STRUCTURAL

RATIONALISM
& PROBLEMS OF
ORNAMENTA-
TION IN
MODERN
PERIOD
 Voillet- le-Duc

According to him-
“In architecture there are two
necessary ways of being true.
It must be true according to the
program
To be true according to the program is
to fulfill exactly and simply the
conditions imposed by need.
& it must be true according to the
method of construction.
This is to employ the materials
according to their qualities and
properties, purely questions of
symmetry and apparent form are only
secondary condition in the presence
of our dominant principles.”

For Viollet-le Duc , these principles
clearly precluded the architectural
tradition of French Classical
Rationalism.

In place of an ‘abstract’ international
style he advocated a return to regional
building.

His illustration to the Entretiens, which
in some aspects anticipated Art
Nouveau, ostensibly indicated the kind
of architecture that would evolve from
his principle of Structural Rationalism.

He proffered not only models but also
methods which would free architecture
from the eclectic irrelevancies of
historicism.

In this way, his Entretiens came to serve
as an inspiration to the avant garde of
the last quarter of 19th century.

His methods penetrated to those
European countries where French
cultural influence was strong but
tradition of classicism was weak.

Eventually his ideas spread even to
England, where they influenced men
such as Sir Gorge Gilbert Scott, Alfred
Waterhouse and even Norman Shaw.

Outside France his thesis, in particular
its implicit cultural nationalism, had its
most pronounced impact on the works
of Antonio Gaudi, Victor Horta, and
Hendrik Petrus Berlage.
 Ornamentation

There is an old debate in the history of
architecture concerning the relative primacy of
formal and structural invention
 On one side are those who see major revolutions
in style as the direct result of new materials and
methods of construction &,
 On the other hand are those who argue that
changes in world-views or aesthetic intention
adapt techniques to their expressive aim.

Many believed ‘Art Nouveau was actually the first
stage of modern architecture in Europe, if modern
architecture be understood as implying primarily
the total rejection of historicism’.

It was a major step towards the intellectual and
stylistic emancipation of modern architecture.

Art nouveau proposed fresh inventions exploiting
the lightness and airiness permitted by glass and
metal construction and drawing inspiration from
nature instead of ponderous monumentality

Viollet-le-Duc, formulated model of
architectural history linking the
frank expression of building
construction and materials to the
progressive march of history.

He was increasingly aware of the
impact of new materials like iron
and plate glass .

He felt that the nineteenth century
must try to formulate its own style
by finding forms appropriate to the
new techniques, and to altered
social and economic conditions.

Mackmurdo’s design can be said to
be the start of a sequence.

It was an early manifestation of a
broad shift in sensibility.

It could also be sensed in such
diverse examples as the
ornamental designs of Louis
Sullivan, Antonio Gaudi, and
William Burges.

A consolidation did not occur until
the early 1890s, in the work of
Victor Horta, which seemed a
three- dimensional equivalent to
the painter’s two-dimensional linear
inventiveness.
 Victor Horta

Born in 1861 in Ghent

Studied art and architecture at the
local academy.

Worked with an architect by the
name of Jules Debuysson in Paris

Entered Ecole des Beaux-Arts in
Brussels

Became a draughtsman for a minor
neo-classical architect, Alphonse
Balat

In mid 1880s he designed some
uninteresting houses in Brussels.
 Horta’s hotel Tassel

Synthesis of architecture and the decorative
art and its declaration of new formal
principles.

With this Horta became one of the first
architects to make an extensive use of iron in
domestic architecture.

Narrow fronted building.

Three storied

Bald façade with bowing central volume

Restrained use of stonework

There was a discreet introduction of an
exposed iron beam-this in the ample space
of the stairwell.

He treated iron as though it were an organic
filament insinuated into the fabric.

Principal innovation lay in the frank
expression of metal structure.

Emphasis was on the direct use of a
modern material & the inspiration of natural
forms for the metal ornament, recall Viollet-
le-Duc ’s exploration in iron

Vollet-le-Duc’ s proposal for a

wrought iron bracket, 1863-72
 Hotel Tassel

Tendril like
ornamentation

Vegetal
shapes for:

Banisters
Wallpaper

Floor mosaic
Extension of style…

He designed a number of town halls

in Brussels in the 1890s.

The props for the mood were the
spacious stairwells, the long internal
vistas through dinning rooms and
over winter gardens

The rich contrasts of colored glass,
silk stuffs, gold, bronze, and
exposed metal, and vegetal forms.

Horta’s buildings never lapsed into
mere theatricality

There were always a tense,
underlying formal order
Hotel Solvay

In the Hotel Solvay in

1895-1900, his newly
found style was
successfully carried
through in all aspects of
the design

This included the linking
of the interior volumes
and the treatment of
façade

the façade had a display
of appropriate linear
ornament
The Maison du Peuple

Built for the Belgian

Workers’ Socialist party in
1897-1900

Most original work of
Horta’s career

The only one in which he
seems to have felt free to
pursue the principles of
Viollet-le-Duc to their logical
conclusion.

Here native brick and stone
vernacular was brilliantly
exploited to create an
architecture of revealed
construction

The façade combined convex
and concave curves

Visible iron skeleton

This was every bit as ‘radical’ as
Sullivan’s contemporary
skyscraper design in Chicago

This treatment was inspired by
earlier nineteenth century
engineering structure like train-
sheds and exhibition building

There is emphasis on lighting the
interiors, this was achieved by
the choice of materials, through
infill panes of glass.
 Extensive use of glass

Convex curve Concave Curve

Visible iron skeleton

Entrance on shorter convex
protrusion

Details of façade Maison du Peuple

Ceiling ingeniously corrugated to

control reverberations
Exposed steel framework for all
major volumes: the offices,
meeting rooms, lecture theaters
Hammer-
Hammer-beam system in
steel
Side walls and fenestrations-
fenestrations-
reduced to thin infill screens

Auditorium Maison du Peuple

The A l’Innovation
Departmental Store

Horta’s experimentation with iron

and steel was continued in this
project in 1901

Here materials were chosen for
their capacity for large internal
spans and wide openings

practical consideration were again
transcended in a façade
composition

Delicate screens and large plates
of glass provided a forward-looking
image to a relatively new building
type

Similar to the work of Louis
Sullivan
Style liberty…

The full triumph of the new style in

the public taste was clearly evident
at the Paris exhibition of 1900and
the Turin Exhibition of 1902

Here ‘Art Nouveau’ or the ‘Style
Liberty’ was dominant

While one ideal of Art Nouveau
was the perfectly crafted and
unified interior, the style also
revealed its possibilities for much
broader public applications

Most notable of these were Hector
Guimard’s design for the Paris
Metro.
Hector Guimard

Like Horta, Guimard

passed through the
academy

Had been at the Ecole des
Beaux-Art from 1885 to the
early 1890s

At the Ecole des Arts
Decoratifs from 1882 to
1885 he had become
acquainted with Viollet-le-
Duc’s Rationalism

He reinterpreted it in a
highly personal way.
Paris Metro

Began in 1900

Naturally inspired forms were
used to create arches and
furnishing in iron

These were then mass-
produced from moulds

Over the next four years,
these apparently natural
emanations from the
subterranean world erupted in
the streets of Paris

This made Guimard notorious
as the creator of the ‘Style
Metro’.
 Glass
Enameled steel

Interchangeable
standard iron pieces,
cast in the form of
naturalistic elements

Front- Paris Metro

Station

Side elevation Front elevation

 Art nouveau
continues…

In the hands of major talents, Art
Nouveau was far more than a
change in architectural dress

It was far more than a new system
of decoration

In the best work of Horta, Guimard,
the very anatomy and spatial
character of architecture were
fundamentally transformed.

Their forms were usually tightly
constrained by functional discipline

Also by a Rationalist tendency to
express structure and material

Furthermore, each artist in his own
way attempted to embody a social
vision and to enhance the
institution for which he built
Antonio Gaudi

Similar points can be made

for the Catalan architect
Antonio Gaudi

His achievements seems to
have sprung from two
rather antithetical impulses,
 The desire to revive
indigenous architecture &,
 The compulsion to create
totally new forms of
expression

Born in 1852

Earliest work date from
1870s

They indicate his reaction
against the prevalent Neo-
gothic

Inspiration for his early
designs are clearly
medieval

Immediately after his graduation he
had been involved with the Mataro
Workers’ co-operative, who
commissioned him to design a
workers settlement comprising
houses, a community structure and a
workshop—of which only the last was
built in 1878.

Gaudi began to work for the
bourgeoisie, building the exotic Casa
Vicens in a quasi-Moorish style in
1878.

In Casa Vicens Gaudi first formulated
the essence of his style

Which while Gothic in structural
principle was Mediterranean
Palau Guell, Barcelona

AS Casa Vicens had been built

around a conservatory, so the
Palau Guell was built around a
music room, an organ loft and
chapel

The interiors were transformed into
spaces of an almost ecclesiastical
character

The façade were elaborately
ornamented with wave-like
ironwork

This preceding Horta’s experiment
by a few years

Gaudi’s style, like Guimard’s was
in part an abstraction of medieval
form
Interior Palau Guell
Casa Mila, Barcelona

1905-10

Swirling curve façade

Even interior spaces and the
plan –curve

The elevation in is in constant
motion

Sophisticated ornamentation
and stone-cutting

Contrived texture of the ledges
give impression of gradual
errosion
 Deep-
Deep-cut, overlapping ledges
Elevation constant motion

Casa Mila, Barcelona


As in the Park Guell, the
articulation of the structure has
been sacrificed to the evocation
of some primal force

Nothing could have been further
from Violett-le-Duc

For neither the fabric nor its
mode of assembly was explicitly
rendered

Departing from the principles of
Violett-le-Duc, Gaudi finally
transformed his ideas to
powerful images.
Curved buttresses textured with
scales suggest the form of some
trees or some natural origin of The main terrace is
gothic flying buttresses supported by a
hypostyle hall

Hollow concrete columns with

drains running through their
cores

Beast like benches embedded with

fragments of colored tile mark off
the edge of stepped terraces-
terraces-these
offering views over the city
Problems-Art Nouveau

One of the complaints was

that its proposition relied
too completely on a
subjective approach

They were not geared
sufficiently to the ideal of
designing types for
standardized mass
production
Charles Rennie
Mackintosh

Mackintosh is important because of
the imaginative force of his own
design

Particularly the Glasgow School of
Art

He is also important because his
development encapsulated the
path beyond Art Nouveau.

This led towards a more sober
form of expression

In this broad dispositions of simple
masses and sequence of dynamic
spaces was stressed.

His style emerged independently of
Horta’s but from loosely similar
sources and concerns

In 1897 he won a competition to
design the new School of Art in
Glasgow
School of Art in
Glasgow

Stands on an almost impossible

slope

Two tiers of studios along north
side

Modeling room, the architecture
school, and the design and
composition room facing east
and west director’s room and
studio were placed over the
entrance

Museum was set to the rear of
the scheme

The richness of scheme arose from
the sequence of room of different
sizes

From the orchestration of different
qualities of light

And from the clever overlapping of
down the slope in section

And also from the way the stairs,
corridors, and display rooms were
modeled as if from a continuous
volume of space

Windows, walls, chimneys, steel
brackets and other functional
elements were handled with
uncompromised directness.

There is a tense interplay between
solid and void, mass and plane
 Direct handling of glass and metal—
metal—frank
evocation of industrial technology

Ironwork on the exterior, in the

railing and in the cleaning
brackets on the main window

Entrance
emphasized by a
cluster of motifs
and an arch
Chiseled abstract shapes

Austere vertical windows on the

outside—
outside—supplemented by rectangular
brackets in the interior of reading room

Later became centre for

modern movement

Glasgow School of art, interior of library

 Otto Wagner

In 1895 Wagner published
Moderne Architektur

In this he spoke of the need for
architecture to orient itself to
‘modern life’

He argued that the new style
should be a ‘realist’ one

Which seems to have implied a
direct expression of the means of
construction;

An admiration for modern
techniques and material

And responsive to the changing
aspirations of the society

He insisted that ‘new purpose
should give birth to new methods
of construction, and by this
reasoning new forms’
Vienna Post Office
Savings Bank

1904-06

We enter an entirely different world
from that of Art Nouveau

A world in which nuts and bolts
rationality, and a stable and dignified
order have replaced the dynamic
tendrils and curvaceous effects

Wagner has invoked and subverted
norms of monumentality in his solution

Façades themselves were covered
with thin marble sheets with bolt-
heads expressed and dramatized by
shiny aluminum caps

The ‘modernity’ of Wagner’s solution
relied upon the freshness and
luminosity of his institutional
interpretations and his radical
reinterpretation of pre-existing norms
for public architecture
 Bathed with natural light

Slender metallic columns

of the entrance canopy

Vienna Post Office Savings Bank

 Josef Hoffmann

Balanced but
asymmetrical
Protruding volumes in
facade

Stepped stair-
stair-
tower ---main
---main
emphasis

Bow
windows

Palais Stoclet, Brussels 1905-11

Adolph Loos

Moved towards rectilinear and

volumetric simplification which was
even more drastic than Hoffman

He admired simplicity and
directness of peasant architecture
and even of modern architecture

He declared ‘to seek beauty only in
form and not in ornament is the
goal to which all humanity is
striving’

In his few house designs of that
period he reduced the external
vocabulary to rectangular stucco
boxes punctured by simple
openings

Without even the reminiscence of a
cornice or a plinth.
 Plan elevation
Effect relied on the adroit placement of large plate-
plate-glass
window in undercoated planar surface

Steiner House in Vienna

 Modern Architecture

The notion of a ‘modern architecture’ was

rooted in developments of the late
eighteenth century.

The very conception of ‘modern
architecture’ implied a frank engagement
with the new social and technological
realities brought about by industrialization.

Its very notion contradicted traditional
views of design which relied upon an overt
use of past models in the genesis of forms.

It also implied that the rejection of
superficial imitation of past forms, and a
more ‘direct’ and ‘honest’ portrayal of the
contemporary world

‘Modern Architecture was a ‘direct’
expression of function and structure.
 The Advent…

The historical process which led to the
creation of the modern movement had no
clear beginning which can be pinpointed
with precision. There were a number of
predisposing causes and strands of ideas,
each with its own pedigree.

The critical synthesis began the turn of the
century.

It followed that revivals should be regarded
as failures to establish a true expression.

There was a loss of confidence in the
renaissance tradition and the theories
which had supported it—this led to the birth
of progressive ideals

A split of sorts was created between
engineering and architecture, with the
former often appearing more inventive and
responsive to contemporary needs.

Another major force in the creation of the ideas of
modern architecture was the Industrial
Revolution.

It created new patrons, generated new problems,
supplied new methods of construction (e.g. in iron),
and suggested new forms.

Industrialization transformed the very pattern of life
in country and city

It led to the proliferation of new building task—
railways stations, suburban houses, skyscrapers—
for which there was no obvious convention or
precedent.

Industrialization also disrupted the world of crafts
and hastened the collapse of vernacular traditions.

Local vernaculars were gradually invaded by
standardized system in iron, glass and steel- this in
the end of the nineteenth century.

Industrialization also created new economic
structures and centers of power. Where the
patronage of architecture in the eighteenth-
century Europe had relied principally on the
Church, the state, and the aristocracy, it
came increasingly to rely on the wealth and
purposes of the new middle classes.

A major theme of modern architecture in the
early twentieth century would be the reform
of the materialistic city, and its replacement
by a supposedly more humane and
harmonic order enriched through contact
with ‘nature’.

With new materials came new ideas and
beliefs which finally led us to a distinct
period called ‘Modern’.

It was different from Art Nouveau, different
from Rationalism. although these played a
role in getting us today where we are in
architecture