Modern

Sutton prefaces his account of the rise of architectural modernism by drawing both a parallel, and a distinction, between the role of the architect and the engineer in building. As he says, architects have always acted in one sense as engineers (any architectural design has to be capable of actually being built!), but by the end of the nineteenth century, with radically new building materials and techniques becoming available, ‘The two professions drew apart and for reasons of cultural snobbery critics were reluctant to give them equal esteem’ (p. 304).

Referring to the advent of iron as a building material as ‘the most radical crisis-point in the whole history of architecture’ (p. 309), Sutton attempts to explain the significance of this event in the following terms:

Until then, for incalculable ages, men had built in materials that nature herself supplied: stone, brick and wood. Throughout all the changes of styles and cultures, those materials had imposed their own constructional limits. Now those limits were to be overstepped. It was the great divide. For instance Victoria Tower - part of Barry and Pugin’s Palace of Westminster complex (1836-68), constructed of an iron framework sheathed in masonry.

At the outset of his account of the theoretical underpinnings of the modernist movement in architecture, Sutton refers to the ideas of Adolf Loos, who famously proclaimed that ‘Ornament is crime’ (quoted in Sutton, p. 319). Later in his account, he refers to the work of the (Swiss-born) French architect Le Corbusier, who – equally famously – declared of domestic architecture that:

If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to houses and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the ‘House Machine’, the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful. Quoted in Sutton, p. 328 This broad notion – that if we somehow strip away the excrescence of ‘ornament’ from the purely functional aspects of architecture, we shall arrive at a pure ‘machine for living’ which somehow encapsulates the modern condition – in fact has a surprisingly lengthy pedigree within the annals of Western architectural theory. You may recall, for example, Inigo Jones’s strictures against ‘thes composed ornaments the wch Proceed out of ye aboundance of dessigners and wear brought in by Michill Angell and his followers’, made in 1615: this has clear parallels with Loos’ declaration that ‘Ornament is crime’

Commentary

I found myself eventually warming to Modernism having always equated it with post-war, unimaginative, poorly built New Towns like Crawley or the Brutalist visions of Erno Goldfinger [Trellick Tower, London].

Tellick Tower

Where Modernism succeeds is when its architecture expresses its function in a plain, form-follows-function rational, unadorned fashion bereft of any unnecessary cutural, religious or political symbolism. The United Nations building fits that rationale. One can see that this is an International building that owes little to the antecedents of any one country. It also looks to the future not the past.

UN Building

It is also 'honest' where there is no disguise of the engineering that went into the building. There is no implied strength where none exists or design feature where not needed. It avoids the pastiche or conceit that goes into the building of something that (although well meaning) pretends to be something it is not [e.g. Podium Shopping Center - Bath]

Podium Shopping Center

Modernism can also be innovative and dramatic like Niemeyer's Brasilia Cathedral or Peutz's Glass Palace [Netherlands 1935], which looks very contemporary.

Brasilia Cathedral

Peutz's Glass Palace

Response

I think that this is a sensitive and perceptive analysis of the high Modernist style. At its best, Modernism was indeed capable of producing buildings which possess a refreshing and invigorating elegance of style allied to a rigorous economy of means. I would, however, introduce the caveat that the apparent functionality of high Modernism is often achieved through the lavish use of expensive materials and very high-quality design and construction techniques (I am thinking here in particular of the work of architects such as Mies van der Rohe, who were never shy in their use of decidedly non-'functional' materials, such as marble, polished granite, or even bronze,in their more prestigious commissions!). Which would seem to suggest to me that the sleek minimalist chic of high Modernism was perhaps often not quite as 'unadorned' or as purely 'functional' as the Modernists themselves would have us believe...?