The origins of Modernism are as tangled and debated as the causes of World War I. Yet nearly a hundred years since its beginning, at the turn of the century, it is clear that Modernism has become one of the great architectural styles, continuing to influence the way we design and live in our homes today.
Modernism is rooted in an attempt to create an architecture for a new machine age, for a time when innovations in materials and building techniques allowed a flexibility of design undreamed of in millennia of bricks and mortar.
There was also a strong moral and philosophical basis to the work of many early Modernists: a conscious wish to express in three dimensions
the political, social and economic theories being advanced by contemporary writers and thinkers. They believed that by transforming architecture, they could transform society itself, making the way we live healthier and more stable.
But beyond its social message and enthusiasm for machines and their products, Modernism had various clear imperatives: in particular and emphasis on light, openness and honestly. And this aesthetic credo has been its greatest legacy to succeeding generations.
The great technical advances of the nineteenth century- particular, new materials such as steel and reinforced concrete – were also, of course, fundamental steps on the road to Modernism, for
without these innovations the flexible interior walls and large expanses of window that characterize the style would have never been achievable, and with these innovations, too, came the call for a machine aesthetic, one that would reveal rather than obscure the products of the factory or engineer
As early as 1896, the Viennese architect Otto Wagner predicted an architecture of “horizontal lines… and great simplicity.” His fellow Austrian Adolf Loos published an essay “Ornament of Crime”, in which he equated decoration with decadence and criminality. The latter’s early-twentieth-century building- such as the reinforced concrete Steiner residence (1911) in Vienna –predated by some ten years the
1/4
