Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna

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 well-lit spaces. The exterior is covered in light-coloured marble panels held in place by metal-studded bolts set out in a decorative, pattern-like Jugendstil framework. Internally, the barrel-vaulted banking hall proved remarkably successful, with its transparent roof, white walls and exposed steel structure. The building also incorporates a fresh air circulation system for both the offices and the public space.
Art historian Peter Haiko describes Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna:

The three-naved, basilical system of this space a high central nave is accompanied by lower side-naves, this system is in itself a characteristic of church-building in hisotrical architecture… as a modern aesthetic architect, Wagner tries to give his creation a rational base, in order to establish artistic form as the inevitable result of functional form. With the quotation from church architecture, he raises money trading from its profane level… He perfects money dealing with a quotation from a machine room, similarly inherent in the spatal solution, in the same way that labour is taylorised in the machine room.

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. 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.