism the new architecture practiced in the XIX century based on advances technologies fostered by the Industrial Revolution, which were reflected in various typologies such as architecture in iron or glass and iron. It should be borne in mind that the new industrial era brought with it new problems and approaches in the construction and urban areas, since technical, economic and social progress led to the appearance of new needs such as railway stations, bridges and viaducts for new media. of transport, changes in cities due to population increases that demanded new infrastructures and a whole series of new needs that architecture and engineering had to face. These needs led to a faster and cheaper type of construction, with more daring solutions and far from academic architecture. A good example were the cast iron constructions, developed by architects and engineers such as Hector Horeau, Henri Labrouste, William Fairbairn and James Bogardus. A dynamic factor of this new type of architecture were the trade fairs known as Universal Expositions, which due to their ephemeral nature fostered a type of construction of modular forms using prefabricated elements. The first, the Great London Exhibition of 1851, was notable for Joseph Paxton's The Crystal Palace building, made of glass with a metal structure. The paradigm of this type of construction was the Eiffel Tower, built by the engineer Gustave Eiffel for the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889.
Throughout the XIX century, a new way of conceiving design and construction was developed based strictly on the reason and scientific criteria, which subordinated the shape of the building to its function: functionalism, also called “architectural or structural rationalism”. For this new generation of architects, their main tool was applied mathematics and their fundamental objective was the calculation of the lines of force in the structure of a building. Among its main representatives are: Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Henri Labrouste, Gottfried Semper, Augustus Pugin, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Anatole de Baudot and Hendrik Petrus Berlage.
Another influence on modern architecture was William Morris and the Arts & Crafts (Arts and Crafts), emerged in the United Kingdom around 1860 and lasted until 1910. This current defended a revaluation of craft work and advocated a return to traditional forms of manufacturing; it stipulated that art should be as useful as it is beautiful, with an ideal of beauty based on purity and simplicity. The greatest architectural exponent of this movement was the Red House, Morris's own house, built in 1859 by Philip Webb in Bexley Heath (Kent), made of red brick with a fluid design, without prominent facades, using traditional techniques; Morris designed the garden and the decoration was carried out by Morris, Webb and the Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, in an ensemble that was classified as a "complete work of art". Other architects of this movement such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and Charles Francis Annesley Voysey finished laying its programmatic foundations: design subject to function, prevalence of vernacular styles and native materials, freedom of style and integration of the building into the landscape.
Another of the precedents of rationalism was the so-called Chicago School, developed in the US city of Chicago between 1875 and 1900, and which stood out for being the promoter of a new type of building: the skyscraper. At that time, the city was growing at a dizzying rate thanks to its thriving economy, so the buildings had to be fast, which is why architects adopted iron engineering techniques. On the other hand, the speculative process of building land made it necessary to build at a height to make the investment profitable —a fact fostered by the invention of the elevator in 1853—. Thus, a series of large buildings in the functional style appeared, built by architects such as William Le Baron Jenney, Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root, William Holabird, Martin Roche, Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. The latter coined the famous phrase "form follows to function", the main aphorism of functionalism.
The Austrian Sezession, the local variant of modernism, also initiated a path towards rationalism —especially Germanic—. Although international modernism was a renovating movement and opposed to academic historicism, which was committed to integral design and the use of new materials and technologies, its excessive decorativeness distanced it from the postulates of rationalism; however, the Austrian variant —like the Scottish one represented by the Glasgow School— had a more geometric and rectilinear component that did influence the appearance of Germanic rationalism. Its first exponent was Otto Wagner, professor at the Academy of Vienna who instilled in his students modernity as a starting point for artistic creation, and who was interested in the use of new materials and urban planning approaches in line with the new times, as can be seen in his reform of the Karlsplatz in Vienna or his project of metropolitan with overpasses and stations of modern design. Joseph Maria Olbrich (Vienna Sezession building, 1898) and Josef Hoffmann (Stoclet Palace in Brussels, 1905-1911) followed in their footsteps. In 1903, Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops), a close association to the Arts & Crafts which aimed to bring the industry closer to the world of applied arts.
In the field of urbanism, the theories of Ebenezer Howard and his idea of the garden-city were essential for the rationalist proposals, a type of urban entity of residential areas separated by large green areas and connected by large radial avenues, with a center neuralgic that would bring together the buildings for administration, finance, services, education, health, culture and other sectors.
Lastly, it is worth remembering the work of various architects who, in reaction to the excessive decorativeness of art nouveau, developed in the first decade of the century XX a more sober style based on classical shapes but without falling into the stagnant language of academic neoclassicism, but with modern solutions that largely pointed to rationalism. This style is sometimes defined as "modern classicism" or "primitive rationalism" and its greatest representatives were: Tony Garnier, Auguste Perret, Adolf Loos and Peter Behrens. The first was an architect and urban planner, the first to propose a global model of industrial city (Une Cité Industrielle, 1917) in which life and technique are combined, with an in-depth study of urban functions and the adaptation of each element to its function. Most of his works are in Lyon: market and slaughterhouse (1908-1924), Grange Blanche Hospital (1911-1927), Municipal Stadium (1913-1918), United States neighborhood (1920-1935). Perret stood out for his use of concrete both as a constructive and expressive element, generally with large stained glass windows in the spaces between and with a complete absence of ornamentation: house on Rue Franklin in Paris (1903), garage on Rue Ponthieu (1905), church of Notre- Dame de Le Raincy (1922-1923). Loos received the initial influence of Otto Wagner's secessionism, but moved away from it due to his fear of confining himself to a style of marked guidelines and excessive originality, in search of a greater simplicity far from any ornamentation. He took from the Arts & amp; Crafts his commitment to craftsmanship and a more human component in the construction process. His works include: the apartment building on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna (1909-1911) and the Steiner (1910) and Scheu (1912), also in Vienna. Behrens opted for an architecture with simple, austere and functional lines, with the use of new materials and technologies, with a certain influence from William Morris. Director of the General Electricity Company AEG of Berlin, he built for it a series of factories and buildings where he anticipated many of the structural solutions of rationalism, among which the turbine hall (1909) stands out.
Pre-rationalism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a cultural movement that emerged in Germany at the beginning of the XX century, which was reflected in a large number of fields: plastic arts, architecture, literature, music, cinema, theater, dance, photography, etc. Expressionist architecture developed mainly in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Denmark. It was characterized by the use of new materials, sometimes caused by the use of biomorphic forms or by the expansion of possibilities offered by the mass production of construction materials such as brick, steel or glass. Many Expressionist architects fought in World War I, and their experience, combined with the political and social changes brought about by the German Revolution of 1918, led to utopian perspectives and a romantic socialist program. Strongly experimental in nature, the expressionists' works stand out for their monumentality, the use of brick and the subjective composition, which gives their works a certain air of eccentricity. The main expressionist architects were: Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Poelzig, Hermann Finsterlin, Fritz Höger and Hans Scharoun.
Expressionist architecture developed in Germany in various groups, such as Deutscher Werkbund, Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Novembergruppe and Der Ring ; Also noteworthy in the Netherlands is the Amsterdam School. The Deutscher Werkbund (German Labor Federation) was founded in Munich in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius, Friedrich Naumann and Karl Schmidt, and later included figures such as Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, Theodor Fischer, Wilhelm Kreis, Richard Riemerschmid, and Bruno Paul. Heir to the Jugendstil and the Sezession, and inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, its objective was the integration of architecture, industry and crafts into through professional work, education and advertising, as well as introducing architectural design into modernity and giving it an industrial character. The main characteristics of the movement were the use of new materials such as glass and steel, the importance of industrial design and decorative functionalism. This group was the one that organized an exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927 for which they built a large housing colony, the Weißenhofsiedlung, designed by Mies van der Rohe and buildings built by Gropius, Behrens, Poelzig, Taut and others, together with architects from outside Germany such as J.J.P. Oud, Le Corbusier and Victor Bourgeois. This exhibition was one of the starting points of the new architectural style that was beginning to emerge.
Parallel to the German Deutscher Werkbund, between 1915 and 1930 a notable expressionist architectural school developed in Amsterdam (Netherlands). Influenced by modernism -mainly Henry Van de Velde- and by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, they were inspired by natural forms, with imaginatively designed buildings where the use of brick and concrete predominates. Its main members were Michel de Klerk, Piet Kramer and Johan van der Mey, who worked together countless times, contributing greatly to the urban development of Amsterdam, with an organic style inspired by traditional Dutch architecture, in which the wavy surfaces.
The Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Council of Art Workers) was founded in 1918 in Berlin by the architect Bruno Taut and the critic Adolf Behne. Emerged after the end of the First World War, its objective was the creation of a group of artists that could influence the new German government, with a view to the regeneration of national architecture, with a clear utopian component. His works stand out for the use of glass and steel, as well as for the imaginative forms charged with intense mysticism. They immediately recruited members from the Deutscher Werkbund, such as Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Otto Bartning and Ludwig Hilberseimer. After the events of January 1919 related to the Spartacus League, the group renounced its political aims and dedicated itself to organizing exhibitions. Taut resigned as president and was replaced by Gropius, although the group was finally dissolved in 1921. Linked to this was the group Novembergruppe, which emerged in 1918 and was active until 1933, with the aim of using art and architecture to improve the world. Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, Erich Mendelsohn and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were in their ranks.
The Der Ring (The Circle) group was founded in Berlin in 1923 by Bruno Taut, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelsohn, Otto Bartning, Hugo Häring and several other architects, to which Walter Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Hans Scharoun, Ernst May, Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, Adolf Meyer, Martin Wagner, etc., were soon added. His goal was, as in previous movements, to renew the architecture of his time, with special emphasis on social and urban aspects, as well as research into new materials and construction techniques. Between 1926 and 1930 they carried out notable work in the construction of social housing in Berlin, with houses that stand out for their use of natural light and their location in green areas, among which the Hufeisensiedlung (Cologne of the Horseshoe, 1925-1930), by Taut and Wagner. Der Ring disappeared in 1933 after the rise of Nazism.
The last phase of German expressionism was the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a mostly pictorial movement that had a translation to architecture based on a rational and objective conception of it, as well as in the architect's social commitment. This movement materialized in the Neues Bauen (New Construction) association, which included Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn and Hans Poelzig.
Cubism
Cubism (1907-1914) was an artistic movement based on the distortion of reality through the destruction of spatial perspective of Renaissance origin and, instead, the organization of space according to a geometric pattern and vision objects simultaneously. Although it occurred essentially in plastic arts, it had some manifestation in the field of architecture, especially in Czechoslovakia. Its main representative was Josef Gočár, who after a few beginnings influenced by the work of Josef Hoffmann, in 1911 joined the Group of Fine Artists (Skupina Výtvarných Umělců) and began working in the Cubist style, as denoted in the house of the Black Madonna in Prague (1911–1912) and the thermal establishment of Lázně Bohdaneč (1912-1913).), where he combines classical and modern forms with pyramidal cubism. After the First World War and the independence of Czechoslovakia, he began with Pavel Janák the search for a national Czech architectural style, which was reflected in the so-called "rondocubism", which incorporates rounded and multicolored shapes from the bohemian-moravian vernacular decoration, as evidence his Legion Bank in Prague (1921-1922). From 1923 his style evolved towards a functionalism of neoplastic influence.
Other representatives were: Pavel Janák (Jakubec villa in Jičín, 1911-1912; Drechsel villa in Pelhřimov, 1912-1913; Pardubice crematorium, 1921-1923; Adria palace in Prague, 1922-1925); Josef Chochol (Kovařovic villa in Prague, 1912-1913; Bayer and Hodek residential buildings in Prague, 1913-1914);
Futurism
Futurism (1909-1930) was an Italian artistic movement that exalted the values of technical and industrial progress of the XX century, which highlighted aspects of reality such as movement, speed and the simultaneity of action. Although it occurred especially in plastic arts, it also had some approach in architecture, although the utopian nature of its formulations prevented its material realization in many cases. The figure of Antonio Sant'Elia stood out, who in 1914 presented his model of a futuristic city, characterized by tall skyscrapers, streets at different levels and new types of buildings, such as stations and power plants. In 1914 he signed the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, where he proclaimed that architecture "must be preserved as art, that is, as a synthesis, as an expression". Sant'Elia was joined by the architect Mario Chiattone and together they exhibited drawings of their dream city of the future, the Città nuova (new city). Died in 1916, Sant'Elia could not carry out his projects, but his theoretical work influenced the construction of the FIAT workshops of Giacomo Mattè-Trucco in Turin (1915-1921), with flat concrete roofs where the cars ran over the workshops.
Neoplasticism (De Stijl)
Neoplasticism (1917-1932), also known by the Dutch name De Stijl (“the style”), was also an interdisciplinary movement that excelled in painting with figures such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, with an abstract style, while in architecture a style marked by geometric compositions and objective and innovative solutions developed, greatly influenced by the work of Hendrik Petrus Berlage. They are works that stand out for their smooth surfaces and their breakdown into planes, vertical and horizontal lines, with the use of color as an element that emphasizes the structure, generally primary and flat colors. Some of their stylistic hallmarks, such as flat ceilings, smooth walls and free and flexible interior spaces were later characteristic of the International Style.
The most paradigmatic work of this style was the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht (1924), by Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schröder, whose structural solutions largely indicated the main characteristics of the International Style: asymmetrical composition, geometric shapes without relief, flat roofs with overhangs at the corners, absence of ornamentation, longitudinal windows and a preference for the color white. This new way of understanding architecture was translated into transparent volumes, without load-bearing walls or monumental openings, which gave the buildings an appearance of spaciousness and incorporeality that would be the most attractive image of rationalism. Within a three-dimensional grid, the volumetric composition is based on translations and superimpositions of planes, with a fluid sequence of spaces that favors the multiplicity of functions.
A variant of Neo-Plasticism was Elementarism, a movement founded in 1924 by Theo van Doesburg. Faced with the primary colors and right angles promoted by De Stijl, Van Doesburg introduced greater dynamism through diagonals and rotations, described by this artist as "counter-compositions", which meant a break with Piet Mondrian. Although it began in painting, this style was also transferred to architecture, in which the constructivist and Bauhausian influence was denoted. Van Doesburg intended to make a synthesis between the arts and facilitate a practical application of artistic creation in everyday life. In 1924, Van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren published Towards a Collective Construction, in which they declared that "painting, without architectural construction, has no raison d'etre." They developed their aesthetics in the Elementarism Manifesto (1926), in which they defended the contrasting of the diagonal in paintings and sculptures with the vertical-horizontal linearity of architecture, as they put into practice in the decoration of the Café L'Aubette in Strasbourg (1928-1929), made by Van Doesburg in collaboration with Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
Constructivism
Constructivism (1914-1930) was a movement that emerged in revolutionary Russia, a politically committed style that sought through art to transform society by reflecting on pure artistic forms conceived from aspects such as space and time, which generated in plastic arts a series of works of abstract style, with a tendency to geometrization. In its architectural aspect, it initiated a program linked to the revolution that sought a functional architecture that would satisfy the real needs of the population. Constructivism coincided with neoplasticism in the search for an art of collective utility based on objective aesthetic principles. The end of the movement came in 1932 with the suppression of artistic groups carried out by the Stalinist dictatorship.
Halfway between architecture and sculpture is the Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin (1919-1920), of which he only made the model. It would have consisted of a 395-meter-tall structure, with a stepped spiral shape that symbolized the progress of socialism, with floors that would rotate at different time intervals: daily, monthly, and yearly. According to Tatlin, the monument represented the "union of purely artistic forms (painting, sculpture and architecture) for a utilitarian purpose".
Like this one, many other projects of the time were not carried out due to the precariousness of the country's political situation, such as the largely utopian postulates of El Lissitzky, which brought together some of the premises of constructivism, neoplasticism and the Bauhaus. Among them are his Proun spaces, which anticipated the environments of later installation art, or his «cloudstriban» buildings (1925), horizontal skyscrapers supported by large tower-shaped pillars.
The most practical achievements were carried out by two associations: ASNOVA (Association of New Architects), created in 1923 under the premise of finding universal solutions for architecture, detached from form-function or form-social context relationships, and fundamentally represented by Konstantin Mélnikov, author of the Moscow Workers' Club (1925-1927) and of the Russian pavilion at the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts, and by Nikolai Ladovsky, author of the Lenin Institute in Moscow (1927); and the OSA (Union of Contemporary Architects), founded in 1925 with the aim of uniting artistic and political avant-garde and creating a productive and utilitarian art, represented by the brothers Aleksandr, Leonid and Víktor Vesnín (Moscow Palace of Labor, Pravda in Leningrad, Lenin Institute in Moscow) and by Iván Nikolayev. It is also worth noting in the promotion of Russian constructivism the work of Vjutemás (acronym for Higher Education Workshops of Art and Technology), a state art and technical school located in Moscow that fostered the avant-garde in art and architecture.
In the field of urbanism, the essential concern was housing, which resulted in the «communal house» projects, such as those developed by Moiséi Guínzburg (Narkomfin Collective House in Moscow, 1929). In 1929, the ARU (Union of Urban Planners Architects) was founded, within which two urban tendencies developed: that of the "urban planners", advocates of restructuring traditional cities; and that of the "desurbanistas", who promoted the creation of longitudinal settlements inspired by Arturo Soria's Ciudad Lineal.
Organism: Frank Lloyd Wright
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Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, pioneer of organic architecture and founder of the Prairie School movement. In his work, certain coincidences with rationalism can be perceived, such as the use of terraces and perpendicular forms, but from an organic approach, that is, adapted to nature: the architectural forms merge with the natural ones in an integrated and harmonious whole, as in his famous Kaufmann house, better known as House of the waterfall (in English Fallingwater, 1936-1939).
Wright initially worked in the studio of Louis Sullivan for six years and inherited from his teacher the idea that American architecture should be renewed. Even so, he thought that the basis of this renewal was in the traditional North American way of life and in the integration of man with nature achieved by the pioneers of the American West. Thus, Wright's constructive ideal was the single-family house with horizontal spaces, wide ceilings and a perfect interrelationship with the environment, as in the Cascade House, which forms part of the surrounding landscape. He thus created the typology of prairie houses (houses on the prairie), of which he built quite a few for businessmen and magnates, as well as his own residence, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona (1938).
For Wright, architecture should encompass both the construction itself and its adaptation to its environment; according to his words: "an architecture that develops from the inside out, in harmony with the conditions of its being", as well as that "in organic architecture, then, the building as one thing, its furniture as another, and its position and its environment as another one". Wright adopted from the English movement Arts & Crafts the idea of “total design”, for which reason in his works he designed both the exterior and the interior of the houses, with a type of furniture that was equally organically conceived. Other prominent Prairie School architects included William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie.
Rationalism
The Bauhaus
The Bauhaus School is usually considered the first exponent of a fully mature rationalism. The Staatliche Bauhaus (State Building House) was born in 1919, when the architect Walter Gropius took over the direction of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, which he reoriented towards a multidisciplinary study program that attended both architecture and design and decorative arts: students at the school learned theories of form and design, as well as stone, wood, metal, clay, glass, weaving and painting workshops. The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932. Gropius was succeeded by Hannes Meyer in 1928 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930. The school was closed by the center's management in 1933 due to harassment system to which they were subjected by the Nazi authorities.
The Bauhaus teaching program was based on the correlation between all creative processes, with the aim of unifying art and design. According to Gropius, "the ultimate goal of the Bauhaus is the collective work of art, in which there are no barriers between the structural arts and the decorative arts." Thus, architects, artists and craftsmen would work together in the construction of the "building of the future". At first, the Bauhaus was influenced by the Viennese Sezession and the Wiener Werkstätte, as well as by William Morris and the Arts movement. & Crafts, by Peter Behrens and Henry Van de Velde, as well as the expressionism that was fashionable in Germany at the time. However, from 1922 the influence of the Dutch De Stijl group was noted and the school became more austere and functionalist, and more oriented towards industrial design. Again according to Gropius, "we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios, and fast-engined cars, an architecture whose function is clearly identifiable by the relationship of its forms."
Four phases can be distinguished in the history of this school: the first (1919-1924) corresponds to his stay in Weimar and the architectural formulations that are proposed are still of survival of the expressionist style, with a certain utopian component; With hardly any material achievements, the most relevant project sketched at this stage is Gropius's project for the headquarters of the Chicago Tribune (1922, not carried out), as well as that of an International Philosophical Center in Erlangen (1923-1924), also not carried out. The second stage (1925-1930) began with the move to Dessau, where the school's headquarters building was built, the work of Gropius. The line of the school is already fully rationalist, with a clear commitment to design and industrial production. The main architectural characteristics of these years are the geometric planimetry, the orthogonal layout, the use of glass curtain walls and horizontal windows, as can be seen in the projects of "large-scale construction houses" (1924), the houses of teachers (1925-1926) or the Törten Colony in Dessau (1926). During the direction of Hannes Meyer (1928-1930) there was a greater link with the political left and an architecture at the service of the needs of the population was opted for, more practical and far from pure forms, which denotes the influence of constructivism Russian. Meyer's main works were the project for the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva (1926-1927) and the School of Trade Unions in Berlin (1928-1930). After Mies van der Rohe (1930-1933) took over the leadership, the school moved towards a conception of architecture more focused on structural issues, with some influence from the Dutch group De Stijl and the Russian architect and artist El Lissitzky. Among Mies's works in these years, the following stand out: the German Pavilion for the Barcelona International Exposition (1929), the Tugendhat house in Brno (1930) and the Lemcke house in Berlin (1932).
In 1923, the Bauhaus organized an exhibition entitled Art and Technology: A New Unity, which featured Georg Muche's Experimental House or Haus am Horn and Adolf Meyer, a prototype of a mass-produced functional house built in steel and concrete, completely decorated with objects and furniture designed by Marcel Breuer. In 1927 the department of architecture was established, until then non-existent despite the multidisciplinary approach of the school., headed by Hannes Meyer and, in 1928, an urban planning department, headed by Ludwig Hilberseimer.
Probably the most outstanding architectural achievement of this school is the Bauhaus building in Dessau, designed by Gropius in 1925. He created it with strict criteria of functionality, which is why it became an icon of rationalist architecture. The building consisted of two bodies, one rectangular with classrooms and laboratories and the other L-shaped with an auditorium, stage, kitchen and dining room, five stories high that housed rooms for students, bathrooms and a gym. Both buildings were connected by a two-story high bridge, which housed the administration offices. He mainly used concrete and glass as materials, with profuse use of curtain walls.
France
As seen in the background, the pioneers of a pre-rationalism in France were Tony Garnier and Auguste Perret. The general lines of later French rationalism were based on most of the premises of the International Style, although with less interest in functionality than in German rationalism. In 1929 the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM) was founded, where in addition to painters and sculptors involved architects such as Robert Mallet-Stevens, Charlotte Perriand, René Herbst, Pierre Chareau and Pierre Barbe; in 1931 Le Corbusier, Gropius, Victor Bourgeois and Willem Marinus Dudok joined; in 1932, André Lurçat and Alberto Sartoris. This association promoted various exhibitions and, in 1934, published the manifesto Pour l'art moderne, cadre de la vie contemporaine, which defended modern architecture. On the other hand, in 1930 the magazine Architecture d'aujourd'hui was founded, directed by André Bloc, which served as an organ for the dissemination of the new architecture.
Le Corbusier
The main referent of French rationalist architecture was Le Corbusier, the pseudonym of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris. Although Swiss by birth, he settled in Paris in 1917 (at the age of thirty) and became a French national in 1930. He was an engraver, designer, painter, sculptor and writer, although, paradoxically, the person who most influenced architecture in the XX did not qualify as an architect. He was influenced early by Tony Garnier and Auguste Perret, as evidenced by his use of the reinforced concrete. Le Corbusier represents a classicist rationalism, which has its roots in Greco-Roman architecture; as he affirmed, his only teacher had been history. For him, «architecture is the wise, correct and magnificent game of volumes assembled under light. Cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary shapes that light reveals well. It is the essential condition of the plastic arts”.
Among his first formulations is the Maison Domino (1914), a typical house conceived as an elementary housing cell to be mass-produced and that would allow the layout of free plans, formed by a concrete structure supported on six cantilever beam uprights. A more evolved variant would be the Maison Citrohan (1920), a habitable unit designed —in his words— “like a bus or the cabin of a ship », and that would serve as a minimum cell to build blocks of flats that he would call immeuble-villas («city-buildings»), as he materialized in his villa Besnus de Vaucresson in 1922.
In the beginning he was linked to purism, a variant of synthetic cubism led together with Jeanneret by Amédée Ozenfant. They admired the beauty and purity of machines, which was their main inspiration along with mathematics, with a desire to integrate architecture, painting and design, concepts that they developed in the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau (1920-1925) and in the book Vers une architecture (1923), as well as in the L'Esprit Nouveau pavilion for the Decorative Arts Exhibition of Paris in 1925. In 1922 he teamed up with his cousin, the engineer Pierre Jeanneret, with whom he opened a studio in Paris and, from 1927, he collaborated with Charlotte Perriand on furniture design.
Just as Mies van der Rohe preferred steel and glass and Le Corbusier used reinforced concrete, both nevertheless achieved free and open structural solutions, which would be the main stylistic hallmark of their work. Another of its characteristics would be the use of pilotis, some concrete pillars that allowed the building to be supported on an empty space, which accentuated the sensation of volume as opposed to that of mass. In 1926 he published his Five points for a new architecture, in which he recounted his main architectural proposals: the ground floor on pilotis, the free plan, the free façade, the longitudinal window (fenêtre en longueur) and the terrace-garden., which he first developed in the villas Jeanneret and La Roche in Paris (1923). He applied all these principles in the villa Stein in Garches (1927) and, especially, in the villa Savoye in Poissy (1928-1930), one one of the most accomplished examples of rationalist architecture, made up of a square-shaped floor raised from the ground by a se rie de pilotis, with an open floor plan, elongated horizontal windows and a flat roof on which there is a terrace-garden; it has no façade, no front or back, but is an unfathomable whole from a single point of view. In 1927 he built a version of his Maison Citrohan for the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, for which he also built another double-dwelling building. In these years he also drew up the unrealized projects for the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva (1927), the World Museum for the Mundaneum in Geneva (1929) and the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931). Between 1929 and In 1933 he built the Cité de Refuge in Paris for the Salvation Army, a building inspired by nautical design and, between 1931 and 1933, the Swiss Pavilion for the International University City of Paris.
After the Second World War, he devoted himself more to his urban aspect, with a special interest in the city-block or «machine à habiter» (machine à habiter), a type of apartment block self-sufficient that would concentrate all the necessary services for urban life. A good example was the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1947-1952), a twelve-story block with a total of 337 apartments, made of concrete and calculated according to the system of measurements Modulor devised by Le Corbusier himself in 1942, based on the human scale and the golden ratio. The building is made up of a rectangular block supported by pilotis, with a system of enclosures in brise-soleil and, in addition to the houses, contains all kinds of community services, such as gardens, swimming pool, sports facilities, nursery, gym, shops, restaurant, laundry and a doctor's office. In addition to the one in Marseille, he built three other unités in France (Nantes-Rezé, 1953-1955; Briey-en-Forêt, 1956-1957; and Firminy-Vert, 1960-1964) and one in Germany (Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1957-1958).
In the last years of his life his style evolved towards more organic and expressive forms, with a certain baroque component, as denoted in the church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp (1950-1954), in the convent of Santa María de La Tourette in Éveux (1952-1960) or at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (1960-1963), his only work in the United States. At this stage he stood out for his use of exposed reinforced concrete (in French béton brut), which led to a new style called brutalism which, paradoxically, would be the main catalyst for the end of rationalism, staged by Team X —a group of architects Brutalists— at CIAM in 1959. On the other hand, some historians describe Ronchamp's church as the first postmodern building. His latest works include: the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, with Iannis Xenakis; the Maison du Brésil in Paris (1959), designed together with Lúcio Costa; the Saint-Pierre church and the House of Youth and Culture in Firminy (1960-1965); and the Maison de l'Homme/Musée Heidi Weber in Zurich (1960-1967). On the other hand, among his last unrealized projects were: a stadium in Baghdad (1956), an exhibition pavilion in Stockholm (1962), an international art center in Erlenbach am Main (1963), an electronic computing center for Olivetti in Rho near Milan (1963-1964), a congress hall in Strasbourg (1964), a French embassy in Brasília (1964-1965) and a hospital in Venice (1965).
On March 15, 2016, the whole of the "Architectural Work of Le Corbusier - Exceptional Contribution to the Modern Movement" was inscribed as a World Heritage Site, in the category of cultural asset (ref. no. 1321rev).
Other architects
Robert Mallet-Stevens trained in the Viennese studio of Josef Hoffmann. His work is a synthesis of rationalism, functionalism and a figurative poetics close to cubism, which translates into an architectural purism that is close to the most canonical image of the International Style, as evidenced in his Paris Fire Station (1935). Other works of his were: the Paul Poiret villa in Mézy-sur-Seine (1924–1930), the Noailles villa in Hyères (1924-1933), the buildings on Rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris (1926-1927), the Villa Cavrois en Croix (1929-1932) and the Hygiene and Electricity and Light pavilions for the 1937 Paris International Exposition.
André Lurçat introduced the Bauhaus style to his country and was a founding member of CIAM, in which he aligned himself with the German sector against the prominence of Le Corbusier. In 1929 he published Architecture , in which he advocated moderate modernity. That same year he built one of his best works, the Hotel Nord-Sud in Calvi (Corsica). In 1932 he built four houses for the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung. Between 1934 and 1937 he lived in the Soviet Union, where he built a building for the engineers of the Moscow Metro. Among his works, the following stand out: the Michel house in Versailles (1925), the Guggenbühl house in Paris (1927) and the Karl-Marx school group in Villejuif (1930-1933). In the second post-war period he dedicated himself to the construction of prefabricated "vertical garden-cities" in Saint-Denis, on the Parisian periphery, such as the "neighborhood unit" Fabien (1948-1960).
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Pierre Chareau, decorator and furniture designer —he did not qualify as an architect although he practiced as such— built between 1928 and 1932 with Bernard Bijvoet the Maison de Verre (glass house), a building destined for the clinic and residence of Dr. Dalsace, who carried out the commission. It presents a solid molded glass façade, with a structure of steel columns and a cement floor. Chareau also designed the furniture, which caused great admiration.In 1940 he emigrated to New York, where he built the house of the painter Robert Motherwell in East Hampton (1947).
Jean Prouvé was one of the founders of the UAM and in his work he sought to unite art and industry, being one of the pioneers of metal panel construction. His works include: the House of the People in Clichy (1935-1939, with Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin), the facades of the Federation of Construction in Paris (1949, with Raymond Gravereaux and Raymond Lopez) and the Exhibition Pavilion in Lille (1952, with Paul Herbé), the Aluminum Centenary Pavilion in Paris (1954, with Michel Hugonet) and the prototype for the "House of the Best Days" for the homeless (1956), of which Le Corbusier commented that " It is the most beautiful house I know."
Eileen Gray, Irish by birth, worked in France from 1913 to 1937. She began working with lacquer for furniture, an activity for which she opened a gallery in 1922 with which she achieved notable success. Together with Jean Badovici, she designed the house E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on the Côte d'Azur, built between 1926 and 1929, for which she also designed the furniture. She also designed her own house in Castellar (1932-1934).
Gabriel Guevrekian, of Turkish-Armenian origin, was active in France between 1921 and 1933. He trained in Vienna with Josef Hoffmann and, once in Paris, he worked in the workshop of Robert Mallet-Stevens from 1922 to 1926, for the who designed several cubist-style gardens in some of the villas built by him, such as the villa Noailles. In 1928 he carried out his most relevant work, the house of the fashion designer Jacques Heim in Neuilly-sur-Seine. In 1932 he designed two houses for the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung. Between 1933 and 1937 he worked in Iran, to later move to the United Kingdom —where he carried out two projects— and to the United States, where he dedicated himself to teaching.
Marcel Lods worked in association with Eugène Beaudouin. Among his first works are several sets of social housing, such as the Champ-des-Oiseaux neighborhood in Bagneux (1930-1939) and the La Muette neighborhood in Drancy (1931-1934), which stand out for their metal structures and precast elements. Later they built the Suresnes Open Air School (1934-1935), the Buc flying club and the BLPS detachable house (1938), the People's House and the Clichy covered market (1935-1939, with Jean Prouvé).
Georges-Henri Pingusson, architect and engineer, evolved to rationalism from the beginning influenced by the cubist and dadaist avant-garde. His first relevant work was the Hotel Latitude 43 in Saint-Tropez (1932). In 1937 he made the UAM pavilion for the Paris International Exhibition, together with Frantz-Philippe Jourdain and André Louis, projected in a typical rationalist language: free plan, use of pilotis , glass façade and roof-terrace. Later he was the author of the French Embassy in Saarbrücken (1950-1952) and the Deportation Memorial in Paris (1961-1962).
After the Second World War, it is worth mentioning the study formed by Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods and Alexis Josic, active in France, Germany and Morocco. Candilis and Woods met while working in Le Corbusier's workshop, in which they collaborated at the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille; in 1955 they associated with Josic. The following stood out in the design of social housing complexes: Le Blanc-Mesnil, 1955-1957; Bagnols-sur-Cèze, 1956-1957; Bobigny, 1956-1962 Vladimir Bodiansky, of Russian origin, was the founder in 1946 of the Atelier des bâtisseurs (“builders' workshop”) or ATBAT, active in France and Africa, where he developed numerous projects. He collaborated with Le Corbusier in the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille and with Beaudouin, Lods and Prouvé in the House of the People in Clichy; Among his works, the American Hospital of Saint-Lô (1946, with Paul Nelson) stands out.
Lastly, it is worth noting the Unesco headquarters in Paris (1953-1958), by Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss, a complex made up of a large Y-shaped block eight stories high, a auditorium for the General Assembly and six complementary buildings of lower height. It is also worth noting the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (1959-1964), by the Spanish Josep Lluís Sert, a building designed as an integration of the arts in which the architecture is combined with various artistic installations, among which the patio, by Alberto Giacometti; the labyrinth of sculptures and ceramics by Joan Miró; the mural-mosaic by Marc Chagall; the Pol Bury fountain; and the swimming pool by Georges Braque.
Germany
In Germany, as we have seen, rationalist architecture was closely linked in its beginnings to expressionism and the various group manifestations that arose within it, such as Deutscher Werkbund, Arbeitsrat für Kunst and Der Ring, as well as the Bauhaus School, the first in which a fully mature rationalist style was achieved. In the development of German rationalism, it is worth highlighting the Weißenhofsiedlung housing estate, built in Stuttgart in 1927 as an exhibition organized by the Deutscher Werkbund with the aim of promoting low-cost housing, supervised by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and in which German architects such as Peter Behrens, Richard Döcker, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Hans Poelzig, Adolf Rading, Hans Scharoun, Adolf Gustav Schneck, Ferdinand Kramer, Bruno Taut and Max Taut participated, along with others from other countries, such as Victor Bourgeois, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Josef Frank, J.J.P. Oud and Mart Stam. Thirty-one houses were built, designed under premises of visual unity based on white plaster walls, rectangular shapes, flat roofs and horizontal bands of windows.
The two main representatives of German rationalism —and world leaders— were Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Gropius was an architect, urban planner and designer, a disciple of Peter Behrens. Early on he was part of the expressionist movement, within which he was linked to the groups Deutscher Werkbund , Arbeitsrat für Kunst and Der Ring . In 1910 he opened his own studio, in which he worked in association with Adolf Meyer. Among his first works, the Fagus Factory (1911-1914) stands out, in Alfeld, a rectangular building that stands out for the use of the curtain wall, which would be one of its main stylistic hallmarks. Also with Meyer, he built the Model Factory in 1914 for the exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund in Cologne and, in 1923, the Municipal Theater of Jena. In 1919 he founded the Bauhaus School, of which he built its headquarters in Dessau in 1925. In 1928 He opened his own office, from which he drew up the Dammerstock housing development in Karlsruhe (1928-1929), as well as the Siemensstadt project in Berlin (1929-1930). With the rise to power of the Nazis, he was forced into exile, first to the United Kingdom and then to the United States, where he was director of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (for his American work see here).
In 1945 he partnered with eight young architects in the firm The Architects' Collaborative (TAC). In addition to the works carried out by this studio in the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s he carried out some projects again on German soil: in 1957 he built an apartment block with Wils Ebert in the Hansaviertel district of West Berlin; soon after he realized the new city of Britz-Buckow-Rudow; and in 1964 he designed the Bauhaus-Archiv building in Berlin, completed after his death by Alexander Cvijanovic in 1977.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was an architect and industrial designer. He represented the most purist and abstract rationalism, due to his renunciation of formal eloquence, his reduction of form to mere construction, his rejection of historical tradition, his indifference to the typological function and his appreciation of space as emptiness, for which he has been criticized for his unequivocal and monotonous vision of rationalism, especially by postmodern architects. Faced with the greater social concern of Gropius and Le Corbusier, Mies was more interested in technical issues, stating that "I consider the industrialization of the building the main goal of our era. If we achieve such industrialization, social, economic, technological and artistic issues will be easily resolved". Mies devised the famous formula "less is more", which would later become the motto of minimalism.
He was also linked to expressionism and the groups Der Ring and Novembergruppe. Although he never qualified in architecture, he apprenticed in 1908 in the studio of Peter Behrens and in 1911 he opened his own studio. In his beginnings he was influenced by neoplasticism and constructivism, as can be seen in his unrealized glass skyscraper projects for Berlin (I, 1919; and II, 1921). In 1923 he devised an office project in the shape of a box of reinforced concrete and glass, which would be the basis of his compositions and which he captured for the first time in the Wolf house in Guben (1926, destroyed). In 1927 he directed the development of the Weißenhofsiedlung neighborhood in Stuttgart, for which he designed the plan of set and built a steel-framed apartment building that allowed the occupants to vary the storeys to their liking.
In 1929 he built the German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exhibition, one of the best examples of rationalist architecture due to its formal purity, its spatial conception and its intelligent use of structures and materials, which made this pavilion the paradigm of the architecture of the XX century. Rectangular in plan, it rose on a podium covered with travertine; the roof was supported by cruciform columns and load-bearing walls, with walls made of different materials (brick covered with plaster, steel covered with green marble and Moroccan onyx). The furniture, designed with Lilly Reich, included the famous Barcelona chair. The decoration was reduced to two ponds and a sculpture, The Morning, by Georg Kolbe. Demolished after the exhibition, it was rebuilt between 1985 and 1987 in its original location by Cristian Cirici, Ignasi de Solà-Morales and Fernando Ramos, following the plans left by Mies van der Rohe.
Between 1930 and 1933 he was director of the Bauhaus. In these years he was the author of the Tugendhat house in Brno (1930), a "bachelor house" for the Berlin Building Exhibition (1931) and the Lemcke house in Berlin (1932). With the coming to power of the Nazis, his works were reduced: competition for the headquarters of the Reichsbank (1933) and stand for the exhibition Deutsches Volk-Deutsche Arbeit (1934). In 1938 he emigrated to the United States, where he was director of the school of architecture at the Armor Institute of Technology in Chicago, later the Illinois Institute of Technology (for his American work see here). Although he lived in Chicago until his death, he still produced some work in his native country, such as the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1962-1967), a museum dedicated to the art of the 20th century, supported on a granite podium topped by a square metal structure supported by eight perimeter pillars, with an enclosure entirely made of glass.
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Several architects evolved from expressionism to rationalism: Erich Mendelsohn assumed the postulates of rationalism in the 1920s but retaining certain expressionist traits, as well as a certain influence from Frank Lloyd Wright. His main works in these years were the Schocken Warehouse in Chemnitz (1928-1930), the Metal Workers Union building in Berlin (1929-1930) and the Columbushaus building in Berlin (1931). In 1933 he went into exile in the United Kingdom. Hans Scharoun strayed somewhat from the International Style by his occasional use of curved surfaces, but his Siemensstadt apartment blocks in Berlin (1929–31) are cited in the Hitchcock and Johnson book. Hugo Häring tried with his work "to find the form that most simply and directly served the functional effectiveness of the building", as denoted in his stable on the Garkau farm in Lübeck (1924-1925). Ernst May was municipal architect of Frankfurt between 1925 and 1930, where he designed a series of housing estates that combined the principles of the garden city with the mass-production construction methods of rationalism. The brothers Hans and Wassili Luckhardt planned a series of cubic-shaped houses in Berlin from the years 1920-1930, as well as an experimental housing project, the pilot district of Schorlemer Allee (1924-1930). Adolf Rading purified his style around 1925 of an earlier cubist and l to Dutch architecture, in works such as the "house-studio" that he designed for the Breslau Werkbundsiedlung in 1929 or the house of Dr. Rabe in Leipzig (1930).Bruno Taut was a defender of moderate modernity against excessive rationalist schematism; He developed his work especially in the field of housing, of which he built some ten thousand in Berlin: Hufeisensiedlung (1925-1931), the Carl-Legien neighborhood (1928-1930) and the Zehlendorf Waldsiedlung (1926-1932). His brother Max Taut was a strong advocate of the simplicity of reinforced concrete, as in the shop of the Berlin consumer cooperative associations (1929-1932). Otto Bartning also developed a moderate rationalism, as in his apartment complexes in the Siemensstadt (1929-1930) and the Haselhorst Siedlung (1932-1933) in Berlin. Richard Döcker was noted for his use of cubic volumes and terrace-roofs: Luz department store in Stuttgart (1926-1927), Waiblingen Hospital (1927- 1928).
The rise to power of Nazism in 1933 meant the relegation of rationalism in Germany, since the new regime opted for a realistic style that was a mixture of Neoclassicism and art deco. Most rationalist architects went into exile, such as Mies, Gropius, Breuer, May, Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut; some older ones practically stopped working, like Poelzig, while a few, like Scharoun and the Luckhardt brothers, who were less politically active, continued to work for a few more years in a Rationalist style.
After World War II, the hegemonic style returned to being rationalism, although with certain modifications compared to the interwar period, such as a greater use of curved surfaces, the recovery of materials such as stone and wood, a greater adaptability to the environment and less rigid and purist shapes. In this context, it is worth mentioning the work of architects such as Otto Bartning, Hans Scharoun, Adolf Bayer, Paul Seitz, Gottfried Böhm, Hans Maurer, Alexander von Branca and Egon Eiermann. Scharoun's work stood out, which was able to display his monumental and technology that had developed over the years, such as the Romeo and Juliet skyscraper in Stuttgart (1954-1959, with W. Frank), the Kassel State Theater (1952, with H. Mattern and W. Huller) and the Berliner Berlin Philharmonie (1963, with W. Weber). Also of relevance was the work of Eiermann, supporter of a pragmatic modernity of functional aesthetics: Blumberg textile factory (1949-1951), German pavilions for the World's Fair in Brussels in 1958 (with Sep Ruf), Olivetti building in Frankfurt (1968-1972).
In 1953, the Swiss architect and sculptor Max Bill founded the Hochschule für Gestaltung (School of Projection), later called Neues Bauhaus (New Bauhaus) in Ulm — also sometimes Ulm Bauhaus. Funded privately and with grants from the United States, the institution remained until 1968. In those years it became one of the most important institutions dedicated to design in Europe. Bill was the author of the set of buildings for the school, made with a concrete structure, smooth exposed walls with occasional brick panels and wooden frames.
Another milestone was the celebration in 1957 of the Berlin International Exposition, better known as Interbau, organized with the aim of rebuilding the Hansaviertel district of Berlin. Under the direction of Otto Bartning, in addition to German architects —including Walter Gropius—, numerous international architects participated, such as Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, Raymond Lopez, Eugène Beaudouin, Hugh Stubbins and Pierre Vago, as well as Le Corbusier, who built a replica in Charlottenburg of his Unité d'Habitation.
Austria and Switzerland
Austrian rationalist architecture was heir to the Viennese Sezession, especially through the mediation of Josef Hoffmann, a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule who trained a new generation of architects. After the first post-war period, Hoffmann moved closer to the postulates of rationalism, although with a somewhat more traditional language, as in his popular houses built between 1925 and 1930. In Vienna, a Werkbundsiedlung (an exhibition of permanent and temporary buildings promoted by the Österreichischer Werkbund), which promoted an experimental housing development in the Lainz district, in which thirty-one architects built seventy houses, the "largest building exhibition in Europe" as advertised at the time. Most were Austrian architects, including Hoffmann himself, Adolf Loos, Walter Loos, Josef Frank, Richard Neutra, Clemens Holzmeister, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Oskar Strnad, Walter Sobotka and Ernst Plischke, as well as the German Hugo Häring, the French André Lurçat and Gabriel Guevrekian and Dutch Gerrit Rietveld. The result was a set of white houses with an open plan and flat roofs, similar to the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart but somewhat more formal. At the housing level, it is also worth noting the Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna, designed by Karl Ehn in 1927, a gigantic block of houses one kilometer long, rectangular in shape with a large central courtyard that serves as a square, garden and community services center, with almost 1400 apartments.
Among the Austrian rationalist architects, the following stand out: Ernst Plischke, author in 1931 of the Liesing Employment Office in Vienna, considered the "first modern building in Austria"; Alois Johann Welzenbacher, the only representative of his country in the MoMA exhibition from 1932, author of the Adam brewery in Innsbruck (1927) and the Terrassenhotel am Oberjoch in the Allgäu (1932); and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the first woman to qualify as an architect in her country, who participated in the realization of the Popular house Winarsky-Hof and designer of the famous Frankfurt kitchen, as well as facilities for children.
Due to its proximity, Switzerland received the direct influence of German rationalism, but also of French rationalism, especially Le Corbusier, a Swiss by birth. Although he developed his work in France, Le Corbusier left some samples of his work in his native country: the villas Jeanneret-Perret (1912) and Schwob (1916) in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the villa Le Lac in Corseaux (1923), the Clarté building in Geneva (1930-1932) and the Heidi Weber Museum in Zurich (1963-1967).
The initial impetus for rationalism in Switzerland is due to Karl Moser, a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who trained a generation of architects including his son Werner Max Moser, cousins Emil and Alfred Roth, Rudolf Steiger, Max Ernst Haefeli, and Carl Hubacher. Many of them later worked in other countries: Werner Moser in the United States with Frank Lloyd Wright, Alfred Roth in Paris with Le Corbusier, Haefeli in Germany with Otto Bartning. In 1930, all of these architects (except Alfred Roth), together with Paul Artaria and Hans Schmidt, were commissioned to build the Neubühl neighborhood in Zurich, another example of collective housing of a popular nature such as those developed in Germany, with a layout of semi-detached single-family row houses.
Until 1933, Swiss rationalism was notably influenced by German rationalism, but since the Nazis came to power it acquired its own autonomy, with a marked technological commitment, as denoted in the single-family houses on Goldbachstraße in Zurich by Haefeli (1931 -1934), the Doldertal houses in Zurich by cousins Roth and Marcel Breuer (1934-1936), or the collaborative works between Moser, Haefeli and Steiger after 1937 (Congress House in Zurich, 1937-1939). Among these works, it is worth highlighting the Doldertal houses, which included the main premises of internationalism: a cubic shape supported by pilotis, horizontal windows and cantilevered terraces. On the other hand, the association of Paul Artaria and Hans Schmidt between 1926 and 1930 produced many notable works, including the workshop of the painter Willi Wenk in Riehen (1926), the Colnaghi villa in Riehen (1927), the Basel housing for single mothers (1928-1930) and the cooperative settlements. you of Eglisee in Basel (1929-1930).
Another important figure was that of the engineer Robert Maillart, who carried out his activity as a businessman and designer, designing on numerous occasions the structures of other architects' buildings, always concerned fundamentally with the technical processes of construction. He was the inventor of the mushroom slab, which he patented in 1910. After a stay in Russia, he opened his studio in Geneva in 1919, from which date he devoted himself especially to the construction of bridges, such as those of Schiess (1929), Roßgraben (1931), Felsegg (1933) and the bridge over the Arve in Geneva (1936).
It is also worth mentioning: Alberto Sartoris, architect and historian who exercised a notable influence in the theoretical field, author of works such as the church of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil in Lourtier (1932), the communal house of Vevey (1933) and the Morand-Pasteur house in Saillon (1934); Hans Brechbühler, author of the Bern School of Arts and Crafts (1937-1939), based on Le Corbusier's "five points"; Elsa Burckhardt-Blum, author of several houses with pure lines, cubic volumes and flat cantilevered roofs (Burkhardt-Blum house in Küsnacht, 1937-1938); and Otto Senn, who in his works combines rationalist geometric rigor with expressionist organic forms (villa in Binningen, 1936).
In the second post-war period, mention should be made of Max Bill, who studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, after which he settled as an architect in Zurich. In 1951 he was the founder and first director of the Ulm Bauhaus, whose buildings he built (1953-1955). He was also the author of the Swedish pavilion for the World's Fair in New York in 1939 and for the Swiss Design exhibition in London in 1959, as well as the "Educate and create" sector at the Swiss National Exhibition of 1964 in Lausanne, of a rationalism with a minimalist tendency. Another prominent post-war architect was Fritz Haller, of clear Miesian influence, author of the Windisch School of Engineering (1961-1966). Alberto also continued his work Sartoris: Keller factories in Saint-Prex (1959), Les Toises building in Lutry (1959-1960), Huber villa in Saint-Sulpice (1960).
Netherlands and Belgium
Dutch rationalism was the direct heir to the neoplasticism of the De Stijl group. Like the French, he showed less interest in functionalism than the German. Works of remarkable quality were produced in this country: according to Leonardo Benevolo, "after the crisis of the German movement, the main contributions to the progress of modern European architecture come from Holland".
Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud was appointed municipal architect of Rotterdam in 1918, a position from which he promoted the construction of low-cost houses in full International Style, most between 1925 and 1930, such as those in Kiefhoek (1925-1927). Those of Hoek van Holland (1924-1927) stand out, a group of white houses arranged in a row, with horizontal windows, metal doors and curved elements of nautical inspiration. In 1927 he built five houses for the Weißenhofsiedlung housing estate in Stuttgart, small in size but very practical in design and functionally furnished. Oud's architecture is largely based on industrial techniques and the use of new materials, among his latest works are the building for Shell in The Hague (1939-1942) and the bio-home for children's recreation Arnhem (1952-1960).
Gerrit Rietveld broke with De Stijl in 1928, the year in which he joined CIAM and began a more purely rationalist phase, as denoted in his houses on Erasmuslaan street in Utrecht (1930-1931), arranged in a row and with a rectangular shape, stuccoed in white and with horizontal windows, in the purest international style. Other works of his were: the Vreeburg cinema in Utrecht (1936, with Truus Schröder), the Dutch pavilion for the 1954 Venice and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (1963-1972, with Joan van Dillen and Johan van Tricht).
Mart Stam was influenced by Mies van der Rohe and El Lissitzky. Two of his first works, the primary schools of St. Wendel (1924) and Thunn (1925) are already fully International Style. In the Stuttgart Weißenhofsiedlung of 1927 he built three semi-detached houses forming a rectangular block. Later he worked with Ernst May in Frankfurt, where his Budge Asylum for the Elderly (1929-1930) stands out, of which Hitchcock and Johnson noted that although it is "guided exclusively by economic and functional considerations, the building also undoubtedly has aesthetic value." He worked with his wife Lotte Beese, a Bauhaus student and Ernst May collaborator in the Soviet Union —where she met her husband—; he was responsible for the neighborhoods of Pendrecht (1948-1952), Het Lage Land and Ommoord (1962-1969) in Rotterdam.
Willem Marinus Dudok, trained as an engineer, was appointed municipal engineer of Hilversum in 1915, a rapidly growing city in which he was in charge of regulating its general plan and the construction of various popular neighborhoods and public buildings, including The City Hall (Raadhuis, 1924-1928) stands out. Utrecht Theater (1939-1941).
Johannes Duiker built clearly functional, light and resistant buildings, such as the Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hilversum (1926-1928, with Bernard Bijvoet), the Cliostraat School in Amsterdam (1928-1930), the Scheveningen technical school (1932), the Handelsblad-Cineac in Amsterdam (1934) and the Gooiland Hotel and Theater in Hilversum (1934, completed by Bijvoet after Duiker's death).
Cornelis van Eesteren stood out as an urban planner: he was the author of the urban plan for Amsterdam (1935, see the Urban Planning section). He was president of CIAM between 1930 and 1947. After World War II, he was in charge of planning the polders south of IJsselmeer and the new village of Nagele; between 1959 and 1964 he was in charge of drawing up the plans for the new city of Lelystad.
Among the younger architects are Johannes Andreas Brinkman and Leendert Cornelis van der Vlugt, who formed an active studio between 1925 and 1936—the date of Van der Vlugt's death—sometimes in collaboration with Willem van Tijen; subsequently, Brinkman teamed up with Johannes Hendrik van der Broek, while Van Tijen teamed up in 1937 with Huig Aart Maaskant. The main work of Brinkman and Van der Vlugt was the Van Nelle tobacco, tea and coffee factory in Rotterdam (1926-1929), projected with an open shape that allows the addition of successive annexes, with a precise but humane design, welcoming, something unusual in industrial constructions. Other works by these authors were: the Van Nelle headquarters in Leiden, the Mees Bank in Zoonen and the headquarters of the Theosophical Union in Amsterdam, as well as several residential buildings. With Van Tijen they built the Bergpolder building in Rotterdam in 1934, a ten-story housing complex with a steel structure and wooden walls and floors. Inspired by this building, Van Tijen and Maaskant were the authors of the Plaslaan building in Rotterdam (1938), with a similar design but with an exposed reinforced concrete structure.
Belgium was one of the cradles of art nouveau, whose influence was felt until the 1920s, when it was influenced by Dutch neoplasticism. In the genesis of Belgian modern architecture, we must point out the teaching work of the modernist architect Henry Van de Velde at the Higher Institute of Decorative Arts of La Cambre in Brussels, where some of the main Belgian architects between the wars taught: Victor Bourgeois, Huibrecht Hoste, Jean-Jules Eggericx and Raphaël Verwilghen. Bourgeois was the main promoter of the Modern Movement in his country, with a great social concern that he developed as an architect and urban planner; he was one of the founders of CIAM. He began as an architect for the National Society for Cheap Housing, for which he designed various housing complexes, such as the Cité moderne in Berchem-Sainte-Agathe (1922-1926). In 1925 he built his house in Brussels, in simple rationalist forms and, in 1927, he built a house for the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart; between 1927 and 1928 he built the workshop of the sculptor Oscar Jespers in Brussels. In 1930 he organized the III CIAM, held in Brussels. Since then he has focused more on urbanism. After World War II, he was the author of works such as the Ostend Town Hall (1954), the Namur House of Culture (1957) and the Eternit Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels General Exhibition.
Huibrecht Hoste was influenced by the De Stijl group during his exile in the Netherlands in World War I, after which he developed an architecture based on standardization and the use of concrete (house From Beir in Knokke, 1924). In the 1930s his style became more international, as in his homes in Zele (1931) and Avenue de Tervuren in Brussels (1933). Raphaël Verwilghen and Jean-Jules Eggericx worked in partnership, authoring several buildings in Brussels. and the Belgian pavilions at the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts and the 1937 Paris International Exposition.
Another prominent architect was Louis Herman De Koninck, the only Belgian architect represented in the 1932 MoMA exhibition and considered Belgium's greatest interwar modern architect. Concerned with the means of standardizing construction materials and with the study of the minimum habitat, he developed several prototypes of prefabricated elements in concrete, metal and wood; in 1930 he patented a glass brick with normalized refraction. His works include: the house-workshop of the painter Lenglet in Uccle (1926), the house of the photographer Alban in Brussels (1929) and the house of the collector Dotremont in Uccle (1932). Finally, it is also worth mentioning: Marcel Leborgne, author of a Le Corbusier-style villa in Rhode-Saint-Genèse (1933); Paul-Amaury Michel, architect of the House of Glass in Brussels (1935), inspired by the work of Pierre Chareau; and Léon Stynen, who also built works such as the Knokke-Heist Casino (1928-1931) and the Decorative Arts Pavilion for the 1930 Antwerp International Exhibition with Le Corbusier influence.
After the Second World War, it is worth noting Renaat Braem, trained in Le Corbusier's studio, author of various social housing plans in the Kiel neighborhood of Antwerp (1949-1958), of the Heysel model city in Brussels (1956-1963), the Saint Maartensdal neighborhood in Leuven (1957-1967) and the housing units of Arena in Deurne (1960-1971) and de Boom (1965-1972).
United Kingdom and Ireland
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Rationalism did not reach the UK until the 1930s, largely due to the movement's rejection of what was considered excessive Germanism. Many of the rationalist works were built by immigrants from the Continent escaping the Russian and German dictatorships. Notable British architects include Frederick Etchells, translator into English of Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture and author of the Crawfords Advertising Building in London (1929); and Joseph Emberton, author of the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club of Burnham-on-Crouch (1931), the only English exponent cited by Hitchcock and Johnson in their International Style book. It is also worth mentioning the High & Over by Amyas Connell (1929-1930), in Amersham, inspired by country houses Arts & Crafts but built in white concrete with a flat roof and horizontal windows, in the rationalist style; Other works by Connell, in association with Basil Ward and Colin Lucas, included the New Farm house in Greyswood (Surrey, 1932), the Parkwood Estate houses in Ruislip (London, 1935) and Frognal No. 66 in Hampstead (1938), inspired by Le Corbusier.
Due to the English reluctance towards modern architecture, most buildings were houses for the middle class, but some low-cost housing was also built, such as Kent House in Chalk Fram (London, 1934), by Connell, Ward and Lucas, and Sassoon House in Camberwell (London, 1934), by Maxwell Fry —Fry worked in association with his wife, Jane Drew, with whom he carried out important projects in India and Africa. Hampstead (1933-1934), by Wells Coates, an engineer by profession and English representative at CIAM through the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS). Coates was also the author of a country house in North Benfleet, Essex (1934-1936). It is also worth mentioning Francis Yorke, author of the Nast Hyde Villa in Hatfield (1935), and Owen Williams, author of the Boots de Beeston pharmaceutical factory (1930-1932), which stands out for its profuse use of curtain walls and for its columns. made of concrete in the shape of a tree.
One of the main exponents of British rationalism was the Russian Berthold Lubetkin, creator of the Tecton company (1932-1948). One of his main achievements was the Highpoint I building in Highgate, London (1935). It is a tall eight-story block in the shape of a double cross, of Le Corbusierian influence, supported on pilitis and surrounded by gardens, with a communal roof-terrace; Le Corbusier himself defined it as "the first vertical garden-city of the future". Six Pillars on Crescent Wood Road (London, 1935) and Newton Road (London, 1938). The architectural firm, together with engineer Ove Arup, was responsible for the gorilla cage and the penguin pool at London Zoo (1932-1937), whose innovative design, close to constructivist sculpture, brought them notable success.
Among the immigrants are also: the German Erich Mendelsohn, author with Serge Chermayeff of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea (1935); Walter Gropius, who ended up in the United Kingdom before going to the United States, author with Maxwell Fry of Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire (1939); and Marcel Breuer, who accompanied Gropius on his English and American tours, author with Francis Yorke of the Gane pavilion in Bristol (1936) and a country house in Angmering, Sussex (1937).
After World War II, the International Style gradually shifted towards a more accessible and popular aesthetic that came to be called «neohumanism», promoted by the Architectural Review magazine edited by Nikolaus Pevsner. The coming-out of this new orientation was the Festival of Britain in 1951, a fair to commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition in London, in which monumental architecture and a certain romanticism were developed. One of the main buildings in the exhibition was the Royal Festival Hall, by John Leslie Martin, Robert Matthew and Peter Moro, characterized by its smooth, curved façade and vaulted ceiling. In reaction to this, in the mid-1950s a series of young architects led by Peter and Alison Smithson promoted a more physical and social approach, which resulted in a new style that was called brutalism —also sometimes “neobrutalism”, to emphasize its novelty—, inspired especially by the last productive stage of Le Corbusier and his use of raw concrete.
Among the latest prominent figures is Denys Lasdun, an architect with a strong Le Corbusier influence. In his early days he worked with Wells Coates and at the Tecton studio, until in 1948 he established himself on his behalf. Between the 1950s and 1960s, he experimented with new forms of expression of modern language, as in his Bethnal Green nest homes in London (1952-1954) and the luxury apartments in Green Park (1958-1960), which show a greater concern for the environment than classical rationalism, a concern that was accentuated at the Royal College of Physicians in London (1960-1961), the University of East Anglia in Norwich (1962-1968) and the National Theater in London (1967- 1976).
Ireland delved into rationalist architecture after its independence in 1922, with a mixture of Dutch, Scandinavian, French and, especially, German influences. Walter Gropius gave several lectures in Dublin in 1936 and influenced many young architects. Some of the first relevant works were the Kilkenny Hospital, by Joseph Downes (1935); Michael Scott's Scott House at Sandycove (1938); the Irish Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, also by Scott; and Dublin Airport, by Desmond Fitzgerald (1941). During the Second World War, in which Ireland remained neutral, the construction declined, but gradually recovered after the war, in a fully international style: Kilmainham School, by Robinson & Keefe (1950); Dublin Bus Station, by Michael Scott (1953). Scott dominated the Irish architectural landscape for the next thirty years in a style clearly Miesian-influenced; Among his later works, the television studios Raidió Teilifís Éireann (1959-1961) stand out.
Nordic countries
In general, the Nordic countries developed a regionalist variant of the International Style, due to the circumstances of their climate and the materials used, where the use of wood stands out. The main exponent of Nordic architecture was the Finnish Alvar Aalto, halfway between rationalism and organicism. Faced with the excessive geometrization of orthodox rationalism, Aalto, like Frank Lloyd Wright, defended integration with nature, as well as the use of natural materials such as wood. While still a student at the Helsinki Polytechnic University he designed his parents' house in Alajärvi. Graduated in 1921, he worked for two years in the design office of the Göteborg Exhibition. In 1924 he married Aino Marsio, with whom he formed a professional couple. His first major work was the Jyväskylä People's House (1924-1925), inspired by Florentine architecture. Between 1927 and 1929 he built a standardized block of flats in Turku with precast concrete elements reminiscent of the works of Mies and Gropius for the Weissenhofsiedlung. In 1929 he participated in the II CIAM, where his contact with Siegfried Giedion and with artists such as Constantin Brâncuși, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger brought him closer to the avant-garde. Between 1927 and 1929 he built the building for the Turun Sanomat newspaper, based on Le Corbusier's “five points for a new architecture”. Another important work from his early days was the Viipuri Public Library (1927-1935), which shows his evolution from a certain classicism to functionalism.
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Fame came to him with the Paimio Sanatorium (1929-1933), a work adapted to its natural environment for which he studied in depth the trajectory of the sun to make the most of its incidence on the building, so that the patients enjoyed maximum light and heat. In 1931 he settled in Helsinki, where he began to design furniture for industrial production; His foray into wood led him to also use this element in architecture, so his style evolved towards a greater organicism. His works from these years include his house in Helsinki (1934-1936), a complex of houses for workers and a pulp mill in Sunila (1935-1939) and Villa Mairea in Noormarkku (1938-1941), which shows his transition towards a rural-influenced organicism, which has been described as a "romantic modern movement". s Fair in New York, a building that made Frank Lloyd Wright affirm that Aalto was a genius. His later work opted for a more expressive and regional design. In 1952 he married for the second time with another colleague, Elissa Mäkiniemi, with which he designed the municipal center of Seinäjoki, made up of the town hall, a church, a theatre, a library and a multidisciplinary room. Since 1960 he worked on the urban redevelopment of Helsinki. He carried out works in various countries, such as the Aalborg Art Museum (Denmark) or the Cultural Center of Siena (Italy).
In Finland, the following also stood out: Erik Bryggman, who evolved successively from classicism to functionalism and, finally, neo-romanticism; From his functionalist phase, it is worth noting the Finnish Pavilion at the Antwerp International Exhibition of 1930 and the Vierumäki Sports Institute (1933-1936), influenced by Le Corbusier.Hilding Ekelund had a similar stylistic evolution to that of Bryggman; Within rationalism, his Embassy of Finland in Moscow (1936-1938) stands out. Keijo Petäjä was a defender of a strongly industrialized rationalism, as in the Center of Industry in Helsinki (1949-1952, with Viljo Revell), the first modern project in his country. Aulis Blomstedt represented a "humanist rationalism" in works such as the Helsinki Workers' Institute (1959) and a group of houses in Tapiola (1952-1965). Viljo Revell was an exponent of the so-called " technocratic rationalism”, in opposition to the excessive romanticism of Aalto. He designed the Sufika prefabricated houses for the garden city of Tapiola (1953-1955); he also built collective housing in Helsinki and Vaasa. His most purely functional work was the Hyvon-Kudeneule textile factory (1955-1956).
Sweden had a special adherence to functionalism in the 1930s thanks to the impulse initiated at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and the writing the following year of the Acceptera manifesto, written by Erik Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Sven Markelius, Eskil Sundahl and Uno Åhrén. His main reference was Erik Gunnar Asplund, who combined modern and traditional elements in his work, as denoted in the Skandia cinema (1922-1923), where he played with the balance between horizontal lines and vertical. His fame came with the buildings for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, in which he skillfully combined steel and glass to achieve striking light effects. His Stockholm South Cemetery Crematorium (1935-1940) combines classical and modern elements.
Other Swedish rationalist architects were: Uno Åhrén, was the introducer of functionalism in Sweden, as well as the first to defend the work of Le Corbusier in his country, whose influence is denoted in the Central School of Stockholm (1928, with Sven Markelius), the Flamman cinema in the same city (1929-1930), the Ford factory also in the Swedish capital (1930) and the neighborhoods of Söderlingska Ängen (1933) and Övre Johanneberg (1938-1939) in Göteborg; Sven Markelius, initiated in classicism but attached to rationalism in the mid-1920s under the influence of Le Corbusier (Helsingborg Concert Hall, 1924); Sigurd Lewerentz adhered to functionalism midway through his career, already in the 1930s (villa Edstrand in Falsterbo, 1936); Eskil Sundahl, president of the Cooperative Office of Architects, from which he carried out numerous industrial and housing projects (Hornsberg bus depot in Stockholm, 1931-1938); Hakon Ahlberg, who after a classicist phase evolved or towards a stripped-down functionalism, as evidenced in his Hjorthangen residential complex in Stockholm (1934-1935); Wolter Gahn, also attached to functionalism in the 1930s (Karlskrona Theatre, 1936-1939); and Erik Friberger, one of the best representatives of Swedish functionalism for his social commitment, which he developed both in architecture and in urban planning and decoration (Elementhus house in Ystad, 1936).
In Denmark, Arne Jacobsen stood out, an architect and designer who was influenced by both Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, as denoted in his House of the Future (1929), designed with Flemming Lassen, or his Bellavista estate in Copenhagen (1934), prototype of the pan-European model of house, with cubic shapes, horizontal windows and cantilevered balconies. Other works of his were: the Søholm housing project (1950-1955), the Jespersen & They are (1955), the SAS Hotel (1958-1960) and the Danish National Bank (1961-1971), all in Copenhagen; or the Rødovre town hall (1955). Mogens Lassen —brother of Flemming Lassen —, of Le Corbusier influence, author of the Christiansholmfortet villa complex in Copenhagen (1936); and Vilhelm Lauritzen, who considers functionalism a biological necessity, author of the Radio House in Copenhagen (1934-1945) and the airport in Copenhagen-Kastrup (1936-1939).
In Norway the main exponent was Arne Korsmo, architect and designer, author in the 1930s of various villas in association with Sverre Aasland (Villa Damman in Oslo, 1932); Alone, he was responsible for the Norwegian pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. After World War II he devoted himself more to design and applied arts. Other Norwegian architects of this period were: Lars Backer, author of the first functionalist building in Scandinavia, the Skansen restaurant in Oslo (1927); open plan and its roof-terrace; Knut Knutsen, main representative in the 1930s and 1940s of Norwegian functionalism together with Korsmo, author of the Oslo Retired House (1937-1941), the Viking Hotel in Oslo (1949) and the Norwegian embassy in Stockholm (1952); and Sverre Fehn, of Miesian influence, author of the Norwegian pavilion at the 1958 Brussels General Exhibition and the pavilion of the Scandinavian countries in the gardens of the Venice Biennale (1959-1962)..
Iceland began in rationalism with the work of Sigurður Guðmundsson, who in 1935 produced several works in this style. He was the founder of the first architectural studio in his country and was the teacher of a whole generation of architects. Another pioneer was Gunnlaugur Halldórsson, author of the Agricultural Bank in Reykjavik (1943-1948). Einar Sveinsson, Reykjavik's first municipal architect, authored several public buildings and social housing programs. A second generation of rationalists emerged after World War II, with exponents such as Sigvaldi Thordarson, Skarphéðinn Jóhannsson, and Hannes K. Davíðsson.
Eastern Europe
In the Soviet Union, the end of constructivism and the promotion of socialist realism by Stalinism led to the absence of rationalist proposals in the country since the early 1930s. This was staged with the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in 1931, which was attended by renowned rationalist architects such as Gropius and Le Corbusier, as well as numerous Russian constructivists, but which was awarded to the academic Borís Iofán. Despite everything, It is worth noting the presence of a building designed by Le Corbusier in Moscow, the Centrosojuz (1928-1936), headquarters of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives (currently the State Statistics Committee). However, the end of the Stalinist dictatorship led to the return of rationalism since 1955, thanks to Khrushchev's support for functionalism and industrialization, which led to an architecture that was connected with the International Style in its most productivist aspect, without any kind of recollection of the previous constructivism. From the Modern Movement they adopted centralized planning as a methodology, which they considered adequate for a socialist system, and which they applied to the process of growth of urban structures, with a special interest in collective housing, based on serialization and prefabrication. Public buildings were also resolved with a great display of modern materials and technologies. The so-called "Soviet modernism" combined rationalism and a certain monumental character inherited from socialist realism, with a certain influence from English brutalism and Japanese metabolism. Among the main achievements are: the National Library in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan (1969-1975), by Abdullah Akhmedov, Boris Shpak and Vladimir Alekseev; the Orlov Museum of Paleontology in Moscow (1972-1987), by Yuri Platonov; the former Ministry of Transportation in Tbilisi, Georgia (1977-1979, now Bank of Georgia), by Georgi Chakhava and Zurab Dzhalaganiya; the Lenin Museum in Gorki (1975-1987), by Leonid Pavlov; and the Druzhba Sanatorium in Yalta, Ukraine (1986), by Igor Vasilevsky.
In Czechoslovakia, born after the First World War, the influence was received by proximity of German rationalism, from which they also had a direct contribution in their territory: the Tugendhat villa of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in Brno. In In 1928, an Exhibition of Contemporary Culture was held in Brno, for which various rationalist buildings were built, such as the City Pavilion by Bohuslav Fuchs and the Fine Arts Pavilion by Jiří Kroha. It is also worth mentioning the Devětsil group, founded in 1920 by Karel Teige, Jaromír Krejcar and Josef Chochol, which published several magazines on modern architecture, which, however, was criticized for its excessive concern with form. Two Werkbundsiedlungen were held in Czechoslovakia: in Brno in 1928 (known as Nový Dům, "New House"), in which nine members of the Czechoslovak Werkbund built sixteen single-family houses in the Brno-Žabovřesky district; and in Prague in 1932-1933 (Baba quarter), which with the general planning of Pavel Janák, various houses designed by eighteen architects, all Czech except the Dutch Mart Stam, were also built.
One of the first exponents of Czech rationalism was Ludvík Kysela, author in 1929 of the Bata shoe store in Prague, included by Hitchcock and Johnson in the 1932 MoMA exhibition, a rationalist version of the typical art nouveau department store Parisians, with a glass façade of advanced modernity. From the previous Cubist generation evolved towards rationalism Josef Gočár (Church of St. Wenceslas in Prague, 1928-1930; Directorate of State Railways in Hradec Králové, 1931- 1936), Pavel Janák (Mariánské Lázně terminal, 1928-1930; Hotel Juliš in Prague, 1931-1933), Josef Chochol (villa Verunac in Prague, 1931) and Jiří Kroha (Mladá Boleslav Industrial School, 1923- 1927; Villa Patočkova in Brno, 1935-1936). Among the new architects stood out: Josef Havlíček, author of the Central Pension Fund in Prague (1929-1934), one of the best examples of Czech functionalism; Jaromír Krejcar, translator of Le Corbusier into Czech and admirer of the nautical linden and American skyscrapers, author of the Machnáč Thermal Hotel in Trenčianske Teplice (1930–1931) and the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition; Oldřich Tyl, indebted to the work of Mies and Mart Stam, as denoted in his palace of the Trade Fairs in Prague (1926-1928); Bohuslav Fuchs, influenced by le Corbusierian purism, as evidenced in the Vesna School of Popular Arts in Brno (1929-1930); Alois Balán, the best representative of rationalism in Bratislava, where he built the Jaron villa (1930) and the Social Security district office (1939); Emil Belluš, author of the Slovak Rowing Club (1930) and the boat landing stage, worked in the same city of the Danube (1930); Adolf Benš, author of the Prague Electricity Company building (1927-1935) and the Prague airport tower (1932-1934); and Vladimír Karfík, who completed his training at the studio of Le Corbusier and worked for a few years with Frank Lloyd Wright in Taliesin, author of the Zlín House of Culture (1932) and the administration building of the Baťa factory in the same city (1935).
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In Hungary, rationalism had little presence, due to the dictatorship of Miklós Horthy, which was followed by the inclusion of the country in the Soviet orbit. It is worth mentioning: Virgil Borbiró, editor-in-chief of the magazine Tér és Forma (Space and Shape) and member of the Hungarian CIAM group, author of the control center of the Budapest power plant (1930) and of the Budaörs airport reception building (1937, with László Králik); József Fischer, author of several houses with Le Corbusierian aesthetics, such as those on Csatárka (1932) and Szépvölgyi (1934) streets in Budapest; Lajos Kozma, who he evolved from art nouveau to art deco and finally to rationalism, author of the residential buildings on boulevard Margit (1935-1936) and on régiposta street (1937) in Budapest; Farkas Molnár, who studied at the Bauhaus and worked in the studio of Walter Gropius, founder of the Hungarian CIAM group and author of the villa on Mese Street in Budapest (1937); and the twin brothers Aladár and Viktor Olgyay, influenced by Le Corbusier and Italian rationalism, as seen in the apartment building on Városmajor street in Bu dapest (1940).
Poland did not stand out especially in rationalism either, although it is worth noting architects such as: Tadeusz Michejda, author of several houses, villas and hotels in Katowice, as well as the Janów town hall (1931, currently part of Katowice); Rudolf Świerczyński, author of the BGK Bank (1928-1931), the Ministry of Transport building (1928-1931) and the Navy headquarters buildings (1933-1935), all in Warsaw; Szymon Syrkus, representative of Poland at CIAM, author with his wife Helena Niemirska of various workers' cities and housing complexes in Warsaw (Konstancin, 1930; Królewska Góra, 1931; Skolimów, 1935); and the study formed by Bohdan Lachert and Józef Szanajca, representatives of a orthodox functionalism, as can be seen in his unrealized project for the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva (1927) and in his Polish pavilion for the 1937 Paris International Exposition, which won the grand prize of the competition.
In Romania, an incipient rationalism arose in the 1920s as a method of modernizing the country, mainly among progressive middle classes. One of its first exponents was Marcel Janco, trained in Zurich, author of several houses that combine rationalism with a certain Dadaist influence and in which he seeks to integrate all the arts (villa Juster in Bucharest, 1931). His wake was followed in the 1930s by Horia Creangă, Duiliu Marcu, George Matei Cantacuzino and Octav Doicescu. This modernity came to an end with the integration of the country into the communist sphere.
In Yugoslavia, the Modern Movement was adopted in the 1920s by architects such as Dragiša Brašovan, Branislav Kojić, Milan Zloković, Jan Dubovy and Dušan Babić as a way of promoting a Yugoslav national architecture detached from its regional differences, a goal achieved unevenly since while the more western regions, such as Croatia and Slovenia, were familiar with Western influence, Ottoman-influenced Bosnia was more resistant to change. After World War II, socialist realism prevailed, but in In the 1950s there was a certain return to rationalism, facilitated by the break between Marshal Tito and Stalin. Tito adopted modern architecture again as a sign of national identity. The best example was the Yugoslav pavilion at the 1958 Brussels General Exhibition, by Vjenceslav Richter.
In Latvia, it is worth mentioning Aleksandrs Klinklāvs, the main referent of rationalism in his country during the period of its independence between the two world wars. He was the author of the Tērvete Sanatorium (1930-1934), several buildings in Riga (Rudzītis, 1931; Neiburgs, 1934) and various hospitals in Rēzekne, Limbaži, Jelgava and Liepāja (1934-1938). Between 1948 and 1958 he worked in Canada and, from 1959 until his retirement, in the United States.
Italy
After the utopian futurist formulations, in the 1920s Italian architecture headed towards rationalism, through various groups that sought to integrate Italian architecture into the international avant-garde: Gruppo 7 and M.I.A.R. The first was founded in 1926 in Milan by Giuseppe Terragni, Luigi Figini, Guido Frette, Sebastiano Larco, Adalberto Libera, Gino Pollini and Carlo Enrico Rava. In a four-part manifesto published in the magazine La rassegna italiana between 1926 and 1927, they opposed both the "vain and destructive fury" of Futurism and the "artificial impetus" of the Novecento, a movement founded in 1922 that he intended to renew art without breaking with tradition —hence its name, which was linked to the Quattrocento and the Cinquecento—, with the idea of reinterpreting classical architecture in a modern way without losing its essence. Faced with this, Gruppo 7 sought to adapt the International Style to the Italian idiosyncrasy, under the premise that "true architecture must evolve from a strict adherence to logic and reason."
The group became known at the 1927 Monza Biennale, where they exhibited various industrial-inspired models and designs, which were shown shortly thereafter at the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart. The first rationalist building was built by Terragni, the main exponent of the group, a block of flats called Novocomum —better known as "the Transatlantic"— located in Como (1927-1928), in which the Le Corbusierian influence is denoted, as well as of constructivism and metaphysical painting, achieving a synthesis of national and international sources. In 1928 a great exhibition was organized in Rome entitled Esposizione dell'Architettura Razionale, in which both Gruppo 7 and other Italian rationalist architects participated and which led to the convergence of all of them in a larger group, giving rise to the M.I.A.R.
The M.I.A.R. (Movimento Italiano per l'Architettura Razionale) was founded in 1930. Along with some of the members of Gruppo 7 such as Terragni, Figini, Libera and Pollini, they were joined by architects from all over Italy such as Luciano Baldessari, Giuseppe Pagano and Mario Ridolfi. Its premises were based on those of the Milanese group, the adaptation of international currents to Italian architecture, again with the competition of the Novecento, which was favored by the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, who considered avant-garde artists as "degenerates". To make themselves known, in 1931 they organized the II Exposizione dell'Architettura Razionale in Rome, for which the art critic Pietro Maria Bardi wrote the Manifesto of Rational Architecture and a Report for Mussolini on architecture.
The main achievement of the group was the Casa del Fascio in Como (1932-1936, current Casa del Popolo), the work of Giuseppe Terragni. Conceived as the headquarters of the local fascists, it was made up of a white cube, located around a patio with a glass roof and covered with marble. Other works by Terragni were: the Rustici house (1936-1937), the EUR Congress Building (1938, with Pietro Lingeri and Cesare Cattaneo), the Casa del Fascio in Lissone (1938-1939, with Antonio Carminati) and the Giuliani house Frigerio in Como (1939-1940). Also noteworthy are the residential and industrial projects for the Olivetti company in Ivrea carried out by Figini and Pollini. Other works by the group were: the Casa Elettrica (1930), by Figini, Pollini and Pietro Bottoni; and Luciano Baldessari's press pavilion and Giovanni Muzio's graphic arts center for the 1933 Milan Triennale. In the late 1930s the group was increasingly persecuted by fascism and by the association Raggruppamento di Architetti Moderni Italiani, defenders like German Nazism of an anti-modern style, for which the group's activities practically ceased, definitively disappearing after Terragni's death in 1941.
Outside these groups is the work of Marcello Piacentini, an architect with classicist roots who tried to combine the classical tradition with rationalist language, once it had already surpassed its initial postulates and had become a canonical style. Linked to fascism, Piacentini's work stands out for its monumentality, harmony and a stripped-down, almost timeless language, as evidenced in his entrance to the University City of Rome (1935). It is also worth mentioning the Milanese firm BBPR, formed by Gian Luigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, founded in 1932, responsible for works such as the Italian pavilion for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, the Colonia Helioterápica in Legnano (1936-1938) and the building of Rome EUR Post Office (1939). After the world war —Banfi died in 1945 in a concentration camp— they devoted themselves largely to urbanism, while his masterpiece, the Torre Velasca in Milan (1956-1958), borders on brutalism.
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After the war, some architects took up the principles of rationalism, such as Pier Luigi Nervi and Gio Ponti. The first had established himself as an architect in Rome in 1923. Trained in engineering, his style stood out for its aesthetic sense of concrete work. Some of his first works were: the Municipal Stadium of Florence (1930-1932) and the aircraft hangars of Orvieto (1936-1938) and Orbetello (1941-1943). Later he was the author of the pavilions for the exhibitions (1948-1950) and the FIAT factory (1955) in Turin; the Unesco headquarters in Paris (1957), with Marcel Breuer and Bernard Zehrfuss; the Palazzetto dello Sport in Rome (1956-1957), with Annibale Vitellozzi; and the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin (1961). Ponti studied at the Milan Polytechnic, where he was a professor between 1936 and 1961. He was influenced by Otto Wagner and was the architect of the so-called "elegant modern movement". His works include: the Montecatini offices in Milan (1951) and the Banca Antoniana in Padua (1962), with Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli. He also executed several works in Iraq, Pakistan and the United States. Nervi and Ponti collaborated with Antonio Fornaroli, Alberto Rosselli, Giuseppe Valtolina, Egidio Dell'Orto and Arturo Danusso on the Pirelli Tower in Milan (1956-1960), one of the best works of postwar Italian rationalism.
Other post-war architects were: Ignazio Gardella, one of the architects of the reconstruction of Milan, author of the Park House in Milan (1947), Borsalino's employee house in Alessandria (1950), the Regina Isabella baths in Ischia (1950), the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Milan (1949-1953) and the Zattere house in Venice (1953-1958); Ludovico Quaroni, initiated into fascist monumentalism, devoted himself in the postwar period to programs reconstruction and social housing, as in the Tiburtino neighborhood in Rome (1950-1954, with Mario Ridolfi); and Giuseppe Samonà, the main architect of post-war Venice, influenced by Le Corbusier, was the author of a "neighborhood unit » experimental in the Ina-Casa neighborhood in Mestre (1951-1956, with Luigi Piccinato).
Last mention should be made of the Tendenza group, generally considered «neorrationalist», which emerged in the late 1960s and was made up mainly of Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi, Giuseppe Samonà and Carlo Aymonino. In opposition to pop and high-tech architecture, this group sought to continue the rationalist tradition of pre-World War II Italian architecture. Ideologically they were nourished by the functionalist theory of Aldo Rossi, exposed in L'architettura della città (1966), where he defended a return to the classicist tradition and architectural design based on logical principles. Thus, for the members of the group, architecture should direct the urban growth of cities, detached from any other discipline in a specific autonomy that purifies architecture of extra-architectural dependencies. In this new relationship between architecture and the city, the collective uses of urban morphology will define the new architectural typologies to follow.
Spain
In Spain, rationalism arrived late, at the end of the 1920s, with which its reception arrived in an established, uncritical way, and its first exponents adopted it in an epidermal, eclectic way, transferring their solutions without considering a possible adaptation to the national environment. One of these first pioneers was Luis Gutiérrez Soto, author of works of notable quality but out of context, such as the Europa (1928) and Barceló (1931) cinemas in Madrid, the Madrid-Barajas airport (1930) and the Bar Chicote in Madrid (1931).
In 1928, Le Corbusier gave lectures at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza in Madrid that powerfully influenced the young architects of that time. Some of them came together under the acronym GATEPAC (Group of Spanish Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture). This group was founded in Zaragoza on October 26, 1930 with three subgroups: Center, located in Madrid, made up of Fernando García Mercadal, Víctor Calvo, Santiago Esteban de la Mora, Manuel Aníbal Álvarez, Manuel Martínez Chumillas and Felipe López Delgado; North, located in the Basque Country, which included José Manuel Aizpurúa, Joaquín Labayen and Luis Vallejo; and Este or GATCPAC (Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture) in Catalonia, the most active group, whose members included Josep Lluís Sert, Josep Torres Clavé, Joan Baptista Subirana, Sixte Illescas, Germán Rodríguez Arias, Ricardo de Churruca, Antoni and Ramon Puig i Gairalt, Raimon Duran i Reynals, Jaume Mestres i Fossas and Antoni Bonet Castellana. The purpose of the group was "to contribute in our country to the development of the new universal orientation in architecture and to solve and study the problems that arise in their adaptation to our environment".
The group was a member of CIAM and, in March 1932, organized a CIRPAC meeting in Barcelona with a view to preparing the CIAM in Moscow —finally held in Athens in 1933—, at which Le Corbusier, Victor Bourgeois gave lectures, Walter Gropius, Sigfried Giedion and Cornelis van Eesteren. As a disseminating body for their activities, they edited a magazine, A. C. Documents of Contemporary Activity (1931-1937), based on avant-garde magazines such as Das Neue Frankfurt, directed by Ernst May, or L'Esprit Nouveau, by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. In 1933 the northern and central groups dissolved, leaving only the GATCPAC as an active group until the end of the Civil War.
The Center sector had little activity as a group —only the organization of some congresses and a certain participation in the magazine A.C., published in Barcelona—, and showed a certain internal incoherence. Fernando highlighted García Mercadal, one of the founders of CIAM in 1928 and Spanish delegate of CIRPAC. A member of the so-called generation of '25, his style moved like that of his co-religionists in a rationalism marked by a certain academic heritage and he interpreted the modern language of a more formalistic than programmatic way. His first project close to rationalism was the Rincón de Goya pavilion in Zaragoza (1927), which denotes a certain art deco influence. Subsequently, it is worth noting the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid (1933), after which he moved away from the avant-garde.
The Basque group barely functioned as such and only developed in the individual activities of its components. In general, they showed greater skepticism towards the modern Movement than the rest of the GATEPAC components. Aizpurúa and Labayen became known at the Exhibition of Modern Architecture and Painting organized by the Ateneo Guipuzcoano in 1930, in which the majority of those who would be members of GATEPAC attended. Both jointly designed the Club Náutico de San Sebastián, the main achievement of the North group (1929), a building inspired by nautical design —a general influence of the International Style—, as denoted by the curved surfaces, the smooth textures, the stairs exteriors, flat roofs, white color and the use of portholes. Other joint works by both architects were: a restaurant on Mount Ulía (1928), an elementary school in Ibarra (1930) and the Attraction and Tourism pavilion in San Sebastián (1930); in 1933 they stopped collaborating.
In Catalonia, the GATCPAC was the most active and long-lived group. It arose with a will to renew and liberate the noucentista classicism, as well as to introduce new international currents in Spain. With progressive ideas and concerned with both social and architectural renewal, this movement had a great relationship with the republican authorities, especially with the Generalitat of Catalonia, for which they drew up numerous projects related to urban planning —such as the Macià Plan—, workers' housing and school and health infrastructures. The Macià Plan (1932-1935) was an urban reform project for Barcelona prepared by the members of the GATCPAC together with Le Corbusier, which provided for a functional distribution of the city with a new geometric order, through large backbones in the shape of a wide avenues and a new maritime façade defined by Cartesian skyscrapers. The start of the Civil War cut short the project. The main exponent of GATCPAC was Josep Lluís Sert, an internationally renowned architect who settled in the United States after the Civil War. Graduated in 1929, he was a disciple of Le Corbusier, with whom he worked in Paris and whom he invited to visit Barcelona in 1928, 1931 and 1932. His two main works in Barcelona in these years were the Bloc house (1932-19365) and the Central Tuberculosis Clinic (1934-1938), both in collaboration with Josep Torres Clavé and Joan Baptista Subirana. The first is based on the housing project à redent by Le Corbusier (1922) and is an S-shaped housing complex, made up of long, narrow blocks with a metal structure with two bays, with access to the houses through covered corridors; the Dispensary presents two parallel bodies arranged in an L shape, with a central garden that serves as access. In 1937 he was the author with Luis Lacasa and Antoni Bonet of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic for the Exhibition International Paris in 1937, where Picasso's Guernica was exhibited for the first time. Emigrated to the United States, he was a professor at Yale and Harvard (for his American work see here). Between 1947 and 1956 he was president of the CIAM. After his return from exile he was the author in Barcelona of the Joan Miró Foundation (1972-1975), a unique building built with concrete and precast plates and made up of the access tower with a events, bar and library, from where a set of patios is configured that articulate the various exhibition rooms, arranged in a closed circuit.
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The so-called Generation of '25 was active in Madrid until the start of the Civil War. The first projects were, next to the Rincón de Goya by García Mercadal, the Porto Pi gas station by Casto Fernández Shaw and the house of the Marqués de Villora by Rafael Bergamín, all from 1927. These three architects were the main referents of this group, which also includes Luis Blanco-Soler, Miguel de los Santos Nicolás, Agustín Aguirre López, Manuel Sánchez Arcas, Luis Lacasa, Carlos Arniches Moltó and Martín Domínguez Esteban. His were the main avant-garde works in Madrid before the Civil War: the Parque-Residencia (Bergamín-Blanco Soler) and El Viso (Bergamín-Luis Felipe Vivanco) neighborhoods, the Instituto Escuela (Arniches y Domínguez) and the set of the University City of Madrid, of which the Thermal Power Plant (1932, Sánchez Arcas), the Faculty of Physical and Chemical Sciences (1943, de los Santos), the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (1933, Aguirre), the Faculty of Architecture (1933, Pascual Bravo Sanfeliú) and the student residences (current Ximénez de Cisneros and Antonio de Nebrija Residence Halls, 1928-1932, Lacasa). In Madrid, it is also worth mentioning the work of the engineer Eduardo Torroja, author of the Frontón Recoletos (1936, with Secundino Zuazo) and the Hipódromo de la Zarzuela (with Arniches and Domínguez Esteban); he also carried out all the structural calculations and infrastructures of the City University. From Secundino Zuazo it is also worth mentioning the Casa de las Flores (1930-1932), which stands out for its central landscaped corridor.
Outside Madrid, in the 1930s various architects practiced rationalism individually, generally with an eclectic style in which influences from art deco and expressionism are denoted, or even an unornate classicism among the older architects; They are the so-called "rationalists on the margin", according to a definition by Oriol Bohigas. It is worth mentioning: Ramon Reventós, Francesc Folguera, Josep Goday, Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí, Joaquim Lloret and Antoni Sardà in Catalonia; Carlos Garau, José Oleza, Enrique Juncosa Iglesias, Francisco Casas Llompart and Guillermo Muntaner in the Balearic Islands; Francisco Javier Goerlich, Enrique Viedma Vidal, Joaquín Rieta Síster, Cayetano Borso di Carminati, Luis Albert Ballesteros and Miguel López González in the Valencian Community; Juan Crisóstomo Torbado and Ramón Cañas del Río in Castilla y León; Regino and José Borobio in Aragon; Fermín Álamo and Agapito del Valle in La Rioja; Victor Eusa in Navarra; Fernando Arzadún, Pedro Ispizua and Manuel Ignacio Galíndez Zabala in the Basque Country; Mariano Marín de la Viña and Juan Manuel del Busto in Asturias; Deogracias Mariano Lastra and José Enrique Marrero Regalado in Cantabria; Santiago Rey Pedreira, Antonio Tenreiro, Pelegrín Estellés, Francisco Castro Represas and Rafael González Villar in Galicia; Antonio Sánchez Esteve, José Joaquín González Edo and Guillermo Langle in Andalusia; José and Gaspar Blein in Ceuta; and Miguel Martín-Fernández de la Torre in the Canary Islands.
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After the Civil War, the first years of the Franco dictatorship led to a setback in architecture, since it was rebuilt along historicist academic lines, mainly in a neo-Herrerian style, with a monumental component typical of the new political mentality. However, in the 1950s a slow development began that led to a return to rationalism. The first exponent of a certain return to the international vanguard was the building of the National Delegation of Trade Unions in Madrid (1949, current Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality), by Francisco de Asís Cabrero and Rafael Aburto. From then on, the authorities encouraged the opening of architecture to modern trends as a means of integration into the international community. One of the first to return to modernity after a historicist period was Luis Gutiérrez Soto, one of the pioneers of movement at the beginning of the 1930s, with works such as the building of the Alto Estado Mayor Central in Madrid (1949).
Thus, in the 1950s a generation of young architects once again channeled their work towards the International Style, with two main foci: Madrid and Barcelona. The so-called Madrid School was a heterogeneous movement, without clear influences due to the political isolation of the country, beyond the very Spanish rationalism practiced in the 1930s. Among its main representatives were: Alejandro de la Sota (Civil Government of Tarragona, 1957; Maravillas College gymnasium in Madrid, 1962), Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza (Sanctuary of Aránzazu, 1950-1955, with Luis Laorga; Treasury Delegation in San Sebastián, 1957), Francisco de Asís Cabrero (National School of Hospitality at the Casa de Campo Fairgrounds in Madrid, 1959; building of the Arriba newspaper in Madrid, 1962), Rafael Aburto (Pueblo newspaper building in Madrid, 1964), Rafael de la Hoz and José María García de Paredes (Santo Tomás de Aquino University College in Madrid, 1956), Miguel Fisac (Labor Institute in Daimiel, 1951; Institute of Biology of the CSIC, 1955; group for the Dominican Fathers in Valladolid, 1959) and the tandem José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún (Spanish Pavilion at the Brussels Fair in 1958, currently in the Casa de Campo in Madrid; Labor Institute in Herrera de Pisuerga, 1958).
In Catalonia arose the so-called Group R (1951-1961), made up of a group of architects such as José Antonio Coderch, Antoni de Moragas, Josep Maria Sostres, Oriol Bohigas and Josep Martorell. This group connected the experience of rationalism and the GATCPAC with the new international currents, such as Neoliberty and organicism, with the influence of architects such as Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, Bruno Zevi and Gio Ponti. The regime's own style and gradually acquired a vindictive tone, in which the commitment to modernity was considered an opposition to the regime. A more orthodox rationalism can be seen in works such as the Faculty of Law of the University of Barcelona (1958-1959), by Guillermo Giráldez, Pedro López Íñigo and Xavier Subías, with a structural grid of rectangular bodies and interior patios, with glass enclosures and prefabricated walls of white stoneware, with a neoplasticist influence. On the other hand, Francesc Mitjans and Francisco Juan Barba Corsini Those years were exponents of a rationalism with Miesian and Bauhausian roots.
It is also worth noting the housing plans promoted in the mid-1950s by the Obra Sindical del Hogar, carried out in a rationalist style with a popular tone and with a certain neorealist influence, such as the Trinidad and Verdún complexes in Barcelona or the «towns of absorption» of Madrid: Entrevías (1956), by Jaime Alvear, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza and Manuel Sierra Nava; Cañorroto (1957-1959), by José Luis Íñiguez de Onzoño and Antonio Vázquez de Castro; and Fuencarral (1958-1960), by José Luis Romany.
In the 1960s, a movement inspired by organic architecture was produced as a reaction to the International Style, but at the same time some architects remained faithful to rationalist purism, such as Alejandro de la Sota (Colegio Mayor César Carlos in Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid, 1967; Madrid Post Office building, 1977; León Post Office building, 1980-1984), Francisco de Asís Cabrero (Crystal Pavilion of the Casa de Campo, 1964) and Josep Maria Sostres (El Noticiero building Universal in Barcelona, 1965).
Colegio Mayor Antonio de Nebrija (1928-1932), by Luis Lacasa, Madrid
Casa de las Flores (1930-1932), de Secundino Zuazo, Madrid
Fachada del Cine Barceló (1931), by Luis Gutiérrez Soto, Madrid
Grades of the Zarzuela Racecourse (1931), by Carlos Arniches Moltó, Martín Domínguez Esteban and Eduardo Torroja Miret, Madrid
Siboney Building (1931), by José Enrique Marrero Regalado, Santander
Dispensary Central Antituberculosis (1934-1938), by Josep Lluís Sert, Josep Torres Clavé and Joan Baptista Subirana, Barcelona
Park Hotel (1950-1954), by Antoni de Moragas, Barcelona
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Portuguese
The first vestiges of rationalist architecture emerged in the mid-1920s with a certain influence from Le Corbusier, Gropius and Robert Mallet-Stevens, as denoted in works such as the Capitol cinema-theater by Luís Cristino da Silva (1925-1931), the Instituto Superior Técnico of Porfírio Pardal Monteiro (1927-1932) and the Radiology Pavilion of Carlos João Chambers Ramos (1927-1933), all in Lisbon. In addition to the above, it is worth mentioning Cassiano Branco, author of the Hotel Victory in Lisbon (1934-1936); and Francisco Keil do Amaral, strongly influenced by the Dutchman Dudok (Secil School in Setúbal, 1938-1940; Lisbon airport, 1938-1942).
During the beginnings of the Salazar dictatorship there was a regression, in which, as in other totalitarian regimes of the time, architecture returned to classicist academicism, with a special reference in the Pombaline Baroque (soft Portuguese style). This softened from the 1950s, when a new generation of architects took up the modern language. It is worth noting Rui Jervis Atouguia, author of the project for the das Estacas neighborhood in Lisbon, inspired by the Athens Charter (1949), the school in the São Miguel neighborhood, where he applies the brise- soleil lecorbusierianos (1949-1955) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1959-1969), with Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa; blocks suspended on pilitis; Jorge Segurado, influenced by Dutch architecture, author of the Casa de la Moneda in Lisbon (1953); Fernando Távora, author of the urban plans for Campo Alegre (1949) and the Ramalde neighborhood in Porto (1952-1962), inspired by the Athens Charter, as well as works where he developed a regionalized rationalism in the style of Aalto or Le Corbusier in India (Escuela Primaria do Cedro in Vila Nova de Gaia, 1957-1961; Ofir's house, 1957-1958); Nuno Teotónio Pereira, author with Bartolomeu Costa Cabral of the set of living Aguas Libres stores in Lisbon (1953), one of the largest stores of the International Style in Portugal; and Alfredo Viana de Lima, a faithful follower of Le Corbusier, as denoted in his Arístides Ribeiro house in Porto (1952). We must also mention Francisco Keil do Amaral in a second rationalist stage, in which his Lisbon Industries Fair (1957) stands out.
Greece
Rationalism was introduced little by little in Greece in the 1930s, in coexistence with traditional architecture. Among the early works stands out a villa in Glyfada by Stamos Papadakis (1933). During the Second World War several architects left the country and settled in France, where they entered Le Corbusier's workshop, such as Georges Candilis, Iannis Xenakis and Aristomenes Provelengios. After the war, the country began a vast reconstruction process, although the real estate sector was abandoned to private investment. In the 1950s several large projects were developed: in 1955 Dimitris Pikionis was entrusted with planning the area surrounding the Acropolis; the following year, Konstantinos Dekavallas was commissioned to rebuild the island of Santorini, devastated by an earthquake, for which he developed an ambitious Le Corbusier-influenced project; During those years, Aris Konstantinidis also developed one of the few state-financed social housing programs, while, as director of the Office of Studies of the National Tourism Agency, he was in charge of building numerous hotels, such as those in Kalambaka, Epidaurus and the island of Poros. In the 1960s, it is worth noting the construction of several university complexes in Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete and other places.
Primary architects include Dimitris Pikionis, Nikolaos Mitsakis and Patroklos Karantinos. The former trained as an engineer in Athens and completed his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first works denote the rationalist influence due to their functionality, simplicity and their use of the open plan, such as some single-family houses, a school in Aegina, an open-air theater in Athens and a school in Lycabettus. Since 1935 he combined rationalism and popular architecture: Experimental School in Thessaloniki (1935), Aixoni residential complex, Filotei villa and kindergarten (1950-1960), Volos mayor's office (1961). He was in charge of planning the surroundings of the Acropolis and the Philopagos Hill between 1955 and 1958. Mitsakis studied in Athens and was a staunch defender of modern architecture. He worked in the Ministry of Education, where he was in charge of the construction of numerous schools, with a clear Le Corbusier influence, in which he combined modern technology and traditional materials; The Aristotle girls' school in Athens, the school complex in the Santa Sofía neighborhood in Thessaloniki, the Dimitsana Lyceum and the schools in Naxos and Tinos stand out. He died in World War II.Karantinos graduated from the Athens School of Architecture and completed his training in Paris with Auguste Perret. He was a member of CIAM, for which he was in charge of organizing the IV Congress in Athens (1933). He participated as a coordinator in the school building program started in 1928 by Eleftherios Venizelos. His works include several buildings for the University of Thessaloniki (1948-1960) and the archaeological museums of Iraklion and Thessaloniki (1960).
United States and Canada
The first exponents of rationalist architecture in the United States occurred in the 1920s at the hands of immigrant architects, such as the Austrians Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, who settled in California. Both were influenced by Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn and Frank Lloyd Wright.Schindler emigrated to the country in 1913, where he worked for five years in Frank Lloyd Wright's studio in Oak Park (Illinois), later settling on his behalf in The Angels. His first notable project was the Schindler-Chase House in West Hollywood (1921-1922), with concrete floors, precast walls, and wooden ceilings and internal partitions. His most famous work is the Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach (1925-1926), with a cantilevered structure of five concrete pillars that raise the house above the beach and a split-level space that "highlights the unity and continuity of the overall volume of the interior of the building”, according to Hitchcock and Johnson. Schindler's other works included: the Wolfe House in Avalon, Catalina Island (1928-1929), the Rodakiewicz House in Los Angeles (1937), the Hiler House in Hollywood (1944), and the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Los Angeles (1944).. Neutra's work differs from European rationalism in its search for greater luxury and comfort —it was not for nothing that they were residences for Hollywood stars—, as well as a greater integration of the house into the landscape, with large windows that sought transparency and they provided great luminosity. Installed in the United States in 1923, he also worked with Wright in Taliesin (Wisconsin). His best work is the Lovell Health House in Griffith Park, Los Angeles (1927-1929), built for the same patron as Schindler's Newport Beach house, Dr. Philip Lovell; This is a nursing home, a full example of internationalism due to its horizontality and its glass and metal structure. Other works by Neutra included the Josef von Sternberg House in Northridge, Los Angeles (1936), the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs (1947), and the Tremaine House in Santa Barbara (1947-1948).
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When Franklin Roosevelt became president of the country in 1932, he began a broad constructive program —within the economic policy of the New Deal— to alleviate the effects of the 1929 crash, which largely included the principles of low-cost housing that had developed in Europe. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer designed a working-class town in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, in 1940, based on prefabricated housing. Gropius collaborated with the General Panel Corporation for the standardization of structural parts, which became a common construction method. The New Deal policy favored the diffusion of a new type of architecture that was more functional and linked to industrial design, in the which was denoted the influence of designers such as Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss. In this context, American architecture began to distance itself slightly from the rigid European cubic rationalism, with more functional and aerodynamic forms (Streamline moderne), as denoted in the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Los Angels (1936), by Robert V. Derrah.
Another dynamic factor in modern architecture were trade fairs, such as the Century Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933 or the World's Fair in New York in 1939. In Chicago, works made with new materials such as aluminium, bakelite and asbestos, and innovative designs such as Richard Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house or the Travel and Transport Building by Edward H. Bennett, Hubert Burnham and John A. Holabird, with a metal roof supported by cables from twelve steel towers. In New York, works by rationalist architects from all over the world were presented, among which the pavilions of Venezuela, by Gordon Bunshaft; and from Brazil, by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Paul Lester Wiener.
In the 1930s, numerous European architects who fled totalitarian regimes arrived in the country and transferred the principles of rationalism to the new continent. Many Bauhaus teachers emigrated to the United States, among them Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer and Josef Albers. Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, within the Chicago Institute of Design. Gropius went on to teach at Harvard University. Mies van der Rohe worked from 1938 at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (IIT). Another exile was the Spanish Josep Lluís Sert, successor in 1958 to Gropius at Harvard.
Gropius carried out a notable task both as a teacher and as a constructor during his American journey. As director of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, he promoted both architecture and design in the new continent, similar to his leadership work at the Bauhaus. In 1938 he designed his house in Lincoln (Massachusetts), which it would become an icon of modern residential design for its flat roof, its white walls and its continuous windows. The following year he planned with Marcel Breuer the Pennsylvania Pavilion for the World's Fair in New York, original for its new volumetric ideas. In 1945 he teamed up with seven young architects at The Architects & # 39; Collaborative (TAC), with which he undertook larger projects based largely on new technologies, such as the Harvard Graduate Center in Cambridge (Massachusetts, 1948-1950), the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington D. C. (1951) and the United States Embassy in Athens (1956). As director of the Graduate School of Design he trained a new generation of architects including Philip Johnson, Ieoh Ming Pei, Henry N. Cobb, Paul Rudolph and Benjamin C. Thompson.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was responsible for the second architectural golden age of Chicago since the school of the first Sullivan and Jenney skyscrapers, with works such as the twin skyscrapers Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) or the Crown Hall (1956). In his American stage, Mies remained in rationalist orthodoxy, with a progressive formal simplification and an almost total absence of urban projection. He strove to adapt European rationalism to the special North American idiosyncrasy, which he achieved with his so-called «Miesian formula», a more symmetrical, geometric, refined and distinguished style, more monumental than in his European constructions, a formula that was especially translated into his large skyscrapers, with a typical cubic-shaped building with a metal structure and glass cladding. His fame increased thanks to the exhibition organized in 1947 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
In 1939 he designed the new campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, with a regular module that could be expanded in future extensions and buildings in the form of rectangular blocks of steel and glass. For the same institution, he built the Center for Research on Minerals and Metals (1942-1943), the Alumni Memorial Hall (1945-1946) and the School of Architecture or Crown Hall (1952-1956), made up of a rectangular raised glass box off the ground and supported by steel armor knives, with an open plan inside. The works at the IIT represent a first generic form of Mies in his American period, that of elements on a single level without divisions, with space and volumes unified; the second would be the lattice steel skyscrapers, such as the Seagram Building, built in New York between 1954 and 1958 in collaboration with Philip Johnson, one of the first "new generation" skyscrapers. His Farnsworth house (1945) stands out at this stage -1951) in Plano (Illinois), a work that preluded minimalism, composed of a cubic structure of white galvanized steel, elevated from the ground 1.2 m by eight H-shaped steel props, with a single floor that includes a porch and the house, fully glazed, an open space that includes a service area with two bathrooms, kitchen, pantry and fireplace, separated from the rest by wooden partitions. Between 1952 and 1954 he built the Chicago Convention Center and, between 1955 and 1963, a series of buildings in the Lafayette Park district of Detroit, a joint project with Ludwig Hilberseimer in which he arranged a series of houses in a row with skyscraper s intertwined Among his later works are the Federal Center (1959-1964) and the IBM Regional Office (1966-1969) in Chicago.
Marcel Breuer worked with Walter Gropius until 1941, when he created his own studio, first in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then in New York. One of his first important works was the Ferry House at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie (New York, 1948-1951), a T-shaped house with a ground floor for common areas and an upper floor raised on columns for the bedrooms., with a cantilever that served as a parasol. In the 1950s he began to regionalize and his works denoted a more expressionist stamp, such as the Abbey of St. John in Collegeville, Minnesota (1953-1961, with Hamilton Smith), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1963- 1966) and the IBM complex in Boca Raton, Florida (1967-1977).
Among the immigrants is also the Spanish Josep Lluís Sert, who emigrated in 1939. He was a professor at the universities of Yale (1944-1945) and Harvard, where he was dean of the Graduate School of Design (1953-1969).. For Harvard, he built Peabody Terrace (1963-1965), a set of apartments for married students, made up of three tall buildings surrounded by other lower ones for social facilities, in a landscaped setting, made of free concrete and with a grid of balconies with brise-soleil; for measurements he used Le Corbusier's Modulor scale.He was also author of the US Embassy in Baghdad (1955-1960), the Holyoke Center of Harvard University (1958-1965) and the Charles River Campus of the University of Boston (1960-1967).
The Finn Eliel Saarinen, associated since 1937 with his son Eero Saarinen, also settled in the United States in 1923. He was a professor at the University of Michigan and developed his work in the American Midwest, such as the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Bloomfield Hills (Michigan, 1926-1943), the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo (New York, 1938) and the Tabernacle Church. of Christ in Columbus (Indiana, 1940). Until his death he was president of the Cranbrook Academy of the Arts, whose alumni included Charles Eames and Fumihiko Maki, his son Eero worked closely with him until his death in 1950, when he founded his own study of him His inventiveness earned him worldwide fame, to the point that the Architectural Forum magazine described him as "the most famous young architect in America and possibly the entire world". His main achievements were buildings corporate offices and airports, with a careful design with a technological aspect that gives his works a greater aesthetic richness than the usual regular austerity of the International Style, whose premises he treated with a personal and inimitable way. His first relevant work was the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan (1948-1956), a horizontal complex made up of glass boxes arranged around a lake, a water tank and a low dome, which was followed by the Kresge Auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1953-1955), the United States Embassy in London (1955-1960, with the firm Yorke Rosenberg Mardall), the IBM research center in Yorktown, New York (1957 -1961), various buildings for Yale University (1958-1962), the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York (1956-1962), the offices of John Deere & Co. in Moline, Illinois (1957-1963) and the Dulles International Airport terminal in Chantilly, Virginia (1958-1963), one of his last and best works, with an inverted curved roof supported by massive pillars and a space unique glass
The main architectural typology par excellence in the United States was the skyscraper. As an exponent of a purely corporate architecture, this building model became the paradigm of the North American capitalist economy, a symbol of power, progress and modernity that would become the new urban monument of North American cities. After the first skyscrapers in the Chicago School, between the years 1920 and 1960 there was a wave of constructions of this type throughout the country, initially linked to art deco —such as the famous Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building— and later to rationalism, especially after World War II. Some of the first exponents of International Style skyscrapers were: the McGraw-Hill in New York (1931), by Raymond Hood; the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society of Philadelphia (1931-1932), by William Lescaze and George Howe; and the Rockefeller Center in New York (1931-1939), by Reinhard & Hofmeister, Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray and Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux. Subsequently, the following are noteworthy: the Portland Equitable Life Assurance (Oregon, 1944-1947), by Pietro Belluschi; and the United Nations Secretariat in New York (1947-1950), by Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz, with the advice of a group of international architects. The great master of skyscraper construction was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, author of some of the best examples, characterized by their steel and glass grids: Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago (1948-1951); Esplanade Apartments in Chicago (1953-1956); Seagram Building in New York (1954-1958, with Philip Johnson); IBM Building in Chicago (1973). Lastly, it is worth mentioning the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), founded in Chicago in 1936, made up of architects and engineers —including Gordon Bunshaft, chief designer of the New York office—, responsible for the Lever House skyscraper in New York (1950-1952), Inland Steel Building in Chicago (1955-1958), Union Carbide Building in New York (1960) and Chase Manhattan Bank in New York (1955-1961).
After the Second World War, new housing needs led to the appearance of the so-called Case Study Houses, a type of cheap and efficient model houses promoted by the Arts & Architecture, which has involved architects such as Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles Eames, Pierre Koenig and Eero Saarinen on its designs. One of the most influential was the Eames House in Pacific Palisades (1945-1949), by Charles Eames and his wife Ray Kaiser, with a steel and glass structure covered in metal panels in basic colors, made with prefabricated elements and decorated with furniture. by Eames themselves. The main characteristics of the "new American house" were the horizontality and intercommunication of spaces, as denoted in Mies' Farnsworth House or Marcel Breuer's model house for the 1949 MoMA exhibition.
Among postwar American architects, Philip Johnson, Hitchcock's father of the term International Style, stood out. He was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1979, considered the "Nobel for architects." In 1949 he built his house, called the Glass House, in New Canaan, Connecticut, inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. Located on a brick podium, it presents a rectangular box with a single space delimited by columns in the corners, the center and the entrances, with a cylindrical nucleus for the services inspired —according to Johnson— by a drawing by Kasimir Malevich. In 1950 he made the extension of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to which in 1953 he added a sculpture garden. Between 1954 and 1958 he collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building. In the 1960s his style became more eclectic, as denotes at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska (1963), after which he virtually abandoned the International Style.
Paul Rudolph studied with Gropius and Breuer at Harvard, and opened his practice in 1952. He was dean of the Yale School of Architecture (1958-1962). He carried out his first works in Florida: Healy Guest House (1948-1949), Hook House (1951-1952) and Riverview High School (1957-1958), all in Sarasota, with an austere formalism typical of the pedagogical line of the Bauhaus and Harvard. Later he highlighted his Art and Architecture Building at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, 1958-1962), a building with a solid volumetric appearance and marked verticality, made of striped concrete.
Louis Kahn was an architect trained in rationalism who nevertheless reinterpreted in a personal way, with a certain influence of ancient architecture and a great concern for the material and the incidence of light, with a tendency towards monumentality and a certain appearance monolithic. Of Estonian origin, he became a US citizen in 1914 and was a professor at the universities of Yale and Pennsylvania. He opened his office in 1937 in Philadelphia; in 1941 he was associated with George Howe and Oscar Stonorov and, in 1945, with Anne Griswold Tyng. He attended various CIAM congresses and was a member of Team X. His works include the Yale University Art Gallery (1951-1953), the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania (1957-1964) and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959-1965, with Anne Tyng).
Lastly, it is worth mentioning the group Five Architects (also called New York Five), formed in New York and made up of Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. His work was first exhibited at the MoMA in New York, in an exhibition organized by Arthur Drexler in 1967, as well as in the subsequent book entitled Five Architects (1972). Generally labeled “neorrationalist”—like the Italian Tendenza group—they reflected a common allegiance to a pure form of modern architecture, with a special reference to the work of Le Corbusier from the 1920s and 1930s., although with a divergent trajectory: Meier was the most faithful to Le Corbusier's rationalism, while Graves evolved towards postmodern architecture and Eisenman approached deconstructivism.
Canada developed, like its neighboring country after World War II, an International Style with a corporatist sign, whose main typology was the skyscraper. In the postwar period, the country experienced a period of strong construction growth and, as in the United States, many cities changed their appearance with tall skyscrapers, especially Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton and Toronto. A good example is the so-called Place de Ville, a conglomerate of three glass skyscrapers in the center of Ottawa, the work of Robert Campeau. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe carried out two projects in this country: the Toronto-Dominion Tower in Toronto (1963-1969) and the Westmount Square in Montreal (1965-1969), in which he combines two of his typologies, the tower and the large open volume. On the other hand, the Finnish architect Viljo Revell was the author together with the J. B. Parkin Associates studio of the Toronto City Council (1958-1966), while the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi was the architect of the Tour de la Bourse skyscraper in Montreal (1964, with Luigi Moretti).
One of the main Canadian rationalist architects was John Bland, director of the School of Architecture at McGill University between 1941 and 1972, from which he promoted a Bauhausian style of education. He was the author of the Ottawa City Hall (1957-1959) and the Quebec Law School (1965-1967), among other works. It is also worth noting the firm Arcop (Architects in Co-Partnership, 1955-1969), founded in Montreal by Hazen Sise, Jean Michaud, Raymond Affleck, Guy Desbarats, Fred Levensold, and Dimitri Dimakopoulos. Inspired by Gropius's TAC, they were authors of the Vancouver Municipal Auditorium (1955), the Wilfrid-Pelletier Hall (1959-1964) and Bonaventure Square (1963-1967) in Montreal, the National Center for the Arts in Ottawa (1964 -1969) and the Fathers of the Confederation Memorial Building (1960-1964) and Provincial Government Buildings (1963-1967) in Charlottetown, as well as Montreal's Place Ville-Marie skyscraper (1958-1964), next to Ieoh Ming Pei.
Brazil
One of the main Latin American countries where rationalist architecture had an outstanding development was Brazil. The first exponents arose in the 1920s at the hands of the Russian émigré Gregori Warchavchik, author of the first rationalist houses in São Paulo, such as his own (1927-1928) and the Modern House (1930). He worked in association with Lúcio Costa, who would be one of the main architects of the International Style in Brazil. The main impetus for the new style came from the 1930 revolution led by Getúlio Vargas, a progressive type. The new Minister of Culture, Gustavo Capanema, commissioned Lúcio Costa to create a new Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro, carried out in 1936-1943 together with Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Ernâni Vasconcelos, Jorge Machado Moreira and Carlos Leão (current Palace of Culture). Costa had the advice of Le Corbusier, who spent three weeks in the country in 1936 and left his mark on some features of the new building, such as the use of brise-soleil . It is a fourteen-story skyscraper raised on pilitis, with a lattice-shaped façade of vertical screens with adjustable horizontal panels.
The style became established during the 1930s and 1940s, but it had a definitive boost with the decision in 1956 by President Juscelino Kubitschek to move the capital to a new city built from scratch: Brasília (1956-1960). The new city was entrusted to Lúcio Costa in terms of urban planning (see here for its planning), while Oscar Niemeyer was in charge of the construction. of curved surfaces. The nerve center of the new capital is located in the Square of the Three Powers, named after the three public powers that are located around the square: the executive, represented by the Palácio do Planalto (presidential headquarters); the legislature, represented by the Nereu Ramos Palace (seat of the National Congress); and the judicial, represented by the Federal Supreme Court (1958-1960). Both the Palácio do Planalto and the Supreme Court have a similar design, formed by a glass box with a structural frame of modern design although somewhat classicist. The National Congress presents a further innovation: it is made up of a low rectangular building that serves as a podium for a raised plaza accessed by a pedestrian ramp, on which rise two twin blocks in the center and two sculptural forms that crown the chambers of the Assembly (Senate and Deputies), one in the shape of a dome and the other in the shape of a bowl. The shape of the central buildings recalls that of the United Nations headquarters, in whose design Niemeyer intervened. His most visually poetic work was the Cathedral of Nuestra Señora Aparecida (1959-1970), with a hyperbolic concrete structure in the shape of a crown of thorns, whose ribs are intertwined with a metallic mesh of endothermic polygonal glass, in a combination of white and blue that evoke the sky and the sea; Most of the interior building is underground, while on the surface is the bell tower, free from the church, as well as the sculptures of the apostles by Alfredo Ceschiatti. In addition to these buildings, he built the Palácio da Alvorada (1956-1958), the president's residence, a rectangular box with a glass facade and an expressionist colonnade, with a crowded interior; the Cláudio Santoro National Theater (1958-1981), shaped like an irregular pyramid; and the Itamaraty Palace, headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1962-1970), made with raw concrete and a design that combines classic and modern forms.
Other works of his were: the complex of buildings around Lake Pampulha in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais (1942-1944), of which the Casino (now the Pampulha Art Museum) stands out, based on the concept of promenade architecturale by Le Corbusier, as well as a yacht club, a Casa do Baile and the church of San Francisco de Asís; the Ibirapuéra Park exhibition complex in São Paulo (1951-1954); the Copan building in São Paulo (1951-1957); and his house in Canoas, São Paulo (1953-1955), closer to Wright's organicist principles. Late in his career his style became more neoclassical, as seen in the Mondadori building in Milan (1968-1975) and the Maison de la Culture in Le Havre (1972-1982).
Affonso Eduardo Reidy worked with Warchavchik and Costa before setting out on his own. He was the author of the Pedregulho housing complex in Rio de Janeiro (1947-1952), a long, sinuous block raised on pilotis on top of a hill, with two levels of apartments for workers with low purchasing power.. In the same city, he built the Museum of Modern Art (1954-1959), made up of several spaces, including an open-plan rectangular gallery with a glass enclosure and a U-shaped annex for offices.
Jorge Machado Moreira was an exponent of a more expressive rationalism. With Reidy, he was the architect of the Hospital das Clínicas (1942) and the headquarters of the Rio Grande do Sul Railway (1944), in Porto Alegre. His main work was the University City of Rio de Janeiro (1949-1962), of which he made its general layout and various buildings: Child Care Institute (1953), School of Engineering, Faculty of Architecture and University Hospital (1957)..
The Roberto brothers (Marcelo, Milton and Maurício), united in the firm MMM Roberto, were with Costa, Niemeyer and Reidy the main exponents of modernity in Rio de Janeiro. In 1936 they won the competition for the headquarters of the Brazilian Press Association, the first great achievement of rationalism in their country, influenced by Le Corbusier. The following year they also won the competition for the Santos Dumont airport in Rio de Janeiro. Other works of his were the Brazilian Insurance Institute (1941) and the vacation camp for the same institute (1943), reviewed by English critics as one of the twenty most representative works of modern architecture worldwide.
The Italian Lina Bo Bardi, established in São Paulo in 1946 after working with Gio Ponti, was a representative of an eclectic rationalism, expressed both in architecture and in the design of jewelry and furniture, costumes and set design. In 1947, he designed the art gallery of the São Paulo Museum of Art, for which he designed its new headquarters in 1959, one of his best-known works, completed in 1968. Another relevant work was his own house in São Paulo (1951), a box of Glass raised on pilitis, clearly reminiscent of Le Corbusier.
Carlos Barjas Millan combined a Miesian-influenced rationalism with the expressiveness of Wrightian organicism. He was the author of various houses in São Paulo (Oswaldo Fujiwara, 1954; Nadir de Oliveira, 1960; Roberto Millan, 1961; Antonio d'Elboux, 1962), as well as the Club Paineiras de Morumbi in São Paulo (1969), his larger project.
Church of San Francisco de Assisi (1942-1944), by Oscar Niemeyer, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte
Palácio da Alvorada (1956-1958), by Oscar Niemeyer, Brasilia
Cathedral of Brasilia (1959-1970), by Oscar Niemeyer
São Paulo Art Museum (1959), Lina Bo Bardi
Itamaraty Palace, headquarters of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1962-1970), by Oscar Niemeyer, Brasilia
Hispanic America
In Latin America, the hegemonic style until World War II was neocolonial, although since the 1930s there were various exponents of rationalist architecture. However, since 1945 there was a new architectural effervescence that had the International Style as a reference, although contextualized to the socio-economic reality of Latin American countries, with a more monumental and exuberant stamp, structuralist and eager to integrate all the arts. According to Josep Maria Montaner, "in Latin America there are the most interesting, spontaneous and daring experiences in search of a proper interpretation of rationalist language".
Among the various Latin American countries, two trends can be observed: one more international and prone to the use of advanced technologies, as in Argentina, Chile, Cuba and Venezuela; another of a more national character and more artisan procedures, with allusions to pre-Columbian architecture —especially in pictorial, sculptural or ceramic decoration—, as in Mexico, Colombia and Peru. Likewise, two periods can be distinguished: the 1940s and 1950s, marked by a rapid spread of rationalism, especially in Mexico and Argentina; and the 1960s and 1970s, when the movement spread to other Latin American countries, while the crisis of the modern Movement began at the end of this period.
It should be noted that Le Corbusier had numerous disciples in Latin America: Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, Juan Kurchan and Conrado Sondereguer in Argentina; Emilio Duhart, Roberto Matta, Guillermo Jullian and Roberto Dávila Carson in Chile; Rogelio Salmona and Germán Samper in Colombia; Enrique de la Mora, Teodoro González de León, Enrique Castañeda and Vicente Medel in Mexico; Roberto Waceham in Peru; Carlos Gómez Gavazzo and Justino Sierralta in Uruguay; and Augusto Tobito Acevedo in Venezuela. In addition to the Le Corbusier influence, the influence of other rationalist masters such as Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto is also evident in Spanish-American architecture, as well as the organicist Frank Lloyd Wright.
In Argentina, since there was no pre-existing indigenous architecture, the construction models were always of European origin. The first rationalist vestiges date from the late 1930s: in 1938 the Spanish emigrant Antoni Bonet Castellana —a former member of the GATCPAC— founded, together with Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, Juan Kurchan and other young architects, the Austral Group (1938-1945), of clear Le Corbusier influence —the three met in Le Corbusier's studio in Paris—, which promoted a rationalism with a certain surrealist ascendancy, interest in psychology, concern for the landscape and incorporation of local techniques and materials. Some of his works were: the house located between Paraguay and Suipacha streets in Buenos Aires (1938-1939), the OKS house in Martínez (1954-1958), the Rivadavia tower in Mar del Plata (1956) and the Flat Cristal Pavilion at the Sesquicentennial Fair in Buenos Aires (1960), by Bonet; and the building on Virrey del Pino street in Buenos Aires (1941-1943), by Ferrari and Kurchan. Another Le Corbusier-influenced architect was Amancio Williams, author of his parents' summer house —known as Casa sobre el Arroyo— in Mar del Plata (1943-1945), a work of great originality in that he built the house on a large vault.
The relationship between Argentina and Le Corbusier materialized in two projects by the Franco-Swiss architect in Argentina, a house and an unrealized urban project: Casa Curutchet in La Plata (1949-1955) is a rectangular-shaped dividing house based on in Le Corbusier's "five points", with double-height floors with large, brightly lit rooms, with two areas (public - the owner's dental office - and private) separated by a patio and an access ramp, and with an articulated façade with brise-soleil . i>, with the intention of reorganizing the city. The plan was not well received, but was picked up again in 1937 by Ferrari and Kurchan, then working in Le Corbusier's workshop in Paris. Inspired by the Charter of Athens, the plan provided for various actions on an urban and territorial scale, through a series of architectural and landscape complexes and a rearrangement of the road axes, with several high-rise buildings to administrative, commercial and leisure uses. The plan was published in a Buenos Aires magazine in 1947 but it was never carried out.
The next generation, in the 1950s, found construction more difficult due to the economic crisis. It is worth noting: Eduardo Catalano and Horacio Caminos, authors from the Municipal Auditorium of Buenos Aires and the Ciudad Universitaria of the same city (1960-1972), who later emigrated to the United States; the SEPRA studio, made up of Santiago Sánchez Elía, Federico Peralta Ramos and Alfredo Agostini, creators of several International Style skyscrapers, such as the Bank of London and South America in Buenos Aires (1960-1966, with Clorindo Testa); and Mario Roberto Álvarez, author of the General San Martín Municipal Theater (1954-1960).
In Chile, rationalist architecture emerged in the 1960s, with a series of works such as the United Nations building in Vitacura, by Emilio Duhart (1960-1966); the Portales Neighborhood Unit in Santiago, by Carlos Bresciani, Héctor Valdés, Fernando Castillo Velasco and Carlos Huidobro (1961-1963); and the Benedictine Monastery of the Holy Trinity of Las Condes, by Gabriel Guarda and Martín Correa Prieto (1964). The leading figure in the new style was Emilio Duhart, who studied under Gropius at Harvard and worked with Le Corbusier. Between 1953 and 1960 he was director of the Institute for Urbanism and Housing Planning in Santiago de Chile. Duhart's style denotes the Le Corbusierian influence —especially that of his work in India— with a certain organicist and regionalist tendency. In addition to his United Nations building, his tower of the Ministry of Labor in Santiago (1968-1969) stands out.
Colombia is one of the Latin American countries that showed a more unitary architecture. to the Colombian capital of the architect in 1947, the date on which the mayor of the city hired him together with the firm Town Planning Associates (TPA), formed by Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener, assisted by the Colombian architects Rogelio Salmona, Germán Samper and Reinaldo Valencia. The plan was developed at the regional, metropolitan, urban and civic center levels, and was inspired by the Athens Charter, with a restructuring of the city in which the road network was reorganized, sectorized the human fabric in a functional way and the city center was reclassified for governmental, cultural and artistic functions. The plan was presented in 1950 but discrepancies arose between Le Corbusier and the TPA firm, so in 1953 the contract was terminated.
The International Style was developed in Colombia in the 1960s, interpreted under the prism of the traditional legacy of Colombian native architecture and its construction techniques, which resulted especially in the use of brick, a material not widely used by the orthodox rationalism. Its use, especially in Bogotá, gave a cohesive factor to the urban image of the city. Its main representative was Rogelio Salmona, who worked for nine years in Paris with Le Corbusier and participated in the Unesco headquarters with Breuer, Nervi and Zehrfuss. His work combined avant-garde and vernacular language, with a social concern and interest in human needs. Among his works, the set Residencias del Parque in Bogotá (1965-1972) stands out, denoting a certain influence from Alvar Aalto and Hans Scharoun. A somewhat more academic rationalism was shown by Rafael Esguerra, Álvaro Sáenz Camacho, Rafael Urdaneta and Germán Samper, authors of the House of Education for Miners (1958-1959) and the Gold Museum (1970), in Bogotá. It is worth mentioning also Guillermo González Zuleta, known as the "Colombian Nervi"; Doménico Parma, creator of the "cellular reticular" system; and the firm Solano, Otero y Gaitán Cortés, responsible for works with a sculptural tone with abundant use of pilotis and cantilevers, such as the Cartagena Baseball Stadium (1961).
In Cuba, the first vestiges of rationalist architecture occurred between the late 1930s and the 1940s with figures such as Eugenio Batista, Mario Romañach and Joaquín Weiss, who sought to adapt the precepts of modern architecture to the conditions of the island caribbean In 1948, the visit to Havana by Walter Gropius promoted the influence of modernity on young architects, including Max Borges, a Harvard graduate, who combined rationalism with traditional elements, with which he achieved structural solutions of great importance. Originality: Surgical Medical Center of Havana (1948), Cabaret Tropicana (1952). Other exponents were: Nicolás Quintana (Dental skyscraper, 1952) and Ernesto Gómez Sampera (FOCSA skyscraper, 1956).
In Ecuador, it is worth noting the figure of the Swiss Max Erensperger, author of the School of San Francisco de Sales in Quito (1955), of Le Corbusierian and Aaltian influence.
Mexico experienced an architectural renaissance similar to that of Brazil. Here two parallel paths meet: that of orthodox rationalism and that which seeks a national architecture with autochthonous roots. The first is mainly represented by José Villagrán, Juan Sordo Madaleno, Imanol Ordorika and Augusto H. Álvarez. Villagrán was a defender of orthodox rationalism, who never approved its hybridization with traditional Mexican art (National Institute of Cardiology in Mexico City, 1937). Sordo practiced a refined and somewhat academic rationalism, influenced by the Swede Erik Gunnar Asplund, as in the Merck, Sharp & Dohme (1962) and the Palace of Justice (1964), both in Mexico City. Ordorika was the author of the New University of Anahuac, of which the Central Library stands out (1967-1977). Álvarez represented a purist and somewhat poetic rationalism, with Miesian influence, as in the Universidad Iberoamericana (1963) and the Compañía de Seguros La Libertad building (1959).
In the second way, some distinctive features are distinguished that are not generally found in the International Style, such as a greater decorativeness and symbolism in the facades of the buildings, due to the influence of pre-Columbian art. The artistic integration between architecture and plastic arts, with a strong influence of Mexican muralism, with an eye on traditional native architecture. The main project was that of the University City of Mexico (1950-1952), by Mario Pani, Enrique del Moral and Carlos Lazo Barreiro, with murals by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2007. Here a perfect symbiosis was achieved between pre-Columbian aesthetics and modern construction techniques, as in the Central Library (1952), by Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo María Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco. Other outstanding buildings were: the University Olympic Stadium (1952), by Augusto Pérez Palacios, Jorge Bravo and Raúl Salinas Moro; the Faculty of Architecture, by José Villagrán, Javier García Lascuráin and Alfonso Liceaga; the Chancellorship, by Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral; the School of Commerce and Administration, by Augusto H. Álvarez and Ramón Marcos; the Faculty of Chemistry, by Enrique Yáñez, Enrique Guerrero and Guillermo Rosell; the Faculty of Medicine, by Roberto Álvarez Espinosa and Pedro Ramírez Vázquez; the Institute of Nuclear Physics and Cosmic Rays, by Jorge González Reyna and Félix Candela; and the Faculty of Humanities, by Enrique del Moral, Manuel de la Colina and Enrique Landa.
In addition to the university project, it is worth noting the work of Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares, authors of several monumentalist buildings in Mexico City, such as the Museum of the Revolution, the Gallery of History (1960), the Estadio Azteca (1962), the Museum of Modern Art (1964) and the Museum of Anthropology (1964). Mario Pani was the author of numerous urban and collective housing plans —such as the Multifamiliar Presidente Alemán (1947-1949) and the Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco Tlatelolco in Mexico City (1957-1964)—, as well as the National Conservatory of Music (1946), the Acapulco airport (1954) and the Banobras tower in Nonoalco (1966). Carlos Obregón Santacilia evolved from an indigenous academicism towards modernity, such as the Ministry of Health and Assistance (1929), the headquarters of the Mexican Social Security Institute (1946-1950) and the Bank of Industry and Commerce (1949), all in Mexico City. Vladimir Kaspé, of Chinese-Russian origin, noted for the functionalist rigor of his works, such as in the Liceo Franco Mexicano (1950) and the headquarters of the Roussel Pharmaceutical Laboratories (1959-1961). Max Cetto, of German origin, developed a simple and functional style, as denoted in his houses in the Fraccionamiento Pedregal de San Ángel (1949-1950) and in various residences in Mexico City, generally for the country's foreign elite. Finally, it is worth noting Luis Barragán, an original architect who began his work influenced by Islamic architecture and Mediterranean, although it evolved into functionalism after meeting Le Corbusier in Paris; He was the author of the Studio for Painters building in Mexico City (1939), the Pedregal de San Ángel with Max Cetto, the Jardines del Bosque Subdivision Master Plan in Guadalajara (1955) and the project for the Satellite Towers in Ciudad Satélite (1957).
Paraguay received a first influx of modern architecture in the 1930s and 1940s by architects such as Homero Duarte, Francisco Canese, Natalio Bareiro and Ramón González Almeida, with some influence from contemporary Uruguayan architecture. Later, between 1950 and 1970, the main influence would be Brazilian, which materialized in two fundamental works: the Colegio Experimental Paraguay-Brasil, by the Brazilian Affonso Eduardo Reidy (1952); and the Hotel Guaraní, by fellow Brazilians Adolpho Rubio Morales, Ricardo Siever and Rubens Vianna (1960), both in Asunción.
Peru was not a particularly receptive country for rationalist architecture, whose main examples were given above all in the field of urbanism around the housing policy in the capital, Lima. In this city there was a clear dichotomy between the representative and the marginal part, with numerous self-constructed neighborhoods ("barriadas" or "young towns"). In 1966, a competition was organized for the construction of 1,500 houses, the Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), to which projects from all over the world were submitted. The winning projects were those of the Atelier 5 studio, based on houses between party walls; the German Herbert Ohl, supported by technological supports; and that of the Japanese metabolists Kiyonori Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki and Noriaki Kurokawa, based on prefabricated modules.
In Uruguay, one of the pioneers was Julio Vilamajó, who in his Faculty of Engineering in Montevideo (1936) used the typical language of rationalism: open plan, pilotis, reinforced concrete. Another of the first exponents was Román Fresnedo Siri (Hospital Americano, 1946). The Spanish Antoni Bonet Castellana also worked here between 1946 and 1949 —installed in Argentina since 1939—, where he was the author of the Punta Ballena urbanization in Maldonado, of the which include the Berlingieri house (1946) and the Hotel Restaurant la Solana del Mar (1947). It is also worth mentioning Mario Payssé Reyes, author of the Caja de Previsión Social in Montevideo (1957-1975) and the branch of Banco de la Republic in Punta del Este (1960); and Nelson Bayardo, author of the Urnario del Cementerio del Norte in Montevideo (1961-1962), influenced by Le Corbusier.
In Venezuela, it is worth mentioning the work of Carlos Raúl Villanueva, an architect trained in Paris with Le Corbusier, where he entered the avant-garde environment and was associated with artists such as Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró and László Moholy-Nagy. His main project was the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas (1940-1960), declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2000, whose buildings include the Olympic Stadium (1950), the Aula Magna of the Central University of Venezuela (1952), the Faculty of Architecture (1957) and the University Pool (1957). In all of them he sought the synthesis of figurative arts, combining architecture, painting and sculpture in a common project; A good example is its Aula Magna, with the sculpture Floating Clouds by Alexander Calder, or the various artistic works distributed among the buildings: murals by Fernand Léger, Victor Vasarely, Mateo Manaure and Juan Navarro Baldeweg, and sculptures by Hans Arp and Henri Laurens. It should also be noted that the Spanish Rafael Bergamín went into exile here (1938-1959)., Plaza, Los Jardines), villas, the Gathmann Hnos. Store and the Madrid building in Caracas. Other modern Venezuelan architects were: Manuel Mujica Millán (Spanish by birth), Luis Eduardo Chataing and Gustavo Wallis Legórburu.
Asian
India and Indian subcontinent
In the Asian continent, rationalism had an outstanding development in India, especially thanks to the presence of Le Corbusier, who built several buildings in Ahmedabad and Chandigarh between 1951 and 1965. Chandigarh was a newly built city after the division of the Punjab between India and Pakistan, as its former capital, Lahore, fell into Pakistani territory. The urban project was entrusted to Le Corbusier, who had the collaboration of Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew (for its layout, see here). In his buildings, he applied the postulates of his Unité d'Habitation and preferably used raw concrete, a suitable material for the material circumstances of the country. Among the government buildings, the Capitol Complex (1951-1962) stood out, made up of three buildings: the Legislative Assembly, the Secretariat Building and the Palace of Justice, in addition to a square-monument baptized as Open Hand ("open hand"). For its layout, he used the Modulor system, as well as a constructive language based on the repetition of modules on different scales, such as terraces, brise-soleil and the traditional Indian chhatri, a kind of parasol. In the Assembly (1951-1962) he designed a rectangular box with a repetitive pattern façade and a side entrance composed of a portico of wing-shaped pillars supporting a curved roof. The Superior Court of Justice (1951-1955) is a rectangular box with a cantilevered vaulted shell and a façade composed of a pattern of recessed brise-soleil, while the entrance features three large columns that rise to the ceiling. The Secretariat (1951-1958) is a long, narrow block also composed of repetitive modules with brise-soleil and roof-terrace. Another of the Le Corbusierian buildings in the new city was the Government Museum and Art Gallery.
In Ahmedabad, Le Corbusier built two houses: Sarabhai and Shodan, both from 1951-1956. The first presents a design of eight juxtaposed barrel vaults, with thick walls and a roof covered with grass to beat the heat. The second consists of a reinforced concrete box with forged slits and a cantilevered roof to act as a sunshade, under which a terrace is located, following its precepts of the Maison-Domino. On a larger scale, in the same city, he produced the Mill owners association building (1951-1954), in which he adapted his "five points" to the Indian context, with an promenade architecturale with an open plan and the Dominó structure, a free façade with brise-soleil and a cantilevered pavilion with a terrace-garden; and the Ahmedabad Cultural Center (1951-1958), a complex composed of brick compartments with open spaces and a series of internal courtyards with walls covered with vines.
The presence of Le Corbusier promoted rationalist architecture in the country, which had government support, since after the independence of India in 1947 the new authorities sought a national style in keeping with modernity that would show the image of the emerging nation. Indian rationalist architecture followed in the wake of the final stage of Le Corbusier, of a more "heroic" tone and marked by the use of raw concrete. The most outstanding disciple of the Swiss architect was Balkrishna Doshi, who worked in his Paris studio between 1950 and 1954. Back in his country, he designed the houses for the company Ahmedabad Textile Industries Research Association (1957-1960) and the School of Ahmedabad Architecture (1968). Charles Mark Correa studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and opened his office in Bombay in 1958. He was the author of the Anand University Administration Building (1958-1960), the Ramkrishna House in Ahmedabad (1962-1964) and the Church of the Salvation in Bombay (1974-1977). Achyut Kanvinde was a student of Gropius at Harvard and, upon returning to his country, was the author of various Bauhausian-style buildings, among which the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (1959-1966) stands out. Shiv Nath Prasad remained faithful to Le Corbusierian orthodoxy until the 1970s, as denoted in his Akbar Hotel in New Delhi (1965-1969). It is also worth noting the presence in India of Louis Kahn, author of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (1962-1974), a series of brick blocks that combined cubic and cylindrical shapes. Settled in India since 1952, the American Joseph Allen Stein was the author of several projects in New Delhi, such as the India International Center (1958-1962) and the Ford Foundation building (1966-1968, with Garrett Eckbo).
As in India, Pakistan created a new city from scratch, Islamabad, whose design was entrusted in 1960 to the Greek architect and urban planner Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis (see here). During the first years of the city's expansion, numerous buildings with a modern stamp were built, most of them by foreign architects, including: the Government Secretariat, the work of Gio Ponti, Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli (1964-1968); and the complex of the Presidency, by Edward Durell Stone (1964-1984). Frenchman Michel Écochard, author of the campus of the University of Karachi (1955), also worked in this country.
Bangladesh became part of Pakistan after its independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, finally becoming independent in 1971. As in its neighboring countries, modern architecture served as the national style of the new state. Here, too, foreign architects were initially used, such as Louis Kahn, author of the Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban or National Assembly in Dhaka (1962-1984), a building with sculptural forms erected on a brick platform in the middle of an artificial lake, made of concrete. seen articulated by bands of travertine, with openings of different geometric shapes. Other exponents from outside the country were Paul Rudolph (Mymensingh University of Agriculture, 1966) and Konstantinos Doxiadis (Dhaka University Student and Teachers Centre, 1963- 1964). Among the national architects, Muzharul Islam stands out, who studied at Yale with Paul Rudolph and adapted modern language to the idiosyncrasies of his country: Dhaka Public Library (1955), College of Arts and Crafts (1955). Fazlur is also worth mentioning. Rahman Khan, who worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago.
Japan and Far East
In Japan one of the most original and interesting variants of the International Style was developed, a version of the modern language. The first rationalist work was carried out by a Czech-American architect, Antonin Raymond: his own house in Tokyo in 1923 (later rebuilt on Morito beach, Jayama). Entrusted with supervising the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond built several reinforced concrete houses, such as the Fukui houses in Atami Bay (1933-1935), which show some influence from Auguste Perret. Bruno Taut lived in Japan between 1933 and 1936, where he pointed out the similarities between the Modern Movement and the austerity and simplicity of traditional Japanese architecture made of wood. Between the years 1920 and 1930, the so-called Secession Group (Bunri-ha) arose from young Japanese architects, composed mainly of Mamoru Yamada (Telephone General Office, 1926-1927; Tokyo Electrical Laboratory, 1929), Tetsurō Yoshida (Tokyo General Post Office, 1931-1933) and Kikuji Ishimoto (Haneda Airport Offices, Tokyo, 1932); Yamada's laboratory was the only non-Western work exhibited by Johnson and Hitchcock at MoMA in 1932. In those years, some architects such as Iwao Yamawaki studied at the Bauhaus, while others such as Kunio Maekawa and Junzō Sakakura trained in Le Corbusier. Maekawa was the author of the Harumi apartments in Tokyo (1956-1957), inspired by Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation. In Japan there is also a building by Le Corbusier, the National Museum of Art Occidental (1957-1959), in Tokyo, built together with Kunio Maekawa, Junzō Sakakura and Takamasa Yoshizaka; It is a rectangular building raised on pilotis, made of exposed concrete.
Later, Kenzō Tange stood out, who adapted the rationalist style to the special Japanese artistic sensibility. In his early days he worked in Kunio Maekawa's studio and, in 1946, he opened his studio in Tokyo. His first relevant work was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (1949-1956), a tribute to the city of the first atomic bomb. The construction of the Tokyo City Hall (1955-1956), built on the classic Le Corbusierian pilotis, generated some controversy in the Japanese cultural sphere, although Tange included a traditional Japanese garden under the building. Between 1955 and 1959 built the Kagawa Prefecture in Takamatsu, a fusion between rationalism and traditional Buddhist and Shinto architecture. Later he built the Cathedral of Saint Mary of Tokyo (1961-1964), the building of the Yamanashi news and television agency (1961 -1967) and the sports complex of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (Olympic Stadium, Yoyogi National Gymnasium). Since the 1960s he was part of the Metabolism Movement, a way of conceiving architecture through mega-structures theoretically expandable to infinity, just like animal metabolisms. Creator of the so-called "Japanese modern style", Tange inverted the classic axiom of functionalism affirming that "only the beautiful can be functional".
Among the latest representatives, Fumihiko Maki stands out. He studied in Tokyo and at Cranbrook Academy and the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the United States. At the beginning of it he worked in the Tange research laboratory. Especially interested in new technologies and rational design, he developed various projects of a modular type and with prefabricated elements. His works include the Nagoya University Memorial Hall (1959) and the Hillside Terraced Apartments in Daikanyama, Tokyo (1966-1979).
In China there are practically no vestiges of rationalist architecture, since due to its historical evolution it went from traditional Chinese styles to socialist realism and state planning of architecture; even during the Cultural Revolution, architecture was denounced as bourgeois art and architects were sent to work in the countryside. Instead, modern architecture was able to develop in Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997. A city with a prosperous economy, it went from one million inhabitants in 1946 to eight million in 1994, with a population density of 32,970 inhabitants per hectare, one of the highest in the world. This caused the vertical construction and the presence of numerous skyscrapers, many of which followed the precepts of the International Style. One of the most important studios was Wong Tung and Partners, responsible for large housing complexes such as Mei Foo San Chuen (1963-1976), shopping malls, schools, and hotels. Among the architects, Tao Ho stands out, trained in the United States with Walter Gropius, author of the International School (1975) and the Hong Kong Arts Center (1974-1977). There are also works by international architects such as Harry Seidler (Hong Kong Club, 1980-1984) and Paul Rudolph (Bond Centre, 1989).
In South Korea, modern architecture did not start until the civil war with its neighbor to the north. In the 1960s and 1970s, traditional architecture coexisted with a variant of the International Style influenced by commercial buildings in Europe and the United States, with abundant use of concrete, reflective glass and stone cladding. The work is especially noteworthy. by two Le Corbusier-influenced architects: Kim Swoo-geun (Space Group Building in Seoul, 1977; Seoul Olympic Stadium, 1977-1984) and Kim Chung-up (main gate and memorial hall of the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan).
Southeast Asia
In Malaysia, colonial-style architecture survived until practically the 1960s, when the first samples of International Style were produced, which lasted until the 1970s. It is worth noting the work of Lim Chong Keat, trained in the United Kingdom and the United States (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), author of works such as the Singapore Convention Center (1961) and the Negeri Sembilan State Mosque in Seremban (1967). Related to this country is Singapore, a state split from Malaysia in 1965. Lim Chong Keat (Jurong City Council, 1969-1974) also worked here and it is also worth mentioning William Lim (Saint Andrew's Junior College, 1978), Alfred Wong (Marco Polo Hotel, 1962; National Theatre, 1963) and Tay Kheng Soon, author of shopping centers such as People's Park Complex, Katong and Tanglin.
Thailand did not open up to modern architecture until the 1970s. Then Sumet Jumsai stood out, trained in Cambridge, author of buildings such as the Museum of Science in Bangkok (1976-1982) and the Asian Institute of Technology near Bangkok (1981), both clearly influenced by Le Corbusier. It also denotes the influence of the Swiss architect Ong Art Satrablan, author of the building no.
In Cambodia, the International Style had little presence due to its historical vicissitudes: between 1970 and 1995 it suffered the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge regime and the Vietnamese invasion. Thus, there are few examples from colonial times, such as the Central Market of Phnom Penh, by Jean Desbois and Louis Chauchon (1934-1937); and in the 1960s, in which the architect Vann Molyvann stood out (sports complex for the 1964 Asian Games; Phnom Penh Commerce Center, 1966; Phnom Penh University, 1968).
In the Philippines, the work of Leandro Locsin stands out. 1974), the International Convention Center (1976) and the Philippine Plaza Hotel (1976).
Near East
In Israel, it is worth highlighting the White City of Tel Aviv, an urbanization planned by some thirty architects fleeing from Nazi Germany in which the largest set of rationalist works in the world was developed, with nearly 4,000 Bauhausian-style buildings that in 2003 they were declared a World Heritage Site. One of the pioneers was the German architect Erich Mendelsohn, established in Jerusalem in the 1930s, where he built several houses and hospitals (Weizmann residence in Rehovot, 1936). Subsequently, architects such as Alexander Klein, Adolf Rading, Joseph Neufeld and Arieh Sharon developed the urban precepts of the German siedlungen in Tel Aviv and Haifa. In 1933, Zeev Rechter built the Angel House in Tel Aviv, the first in the country supported by pilotis , which together with its white walls, its horizontal windows and its roof-terrace would mark the constructions of that time. After the break of the Second World War, the The massive arrival of Jewish immigrants to the new state of Israel led to the creation of new settlements and housing estates (shikunim), usually built under functionalist precepts. Among the main achievements of Israeli rationalism, it is worth highlighting: the Parliament and the Jerusalem Stadium and the Tel Aviv Railway Station, by Ossip Klarwein; the hospitals built by Arieh Sharon in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Beersheba; the Tel Aviv Palace of Justice, the Palace of Congresses in Jerusalem and the Beersheba Social Center, by Zeev Rechter; the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, by Zeev Rechter and Dov Karmi; and the University of Jerusalem (1954), by Dov Karmi. It is also worth mentioning the University of Haifa (1964), by the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer.
In Turkey, rationalist architecture was introduced in the 1930s with various influences: German (Ankara Faculty of History and Geography, by Bruno Taut, 1937), Dutch (Ankara National Exhibition pavilion, by Şevki Balmumcu, 1933-1934) and lecorbusieriana (offices of the Satie Company in Istanbul, by Sedad Eldem, 1934). However, its beginnings coincided with a revaluation of traditional Ottoman architecture and it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the International Style was adopted again, especially in the work of Turgut Cansever: Anadolu Club on the island of Büyükada (1959).), Ankara Turkish History Society (1966). Another relevant work was the Hilton Hotel in Istanbul (1952-1955), by Gordon Bunshaft (with the SOM label) and Sedad Eldem.
Lebanon became a French protectorate after World War I, until its independence in 1943. An early exponent of modern architecture was Antoine Tabet, a student of Auguste Perret, who combined rationalism with local traditions. In the 1950s, his work was developed by Karl Chayer and George Rayes, in which the Bauhausian influence is evident. In the 1960s, major urban projects and reforms were undertaken, and international architects such as Oscar Niemeyer (International Fair in Tripoli, 1966), Alvar Aalto (office building in Beirut, 1970) and André Wogenscky (Ministry of Defense in Beirut) worked in the country. Baabda, 1962-1968; Lebanese University in Hadath, 1968-1974). In urban planning, Michel Écochard was responsible for the Master Plan for the development of Greater Beirut (1961), while his architectural work (French Lycée de Beirut, 1959) exerted a great influence on a new generation of architects.
Syria was like Lebanon a French protectorate until 1946. Early examples of modern architecture were Farid Tarrad's Hotel Orient Palace (1935) and Michel Écochard's National Museum of Damascus (1935). Subsequently, there were no signs of internationally influenced architecture until the 1970s, as can be seen in the work of Burhan Tayyara and Charles Kassab.
In Saudi Arabia, the rise of the country's wealth derived from the extraction of oil led to an increase in construction and the adoption of a more modern style, although with some delay compared to the international context, around the 1970s. Many achievements were from international firms: University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran (1971), by Caudill Rowlett & Scott; King Faisal Foundation in Riyadh (1976-1984), by Kenzō Tange; Institute of Public Administration in Riyadh (1978), by the American firm The Architects' Collaborative.
Iraq had its first samples of the International Style in the 1940s thanks to several young Western-trained architects, such as Mohamed Saleh Makiya, Rifat Chadirji and Hisham Munir. Works by international architects are also found: Baghdad Government Offices (1958), by Gio Ponti and Antonio Fornaroli; Baghdad University Faculty Tower (1966), by The Architects' Collaborative.
The Turkish-Armenian Gabriel Guevrekian worked in Iran, after several years living in France. Here he built several projects in Tehran: in 1934 for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 1936 for the Ministry of Industry and the Officers' Club in the National Garden neighborhood, as well as several villas. Among the local architects, Vartan Hovanessian, trained in Paris, where he was influenced by Auguste Perret and Tony Garnier, as seen in the Women's School of Arts and Crafts in Tehran, the Saad Abad Palace, the Hotel de Darband and the Sepah Bank, all between 1935 and 1941.
Kuwait was another country enriched by oil and which also entrusted its large projects to foreign architects: the National Museum of Kuwait, by Michel Écochard (1965); Central Bank of Kuwait, by Arne Jacobsen (1971).
Africa
The continent of Africa was divided for the most part from the 19th century into colonies administered by the European powers, until the After the Second World War, they gradually became independent from their metropolis. In the French colonies of the Maghreb, in North Africa, the majority of projects were by French architects. Le Corbusier himself drew up an urban plan for the city of Algiers in 1932 —called Plan Obús—, which was ultimately not carried out due to its utopian approach and the local difficulties for its practical implementation. Also in Algeria, the Swiss architect designed a terraced apartment block in Oued-Ouchaia (1933-1934) and a skyscraper for the Marina district of Algiers (1938-1942), not executed. Another work by Le Corbusier in the Maghreb was the villa Baizeau in Carthage, Tunisia (1928), adapted to the climatic conditions of the area: it has an anti-sun screen that provides shade and the rooms are interconnected to favor ventilation. A disciple of his, Pierre-André Émery, also Swiss, worked in Algiers from 1925 to 1962, where he led the new generation of modern architects; His works include the workers' cities of the Ouenza mines (1948-1953), the Ben-Akhoun (1953) and Châteauneuf (1954) schools, several buildings for Électricité et Gaz d'Algérie and the Protestant temple of Hussein -Dey (1960). Oscar Niemeyer, author of the University of Constantine (1968-1970) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Algiers (1974) also worked in this country.
In Morocco, rationalism had its first traces in the 1930s with some architects influenced by Le Corbusier, such as Marcel Desmet and Maurice Sori, authors of several buildings in Casablanca. In the second post-war period, a generation of young architects (Georges Candilis, Gaston Jaubert, Élie Azagury, Jean-François Zévaco, Jean Chemineau) led the transformation of cities such as Rabat and Casablanca, and formed GAMMA, the local branch of CIAM.. Among the achievements we must highlight the ATBAT project in Casablanca (properties Sémiramis and Nids d'abeille) by Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods and Vladimir Bodiansky (1951- 1956), based on Le Corbusier's Unité of vertical blocks with brise-soleil balconies and garden terraces, combined with lower-rise buildings. André Lurçat also built a housing estate in Casablanca (1953-1955), inspired by his Hotel Nord-Sud in Corsica.
In West Africa, modern architecture developed especially in Nigeria, especially thanks to the presence of Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, installed in this country as advisers for territorial planning in the British Colonial Office. His main work was the University of Ibadan (1953-1959). It is also worth noting the presence of Walter Gropius, author of the University of Lagos (1963), as well as Ove Arup, author of various industrial buildings, and the English firms Godwin, Hopwood & Kuye, Watkins Gray International and James Cubitt & Partners, responsible for several buildings in Lagos. The Israeli Arieh Sharon was responsible for the University of Ife (1960-1970).
Le Corbusier's influence was also received in South Africa, as noted in the work of Rex Martienssen, author of the Peterhouse apartments in Johannesburg (1934-1935), inspired by the Savoye villa. Another exponent was Norman Hanson, who also shows the influence of the Swiss architect in his 20th Century Cinema in Johannesburg (1940). Some exiled German architects, most of whom were trained at the Bauhaus, such as Steffan Ahrends, Helmut Stauch and Bernard Pabst, also developed their work in this country. In the second post-war period, the influence came from the United States, especially in the construction of skyscrapers with metal structures and curtain walls, such as those built in Johannesburg by firms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Carlton Center Office Tower, 1973) and Hentrich Petschnigg & Partners (Standard Bank Centre, 1970).
Oceania
Australia remained faithful to the architecture of the colonial tradition until the end of the Second World War, when the new international currents began to arrive. When this occurred, a variant of rationalism was developed that was innovative in character and not in imitation of the works of modern masters, especially thanks to Harry Seidler and Sydney Ancher. Austrian by birth, Seidler studied at Harvard Graduate School of Design and Black Mountain College. He worked with Marcel Breuer in New York and with Oscar Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro and, in 1948, opened his own studio in Sydney. His early works, such as the Rose Seidler house in Sydney (1948-1950), still show a canonical rationalism, but in the 1960s he evolved towards more minimalist forms, influenced by Frank Stella's painting, with repetitive forms that combined shapes rectangular and curved, and a high quality of execution, as in the Australia Square Office Tower in Sydney (1961-1967, with Pier Luigi Nervi). Other works of his were: the office of the Commonwealth Trade Group in Canberra (1970-1975), the Australian Embassy in Paris (1973-1977) and the Riverside Center in Brisbane (1983-1986). Sydney Ancher adapted Miesian language to the local Australian milieu, as in the Farley House in Warringah (1947), the English House in Saint Ives (1951) and Ancher House in Neutral Bay (1957). Other exponents of modern architecture included: Samuel Lipson, Hugh Buhrich, Frederick Romberg and Mary Turner Shaw.
There were no examples of modern architecture in New Zealand until after World War II. The first exponents were immigrants such as Heinrich Kulka and Ernst Plischke, who, however, were poorly received by the local architectural profession, still mired in the colonial style of previous decades. A first reaction against the prevailing academicism was that of Miles Warren and Peter Beaven, who developed their work in different ways, the first with a certain brutalist influence (Dorset Street apartments in Christchurch, 1956-1957) and the second with a more flowery style., as in his Lyttleton Road Tunnel Building (1963).
Urbanism
Urban planning had a great development in the XX century, since the progressive increase of the urban population since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution led to a growing interest in seeking new formulas and solutions to meet the housing and infrastructure needs of society. If in 1800 there were some 200 cities in the world with more than 20,000 inhabitants, with a total of 21.7 million inhabitants (2.4 &% of the total population), in 1950 there were 5,509 cities of that size, with 502.2 million inhabitants (20.9% of the total). Rationalism, due to its progressive and social ideas, made a great effort to develop urban planning theories that were universally applicable, with special emphasis on hygienic and functional, that satisfy all aspects inherent to the city, both economic and technological, cultural and ecological.
The main rationalist urban planner was Le Corbusier, who set out his principles in Urbanisme (1925), where he developed his ideas about a functional city based on order and linearity. Already in 1922 he had outlined his project for a Ville contemporaine pour trois milions d'habitants, in which he located an urban center with a series of office skyscrapers around a communications hub surrounded by various residential, service and leisure sectors, with abundant green areas and hierarchically ordered streets. The buildings would be of three types: cruciform skyscrapers in the center, à redent houses in the middle and immeubles -villas on the periphery. In his 1925 book, Le Corbusier established four essential points about urbanism: decongesting the center of cities, increasing their density, increasing the means of movement and increasing parks and open spaces. He also pointed out that "modern urban planning is born with a new architecture". 40 hectares of old buildings on the right bank of the Seine, whose space would be occupied by a large green esplanade that would house nineteen tall 180 m skyscrapers with a cross plan, with straight roads and at different levels. In 1933 he reformulated his theories under the name Ville Radieuse ("radiant city"), an almost utopian project that combined functionality with ecological concern, with giant apartment blocks separated between them to guarantee their exposure to the sun, large landscaped spaces, separation of functions and efficient communication routes. Le Corbusier was the "great creator of the utopia of the modern city in its physical aspect", according to Martin Meyerson. In addition to Paris, Le Corbusier drew up urban projects for São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (1929-1930), Algiers (1930), Barcelona (1932-1935), Geneva (1933), Stockholm (1933), Antwerp (1933), Buenos Aires (1938-1940), Saint-Dié (1945), Bogotá (1949-1952), Marseille (1950), Izmir (1950) and Chandigarh (1951-1965), the only one executed.
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All these ideas were concretized in the Athens Charter, one of the main manifestos of rationalist urbanism. It was drawn up at the IV CIAM held in Athens in 1933, mainly under the initiative of Le Corbusier, although the writing was carried out by the Swiss architects Werner Max Moser and Rudolf Steiger. It was not published anonymously until 1942, and in 1944 by Josep Lluís Sert under the title Can our Cities Survive?; finally, in 1957 it was published with the signature of Le Corbusier. Its content was focused on urbanism, with a functional city model opposed to traditional concepts, where the city is based on areas designated for different functions, such as residential, economic and industrial, or leisure (sports and recreation), together to green areas between the different spaces, all of them delimited and structured by rationally arranged road axes. For housing, Le Corbusier's bet was on high-rise buildings. According to his proposal, only historical monuments, surrounded by green areas, would be saved from the old cores of the cities. This approach inspired many of the urban developments of the 1950s and 1960s.
The first realization inspired by the Charter of Athens was the General Extension Plan for Amsterdam (Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan or AUP), drawn up by Cornelis van Eesteren and approved in 1935. The objective was the extension of the city towards the periphery and was drawn up based on detailed statistical research, subdivided into neighborhoods of 10,000 homes separated by green areas and with open blocks oriented from north to south. The concentration of economic activities in the port center led to dense and compact growth, which, however, was optimally resolved with a pre-established organization to create cohesive neighborhoods and with a subdivision of tasks by units smaller than the neighborhood supervised by an architect. The plan is still in force and regulates the progressive growth of the city.
After the Second World War, rationalist urbanism was applied to the reconstruction of cities devastated by the war and its methodology came closer to capitalist economic principles, since its postulates of zoned fragmentation, mass production and prefabrication matched perfectly with the capitalist industrial models. A paradigmatic model was that of the English new towns (“new cities”), which brought together the precepts of garden cities advocated by Ebenezer Howard at the beginning of the century with rationalist postulates. the Greater London Plan to decentralize the English capital, approved in the New Towns Act of 1946. Between 1945 and 1951 fourteen new towns were created, including Stevenage (1946) and Harlow (1947), which show a certain influence of the Scandinavian neo-empiricism practiced at the time. Skärholmen in Sweden, Tapiola in Finland), as well as various regulatory plans in cities such as Copenhagen (Five Finger Plan, 1947) or Helsinki, which expanded its municipal territory six times. In France, Italy and Germany, most devastated by the g In war, priority was given to construction over urban projects, which is why the housing stock grew without proper planning, except in a few cases such as the development plans for Le Havre and Amiens drawn up by Auguste Perret in 1947-1954, the various Unité d'Habitation by Le Corbusier (1952-1964), the neighborhoods planned by the Candilis, Josic & Woods (Bagnols-sur-Cèze, 1956-1960; Toulouse-le-Mirail, 1961-1966), the master plan for Milan in 1953 or the Hansaviertel neighborhood in Berlin planned at the Interbau in 1957 In the Netherlands there was a greater relationship between architecture and urban planning, as in the case of Rotterdam, whose center was completely destroyed in 1940, for which a reconstruction plan was drawn up by Cornelius van Traa and approved in 1946. In eastern countries, the reconstruction of cities was carried out under the academic style advocated by the Stalinist dictatorship and only after Stalin's death did some more rationalist projects emerge, such as the apartment blocks shown in models at the Exhibition General of Brussels of 1958.
It is also worth noting urban planning in Israel, a country that has grown considerably since its independence in 1948: if previously the Jewish population was 70,000 inhabitants —concentrated above all in Haifa and Tel Aviv—, between 1948 and 1961 this figure tripled, for which the construction of new cities was necessary, regulated with a territorial plan inspired by the English new towns directed by Arieh Sharon: between 1948 and 1957 twenty-eight new cities were planned, among which Beersheba stands out and Ashdod; in the 1960s two more were created, Karminel and Arad.
The main urban developments of the Modern Movement were Brasilia (Brazil), Chandigarh (India) and Islamabad (Pakistan). Brasilia (1956-1960), conceived as the new capital of the country, was planned by Lúcio Costa, who was inspired by the Charter of Athens and designed a plan made up of two intersecting axes in the shape of a cross, with wide avenues and large spaces that cause a great sensation of vastness —but also of loneliness, as has been habitually criticized—. In the central part are the official buildings and recreational areas, and around them residential, cultural and commercial areas, as well as green areas, stations, airport and all kinds of infrastructure. Chandigarh was built as the new capital of Punjab between 1951 and 1965, with a project designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. Also based on the Charter of Athens, Le Corbusier put into practice his theory of mixed sectors, in which residential areas are differentiated based on density, and for residential buildings he applied the postulates of its Unité d'Habitation. Islamabad was created as the new capital of Pakistan, with a design by Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis (1960), the originator of the concept of ekistics or habitat science, which examines the human establishments from multiple perspectives in search of techniques to solve their inherent problems. Doxiadis developed a purely rational layout and divided the city into sectors differentiated by their function or their construction typology, starting from a central node from which the city would expand following a reticular plan.
One of the major concerns of rationalist architects—especially in Germany—was that of social housing. The ravages of the First World War favored the rise of socialist ideas, to which numerous architects adhered, concerned with finding solutions for the housing needs of the working class. In France, the organizations HBM (habitat à bon marché, "cheap housing") encouraged the construction of houses in the so-called "red belt" of Paris, and Henri Sauvage devised his tiered apartment buildings, as the one on rue des Amiraux (1913-1928). In the Netherlands, the Amsterdam School experimented with social housing with a sculptural aesthetic, while in Belgium garden cities were promoted through cooperative movements. Self-construction was encouraged in Scandinavia. But the main boom in social housing occurred in Germany, especially during the Weimar Republic, with the phenomenon of the siedlung (plural siedlungen, translatable by settlement or urbanization)., residential complexes of houses or blocks of flats located on the outskirts of large cities, rationally organized with the premises of wide spaces, green areas and optimal healthy conditions of sunlight and ventilation. Among the main achievements are those by Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner in Berlin (six ensembles: Falkenberg Garden City, Siedlung Schillerpark, Großiedlung Britz, Wohnstadt Carl Legien, Weiße Stadt and Großiedlung Siemensstadt), by Otto Haesler in Celle (Italienischer Garten, Georgsgarten) and Ernst May in Frankfurt (Römerstadt, Praunheim, Westhausen, Höhenblick), as well as the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, the colony organized by the Deutscher Werkbund in 1927 in which numerous international architects took part. Opposite to the typology of houses with gardens sponsored by the siedlungen, in Austria the concept of Höfe (courtyard) was developed, large apartment blocks for collective housing, such as those of the Red Vienna, among which stands out the Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna, the work of Karl Ehn (1927). After the Second World War, large temporary housing plans arose to alleviate the ravages of war, generally financed by the states, while Le Corbusier raised his Unité d'Habitation (like the one in Marseille, 1947-1952), large blocks of flats with all the services to constitute self-sufficient entities.
Design and decoration
The Modern Movement also placed a special interest in design, decoration and interior design. One of the most innovative movements in the field of design was the Bauhaus School, which, in the face of the excessive ornamentation of art deco, introduced a more rational and functional design concept, more adapted to the needs people's real This school tried to break the barriers between art and crafts, with a certain influence in its beginnings of Arts & Crafts, while later he opted for industrial production. Its goal was "the collective work of art, the Building, within which there were no barriers separating the structural arts from the decorative arts". Students at the school learned theories of form and design, as well as workshops on stone, wood, metal, ceramics, glass, fabric, painting, theater and photography. His design was based on simplicity, geometric abstraction and the use of primary colors and new technologies, as was evident in the steel furniture tubular created by Marcel Breuer, the Barcelona chair by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich or the lamps designed by Marianne Brandt. In this school, creators stood out —in addition to those previously mentioned— such as László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Vasili Kandinski, Gerhard Marcks or Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Bauhaus designs covered all kinds of objects, from furniture and lamps to tableware, typewriters, bicycles, textiles, clocks, graphic design and even a new typographic typeface, the sans serif. In 1925 the Bauhaus founded its own company to market its designs, the Bauhaus GmbH, which published a catalog of its products.
Heir to the Bauhaus was the Hochschule für Gestaltung (Higher School of Projection), later called Neues Bauhaus (New Bauhaus), founded in 1953 by Max Bill in Ulm. His design works were characterized by their geometric appearance and minimalism, which came to be called the "Ulm style". In a first phase, the school was oriented towards fine arts and crafts and had teachers from the former Bauhaus such as Josef Albers and Johannes Itten. A second phase was marked by the change of leadership in 1956 from Max Bill to Tomás Maldonado, who reoriented the school towards industrial production. Architects and designers such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Frei Otto, Charles Eames, and Richard Buckminster Fuller taught at the Ulm Bauhaus. Bill himself was a remarkably creative designer: he had been a Bauhaus student and in the 1930s he worked as a painter, sculptor, architect and graphic designer, while in the 1940s he began in industrial design, with achievements such as his aluminum wall clock for Junghans (1957), his wristwatches and his minimalist Ulmer stool Hocker (1954).
In the XX century, industrial design gained progressive prominence, based on intellectual creation and functional design, with an increase in experimentation with new materials (plastic, fiberglass) and greater attention to market needs. The basis of industrial design is found in functionalism, a theory that argues that an object that fulfills its function and is elaborated with economy of materials is intrinsically beautiful. This would exclude aesthetics in the design of objects, although such an extreme is rarely carried out in its entirety. One of the precedents for this theory was the architect Louis Sullivan, who stated that "form follows function", as well as Otto Wagner, who stipulated that "nothing that is not practical can be beautiful". In Germany, architects and designers such as Peter Behrens, Richard Riemerschmid and Bruno Paul, and workshops and associations such as Deutsche Werkstätten, Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus, laid the foundations of industrial design in an early phase. In France, the pioneer was the architect Le Corbusier, who proclaimed the "absolute expressive autonomy of industrially produced objects" and pointed out the purity of lines, the functionality of the materials and the luminosity of the surfaces as basic aspects of the new design. the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933, most of its components moved to the United Kingdom or the United States, countries that picked up the witness of industrial design. In the United Kingdom, design had its precedent in the workshops of Arts & Crafts. In 1915 the Design and Industries Association was founded with the aim of promoting design and, in 1930, the Society of Industrial Artists was created to bring together professionals in the sector. In the United States, the pioneer was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, until the emergence of design in the 1930s with figures such as Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague. Some Bauhaus masters such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy were also established in that decade, teaching a new generation of designers. Subsequently, Charles Eames, George Nelson and Harry Bertoia stood out. The Society of Industrial Designers was founded in 1944, the National Association of Schools of Design in 1948, and the Industrial Design Educational Association in 1957.
Subsequently, in Europe, industrial design had two main currents: the Scandinavian and the Italian. The first, represented by Arne Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen and Poul Kjærholm, had its roots in popular art and was based on the naturalness and simplicity of the forms as a fundamental premise of design, as well as the use of natural materials, although without disdaining steel, which they used regularly. The main fields covered by Scandinavian design were furniture, ceramics, goldsmithing and glass. For its part, Italian design was bolder and more extravagant, with a predilection for bright colours, the use of artificial materials such as resin, plastic and conglomerate, as well as steel and more "noble" materials such as marble, and with a creative freedom that ranged from the austerity of Ettore Sottsass, through the rationalism of Joe Colombo, to the refinement of Gae Aulenti. In Spain, a school of notable quality designers also began in the 1930s, marked by a certain expressiveness, a generally small size of the objects and a certain experimental character, with high-quality prototypes that did not always find an industrial outlet. The starting point is the GATCPAC, a pioneer in the introduction of modern design in Spain —in 1931 they opened their business premises, called MIDVA (Furniture and Decoration of Current Housing)—, with figures such as Josep Lluís Sert, Josep Torres Clavé and Antoni Bonet Castellana; Later it is worth mentioning Antoni de Moragas, Oriol Bohigas, Carlos de Miguel, José Antonio Coderch, Miguel Milá and Antonio Fernández Alba. In 1955 the Spanish Society of Industrial Design was founded and, in 1960, the Industrial Design Association (ADI-FAD).
In the field of interior design, the maximum premise after the First World War was innovation, always subordinated to functionality, leaving aside aspects such as comfort or convenience, which were not considered essential. Interior design stopped looking to the past, stopped paying attention to regional styles or forms; something new and valid for any geographical area was sought. In the 1920s, the dominant concepts were technology and hygiene: household objects were designed according to the latest technological advances and interior design was based on open spaces, well sunny and ventilated. Since most interior designs were carried out by architects, they were generally subservient to the external shape of the building, which determined the interior planning and the type of furniture. On the other hand, rationalism's commitment to the open floor plan led to interiors without rooms, with spaces delimited by partitions or by the furniture itself, thus neglecting aspects such as privacy, noise or smells.
The main piece of furniture that received special interest in his design was the chair: according to Christopher Wilk, “no era has produced so many chair designs by architects. Virtually every noteworthy architect and designer felt compelled to direct their attention to the design of at least one chair." Chairs designed in those years include: Marcel Breuer's tubular steel Wassily chair (1927), the chaise-longue by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand (1928) and the steel and leather Barcelona chair by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (1929). Faced with the excessive coldness and asepsis of these designs, in the 1930s —especially in the United Kingdom— a “comfortable modernism” was promoted, such as that developed by the English firm Isokon, based on greater comfort and aesthetic appearance, for which he turned to wood as a material; Breuer himself made a lounge-chair for Isokon in 1936. On the other hand, the exhibition British Industrial Art in Relation to the Home in 1933 showed the Minimum Flat ("minimal apartment") by Wells Coates, with a kitchen and bathroom of strict functional design. Bentwood furniture was also in fashion in those years and the designs of Michael Thonet were recovered, who were praised for their simplicity, low cost and mass production; these pieces of furniture influenced Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, who used them in the L'Esprit Nouveau pavilion in 1925 and in the Weißenhofsiedlung in 1927, respectively. Wood also played a leading role in Scandinavian interior design, a "natural modernism" advocated above all by Alvar Aalto. Apart from furniture, modern interior design paid little attention to the use of fabrics or other ornaments, and even exclusively white was recommended for the color of the walls. It is worth noting the kitchen design by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who in 1925 collaborated with Ernst May on his collective housing project for Frankfurt, for which he created the so-called Frankfurt kitchen, provided with built-in furniture and prefabricated elements, unadorned and well-lit spaces, with a practical, cheap and standardized design.
After the Second World War, interior design opted for a more aesthetic appearance, with bright and cheerful colors that made us forget the horrors of war. Postwar shortages of materials and labor generally meant smaller houses and apartments, with well-placed and easy-to-use furniture and appliances. Demand grew for furniture, largely destroyed during the war, of simple design and mass production, such as that advocated by the Utility plan in the United Kingdom. Gordon Russell designed a line of affordable and comfortable modern designer furniture, inspired by the Arts & Crafts. In the United States, the Knoll company also opened a line of mass-produced contemporary furniture. In Germany, the Thonet company launched a series of electronically molded plywood furniture, which was cheap, flexible and strong. On the other hand, in 1946 the first molded plastic chair was created. In the 1950s the furniture became lighter and more reduced, like the one designed at the Cranbrook Art Academy in the United States by Eliel Saarinen or Charles Eames, more organic and comfortable. Isamu Noguchi designed the first glass-topped table, as well as the first lantern-shaped paper lampshade. Then began the leadership in design fostered in Sweden, more minimalist and equally comfortable, flexible, hygienic and affordable, as in the work of Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen. It was here where the flatpack or removable furniture was developed, which would be led by the Ikea company. In the United States, open-plan houses arose, with open spaces, such as those designed by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, with unique spaces subdivided only by changes in floor covering and furniture. —especially the Le Corbusier design storage units—, while the rooms were placed at half height, on a mezzanine. Kitchens became larger and more technological, efficient and utilitarian, although their functional design led to a certain masculinization of these spaces.
The main characteristics of modern furniture were: functionality, suppression of all superfluous ornamentation and minimal decoration proceeding from the same lines of force (shape, material), structure as the total base of the furniture without additions, standardized canons of universal utility and shapes open, clear and simple. In furniture design, it is worth noting, in addition to architects and designers such as those already mentioned, Kaare Klint, Børge Mogensen, George Nelson, Carlo Mollino, Jean Prouvé, Eileen Gray, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Pierre Chareau and René Herbst.
In general, the interior design of the Modern Movement has been criticized for its lack of comfort and the high cost of its industrial production, since until the 1960s the industry did not achieve standards compatible with the mass production of objects of modern design. Thus, the interior decoration of modern architects was limited at the time to an elite of consumers with a high purchasing power, which contradicted the social principles defended by rationalism.
Teapot designed at the Bauhaus by Marianne Brandt (1924)
Cantilever Chair (1926), by Marcel Breuer
Chair Weißenhof (1927), by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich
Silla Paimio (1929-1933), by Alvar Aalto
BKF chair (1937), by Antoni Bonet Castellana, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy
Single Chair (1947-1948), Eero Saarinen
Eames Lounge (1955), Charles and Ray Eames
Wall clock designed by Max Bill for Junghans (1957)
Silla Egg (1958), by Arne Jacobsen
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