Modern and modern architecture is a new stage in the development process of architecture. In the past two hundred years, there have been unprecedented changes, regardless of the scale, quantity, type, technology, and speed of buildings. These are unmatched by any previous historical period.
Due to the development of society, the revolution of modern and modern architecture has been promoted. It is appearing in front of people with a new look, increasingly embodying the characteristics of function and science and technology.
The new route to Beijing sets sail
The development of architecture is inextricably linked to the development of society. Modern and modern architecture must undoubtedly reflect the characteristics of the social and historical conditions at that time. Among the modern Western architectural schools, the following major schools should be specially mentioned:
1. Retro-architectural school
This school mainly emerged after the Western Industrial Revolution. That is, the mid-18th century to the end of the 19th century. From the perspective of ideological background, it is a product under the influence of bourgeois Enlightenment thought. Its basic tendency is to return to ancient times and revive the style of classical architecture. In this major school, due to the different objects of revival, it can be divided into three small schools. One is the revival of ancient Greek and Roman architecture; the other is the revival of Gothic architecture; and the other is the eclectic school. The formation of these three architectural tendencies is inseparable from the spiritual needs of the emerging bourgeoisie after the industrial revolution. Therefore, in a certain sense, the emergence of these retro architectural schools is exactly the need of the emerging bourgeois revolution.
The center of ancient Greek and Roman revivalism was in France. There are two architectural masterpieces of this school, one is the "Pantheon" in Paris and the other is the "Arc de Triomphe" on the Place de l'Etoile in Paris.
The schools and trends of Gothic Revival are mainly concentrated in England. Its quintessential architectural masterpiece is the Houses of Parliament. Built in 1868, it is a building complex consisting of the Houses of Lords and Commons, Westminster Abbey, Bell Tower, Victoria Tower, etc. The architectural form of the entire Capitol Building is Gothic, emphasizing vertical lines, towering and steep. Because Gothic architecture is full of a romantic sentiment, it is customary to call the Gothic Revival architecture of this period romantic architecture. Gothic Revival is naturally called Romanticism.
Eclectic architecture mainly flourishes in France. Its characteristic is that it is based on history, but it is not limited to the architecture of any era, nor does it focus on any style. It often combines several styles into one, so people also call it "imitationism". A typical example is the Paris Opera House, whose designer was Greener, a fanatical admirer of eclecticism. Viewed from the front, this building has a row of magnificent colonnades. The front facade adopts the "Rococo" decorative style and is carved with extremely complicated curly grass leaves and patterns, which fully demonstrates the emerging bourgeoisie's display of wealth. Exhibited in this gorgeous style.
The retro style has created many masterpieces in architectural art, thus completing its historical mission of transitioning from ancient times to modern times. After entering the 20th century, a more creative trend of thought and school has historically been pushed to the forefront of the architectural revolution, which is the modernist trend of thought and its modern school.
2. Modernist Architecture School
Compared with pure arts such as painting and sculpture, there is a very important difference between architecture and pure art, that is, architecture is practical and engineering.
In 1851, the first World's Fair in London built a huge new exhibition hall - the Crystal Palace - in less than a year. In 1889, a steel structure was used at the Paris World's Fair. A machine exhibition hall with an internal clear span of 115 meters was built at the same time. In 1901, a 22-story high-rise building was built in Chicago. In 1909, a 50-story commercial office building was built in New York. These are new materials, new technologies and new technologies. The product of function.
With the development and changes of the social and economic foundation, the social and cultural psychology finally showed a turning point. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, various deviations from tradition appeared in the paintings and sculptures of the advanced capitalist countries in Western Europe. New wave.
When new styles have appeared in the fields of painting and sculpture, it is inevitable for architects to explore new architectural styles. Moreover, new materials, new technologies and new functions of architecture have already prepared the material basis for the transformation of architectural styles. At this time, the reform wave in the Old World continued to advance. Corresponding to various new trends in the art world, "Futurism", "Juche", "Constructivism", "Expressionism" and "De Stijl" also appeared in the architecture world. Waiting for new architectural perspectives and architectural art styles.
After World War I, the social, political and economic conditions in Western Europe had an important impact on architectural reform. In 1919, architect Gropius founded a new design school in Weimar, Germany - The Weimar State School of Architecture, referred to as "Bauhaus", recruited trendy artists and designers from Western Europe and Russia at that time, and cultivated new design talents according to new teaching plans and methods. Another famous German architect, Mies van der Rohe, and other young architects are also active in innovation. In France, Le Corbusier was the representative of the radical reformist architects. Le Corbusier attached great importance to architectural art, but at that time he advocated a machine aesthetics. From the 1920s to the early 1930s, a number of representative works of modernist architecture appeared. The Bauhaus school building in Germany, the Villa Savoye near Paris, the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona Exposition, the Swiss Student Dormitory in Paris, the Palmio Sanatorium in Finland, and the Wanler Tobacco Factory in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, are some of the more famous ones.
Since the 1930s, modernist architectural trends and styles have spread from Western Europe to other parts of the world. In Germany, because Hitler's regime promoted classical architecture, the Bauhaus was considered heretical and was disbanded. Representatives of modernism such as Gropius and Mies immigrated to the United States. The skyscraper is the most characteristic building type in the United States in the 20th century. Before the 1930s, most skyscrapers used steel frame structures, but their exteriors were still decorated with masonry walls and traditional decorative carvings. After the Second World War, the shapes of skyscrapers tended to be neat and simple, and the walls were replaced with factory-prefabricated lightweight curtain walls made of glass, stainless steel, aluminum, etc. The thick, heavy, rough and solid appearance of traditional masonry buildings has been replaced by the new look of light, light, transparent and thin curtain walls. The famous ones include the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the Lever Building, the Seagram Building, the World Trade Center in New York (destroyed on September 11, 2001), and the Sears Tower in Chicago. The latter two buildings both have 110 floors and are still the skyscrapers with the most floors in the world. In short, by the mid-20th century, modernist architectural style had been widely accepted as a new architectural art language. Modernist architectural thoughts and customs became the protagonist on the world architectural stage in the 1950s and 1960s. Since modernist buildings around the world have obviously similar images, people call them "international style".
3. Postmodernist Architecture
The postmodernist architectural trend entered the 1970s, and the world architectural stage presented a new diversified situation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the most influential one was "postmodernist architecture". If Le Corbusier's "Toward a New Architecture" in 1923 is a classic work of modernist architectural thought, then American architect Venturi's 1966 book "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" is a later work. A manifesto of modernist architectural thought. The specific manifestations of postmodernist architecture are diverse. American architect M. The Municipal Building in Portland, Oregon, designed by Graves, and the new National Gallery of Art in Stuttgart, Germany, designed by British architect J. Stirling, are two representative examples of postmodernist architecture. A group of buildings at the International Architecture Exhibition in Berlin in 1987 were a concentrated expression of postmodern architecture. They were in direct contrast to the 1927 Stuttgart Housing Exhibition.
4. Other architectural styles and schools
The rise and evolution of modernist and postmodernist architectural trends are the most eye-catching architectural phenomena on the world architectural stage in the 20th century. However, there were many other styles and schools in the 20th century. Some were variants of modernist or postmodernist architecture; some were completely different from them; some were quite large in scale and influence; and some were just the personal styles of a few architects. .
The American architect Wright did not agree with the architectural creation path of academic retroism. He advocated innovation. His early architectural works inspired and promoted the European modernist architectural movement. However, Wright’s architectural views were inconsistent with There are important differences among the representatives of European modernist architecture. Wright explicitly rejected Le Corbusier's view of the house as a "machine for habitation." He advocated that architecture should be like plants, organically and closely integrated with the environment, and should emerge from the specific needs of people and the specific environment. Wright designed a large number of buildings throughout his life, and Fallingwater, located near Pittsburgh, USA, is one of his masterpieces. This villa takes the design art of this architectural type to a new level and can be called a treasure in the history of world architecture.
Between modernist architecture and postmodernist architecture, there is actually a stage of transformation and transition. Shortly after the end of World War II, there were already signs of breakthroughs and departures from the orthodox modernism of the 1920s. What is significant is that in the early 1950s, Le Corbusier himself went against the rationalist views he advocated in "Towards a New Architecture" and created a group of buildings called "brutalism". The most famous one is the Ronchamp Church, a small Catholic church in the Vosges Mountains of France. It is located on a hilltop and is surrounded by mountains and river valleys. The Ronchamp Church marked a profound change in Le Corbusier's architectural creation. In a sense, Le Corbusier's Ronchamp Church foreshadowed the rise of postmodernist architectural aesthetics.
The Sydney Opera House in Australia is a famous performance building built in the middle of this century. Its appearance is different from all theaters in history. This is a beautiful architectural work that broke through the orthodox modernist architectural creed of "form follows function" earlier. Although the cost of the Sydney Opera House repeatedly exceeded the budget and the construction period was delayed for more than ten years, once it was completed, it immediately gained widespread public recognition. It has become a symbol of Sydney. In the 1950s and 1960s, before the rise of postmodern architecture, a few architects advocated the integration of modern architecture with classical architecture. This trend was called neoclassical architecture in the 20th century. American architects Stone and Yamasaki are famous representatives. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., designed by Stone, combines Greek and Roman classical architectural styles with modern performance architecture. Yamasaki is a Japanese-American who pays attention to absorbing certain characteristics of traditional Eastern architecture and using them in modern architectural design. In his design of the U.S. Pavilion at the World Agricultural Exhibition in New Delhi in 1959, he used a promenade on a pool and a golden dome to give the building an obvious oriental color. He designed the waiting room of Dhahran Airport in Saudi Arabia. , using prefabricated reinforced concrete plate shell structure, but after his clever processing of the lines and wall decorations, this modern building has a strong Arabic flavor.
Stone and Yamasaki and postmodernist architects are an architectural style known as high tech. The Pompidou Center for Culture and Art in Paris, the HSBC Building in Hong Kong and the Lloyds Building in London are all representative works of the high-tech architectural style. Their unique feature is that their structures are fully exposed and the original shapes of various electromechanical equipment are exposed. Inside and outside such buildings, people see huge beams and columns, exposed lifts, and a variety of uncovered pipes and cables. This approach may facilitate inspection and maintenance to a certain extent, increase the flexibility of modifications and changes, and thereby improve usage efficiency. However, in fact, the designer’s starting point is not mainly due to such functional or economic considerations, but more out of consideration. An aesthetic consideration whose basis is machine aesthetics or technical aesthetics.
5. Modern Architecture in the Third World
In the middle and late 20th century, with the rise of the national independence and liberation movement, the development of the national economy and the revival of the national culture, the situation gradually changed. On the one hand, emerging countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America strive to master new science and technology, and the construction industry is on the road to modernization.
On the other hand, it is a difficult road to break cultural Western centralism, abandon the trend of total Westernization, and strive to combine the architectural cultural traditions of the nation and region to create new modern buildings with their own characteristics. However, after the third world architecture Through the conscious exploration of architects, as well as the attempts of Western architects who respect the cultures of various ethnic groups, many modern and outstanding architectural works with rich national and local characteristics have appeared in the vast third world. As the country with the earliest economic take-off in Asia, Japan's architects have vigorously absorbed Western advanced construction science and technology. At the same time, many architects have consciously explored absorbing and carrying forward the characteristics of Japanese traditional architectural culture under the conditions of the new era to create Japan. modern architecture. The Kagawa Prefectural Government Building in Japan, created by the world-renowned Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in the 1950s, integrates the image and characteristics of traditional Japanese wooden structures into modern reinforced concrete high-rise buildings, which is ingenious and natural. The Yoyogi National Indoor Stadium in Tokyo he designed is another outstanding work that has received high praise at home and abroad. It is a symbol of Japanese modern architecture reaching the international water disaster. Chinese architects have long explored ways to combine traditional Chinese architectural culture with modern architecture. The Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, built in 1929, was a starting point for the combination of modernization and nationalization in Chinese architecture. From the floor plan layout to the architectural details, they all show Chinese characteristics and reflect the new awakening of the Chinese people’s national consciousness. In 1959, on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the new Tiananmen Square was built in front of Tiananmen Square, the entrance to Beijing's ancient imperial city. There are two new buildings on both sides of the square, the Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Chinese Revolutionary History. Neither of them uses the traditional Chinese big roof, but they have distinctive Chinese characteristics. The square and the buildings on both sides embody modern architecture and Chinese tradition. A successful combination of features. The Bahī chapel in New Delhi, India, is the work of Iranian-born architect Sapa. Sapa said: "I want to design a new, elegant, non-exotic, familiar and friendly architectural image." Under the guidance of such creative ideas, he made the church look like a huge white lotus. In the Indian subcontinent, the lotus is traditionally regarded as a symbol of perfection. This church appropriately embodies the beautiful feelings and feelings of the Indian people. Kind wishes.
Riyadh International Airport, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is an advanced airport with advanced technology and large scale. Before the design began, the state of Saudi Arabia required that the airport be both modern and Islamic. The designer, American HOK Architectural Design Office, followed this spirit and created only one modern airport with an Arabic feel. There is a mosque with a circular dome in the airport, which gives this building complex an unmistakable national identity.
Facts show that the modernization of architecture is not completely opposed to nationality and regionality. After overcoming the cognitive bias of modernization as Westernization, people of all countries can create their own unique modern architecture. The combination of tradition and modernization has increasingly become the common sense of most architects around the world. People have reason to believe that in the last years of the 20th century, more and more beautiful national and regional modern architectural art wonders will appear in the vast third world.