modern maven: Irving Gill

Part Gill in a multi-part series!

Who: Irving Gill 

What: Protomodernist architect of early Californian minimalism

When: b. 1870 d. 1936; key active time 1907-1919

Where: San Diego and Los Angeles

Why: Designed buildings of simple beauty inside and out inspired by Mediterranean architecture

Way: Worked under Louis Sullivan (and with Frank Lloyd Wright in Sullivan's office); was an influence on R.M. Schindler. Lloyd Wright worked for Gill for a time.

Gill began his career under Louis Sullivan working alongside Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Due to health reasons, Gill moved to San Diego and started a practice that ably designed projects that aped the popular styles of the time. The combination of restoring the San Diego Mission and hooking up professionally with Frank Mead, a young architect who had just returned from photographing the simple whitewashed cubic huts that huddled against the sides of the Mediterranean sea, led to Gill's golden era between 1907 and 1919.

Gill removed nearly all ornamentation and greatly smoothed and simplified his architecture. His work still evoked Mission Revival with its arches, especially on homes and churches. The buildings he designed for Scripps looked like full-steam ahead Modernism: simple, devoid of ornamentation, and white. One of the great losses to American Modern architecture was the loss of Gill's Dodge House (1914-16) in West Hollywood in 1970. 

Gill was attentive to simplifying interiors as well as exterior. On interiors, he worked to minimize places where dust could collect by removing trim as much as possible and curving corners where walls and floors met. His houses during his key active time were light and airy.

Due to east coast architectural snobbery, Irving Gill's career was roundly ignored by the cognoscenti at the time. Today's historians recognize Gill's influence on early California Modernism and how the simplicity and utility he explored in his buildings approached if not surpassed that of Adolf Loos. 

Dodge House, West Hollywood (1914-6)

modern maven: Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens (1913)

Part Behrens in a multi-part series!

Who: Peter Behrens 

What: German proto-modernist architect

When: b. 1868 d. 1940; key active time 1907 to 1912

Where: Berlin and Vienna

Why: Designed the AEG Turbine Factory

How: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Adolf Meyer, and Walter Gropius worked in his office.

Similar to Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens' first love was painting. He attended art school and then, after joining the Jugenstil (Art Nouveau) Movement, worked as a poster and graphic designer. His first stab at architecture came when he designed his own house in an Art Nouveau style after joining an artist's colony in 1899. Not only did he design his house, but he designed everything in it including the furniture, towels, and art. 

Along with a dozen other folks, including Josef Hoffman, he formed the German Werbund. The Werkbund was inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement but with the goal of bringing good design to the masses through industrial mass production. AEG was a supporter of the movement and hired Behrens to design almost everything related to the company, including its logo, products, font, marketing, and buildings. Between 1907 to 1912, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1908 to 1911), Le Corbusier (1910 to 1911), Adolf Meyer, and Walter Gropius (1907 to 1910) worked in his office. During this time he designed and built the key building of his career: the AEG Turbine Factory.

The AEG Turbine Factory was built in 1909 in Berlin and is notable for its lack of ornamentation and use of steel and glass. The building is considered transitional in the overall Modern oeuvre because of the non-load bearing masonry at the corners. Nevertheless, key budding minds in early Modernism were in his office when the project was realized. The factory somehow managed to escape destruction during World War II and is now owned by Siemens, who still makes turbines there. 

In 1922, Behrens accepted a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as retaining his position in Berlin, a position he held until his death.

Peter Behrens, woodcut (1898)

Peter Behren's House (circa 1899)

Front door of Peter Behren's House (circa 1899)

Inside of the AEG Turbine Factory (1909)

Peter Behrens, promotional materials (1912)

New Ways House in England (1926)

modern maven: Adolf Loos

Part Loos in a multi-part series!

Who: Adolf Loos 

What: Anti-ornamentation theorist and protomodernist architect

When: b. 1870 d. 1933; active 1903-1933

Where: Czechoslovakia, Austria, France

Why: Wrote "Ornament and Crime" in 1910; invented the raumplan

Way: Taught R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra

If you appreciate minimalism and sunken living rooms, then you owe Adolf Loos a nod of gratitude. Born in Brno in modern-day Czechoslovakia to a stonemason, Loos attended a couple technical schools before spending a few years doing odd jobs in the United States in the mid-1890s. While stateside, he was impressed with the efficiency of industrial buildings with respect to their volumes (containing what needed to be contained and nothing more) and lack of decoration. A subsequent trip to the Greek island of Skyros where he saw its simple white and cubist dwellings solidified his thoughts on architecture.

His primary contribution to architecture came in 1910 when he wrote and presented an essay titled "Ornament and Crime". In the essay he equated ornamentation with depravity:

A person of our times who gives way to the urge to daub the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. What is natural in the Papuan or the child is a sign of degeneracy in a modern adult. I made the following discovery, which I passed on to the world: the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use.

The other major architectural contribution Loos made was the raumplan, the use of multiple levels inside a structure for different rooms to indicate their function and importance. "My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces. I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor, etc... For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces, etc. Stories merge and spaces relate to each other."

Loos started an architectural school in Vienna in the 1910s to share his thoughts and theories with the impressionable young architectural students attending the area's more formal universities. R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra were notable students of Loos' school as well as lifelong admirers.

Loos built a dozen or so structures that succeed more as transitioning experiments in Modernism than good architecture, such as the nakedness of Villa Karma (1903-1906); the minimal rear facade of the Steiner House (1910); and the outward simplicity of Villa Scheu (1912-1913), Villa Moller (1926), and Villa Muller (1930). Loos' post-1920 work was clearly eclipsed by the youthful architects he had inspired, but his impact on Modernism is unquestioned, echoes of his theories still resonating today.

Villa Karma (1903-1906)

Villa Steiner (1910)

Villa Scheu (1912-1913)

Villa Moller (1926)

Villa Muller (1930)

modern maven: Antonio Sant'Elia

Part Sant-Elia in a multi-part series!

Who: Antonio Sant-Elia 

What: Early Futurist architect

When: b. 1888 d. 1916; active 1912-1916

Where: Italy

Why: Visionary drawings of the cities of the future

Antonio Sant-Elia was an Italian architect and early (and now the most remembered) adherent of  Futurism, an avant-garde movement started in Italy by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. Between 1912 and 1914 Sant-Elia drew hundreds of futurist impressions for a Città Nuova ("New City") that is remarkable in predicting the general architectural setting of cities today. He presented the drawings at a show of the Nuove Tendenze group in May/June of 1914. Later that same year he authored* a manifesto titled Futurist Architecture that starts like this:

No architecture has existed since 1700. A moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements used to mask the skeletons of modern houses is called modern architecture. The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by constructive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are in Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism.

He might not have been a whole lot of fun to drink espresso with...

Inspired in part by Adolf Loos' premise that ornamentation is crime, Sant-Elia stripped most ornamentation off his perspectives, revealing the bustling and efficient cities beneath, naked yet beautifully exposed. In a radical interpretation of shedding the previous generation's architecture, Sant-Elia envisioned each generation building their own city with their own architecture (something we see today in the slow but inexorably constant renewal in the footprints of our current cities, at least in the United States).

He joined the army in 1915 when World War I started and sadly perished in late 1916 in a battle at Monfalcone, Italy, leaving behind few built works. He was a mere 28 years old at his death.

Futurism later became associated with Italian Fascism when Marinetta merged his Futurist political party with Mussolini's Fascists in 1919. Several Futurist buildings were erected at that time, but the Fascists, including those in Germany, ultimately preferred a futuristic interpretation of Roman imperialistic architecture.

Sant-Elia's work surely influenced later hypothetical designs of skyscrapers (see Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's early designs) as well as hypothetical urban planning designs by Le Corbusier, Richard Nuetra, and Frank Lloyd Wright (with some of the latter's work looking remarkably similar to Sant-Elia's work). One could argue that Googie, that Jetsons-inspired Modernism, is neo-Futurism.

* There's some debate over exactly who wrote the manifesto, with some suggesting it was F.T. Marinetti, the founder of Futurism. However, Marinetti was a poet rather than an architect, and it is Sant'Elia's name on the document, not Marinetti.

Below is a monument to Italy's WWI dead strongly inspired by Sant'Elia's visions of the future (see image immediately above). A fitting tribute to a man who predicted the future but didn't live to see much of it.