| Sample questions (for three 30-minute essays in final exam):
First Slide Test: 10 buildings, 10 minutes "MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE" "Like William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright, both of whom stressed the need for furnishings to fit the homes they were in, Stickley designed homes to fit the furniture he created. Simple 'Craftsman-style' homes -- often no more than a few spacious rooms whose only ornamentation consisted of beautiful natural woodwork and room dividers along with a stone or brick hearth. An abundance of windows to let in natural light was also important since sunlight cast an entirely different light than gas and electric lights. 'We have planned houses from the first that are based on the big fundamental principles of honesty, simplicity, and usefulness...' wrote Stickey in his Craftsman Homes." ("Craftsman Perspective: History of the Arts and Crafts Movement - America 1895-1920" http://www.craftsmanperspective.com/history/america2.html) Illustration from Stickley's Craftsman Magazine, 1903
Gamble House Interiors, Greene & Greene (Pasadena, 1907)
Robie House Interiors, Wright (Chicago, 1908)
Larkin Building (demolished 1950), Frank Lloyd Wright (Buffalo, 1904) "The Creator's Words "'I think I first consciously began to try to beat the box in the Larkin building [Wright said years later]. I found a natural opening to the liberation I sought when [after a great struggle] I finally pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building, made them into freestanding, individual features.' — Frank Lloyd Wright. from Peter Blake. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space. p55. "'It is interesting that I, an architect supposed to be concerned with the aesthetic sense of the building, should have invented the hung wall for the w.c. (easier to clean under), and adopted many other innovations like the glass door, steel furniture, air-conditioning and radiant or gravity heat. Nearly every technological innovation used today was suggested in the Larkin Building in 1904.'" — Frank Lloyd Wright. from Frank Lloyd Wright, Edgar Kaufmann, Ed. An American Architecture. p137-138. ("Larking Building - Archiplanet" http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/Larkin_Building)
"Wright's contemporaries -- he would have disdained the term 'peers' -- lauded the Larkin Building as proof of his transcendent genius. They were dazzled by the clean lines of its stark, powerful exterior. They were charmed by the openness of its light, airy interior. They were amazed by its many innovations, from an air-cooling system to hanging bathroom partitions." ("Work of art - Business First of Buffalo" http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2004/10/11/story3.html) 
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, himself destined to rank among the century's
great architects, hailed the Larkin Building as a masterpiece.
His enthusiasm was too restrained for H.P. Berlage, the state architect
of Holland, who insisted after a pilgrimage to Buffalo that Wright's design
was 'without equal in the whole of Europe.'" ("Work
of art - Business First of Buffalo" http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2004/10/11/story3.html)Futurism
"Technology and even violence were among the themes of the Futurists. The movement was founded by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who produced its first manifesto, the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909. ("Futurist architecture - Wikipedia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_architecture ). Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914) "No architecture has existed since 1700. A moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements used to mask the skeletons of modern houses is called modern architecture. The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by constructive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are in Egyptian, Indian, or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism. These architectonic prostitutions are welcomed in Italy, and rapacious alien ineptitude is passed off as talented invention and as extremely up-to-date architecture. Young Italian architects (those who borrow originality from clandestine and compulsive devouring of art journals) flaunt their talents in the new quarters of our towns, where a hilarious salad of little ogival columns, seventeenth-century foliation, Gothic pointed arches, Egyptian pilasters, rococo scrolls, fifteenth-century cherubs, swollen caryatids, take the place of style in all seriousness, and presumptuously put on monumental airs... [Read the entire manifesto: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/architecture.html.] Filippo Marinetti exulted: "A screaming race-car is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace."
Cubism "The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points." ("Cubism | Thematic Essay | Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art" http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.htm)  "Nude Descending A Staircase (1912) caused a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.
Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968) was a French painter and theorist, a major
proponent of Dada, and one of the most influential figures of avant-garde
20th-century art. After a brief early period in which he was influenced
chiefly by Paul Cezanne and Fauve color, Duchamp developed a type of symbolic
painting, a dynamic version of facet Cubism (similar to Futurism), in
which the image depicted successive movements of a single body. It closely
resembled the multiple exposure photography documented in Eadweard Muybridge's
book The Horse in Motion (1878)." ("Nude Descending A Staircase" http://www.idiom.com/~wcs/duchamp.html)De Stijl "In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight (horizontal and vertical) lines and rectangular forms. Their formal vocabulary was limited furthermore to the primary colours red, yellow and blue and the three primary values black, white and grey. The works avoided symmetry and attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition. "In many of the group's three-dimensional works, vertical and horizontal lines are positioned in layers or planes that do not intersect, thereby allowing each element to exist independently and unobstructed by other elements. This feature can be found in the Rietveld-Schröder House and the Red and Blue Chair. "De Stijl movement was influenced by Cubist painting, as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about 'ideal' geometric forms (such as 'the perfect straight line') in the neoplatonic philosophy of the mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the international style of architecture, as well as clothing and interior design. "The De Stijl influence on architecture remained considerable, long after 1931. Mies van der Rohe was among the most important proponents of its ideas. Between 1923 and 1924, Rietveld designed the Rietveld Schröder House, the only building to have been created completely according to De Stijl principles. Examples of Stijl-influenced works by J.J.P. Oud can be found in Rotterdam (Café De Unie) and Hoek van Holland." ("De Stijl - Wikipedia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl) Virtual tour of Rietveld Schröder House: http://www.rietveldschroderhuis.nl/rondleidingEng.jsp Adolph Loos "'Ornament and Crime' is an essay written in 1908 by the influential and self-consciously 'modern' Austrian architect Adolf Loos under the German title Ornament und Verbrechen. And it was under this challenging title that in 1913 the essay was translated into English: 'The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects,' Loos proclaimed, thus linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts. "In the essay, Loos's 'passion for smooth and precious surfaces' informs his expressed philosophy that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. It struck him that it was a crime to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. Loos introduced a sense of the 'immorality' of ornament, describing it as 'degenerate,' its suppression as necessary for regulating modern society. He took as one of his examples the tattooing of the 'Papuan' and the intense surface decorations of the objects about him — Loos considered the Papuan not to have evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man, who, should he tattoo himself, would either be considered a criminal or a degenerate. "The essay was written when Art Nouveau, which Loos had execrated even at its height in 1900, was about to show a new way of modern art. The essay is important in articulating some moralizing views, inherited from the Arts and Crafts movement, which would be fundamental to the Bauhaus design studio and would help define the ideology of Modernism in architecture." ("Ornament and Crime - Wikipedia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime) American Factory (Waltham, MA, 1813)
Peter Behrens (1868–1940)
"He was responsible for the corporate image of the company, expressed in its stationery and advertisements, and for the design of products, including clocks, ventilators, and electric kettles." ("European Route of Industrial Heritage" http://en.erih.net/index.php?pageId=116&anchor=522&c filter=&subcat=) "Peter Behrens was a pioneer in everything he did in the first half of the 20th century and his ideas were spread around the world by his students, especially by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. The creation of the concept of corporate identity had a direct influence in other post WWII companies such as Braun or MacDonald's." ("Peter Behrens - Wikipedia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Behrens ) AEG Turbine Factory (Berlin, 1909)
"The revolutionary character of Behrens' building, which made such an impression on his contemporaries, only becomes clear when it is compared with the "classical" facades with their columns, triangular gables and neo-baroque ornamentation - although later architects criticised the design of the end facade, suggesting that it made too many allowances for tradition. "The hall was
originally 110 metres long. In 1939 it was extended to over 200 metres
- with architecture of a far weaker character. On the side facing the
factory premises it is joined to a further two-storey hall which is
faced with hewn stone." ("AEG Turbine
Hall" http://www.berlin.de/tourismus/sehenswuerdigkeiten.en/0000 3.html) The Bauhaus, Dessau (Walter Gropius, 1925)  
 
Walter Gropius, 1883-1969 "Studied at the Colleges of Technology of Berlin and Munich. Worked under the German architect Peter Behrens from 1907-1910. He was influenced by the writings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Founded the Bauhaus (House of Building), one of the most influential architecture and design schools of the 20th century. The rise of National Socialsim and Adolf Hitler drove Gropius out of Germany. He first went to London, but eventually settled in Boston, where he taught at Harvard and MIT." ("20th Century Architecture: Walter Gropius" http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/gropius.html)
Shoe Last Factory (1911, Alfeld, Germany)
"Nikolaus Pevsner,
writes [of the Shoe Last Factory] in Pioneers of Modern Design:
'For the first time a complete facade is conceived in glass. The supporting
piers are reduced to narrow mullions of brick. The corners are left
without any support, a treatment which has since been imitated over
and over again. The expression of the flat roof has also changed. Only
in the buildings by Adolf Loos which was done one year before the Fagus
Factory, have we seen the same feeling for the pure cube. Another exceedingly
important quality of Gropius's building is that, thanks to the large
expanses of clear glass, the usual hard separation of exterior and interior
is annihilated.'" ("Fagus Factory - Wikipedia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_Factory)
Machine Hall at Werkbund Exhibition (Cologne, 1914). Walter Gropius with Adolf Meyer
Gropius House (Lincoln, MA, 1938)
American Grain Elevators 
|
"Futurist
architecture (or Futurism) began as an early-20th century form
of architecture characterized by anti-historicism and
long horizontal lines suggesting speed, motion,
and urgency. 
"Peter
Behrens was not only the father of German industrial design – he was
also the founder of corporate identity. Working for AEG, Behrens was
the first person to create logos, advertising material, and company
publications with a consistent, unified design. [In 1907, he] was appointed
Artistic Consultant at AEG, [becoming] the world’s first industrial
designer." ("AEG-Electrolux - AEG-Electrolux
| 100 Jahre Inspiration" 
"For the first time ever, the outer facade of an industrial
building showed the bare structure: the steel trusses and their joints
are plainly seen outside the glass facade which leans slightly inwards,
following the interior supports. The gable of the end wall, in describing
six sides of a polygon, also follows the interior structure. But here
it is also clear that Behrens did not merely wish to show the structural
elements for their own sake. The gable appears to rest on the glass
front and the principle of loads and supports appears reversed by the
receding ashlar corner pillars. The solid corner pylons, which are not
necessary from a structural point of view, give the facade a solid heaviness
which was designed to strengthen the confidence of the workers and the
public at large. The architecture in itself became an advertising medium.
Walter Gropius, 1920 
Gropius & his design for Chicago Tribune Tower
competition (1922)
