Le Corbusier applied these five points in the design of the Villa Savoye, a weekend retreat located at Poissy, thirty kilometers outside of Paris. A visitor’s first impression is of a pristine geometric form lifted off the ground on pilotis so slender that any sense of gravity seems negated. The curve of the recessed ground story was determined by the turning radius of an automobile. Once inside, the visitor is drawn into what Le Corbusier described as a promenade architecturale?a carefully orchestrated progression through space?that leads to a rooftop terrace. Because the structural skeleton of the building consists of point support rather than continuous load-bearing walls, internal partitions can be arranged freely. The elevations are treated as thin, taut planes. The horizontal windows (also termed ribbon or strip windows) signaled a break with the tradition of square or vertically oriented openings. Modern architects maintained that hori?zontal windows allowed a more even distribution of light throughout interior spaces. In the history of architecture, the rooftop solarium and the horizontal windows are clear responses to the emphasis on sunlight and fresh air that figured prominently in early-twentieth century descriptions of modern environments.

b. Norwich, 1778;
d. Cambridge, 1839.

English architect and classical scholar who pioneered the Greek Revival in Britain. The eldest son of an architect, Wilkins took a joint degree in classics and mathematics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1796-1800). He was elected to the Society of Antiquaries and travelled round Sicily, Greece and Asia Minor as University Scholar. On his return in 1807 he published Antiquities of Magna Graecia, which paved the way for the archaeological Greek Revival. But his approach was rather smug and doctrinaire, and he was later to be outwitted and upstaged by his leading rival, Sir Robert Smirke. Wilkins’s first major commission was for Downing College, Cambridge, of historical significance as the first true university campus comprising separate buildings arranged around a central lawn. He was presented with several opportunities to develop his Greek Revival style in London: University College, St George’s Hospital and the National Gallery, but none of these major commissions was well received. In particular, the patchy fa?ade of the National Gallery served only to lower Wilkins’s reputation and highlight his failure to subordinate the parts to the whole. The scheme was, however, dogged by financial constraints. Wilkins also undertook a parallel career as a Gothicist, his most important works being additions to Trinity, King’s and Corpus Christi colleges in Cambridge. After 1830 Wilkins’s health and career declined. In 1837 Wilkins gained Pyrrhic consolation in being elected to the Royal Academy as Professor of Architecture.

b. Oxford, 1831;
d. Worth, Sussex, 1915.

As close friend of William Morris, friend and mentor to W. R. LETHABY, the chief technical adviser and instructor to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and the designer of a relatively few but hugely influential major houses Webb became the principal instrument through which the Arts & Crafts movement developed and promulgated its architectural ideas to the following generation. Webb was educated at Aynho in Northamptonshire, and did articles with a firm of builder-architects in Reading after which he moved to London and was employed by G. E. STREET, eventually becoming his senior assistant. In this capacity he met and befriended William Morris, who joined the firm for a year. Morris commissioned Webb to design the Red House at Bexleyheath for his own occupancy, and this commission was followed by other houses. Webb insisted on undertaking no more than one commission at a time, and his approach to the design issue was to enter the spirit and object of building as entirely as possible. His work represented a disciplined secularizing of Gothic Revival principles.

b. Karlsruhe, 1766;
d. Karlsruhe, 1826.

Friedrich Weinbrenner was the dominant figure within the German school of Neo-Classicism at the beginning of the c19. After studying mathematics and architecture at the Academy in Vienna, Weinbrenner travelled to Berlin and Italy, returning in 1797 to take up the position of building inspector in Karlsruhe, where his influence became considerable. His works included several important civic buildings and also a series of model dwellings which private contractors were obliged to copy. Weinbrenner shared with Goethe an unshakable faith in the Classical ideal, believing that Truth and beauty could be found only in antiquity. His vision of a new German architecture, founded on early Greek and Roman examples, was instrumental in his decision to open a private architecture school at his Karlsruhe home in 1800. Many of his students, such as Wimmel and Hubsch, were to become influential in their own right and the school was later incorporated into the main University.

b. Kirkcaldy, Fife, 1728;
d. London, 1792.

Robert Adam is unquestionably Scotland’s most famous architect and one of the most celebrated of British architects. He formed a fertile repertory of new ideas on a visit to Italy (1754-8), and at his return to London he was determined to become the leader of classical revival in England in architecture and decoration.

Robert Adam

His ability to select and use motifs from the classical antique in an original way led to his success, and his interior designs are one of the finest expressions of C18 artistic achievement. Adam had decided, whilst still in Italy, to measure the ruins of the Roman emperor Diocletian’s palace at Spalatro. This experience helped him to abstract the essential details of antiquity, and then infuse them with a personal slant composed of many component pieces. Robert was the second surviving son of William Adam (1689-1748). Himself the son of a builder, William had become one of the first strictly classical architects working in Scotland.

Syon House interior, Brentford (1762-1769)

He owed a little to the two principal architects of the previous generation, Sir William Bruce (c.1630-1710) and James Smith (c.1645-1731), and he used architectural forms as they did, from a wide variety of sources. This gave a “vigorous and sometimes over-dressed character” to the facades of his houses. The same might, unfairly, be said of his son’s interior schemes. The most unusual of the interior wall treatments Robert created were those which were based on Etruscan vase decoration. The Etruscan Dressing Room at Osterley Park, Middlesex (1775-6), is the only substantial survival of at least eight such rooms; its fans, palmettos, painted pedestals, urns, sphinxes and roundels of disporting classical figures make a unique pattern. It breaks with the servitude to antiquity in an original way. Adam decorative schemes are associated with a lavish use of colour. This can be observed not only in the actual settings but in their surviving drawings. Some nine thousand of these survive (Sir John Soane’s Museum, London), and often surprise by their strength and clarity of colour. The Adam style was created by a true eclectic who incorporated lightness, smallness of ornament, colour, and archaeological, Italian, French and Renaissance influences. That it has enjoyed lasting approval is due to the quality of Robert Adam’s directing, if ruthless, mind, which was backed by superb craftsmen and, thanks to his acute business sense, by a family firm to supply all the building materials needed.

One of Adam’s masterpieces: Pulteney Bridge, Bath

b. Kuortane, Finland, 1898;
d. Helsinki, 1976.

Alvar Aalto, the singular figure who established modern architecture in Finland. He studied at Helsinki Polytechnic, graduating in 1921 with all possible honours. His early work showed the familiar signs of a developing Neo-Classicism, but he ruptured the architectural scene in 1929 with his Internationalist inspired entry for Paimio Sanatorium in the W of Finland. The obvious recall and refinement of LE CORBUSIER into the iconography of the Modern Movement as it was then developing, and the functionalist leap in scale from the domesticated constructivist reference of the Turun Sanomat Building (1927-9) make Paimio the seminal building for Finnish architecture. As so often throughout Aalto’s immense oeuvre, his Mediterranean affinities, the Greek and Italian predilections, allowed a remarkable and consistent refinement of the Finnish cultural environment. Many of Aalto’s buildings in Finnish towns established a dignity and scale absent both before and after. The white period of “literal functionalism”, a cleansing of both national romanticist excess and Neo Classical limpidity, an absolute explosion into the rather provincial architectural scene, is nowhere better indicated than in the ill fated Viipuri Library of 1935. This pivotal building displayed the source and what was to come in later projects. But it would be a mistake to claim a neat identification for Aalto’s architectonics so early on: the Villa Mairea (1939) indicated the transformation of romance as it moved into the Finnish landscape. Buildings that in Central Europe lacked regional discipline were given a privilege by Aalto in the Finnish space. It is this transition from the universal versions of modern architecture found in almost all Central European towns and cities to the Italianate refinements Aalto made that left such an influence on Finnish architecture and planning. Where planning was, and still remains, pocket handkerchief plot isolation, Aalto’s complex village semiotics (S?ynatsalo, Seinajoki, Jyvaskyla, Otaniemi) reinforced the domestic cluster whilst introducing a much-needed complexity to Finnish towns. Possibly because Aalto was neither theoretician nor teacher, his range and output were immense. His work abroad, significant for the response to site, material and form, can be seen best in the projects in Germany, America and Sweden. A useful exercise is to trace Aalto’s projects back to the functionalist-hygiene model (the streamlined Paimio) leading to the later marble-clad versions; or then the softer, more ambiguous statements, a lyricism from Viipuri and Mairea into the later red-brick statements (Pensions Institute, Helsinki, 1956, and The House of Culture, 1958). Often at work on multiple projects Aalto intermingles ideas and details; an activity that might be said to have led to less rigour in later buildings. It is no surprise that Aalto remains the admired master of many different types of architects, and, like Eliel SAARINEN and PIETILA, no doubt his reputation will survive eras of strict rationalism and indiscriminate pluralism.

Mies’s treatment of living space as a single transparent volume provoked harsh criticism as well as praise. House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon attacked the International Style as un-American in an April 1953 article entitled “The Threat to the Next America.” Gordon blasted what she called a “self-chosen elite” of museum curators, academics, and architectural critics for promoting the most extreme forms of Modern Archtiecture such as the Farnsworth House:

They are all trying to sell the idea that “less is more,” both as a criterion for design, and as a basis for judgment of the good life. They are promoting unlivability, stripped-down emptiness, lack of storage space and therefore lack of possessions.
(Gordon. p. 128)

Gordon’s essay serves as a reminder that even during the postwar decades when modernism constituted the dominant model for design thinking, it did not go unchallenged. If history is to provide an intelligible portrait of complexity, then episodes of resistance as well as acceptance must be included in the account.

b. St Petersburg (Leningrad), 1761;
d. St Petersburg, 1811.

Leading Russian Architect, the classicist of the early 19 century. Son of a minor admiralty official, Zakharov entered the preparatory school of the Academy of Arts in 1767, ultimately graduating from its Architecture School in 1782 with the gold medal. The prize took him to Paris for four years under J.F.T. Chalgrin and to Italy. On his return he taught at the Academy from 1787, becoming senior professor of architecture in 1803. He was appointed chief architect to the admiralty in 1805. His early work for various establishments was eclectic, including a Neo-Gothic church at Gatchina. Large urban scale characterized other early projects, including an unrealized one for unifying all buildings of the Academy of Sciences into one grandiose structure, and a highly successful one for developing the tip of Vasilevsky Island with a Bourse complex and related new urban space.

Andreyan Zakharov, The Admiralty, Leningrad, 1806-23

The two characteristics came together in his redevelopment of the whole admiralty complex in central Petersburg. Replicating the needle-like gilded spire of the previous complex (by 1. K. Korobov), Zakharov wove an original and eclectic synthesis of Classical motifs into the most powerful of all architectural expressions of Russia’s imperial power, with volumes of great geometrical clarity, subtle regulation of vast elevation-al lengths through recession and the play of columnar and flat-wall surfaces, and with superbly scaled symbolic and narrative sculpture. The result was a world-class model of true classical continuity between a city-planning concept, the architectural language and the narrative potential of public art.