Transcript PowerPoint Presentation - Modernism in the 1930s

Modernism in the 1930s
Europe and the Americas
During the 1930s, modernism and its practices were
disseminated widely in the western world. This was due in part to
the fact that architects and clients often felt that modernism
responded to the needs of post-WWI social and economic
circumstances. Often the introduction of modernism was
accomplished by governmental agencies who commissioned new
buildings to house social and economic programs.
The spread of modernism was also accomplished by
increased attention to its accomplishments. One of the most
important ways that such attention was given was an exhibit held
by the then new Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932.
Modern Architecture: International Exhibition was a show
researched and organized by two architectural historians: Philip
Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Their fundamental
position was that modernism had coalesced into an identifiable
and international expression by 1922 and that it was clear by 1932
that this was the style of the new age.
Hitchcock and Johnson posited that there had been an early
period of preparation for the advent of modernism. This early
period was characterized by qualities still representative of the
19th century and earlier traditions of European architecture. It
was evidenced in the work of such designers as Peter Behrens,
Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
This early formative period, they argued, was followed by
the great modernists: Gropius, Breuer, LeCorbusier, Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, George Howe, William Lescaze, and others whose
designs followed the general principles laid out by the Bauhaus
and by LeCorbusier in his writings.
Hitchcock and Johnson further argued that the new modern
style was international and could not be mistaken for idiosyncratic
personal expressions. It consisted of several identifiable qualities,
including volumetricity, asymmetry, a sense of machine
production, the absence of applied ornament, and a clear interest in
functionalism.
The argument put forth by Hitchcock and Johnson gained
many adherents in the United States where a debate had been
waged for over ten years about the definition of modernism. There
was no general agreement about what should be considered
authentically modern; and for many people, the definition offered
by the exhibit at the MOMA was a relief. It seemed plausible.
Finally, modernism also spread during the 1930s because
of the oppression suffered by modern artists and architects under
National Socialism in Germany. The Bauhaus had suffered
political criticism in the 1920s in Weimar. It continued to be the
object of political assault after it moved to Dessau. In 1930, the
Bauhaus moved to Berlin and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became
the director. However, despite the efforts of the Bauhaus to be
viewed as an art academy with no political ambitions, the Nazis
finally closed it. Most of the faculty left Germany and settled
elsewhere. Gropius became the head of the Graduate School of
Design at Havard; and Mies founded IIT in Chicago.
Gropius House in Lincoln,
Massachusetts, c.1938-40
Lovell House by Richard
Neutra, Griffith Park, CA,
1929
Research House by Richard
Neutra, Los Angeles, CA,
1932-33
In Italy, the “Gruppo 7” organized itself in 1926. Its
members included Luigi Figini, Guido Frette, Sebastiano Larco,
Gino p;ollini, Carlo Enrico Rava, Giuseppe Terragni, and Ubaldo
Catagnoli (later replaced by Adalberto Libera). They intended to
create an “architettura Razionale” (rational architecture) and their
early work clearly reflected the influence of the Bauhaus, Russian
constructivism, the modernism of other European countries along
with memories of Futurism.
Probably the most important of all the modernists working
in Italy in the 1930s was Giuseppe Terragni. Admiring the new
modernism of northern Europe, he worked to preserve a certain
classical figuration within the matrix of new building techniques
and abstract form. He admired LeCorbusier more than any of the
other modernists and felt an affinity for Corbu’s ingrained love of
the classical tradition. This made Terragni particularly well suited
to create an architectural setting for Fascism’s program of
propaganda and mythology.
Giuseppe Terragni, Apartment
house in Como, Italy, c1936
Casa del Fascio (Headquarters of the Fascist Party), Como,
Italy,1932-36
In his design for the local headquarters of the Fascist party,
Terragni referred to Mussolin’s definition of the Fascism as “a
glasshouse into which everyone can peer.” His metaphor for this is
found in his redefinition of the grid on the façade as a clearly
articulated between support, opening and enclosure. The Corbusian
sources of this are abundant, but the building also recalls a classical
palazzo in its clearly described proportions and its conversion of a
central cortile into a public meeting space reflective of the adjacent
outdoor piazza.
The Casa del Fascio is full of contradictory and productive
tensions. For example, the façade is both symmetrical and
asymmetrical. It is both open frame and closed volume. The
building is self-contained but projects a strong axial relationship
between internal space and the surrounding urban space. It is both
fragile and strong.
One of Terragni’s most interesting projects is his design for a
monument to the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The building
was to be called the “Danteum” and would have stood near the
Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine in the Forum, a monument to
the continuity of classical culture and the renewed empire of the
fascist dictator Mussolini. It was to contain a Dante study center as
well as serve as a commemorative structure.
The building was based on Dante’s great poem The Divine
Comedy in which Dante visits the three realms of Paradise,
Purgatory, and Inferno. Spaces representing these three stages of the
Divine Comedy were arranged processionally and each had a
different mood or character based on formal elements of walls and
cylindrical columns on a complicated proportional system. The
complexity was based on a relationship between the Golden Section,
the dimensions of the Basilica of Maxentius, and a symbolic
numerology devised by Terragni.
Danteum project, 1938,
by Giuseppe Terragni with Pietro Lingeri
Terragni’s design was further involved with his ideas about
the origins of architecture and what he perceived to be archetypal
forms (cylinders, rectangles), archetypal relationships (rows,
grids), basic types (free-standing columns, porticoes, hypostyles)
and institutional typologies (temple, palace). The building thus
amalgamates sources as remote as Egyptian temple design
(hypostyle halls), the vocabulary of modern architecture, the
abstract qualities of modern painting, and elements of the nearby
Roman buildings.
The Danteum and, for that matter, much of Terragni’s other
work suggests that modernism--even European modernism with
sympathies for Bauhaus and Corbusian ideas--was not always
based on liberal viewpoints but could serve just as easily a
conservative fascist regime handsomely. Is this due to Terragni’s
talents as a designer or to an inherent flexibility within the
modernist style?
Paradise
Purgatory
Inferno
If Terragni’s work represents the sublime end of the
spectrum of conservative architecture in the early 20th century, the
architecture commissioned by and produced for the Nazi regime in
Germany represents the banal. When Hitler first came to power,
he used Paul Ludwig Troost as his architect. Troost and Hitler both
admired Karl Friedrich Schinkel and shared other views about the
need for an updated classicism to express the values of the German
Volk and the Nazi myth of Arianism.
When Troost died in 1934, he was succeeded by Albert
Speer who was more theatrical and interested in quick effect and
rhetorical power. His designs for individual monuments were
usually conceived in over-simplified and over-scaled classicism.
His concepts for a new Berlin were as megalomaniacal as Hitler’s.
His most successful design was probably his use of 1,000 airplane
headlights to create a “cathedral of light” for a rally at the Zeppelin
Field in Nuremburg in 1934.
German Pavilion,
International Exposition,
Paris, by Albert Speer, 1937
Salzburg-Munich Autobahn
Propyleum, by Albert
Speer, 1937
Wehrmacht High Command,
Berlin, by Albert Speer, 1940
Great Plaza Complex,
Berlin, by Albert Speer,
1937
Great hall with Brandenburg Gate,
Berlin, by Albert Speer, 1937-43
Zeppelin Field,
Nuremburg, by
Albert Speer, 1934