Architecture-Building & Construction

The ideas of the German Bauhaus school of architecture and applied arts have greatly influenced the development of architecture and design in the 20th century. Founder Walter Gropius designed the unadorned, functional buildings for its quarters in Dessau in 1925.

Bauhaus Archive
The Bauhaus was a school of design founded in Germany by architect Walter Gropius in 1919. Many outstanding artists and architects served on its faculty. In 1933 the school was shut down by Germany's Nazi government, and many of its faculty members, including Gropius, immigrated to the United States. The Bauhaus Archive, shown here, was built in Berlin, Germany, in the late 1970s. This museum, which is based on a 1964 Gropius design for another site, is devoted to the accomplishments of the Bauhaus school.

Notre-Dame-du-Haut Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier incorporated Bauhaus influences into his design of the pilgrimage church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1950-1955), located in Ronchamp, France. Le Corbusier’s patron for the building, Father Courturier, believed that an architect could best design an effective expression of spiritual consciousness if given the utmost in creative freedom. Le Corbusier’s unique creation at... Ronchamp reflects Courturier’s artistic latitude, exhibiting an unconventional synthesis of iconography, architecture, and sculpture. Shaped like a great ship, the church incorporates the ideas of Noah’s ark, Saint Peter’s ship, and the architect’s own love of the sea.© 2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

When the Bauhaus opened, the modern movement in architecture began to coalesce. The Bauhaus school (Weimar, 1919-1925; Dessau, 1926-1933) brought together architects, painters, and designers from several countries, all determined to formulate goals for the visual arts in the modern age. Its first director was Walter Gropius, who designed the innovative buildings for the move to Dessau; its second was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The new architecture demonstrated its virtues in new Siedlungen (low-cost housing) in Berlin and Frankfurt. An exhibition of housing types, the Weissenhof Siedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, brought together works by Mies, Gropius, the Dutch J. J. P. Oud, and the Swiss-French Le Corbusier; this milestone identified the movement with a better life for the common man. The chastely elegant German Pavilion (1929) by Mies for the Barcelona Exhibition, executed in such lavish materials as travertine, marble, onyx, and chrome-plated steel, asserted a strong, formal argument independent of any social goals. Gropius, his disciple Marcel Breuer, and Mies eventually established themselves in the U.S., where they enjoyed productive and influential decades—extending through the 1970s for Breuer—as architects and teachers.

First Skyscraper Built

American architect and engineer William Le Baron Jenney completes the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, a ten-story structure featuring a unique all-metal frame designed to support the high walls. Jenny’s unprecedented design initiates a wave of tall buildings—soon known as skyscrapers—built by the so-called Chicago School of architects.

Jenney, William Le Baron (1832-1907), American architect and engineer, whose innovative construction methods earned him the title father of the skyscraper. After completing his architectural and engineering education in Paris, Jenney returned to the U.S. and served as an engineer in the Union army during the American Civil War. After the war Jenney settled in Chicago, where he opened his own architectural office. In later years many members of the Chicago School served their architectural apprenticeships on his staff, including Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham. Jenney's great contribution to architecture was his pioneering use of metal-frame construction for large buildings, first used in his Home Insurance Company Building (1885, demolished 1931) in Chicago. Cast-iron columns, encased in masonry, were used to support the steel beams bearing floor weights. The outside walls, freed from their load-bearing function, were filled with windows. Jenny's revolutionary method of building, termed curtain-wall construction, remains basic for the design of tall buildings, now known as skyscrapers.

Le Corbusier, over a long career, exerted immense influence. His early publications championed a machine aesthetic and urged the replacement of traditional cities in favor of life and work in skyscrapers arranged regimentally in vast parks. His Villa Savoye (1928-1931) in the French countryside downplays a sense of structure and materials in order to dramatize complexity of spacial organization and allow a subtle ambiguity between interior and exterior space. In the 1950s, with Jawaharlal Nehru as client, he laid out the new capital city of the Punjab, Chandigarh, and designed for it three monumental concrete government edifices standing in a vast plaza. In France he produced two unique religious buildings, the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp (1950-1955) and the Dominican monastery of La Tourette (1957-1961), both in concrete. Having abandoned the extreme rationalism of his early career, he manipulated form and light in these extraordinary structures for emotional response and dramatic effect.

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