Architectural Styles and Movements: From Antiquity to Modernity

Posted on Jan 13, 2025 in Architecture

Key Quotes on Architecture

  • Le Corbusier: “The masterly, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light.”
  • Mies van der Rohe: “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated to space.”
  • Pablo Campos: “Architecture is the composition of spaces in space.”
  • Art: “The intellectualization of sensations through expression.”

Public Library Stockholm and Architectural Precedents

Public Library Stockholm (1920-27) by Erik Gunnar Asplund (1895-1940) introduces Modern Architecture in Scandinavia.

  • Simple volumes
  • Door monumentality – Egyptian influence
  • Stairway that ascends towards light, towards knowledge

Architectural Precedents:

  • Pantheon of Adrian (117-138 AD), in Rome
  • National Assembly in Bangladesh (1961)
  • Villa Rotonda, Andrea Palladio (1566-1571)
    • Exterior Interaction: The four axes of the environment merge under the central dome, and the centrality of the dome transforms them into a vertical axis.
    • Interior Interaction: The staircases’ volumes are projected towards the environment through four directions.

Functionalism and the International Style

Functionalism: A theory where an architect’s primary obligation is to ensure a building functions perfectly.

Bauhaus (Walter Gropius) 1919-1930

  • Form of a swastika
  • School for artisans and artists
  • Integration of all types of arts
  • Anti-monumental building (no entrance)
  • Fourth dimension/understood from several points of view

International Style (1926)

  • Term coined in the USA prior to WWI
  • Key Figures: Wright, Loos, Garnier, Hoffman, Gropius, Le Corbusier
  • Characteristics:
    1. Simple prismatic volumes
    2. Straight planes
    3. Flat roofs
    4. Rejection of ornament
    5. Concrete and steel
    6. Free façade and free plan
    7. Ingravity
    8. Horizontal fluent space
    9. Ribbon windows, transparency
    10. Prefabrication

Examples: Ciudad Universitaria, Villa Savoye

High-Tech and Contemporary Architecture

High-Tech

  1. The building should be hosted in a large, flexible space with no decoration.
  2. Integrated system of light and ventilation.
  3. Necessity of expressing structure and equipment.

Examples:

  • T4-Barajas (Richard Rogers)
  • Centre Pompidou (Renzo Piano)
  • Sydney Opera House (Jorn Utzon) – International Style, façade made of void stones for more light

Shigeru Ban

  • Uses non-conventional materials (plastic or paper)
  • Avoids sophisticated details
  • Simplicity and ecological
  • Sense of human vulnerability
  • Interest in Japanese culture

Examples: Paper House (1995), Naked House (2000), Christ Church (2013)

Therme Vals (Switzerland), Peter Zumthor (1996-98)

“Mountains, stone, water – to build in the stone, to build with stone, inside the mountain, to build outside the mountain, being inside the mountain. How can the implications and sensuality be interpreted in the association of these words? Architecturally? The whole concept was designed following these questions, and all that took shape step by step.”

Historical Architectural Styles

Greek Style

  • Human scale
  • Built for gods
  • Gods inside, humans outside
  • One axis of symmetry

Example: Parthenon

Roman Style

  • Internal space for human beings
  • Static space
  • Two axes of symmetry

Examples: Pantheon, Basilica Ulpia

Christian Style

  • Human direction
  • One axis

Example: Santa Sabina (Rome)

Byzantine Style

  • Quickened and expanded space
  • Increase of rhythm
  • Repetition
  • Expansion from the central space

Examples: San Apollinare in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

Barbarian Style

  • Interruption of space and rhythm
  • Elevated element in the vertical plane of the floor

Example: Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome

Romanesque Style

  • Space and metrics
  • Thick walls
  • Rounded arch
  • Edge vault
  • 3D modules, not 2D elements

Example: San Ambrosio, Milan

Gothic Style

  • Dimension contrast and spatial continuity
  • Lots of light
  • Skeleton becomes more agile and tense
  • Very tall and big buildings
  • Introduction of glass to substitute walls for light to enter

Examples: Cathedral of Salisbury, Cathedral of Milan, Notre-Dame Cathedral

Renaissance Style

  • Laws and measures
  • Inspired by human beings
  • 15th Century
  • One architect conceiving everything
  • Plasticity and volume
  • More structured shapes (order and unity)

Examples: Santo Spirito in Florence, San Pietro in Montorio (Bramante), Villa Rotonda (Andrea Palladio), Palacio Farnese (Antonio da Sangallo), San Pietro in Rome (Michelangelo)

Baroque Style

  • Movement (oval) and interpretation (loss of clarity in geometry)
  • Decoration and ornamentation

Examples: Laurentian Library in Florence (Michelangelo), Vatican St. Peter’s Square (Bernini), San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Borromini), 14 Saints Church (Neumann)

The Modern Movement

A significant change culminated in the Modern Movement:

  • The plan became the generator of the project when the classic ideal fell from grace as an element for inspiration. The project became an act of problem-solving.
  • The plan as a generator of the project, instead of design patterns or models, from the middle of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th century.
  • The new method focused on private dwellings (single houses) due to:
    • Democracy and the relevance of the individual human being
    • Technological sophistication of ordinary domestic existence
    • Increase in the quality of life (prosperity)

Stoclet Palace, Brussels (1910) by J. Hoffman

  • Internal space fluency
  • Internal spaces are prominent outside through their respective volumes
  • Balanced composition of wings, but non-symmetrical

“Five Points of a New Architecture” (1926):

  1. Pilotis (free-standing supports)
  2. Roof garden
  3. Free design of the plan
  4. Horizontal (ribbon) window
  5. Free design of the façade

Moller House, Vienna (Adolf Loos)

  • Fight against decoration: “Ornament and Crime” (1906)
  • Independence of architecture in relation to other figurative arts
  • Inspiration in the simplicity and tectonicity of classical architecture
  • Rejection of curves
  • Rejection of the decoration from the Austrian Secession
  • Raumplan: Each space must have its proper ceiling height – architecture as a spatial (3D) puzzle, not only in plan

Neoplasticism

  • Volumes are decomposed into color planes.
  • Openings are no longer holes in the walls; they are arranged in the space that results after two planes are superimposed or overlapped.
  • Integration of interior and exterior.

Schröder House (Gerrit Rietveld)

  • Breaking the cube by breaking its corners
  • Language of free planes in space, which seem to float
  • Spatial fluidity
  • There are neither clear axes nor symmetries.
  • Internal mobile partitions

Louis Kahn – Goldenberg House, Rydal, Pennsylvania (1959)