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.

An ideological clash among generations occurred in the Modern Movement’s co-ordinating organization CIAM in the mid 1950s. A group of younger architects felt that the older Modernists were too doctrinaire and that their architecture was both impersonal and inflexible. Thus, CIAM was superseded by “Team 10″, which included Aldo Van Eyck (Holland), Georges Candilis (France), Ralph Erskine (Sweden), Reima Pietila (Finland) and Alison and Peter Smithson (Britain). The latter were closely associated with the social content of architecture, with questions of “identity” in buildings and the so-called “New Brutalism”. This term seems to have derived from two main sources: Le Corbusier’s use of beton brut and its tough appearance, and the exposed services and materials of its key monument, a new school at Hunstanton, Norfolk, in 1957 by the Smithsons. The term is also often applied to the unadorned raw concrete of buildings like the London South Bank complex (including Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre). It heralded one aspect of a new era, while another was the “free-form” design of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel, the originality and freshness of which surprised even the young revolutionaries. It led to a host of free architectural compositions from Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York, and Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, to Ton Albert’s HMB buildings in Amsterdam.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris by Piano and Rogers represented a break in another direction. As a museum it was to be viewed as a cultural “machine”. One of the first major essays in the new “High-Tech” manner in the history of architecture, it was rooted in the science fiction ideas of the British ARCHIGRAM group of designers. Engineering, or High- Tech, architecture carries on the Modernist tradition of the simple functional shed, albeit with external guts or services a la Lloyds Building in London, also by Richard Rogers.

Fuller, denying the need for an emblem beyond creating an image of “newness”, produced a remarkable metal structure hung from a central core in the history of architecture. The project made little allowance for normal domestic habits and needs; instead, it displayed the romance of technology. The intense concentration on elegant technical solutions to rationally stated problems, without being prejudiced by experience, is a Modernist theme which only came to fruition in the last decades of this century with the works of Norman Foster.

Loos integrated emblem and instrument in a house with a timeless calm. By reinforcing existing forms of habitation, with slight level changes of both floors and ceilings and the relationship of spaces, it is for the whole body not just the eye. To Loos, the house, while it must contain symbolic and formal values, was neither a work of art nor a spectacle. All these designers were concerned with the making of their buildings in the history of architecture. Fuller focused on technology transfer from industry, Le Corbusier on the imagery of new building technology, while Loos reconsidered the domain of craftsmanship.

Le Corbusier used technology to suggest new ways of moving through space and inhabiting it; new senses of enclosure, a new visual language of compressed planes, overlaid forms and virtual transparencies, a feast for the promenading eye. In contrast to Loos, Le Corbusier exploited his skill with publicity. As a result, the Villa Stein/ de Monzie, along with the celebrated Villa Savoye at Poissy which was built shortly after it, came to canonize the ideals of Modernism / Modern Architecture.

These three, so different, not only in their intentions but in their image, left rather worthless the term “International Style”. But undoubtedly Le Corbusier reinforced the “International” idea with his memorable Five Points of Modern Architecture: (1) Lift the building on columns off the ground; (2) Replace the ground covered by the building’s footprint with a roof-terrace; (3) Let long windows stretch across the facade, and from side to side of rooms; (4) Let the plan be free-flowing; (5) Let the facade be a free composition, able to respond to light, views or compositional effect.

Le Corbusier’s own series of buildings, from the villa for La Roche, 1923–4, via the Villa Cook of 1926 (which first canonized the “five points”), exploits the polemic without limiting the excitement of the architectural experience. The interior spaces of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe might sometimes seem to “obey” the five points, but the effect is quite different, of pure, calm, almost abstract space. The experience of Le Corbusier’s villas, by contrast, is captured by a dynamic promenade architecturale.

This enthusiasm for modernity is a central feature of modernism in the history of architecture. Unlike the efforts of some architects to resist the advance of the modern world or create domestic environments opposed to it, modernist architects wished to accelerate the transformation of life provoked by modernization. They seized opportunities afforded by commissions to create spatial experiences and images that brought into focus architectural possibilities inherent in a world no longer bound by historical precedent.

It is in this context that small projects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion for the “International Exhibition,” Barcelona, 1929, acquire significance out of all proportion to their actual size or program. Erected originally as a reception pavilion for distinguished visitors to the fair, the Barcelona Pavilion demonstrated the spatial possibilities latent in the simple column and slab system described in Le Corbusier’s Domino scheme. In place of the concrete of the Domino design, Mies van der Rohe used chrome-plate metal columns and vertical surfaces of glass alternating with beautifully veined and polished marble slabs. The layering of space, the juxtaposition of transparent, reflective, and opaque surfaces, and the freedom implied by separating column and wall marks the Barcelona Pavilion as one of the paradigms of early-twentieth-century architecture.

Early chroniclers of the modern movement, such as Siegfried Giedion, tended to present the work of modernists such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius as the manifestation, in architectural terms, of the underlying principles and forces shaping the modern world. In his influential account of the origin and development of modern architecture, Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion ‘portrayed modernism in architecture as the synthesis of modern science, technology and aesthetics.

Today, this equation of modernism and modernity is being challenged by some and historians who see tension rather than congruence in the relationship between modernist design ideals and the reality of modern systems of production. Modernism according to this school of thought, sought to make available models of art and architecture that suggested what was possible and desirable rather than merely confirming the status quo. There is thus a utopian impulse behind architectural modernism in the first half of the century, and a challenging stance adopted by the modernist to the contemporary world.

It may be considered that the Ronchamp chapel, being a ‘pure expression of poetry’ and the symbol of an ancient ritual, should not therefore be criticised by the rationale of the modern movement. Remembering, however, that this is a product of Europe’s greatest architect, it is important to consider whether this building should influence the course of modern architecture. The sensational impact of the chapel on the visitor is significantly not sustained for any great length of time and when the emotions subside there is little to appeal to the intellect, and nothing to analyze or stimulate curiosity. This entirely visual appeal and the lack of intellectual participation demanded from the public may partly account for its easy acceptance by the local population…

With the loss of direction in modern painting, European architects have been looking to popular art and folk architecture, mainly of an indigenous character, from which to extend their vocabulary. An appreciation of regional building, particularly of the Mediterranean, has frequently appeared in Le Corbusier’s books, principal]), as examples of integrated social units expressing themselves through form, but only recently has regional building become a primary source of plastic incident. There seems to be no doubt that le Corbusier’s incredible powers of observation are lessening the necessity for invention, and his travels round the world have stockpiled his vocabulary with plastic elements and objets trouves of considerable picturesqueness. If folk architecture is to re-vitalise the movement, it will first be necessary to deter-mine what it is that is modern in modern architecture. The scattered openings on the chapel walls may recall de Stijl but a similar expression is also commonplace in the farm buildings of Provence …

Since the Bauhaus, the fusion of art and technology has been the lifelong mission of Gropius, and yet it is this aspect which denotes his least achievement. The Dessau building itself presents a series of elevations each of which is biased towards either art or technology. The suggestion that architecture has become so complex that it needs to be conceived by a team representing the composite mind may partly account for the ambiguity which is felt with buildings generated in this manner. On the other hand, Maillart, who evolved his aesthetic as the result of inventing theories of reinforcing to exploit the concrete ribbon, achieved in his bridges an integration of technique and expression which has rarely been surpassed. The exaggerated supremacy of ‘Art’ in European Architecture probably denotes a hesitant attitude towards technology, which itself has possibly been retarded by our derisive attitude towards the myth of progress, the recent belief that true progress lies in charity, welfare, and personal happiness, having replaced the Victorian idea of progress as the invention and perfection of man’s tools and equipment …

The desire to deride the schematic basis of modern architecture and the ability to turn a design upside down and make it architecture are symptomatic of a state when the vocabulary is not being extended, and a parallel can be drawn with the Mannerist period of the Renaissance. Certainly, the forms which have developed from the rationale and the initial ideology of the modern movement are being mannerized and changed into a conscious imperfectionism … (pp155-161)

Extracts. Source: The Architectural Review, vo 1 1 19; no 71 1, March 1956. ? Lady Mary Stirling.