Built in two phases in 1903-6 the Vienna Post Office Savings Bank is Otto Wagner’s most technically advanced building and most mature work of architecture. It epitomizes the state of modern architecture in Vienna in the early years of this century with its extensive use of new materials, especially aluminium, its neat rational structure and [...]

“Falling Water” designed by famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright is often referred to as the most beautiful and inventive modern house in the world. Originally it was designed as a weekend house for a wealthy client, Edgar Kaufmann Sr. Today it is a much visited landmark building which straddles a precipitous site combining the familiar [...]

For centuries the Louvre has served as the architectural representation of French authority in both the political and cultural realms, first as the royal residence and later as one of the world’s foremost museums. Thus the decision to undertake a major reconfiguration of the building signalled the importance of the grand projets. In 1981 President [...]

Le Corbusier was a prolific writer and an accomplished painter as well as an architect in the history of architecture who produced an imposing and influential body of work. During the decade of the 1920s he executed a series of designs for private villas that crystalized the International Style. When, in 1903, Lutyens declared “In [...]

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 [...]

While the impracticalities of life in a glass box rendered the Farnsworth House an unlikely model for the mainstream housing market, the concept fascinated many architects. In 1949 Philip Johnson (b. 1906) began work on his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut. In some ways, the Farnsworth and Johnson houses studies in contrast. Painted white [...]

In 1946, Mies van der Rohe designed a weekend retreat for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois, near Chicago. A number of architects including Richard Neutra and Buckminster Fuller had grappled with the practical problems of using metal-framed structural systems for domestic design but no one idealized the concept to the degree Mies did in [...]