You are browsing the archives of Modern Architecture.

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 [...]

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 [...]

By the mid-1970s a wide dissatisfaction had grown up with “Modern” architecture, which began to be viewed as an arrogant imposition of inadequate environmental ideas upon society. Its basic ideals were seriously questioned and eventually its “death” was recorded. It was soon followed by the growth of a fashionable “Post-Modernism” invented by a number of [...]

The past four decades have seen one of the largest building programmes in the history of architecture. The world has literally been reshaped. This extensive building programme began with the need to rebuild, renew and reinstate after the ravages of the Second World War. Housing took priority, and from an architectural point of view, it [...]

At the same period in the late 1920s, three houses were designed which encapsulated the differing strands within the new view of architecture, by then often called “Modernism”: the Dymaxion House by Richard Buckminster Fuller in the USA; “Les Terraces” outside Paris by Le Corbusier for the Stein and de Monzie families; and Haus Moller [...]

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 [...]