We use the term “modern architecture” to refer to the ensemble of architectural styles and trends that coexist throughout the 20th century in the geographic area of the global West. Despite the general scope of the term, a series of technical innovations and cultural, social, and stylistic …
Although the term modern architecture has a general scope and is not very specific, when we talk about the characteristics of modern architecture, there are a series of features that stand in clear contrast with the architecture from the periods that came immediately before. In the early 20th …
Rue de Paris, Le Havre, 1945-1964, Auguste Perret. © Susana Landrove Although we often refer to the emergence of modern architecture as a moment of breaking with what came before, there is no one outstanding historical event that can be taken as its origin, nor is there a single work of …
William Curtis begins his book Modern Architecture Since 1900 with a reflection in this regard: “The historian who sets out to write a history of modern architecture has necessarily to begin with a definition of his subject. Many past eras have referred to their own architectures …
Kenneth Frampton also opens his Modern Architecture: A Critical History by looking into the origins. Although he begins by asserting that “the more rigorously one searches for the origin of modernity, however, the further back it seems to lie”.[1] no more than two sentences later he …
The seminal book by the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock is called Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.[1] Taking into account the chronology, this book should give us some indication of when, in Hitchcock’s view, the transition towards modern architecture …
One architectural critic who was especially concerned with explaining the origins of modern architecture was Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner was born in Germany, but ultimately became a British citizen. In 1936 ─ preceding Curtis, Frampton and Hitchcock ─ he wrote the text Pioneers of the …
Bauhaus School, 1925-1926, Dessau (Germany), Walter gropius. WIKIPEDIA Licence CC Despite its enormous influence, the Bauhaus was not created as an architecture school, nor did it have an architecture department in the early days. Its foundational goal was to rethink applied arts education and …
Vanna Venturi House, 1964, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Robert Venturi Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, although modern architecture does not disappear, a series of new tendencies emerge that diversify architectural production around the world. In some cases, these new trends are difficult to …
