Architectural Technology

Modernism is a response to - and sometimes a reaction against - the conditions of modernity. On the one hand, modernist architecture modernizes, and is, therefore, part of the condition of modernity. On the other, as it reshapes the built environment, modernist architecture rejects the ad hoc process of modernity, and therefore represents a profound critique of the conditions of modernity. The tension between these two treatments of modernity runs through the history of twentieth-century architecture.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, much of architectural design and practice would have been familiar to architects, masons, and stonecutters who had worked centuries, maybe even millennia, earlier. Large-scale architecture remained, as it had been, largely a matter of stone arches and load-bearing walls. Sometimes, as in medieval architecture, the arches - moved outwards - became buttresses, and the walls could open up for huge expanses of colored glass; other times, the arches would crisscross, and the resulting curve in the walls would produce domes. Still, across the centuries, to build a large building was basically to lay one piece of stone directly on top of another. Because load-bearing walls take up a great amount of space at the base of a building, the thickness there determines and limits the ultimate height of the structure. It is also a very expensive method of construction, requiring a wide lot and a huge volume of stone. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, there is a dramatic change: steel-frame construction. With a steel frame (and the development of the elevator), by contrast, taller buildings could be built on the same area of land, much less expensively on a per-square-foot basis. In Autobiography of an Idea (1956), as Louis Sullivan describes the process whereby land prices rise with population pressures, requiring that buildings make a maximal use of space, we can see architecture finding its conditions of modernity. The first examples of such construction can be seen in the buildings designed by the firms of Adler and Sullivan and Burnham and Root, most famously in Chicago, still rebuilding after the fire of 1870. (Francis 2006)

Paxton's Crystal Palace (London, 1851), I. K. Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge (Bristol, UK, 1864), and the Roeblings' Brooklyn Bridge (1883), are among those predecessors that had shown it was possible to build on a new scale, covering great spans, with metal. However, these earlier uses of new materials and explorations at an increased scale mimicked existing architectural styles. The Clifton Suspension Bridge, for example, was meant to have featured sphinxes, and the Brooklyn Bridge imitates Gothic arches. In steel-frame tall buildings, by contrast, the façade indicates the building's structure. Thus the importance of Sullivan's famous phrase, “form ever follows function.” In Adler and Sullivan's Guaranty Building (Buffalo, N.Y., 1896), for example, vertical lines of ornamented terracotta tiles jut out beyond horizontal rows of windows, and suggest the presence of the steel columns behind. In the tall steel-frame buildings of the 1890s and 1900s, such as the Flatiron Building, in New York ...