“I shall confess to you that I have only had one teacher: the past; only one education: the study of the past.”  – LeCorbusier (1929)  

Moored like sleek Cigarette boats in a harbor full of luxury yachts, the growing number of New Canaan ‘moderns’ (more than 75 exist today), offer an unexpected visual respite in a small New England town where, for generations, tradition has ruled supreme. Their sleek, simple façades, flat roof lines, and ample, oversized windows will either shock or delight the observer today, much as they did more than a half century ago, when they were first constructed. Just like an overpowered speedboat, these bad boys of the harbor (and the men who conceived them) were out to make a point—and they succeeded. fine arts magazine  

These distinguished New Canaan architects, known as ‘the Harvard Five’ (Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen, Philip Johnson and Eliot Noyes), introduced a novel design sensibility on the American scene, beginning in the late 1940s. Their designs were shaped by an unexpected post-war prosperity and honed by a desire to upend the notion of “traditional house and home.” Clean angles, open floor plans, efficient space utilization and an unencumbered connection with nature and the materials of construction were foremost in their minds. Many critics found the structural solutions they applied to these design goals cold and uninviting. However, a handful of visionaries saw in modern homes the promise of an exciting, open lifestyle—a setting in which the American dream of luxury living could finally be realized.  

The visual language of modernism is an acquired skill; it requires that the viewer be ready to open his or her eyes to the possibility of elegance in its simplest form. The pristine architectural gems that dot our landscape symbolize another time in our history, a time when life promised to be carefree and filled with leisure hours. These rare creations—extant now in just a few locations throughout the world and constantly threatened with destruction—stand as symbols of a belief that innovative architecture could somehow point the way to making our world a better place to be. For that reason alone, the mid-20th-century moderns, living monuments to that conviction, deserve to be appreciated, preserved, and cherished.  

Modernism—the cultural shift that led, in the early 20th century, to radical changes in art, design, literature, architecture, and political expression—carried with it the idea of, ‘a break from old ways of thinking.’ This is the accepted sense in which the term modern is often used today, on issues ranging from child-rearing to space travel to religious beliefs—that is, meaning new, different, or non-traditional. But for most of its brief history, modern also meant controversial! With that in mind, we will be tracing modernism from its earliest European origins to a warm spring day in Berlin when, in 1933, a dedicated group of architects, artists and weavers were led away at gunpoint for their radical views about modern design.  

It is one of the accidents of history that an unlikely Midwest American city first became the laboratory for modernist experimentation. The Columbian Exhibition in 1893 (held in Chicago in honor of Columbus’ journey 400 years earlier) featured an exhibition called ‘The White City’ —a classical Beaux Arts showcase of American industrial engineering, designed by D. H. Burnham. Appalled by his excessive use of decorative detailing, Chicago resident-architect Louis Sullivan fulminated that “it would set American architecture back for half a century.”  

Sullivan, like some of his European counterparts at the time, was decidedly anti-ornamentation. Extensive decorative embellishments had been a feature of many architectural styles of the 19th century, including Victorianism- and for some it had run its course. In 1892, Sullivan declared that, “We should refrain from the use of ornamentation for several years and concentrate entirely upon the production of buildings well-formed and comely in the nude.” Listening well and carefully watching Sullivan’s every move was a young assistant in his Chicago firm—Frank Lloyd Wright.  

Soon on his own, Wright was just 34 when he introduced his design for a ‘Prairie House’ in 1901. His answer to a concern of the day about the deleterious impact of industry on artisanship was to advocate for the use of the machine to bring out the beauty in natural construction materials. Wright’s vision for residential living was uniquely American and unlike anything seen before. The “prairie look” featured a cruciform footprint; asymmetrical wings; deep, overhanging roof lines that floated above bands of transom windows or glazed walls, forming deep shadows that emphasized the horizontality of the structure. His “organic architecture” took full advantage of its natural setting, both settling into it and appearing to float above it at the same time.  

Wright saw the space within the building as the “reality” of that building, and he avoided the sensation of being walled in through the ample use of glass and open-floor planning. He advocated for “…the destruction of the box—in the corners and at the junction of the walls and ceiling—where windows would let light flow in and create light play in the room.” Thus, the simple geometrics that often served as a starting-point for a design were soon softened and redefined by the creative use of light, space and interior appointments. Eschewing the past, architects like Wright would apply a range of new building materials along with carte blanche from their forward-looking clients, willing to pay for that experimentation, to create something truly unusual on the American landscape.  

Wright was not the only one responding to the changing social climate around him. Europe, too in the early years of the 20th century was in flux. A call for modernization could be heard in industrialized countries on both sides of the Atlantic. In response to this call for ‘the new’, the first two decades of the 20th century saw a profound and dramatic increase in creative output by the architectural, artistic, literary and musical communities. An extraordinarily concentrated burst of creative energy occurred during this time, unlike anything seen since the Renaissance. The culture of change had reached a tipping point—perhaps because of the steady and irrevocable march of industrialization, or the rise of nationalist fervor among certain European nations, or maybe because the reality of the new flying machine and the speed and excitement of the automobile had managed to grip the human imagination– It could now be said that the Modern Era was officially underway!  

In France, architect, Charles Edouard Jeanneret, who adopted the name Le Corbusier was particularly taken by the purity of line and form extolled by the modernist movement. His designs from the period of the 1920s were reductionistic in the extreme, celebrating the virtues of simple geometric forms. Like other European designers, Corbusier extended his belief in the purity of basic shapes to other endeavors, including painting and industrial design. His aesthetic that, “a house is a machine for living in”, spoke as much to his belief in the universal order of simplicity in design as it did to the firm hold that science and engineered solutions for everyday problems had on the imagination of his contemporaries.  

While elsewhere in Europe, a group of artisans banded together in Weimar, Germany in 1919, determined to revitalize the charter of the defunct Berlin-based Arts and Crafts School of the previous century. They called themselves the Bauhaus School. Given that the country was gripped by social unrest, monetary inflation, and political instability after World War I, the mere fact of the creation of such an ambitious project in light of the times was remarkable. Headed by architect Walter Gropius (who had viewed the American architectural scene around Chicago in the 1890s and called it “the look of the future”), the school attracted the best and brightest of the time, including furniture designer Marcel Breuer, artist László Moholy-Nagy, and architects Josef Albers and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, among others.  

For the next 14 years, the staff and students of the Bauhaus School redefined modern design in everything from apartment buildings to serving spoons. The creative energy at the school was fueled by a belief that design should not be defined by tradition, but by a constantly renewing and critical analysis of society’s needs and values. Open to more eclectic influences than the American modernist movement, Bauhaus faculty regularly included some of the best-known abstract painters, photographers, surrealist writers, fabric artists, muralists and actors of the day. Underlying all their efforts was the now-famous dictum put forth by faculty member Mies van der Rohe, “Less is more.”  

Soon, though, the winds of war began to blow again in Germany. The radical views about social change and the experimental art forms they supported soon brought the school to the attention of Hitler’s ultra-right National Socialist Party. Deemed degenerate by the state, the Bauhaus School (staff and students alike) were soon functioning under the watchful eye of the Gestapo. On April 11, 1933, the school was closed by Nazi police, who arrived with weapons drawn.  

This unfortunate turn of events impacted directly on the core members of the Bauhaus faculty—Gropius, Breuer, van der Rohe, Albers, and Moholy-Nagy, who eventually immigrated to America. Consistent with the axiom that “every time a door shuts, another opens,” these masters of the modern would soon imprint a new generation of architects and designer much closer to us here in the United States.  

History teaches us that no important cultural shift occurs spontaneously, without the emergence of novel and sometimes hotly-debated ideas that spark the imagination. The seeds of Modernism that eventually flowered in the 20th century were, in fact, planted three centuries earlier, during a period in the late 17th century that later came to be known as, The Enlightenment. During that period, European philosophers first wrote about the power of the individual to determine his own fate. This was a revolutionary—possibly even heretical—idea in the 1600s, when the power of religion and superstition largely held sway over public behavior and beliefs. In 1689, John Locke, an English intellectual, declared that “every man is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” (borrowing from these sentiments, “Happiness” came later, thanks to Thomas Jefferson.) Locke was not alone in his thinking. The emergence of scientific inquiry, the printed book, industrialization, the growth of cities, the loss of political influence of the church, the challenge to the divine right of kings to rule unconditionally, and the new concept of “free will and self-determinism” all had the effect of defining a new way of thinking for the average 18th-century man-in-the-street.  

This reformist wave was accompanied by some new ways of thinking about architecture, too . . . or, rather, some new old ways of thinking. With the emergence of enlightened thought, which placed a premium on the wisdom of once-idyllic and grand civilizations, came a renewed interest in ancient Greco-Roman style. The search for perfection and balance in nature and design was to be rediscovered in the works of Greek and Roman philosophers, architects, and mathematicians. Eighteen-century exploration and colonization of, and trade with, increasingly far-flung, exotic locales triggered further interest in non-European cultures. Egyptian, other North African destinations and Eurasian and Japanese design elements soon worked their way into architectural motifs, creating a blizzard of building styles and rampant eclecticism in design…with names like federalism (Neoclassical with certain American influences, such as the eagle motif); Greek Revival; Gothic Revival; Romanesque Revival; Colonial Revival; Tudor Revival; Spanish Revival; Beaux Arts; Arts & Craft; and Victorianism, to cite just a few.  

Throughout most of the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, the architectural agenda was being defined by nobility and the aristocracy. Design was the pursuit of the privileged and those favored with the money and time to indulge. The vast disparity in wealth found in all of Western Europe and in the newly-formed United States, for that matter, meant that a handful of powerful and influential individuals (and those employed to express their vision in bricks and mortar) set the stage for architectural fashion. And for them, there was a shared belief that historical hindsight held the key to enlightened reasoning.  

It took the flowering of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s and the emergence of a newly-created middle class, demanding realistic and affordable housing near the city-centers where they were increasingly employed, to finally move the design and construction of mass housing into the realm of the realistic and practical. Here, we can finally say that American initiatives in factory and residential design led the way; and by the late 1880s, Europe was looking to us for inspiration and direction in innovative architectural design.  

It was at this critical juncture that the term modern was first used to describe the shift in values away from established, traditional ways of thinking and toward the search for solutions for the rapidly emerging class of workers and their families. The term cut across class boundaries and touched every aspect of human behavior; but when it came to architecture, modern soon took on the meaning of fast, practical and affordable (milled 2”x4” lumber in various lengths and the ‘balloon frame’ of standardized home construction used even today made their appearance at that time). The class-conscious posturing of previous generations, given expression through their elaborate homes and buildings, gave way to the new reality of a melding of culture and class at the urban neighborhood level–meaning that the expression of wealth and influence through adornment and embellishment became less important than the rapid and practical accommodation of families, workers and the wide range of facilities needed to support them. These pressures to produce on the part of designers and builders, alike, first gave rise to the axiom that, “form follows function”, clearing the way on the eve of the 20th century for a new of thinking about architecture, for which the term modern was soon appropriated.  

Along with the emergence of a new, residential middle class in both Europe and the U.S., innovative commercial building materials were being introduced—materials that could serve the growing space and performance demands of industrial, and retail construction: fireproof steel beams, cast-iron façades, reinforced concrete, and plate glass. With these products, architects were being increasingly called upon to design large, well-lit, utilitarian spaces for large-scale production, where efficiency and unimpaired performance were the main requirements. These newly-developed construction materials, along with the mechanical lift and the telephone, made the creation of the first multi-story building (meaning over three or four stories) possible in the 1880s. The Flatiron Building, NYC (1902), left, was an example of a structure that took advantage of diminishing land resources in the city and the invention of the Otis ‘Lift’, which meant buildings go be taller than four stories.  

Due to rapid innovations in both science and industry, society was gripped by a desire for the changes in life style that these improvements promised. A call for modernization could be heard in most industrialized countries. Harking this call for ‘the new’, the first two decades of the 20th century saw a profound and dramatic increase in creative output by the architectural, artistic, literary and musical communities on both sides of the Atlantic. An extraordinarily concentrated burst of creative output occurred during this time, unlike anything seen since the Renaissance. The culture of change had reached a tipping point—perhaps because of the steady and irrevocable march of industrialization, or because of the call-to-arms by sociopolitical activists like Marx, Baudelaire and Nietzsche, or maybe because the reality of the new flying machine and the speed and excitement of the automobile had managed to grip the human imagination– It could now be said that the Modern Era was officially underway!  

By Richard J. Friswell, Managing Editor  

Editor’s Note: The vital role of architect, Philip Johnson, a protégé of Gropius and his impact on the growth of American Modernism, will be the subject of Part IV in our series.