6. Conclusion

It took until the first half of the 20th century for architects’ ideas to mature, in conjunction with the new materials of steel, reinforced concrete, and electric light, into the distinctive imagery now recognized as modern architecture. But that imagery was only the outward sign of new ways of organizing structure, space, and surface. The Conclusion clarifies that, for much of the 20th century, modern architecture stood for the place of the future—as related to the past—in the present. But the associations of those ideas about future, present, and past always remained complex, changing, and contested. For all its global effects, modernity was never a unified phenomenon.

5. Light and air

The development of air-conditioning and fluorescent tubes meant that decent lighting and ventilation could be provided artificially rather than naturally. Accommodation could then be placed further from windows, enabling buildings to become deeper in plan. This made buildings cheaper, because the amount of external wall—the most expensive part—could be reduced in relation to the overall floor area. ‘Light and air’ explains how General Motor’s research and design campus in Michigan, designed by Eero Saarinen, was an early example of their integration. It also highlights the work of inventor, author, and ‘futurologist’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, and his designs for prefabricated houses and geodesic domes.

4. Brick

Many global cultures have traditions of clay or mud brick construction. Evidence exists of fired brick being used as long ago as 5000 bce in Mesopotamia. The role of brick in modern architecture differed to those of the technical innovations of iron, steel, and reinforced concrete. The adoption of brick represented instead a challenge to the hard-line view of modernity as a rejection of history, understanding modern architecture as a continuation of history. ‘Brick’ discusses the concepts of local and national architectures and critical regionalism, highlighting the monumentality and order of the work of Louis Kahn, including one of his last projects, the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

2. Iron and steel

‘Iron and steel’ explains how the Iron Bridge in Shropshire, UK, completed in 1779, illustrates the industrial cultures where modern architecture started to form. It indicates the beginnings of a shift in global culture, over two centuries, from artisan manufacturing towards mass production. The association of technology with progress became inseparable from modernity. Engineers such as Gustave Eiffel and Joseph Paxton reimagined iron as structural framing that could define the spaces of buildings. The development of less brittle steel resulted in new steel frameworks allowing walls—no longer loadbearing—to become separated conceptually from the building’s structure. The work of influential architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is also discussed.

1. Introduction

Somewhere between 1910 and 1970, architecture changed. Expensive Western buildings became transformed from ornamented fancies, which referred to the classical and medieval pasts, into strikingly plain reflections of novel materials, technologies, and ideas. The phrase ‘modern architecture’ describes a spectrum of buildings and ideas and the Introduction explains that it didn’t just emerge fully formed in the 1910s and 1920s, or as the consequence of 19th-century pioneers, but was instead the product of two centuries of industrialization, and the global spread of industrial culture. The aim of this Very Short Introduction is to illustrate how modern architecture was produced out of—and reflected—the cultures that constructed it.

3. Reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete lends itself to a structural form called the cantilever, where a slab or beam is hung outwards from one side, suspended without columns, counter-weighted by a mass of structure behind. ‘Reinforced concrete’ explains how concrete structures came to represent radically opposing ideas of high capitalism and communism in the 20th century. It explores how concrete—paradoxically liquid and solid, formless and formed, natural and human-made—became associated with attempts to rethink social order and mechanized production. The work of Le Corbusier is described, with the development of Garden Cities, megastructures, and brutalism. Concrete encouraged the reimagination of modern architecture, but its peculiarities also exposed modern architecture to question.