Important Figures of Modernism
- Le Corbusier (France)
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Germany)
- Walter Gropius (Germany)
- Frank Lloyd Wright (USA)
Silicon Valley Modern Real Estate
Germany believed that Wright's life would be wasted in the United States, since the US wasn't ready for his architecture. Just as many European architects saw Wright's Larkin Building (1904) in Buffalo, Unity Temple (1905) in Oak Park, and the Robie House (1910) in Chicago as some of the first examples of modern architecture in the 20th Century. It would be 2-3 decades later before the European architects would bring their version back to the United States.
Wright was a major influence on both Gropius (founder of the Bauhaus) and van der Rohe, however, as well as on the whole of organic architecture. Gropius claimed that his "bible" for forming the Bauhaus was 100 Frank Lloyd Wright drawings that the architect shared with Germany over a decade prior to this point. Many architects in
Modern Architecture's Roots
Most historians see Modern architecture as primarily driven by technological and engineering developments. The availability of new building materials such as iron, steel, and glass drove the invention of new building techniques as part of the Industrial Revolution.
Early structures to employ concrete as the chief means of architectural expression (rather than for purely utilitarian structure) include Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, built in 1906 near Chicago, and Rudolf Steiner's Second Goetheanum, built from 1926 near Basel, Switzerland.
Other historians regard Modernism as a matter of taste, a reaction against eclecticism and the lavish stylistic excesses of Victorian Era and Edwardian Art Nouveau.
Whatever the cause, in the early 20th-century a number of architects around the world began developing new architectural solutions to integrate traditional precedents.
Modern Architecture Image Gallery
About Frank Lloyd Wright
Modern Architecture Characteristics:
- Materials & functional requirements determine the end result of the structure.
- Adoption of a machine aesthetic, which emphasizes horizontal and vertical lines.
- Simplification of form, eliminating "unnecessary detail," a rejection of ornamentation.
- The adoption of expressed structure
- An idea that form follows function