Modern Architecture Since 1900

by William J.R. Curtis

Since its first publication in 1982, Modern Architecture Since 1900 has become established as a contemporary classic. Worldwide in scope, it combines a clear historical outline with masterly analysis and interpretation. Technical, economic, social and intellectual developments are brought together in a comprehensive narrative which provides a setting for the detailed examination of buildings. Throughout the book the author's focus is on the individual architect, and on the qualities that give outstanding buildings their lasting value.

For the third edition, the text has been radically revised and expanded, incorporating much new material and a fresh appreciation of regional identity and variety. Seven chapters are entirely new, including expanded coverage of recent world architecture.

Described by James Ackerman of Harvard University as "immeasurably the finest work covering this field in existence", this book presents a penetrating analysis of the modern tradition and its origins, tracing the creative interaction between old and new that has generated such an astonishing richness of architectural forms across the world and throughout the century.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Art, History, Reference, Design, Art History

736 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 1982

About the author

William J. R. Curtis is an architectural historian whose writings have focused on twentieth century architecture. Curtis seems particularly interested in broadening the "canon" to include a wider range of architects working across the world.
Curtis was educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (First Class Honors, 1970), and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1975). He has taught history and theory of architecture in the United States, Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Curtis's most important work is Modern Architecture Since 1900, first published in 1982, and now in its third edition (1996). This book won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 1984. The third edition was awarded the architecture book prize of the American Institute of Architects in 1997. In 2006 the Museum of Finnish Architecture awarded Curtis its Commemoration Medal of Foundation on the occasion of the Museum's 50th Anniversary.
Curtis currently lives in southwestern France.

Reviews

[PJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

My brother thinks I'm a complete nerd for reading a 700-page textbook for pleasure. But I wanted to learn more about modern architecture and my search for the perfect book on the subject brought me to this tome. If you're interested in 20th century architecture, this book is a great place to start. The development of architectural styles is traced, and several architects (Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn) and major works (Unite d'Habitation, National Assembly Building at Dacca) are studied in detail. The focus is largely western, which is the book's main weakness, but despite this you will learn a lot from this book.

[Rynell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of my husband's architecture textbooks that I snatched away from him and read. I loved learning more about architecture, specifically modern architecture.

How can anyone read this and still want a cookie cutter mini McMansion?

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe this to be the most comprehensive of tomes covering "Modern Architecture." More so than the "critical" Frampton, socialist Benevolo, and the neo-Marxist-nihilist- whatever-the-Hell Tafuri and Dal Co, Curtis simply writes about the buildings, thus purging out all but the most relevant social/economical/political aspects that may have strongly influenced a building or movement. Something like Clement Greenburg's approach to art, he mainly evaluates a building on it's own merits as "architecture." I found this refreshing and I also appreciated the much wider net cast by Curtis (modern architecture in Johannesburg? get out!). Everyone should have this one.

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

240913: amazed that I had not put this on- to the extent I know modern architecture, this is a key work, this is more summary than schools of works, and truly found the earlier years around the world wars more engaging, certainly reminds me of my youthful desire to be an architect, this and my mother's father being one... and, once when very young, looking at an old engineering magazine article he had, about Utzon's Sydney Opera House...

[Zepp · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new way (for me, at least) to see, incorporate, the constructed world. With no patience for pastiche, this is an almost religious treatise on how to live a quality life, as expressed by walls and planes and vistas. I love my little bungalow more than ever, even though it would never make it into a 'textbook' of this sort (compellingly readable, even so)
And, I kind of want to go to Tunisia.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

First ever book I've read on architecture. It was much more engaging than I expected. These people are true artists. Many were painters etc. before they chose architecture as a mode of expression. If you want to know the history of modern art through architecture or art in general, this book delivers. I learned so much and was truly inspired. Highly recommended.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent and concise survey of modern architecture, with the particular advantage that it offers a more global view than most books of this type. it sits on my desk and gets used more than one would think.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Text book that I love now that I'm not required to read it. :-)

[Yahya Nourian · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتابی سخت‌خوان اما مهم

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a weighty tome that excavates our everyday materiality - the architecture of our world - in a quest for its historical and intellectual roots. The first line of attack in this task, therefore, is the defamiliarization of our commonplace built environment by revealing its contingency.

The author details the ideological debates that proliferated midst the ending of the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th - a crucial period in the history of architecture. This was an epoch subject to the subterranean epiphany that the resources of past architecture no longer spoke to a world in turmoil, and, in so drawing upon these resources, could only risk pastiche; yet, the path forward was intangible, undefined, and beset by the clamor of competing aesthetic visions.

Complicating this task of a 'new architecture' was the ambiguous afterglow of the Industrial Revolution - the advent of reinforced concrete, for example, undermined any reversion to classic forms of architecture as being both aesthetically and technologically redundant. Gone was the structural necessity for load-bearing walls; and with it, the concomitant coupling with heavy facades and ponderous buildings. The Gothic inheritance of European architecture was suddenly put on trial.

Other technological blessings included the efficient, reproducible manufacture of high-quality steel - the strength and malleability of this material heralded flexibility in construction; open-floor plans, for example.

This is only to say that the task the early ideologues of a modern architecture faced was a squaring of the circle viz. the abstraction of a genuine aesthetic from the anonymizing plethora of plenty.

Much like the stunned generation of economists post Smithian optimism, the first modern movement that attempted to bridge the gap between industrial production and a rapidly receding aesthetic value was Art Nouveau. Appalled by the destruction of a more intimate producer-consumer nexus, Art Nouveau sprang from the Arts and Crafts Movement, and attempted to re-insert subjectivism into a landscape dominated by an increasingly brute mass production. Flowing lines and organic motifs characterized the movement unto its decline, as more profound thinkers attempted to transcend a mere subjectivist reaction.

Modern architecture therefore clambers onto a recognizably modern theoretical footing, when the past is interrogated as to immutable principles of order, harmony and proportion; this marriage between these retrievable principles, and their re-materialization amidst a new technological epoch, characterizes the history of modern architecture.

While the book pays careful homage to a wide variety of architects, the author returns again and again to two individuals who he justifiably argues are the main figures of modern architecture ; Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. These two artists appropriated and made their own, the dual challenge of modern architecture - the reconceptualization of classical architectural principles in an industrial age, as well as a sensitivity to the dilemma of eliciting a spiritual resonance in said industrial age.

Wright's mastery of the new, advanced construction methods, allowed far greater scope for the fundamental value of proportion - his innovative usage of cantilevering characterized his subtle, dignified rectangular buildings with their long, low-slung eaves; and which owed not a little debt to the haunting silence of traditional Japanese temple architecture. Wright also represents the first, authentic rooting of the modern architectural ethos in his native landscape - the so-called 'prairie school' of architecture.

Corbusier, on the other hand, is unabashedly part of the European avant-garde, more ruthlessly formal - an artist who owed as much to the Cubist revolution in the visual arts, as he did to previous architectural epochs, and whose productions shared the same uncanny effect as a Picasso painting, with their sly juxtapositions of geometrical figures.

These two architects function as anchoring principles, as the author demonstrates how a recognizably modern architecture coalesced from a diverse set of competing intellectual and aesthetic visions ; and how, from this coalescing in Western Europe, the new architecture migrated piecemeal to America, Scandinavia, Russia and Japan - with each successive importation accompanied with the appropriate amount of hand-wringing and resigned modification of the new ethos.

A point that repeatedly surfaces is the insight that thinking in architecture did not operate in a vacuum, but was caught up in a dialectical exchange with other disciplines - particularly that of modern art, and politics. Le Corbusier was as much a painter as he was an architect, being profoundly influenced by the revolution in perspective afforded by the likes of Picasso and Metzinger. The juxtaposed blocks of primary colors in the work of Mondrian, to use another example mentioned in the book, influenced the De Stijl movement in Holland - with the striking Schroeder house being a prominent example.

Politics influences architectural thinking in the modern era in several ways - the deep fissure between the competing schools of formalism and functionalism being one example. With the urbanization attendant upon the Industrial Revolution, a vein of thinking arose insisting that buildings should be designed for function, and nothing more. This strain of democratic minimalism - functionalism, in other words - was most eagerly taken up in the new Soviet Union, and was in opposition to the formalist school that had sprung from a long line of classical architectural theory and which was equally eagerly characterized as decadently reactionary. In a non-socialist context, functionalism received its archetypal modern manifestation in the Bauhaus school, with their stark, strangely beautiful, utilitarian buildings, chairs and typefaces. Here too, however, developments in politics influence the development in architecture, as the Bauhaus movement is criticized by the nascent right-wing, as being insufficiently German.

This is a point that the author wryly notes - he admits quite freely that the modern architecture that drapes our world today was very much a product of the avant-garde, a carefully cultivated intellectual elite operating in Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the US, as well as Russia. A decent portion of the book is given over to the understandable pushback against this alien new architecture.

A theme from the latter half of the book is that every revolution is eventually commoditized - this is most apparent in the eventual ubiquity of the skyscraper. Mies' sleek functionalism was allied with a stunning engineering ingenuity to produce buildings that had never been seen before in the history of the world. It served as a poignant tribute to the nobility of the merchant class - but eventually, the skyscraper became taller and taller and increasingly bereft of aesthetic value and it is in this form that it is exported around the underdeveloped world as a neutralized heuristic of 'Western' progress. Consequently, there is some treatment of heterodox architects from peripheral regions of the world, who seek to modify a received architecture, or, in a similar spirit, seek to revive traditional architectures in a manner commensurate with a new milieu.

There is a substratum of theorizing regarding urban planning, most prominently by Le Corbusier, that surfaces occasionally throughout the course of text.

In conclusion, this was a very impressive tour-de-force of intellectual delineation - it is all too easy to ignore the built environment we all live in, as we live our lives. The author does an excellent job of defamiliarizing the given nature of this environment, to show how many of the archetypal buildings we spend most of our lives in, was not a product of organic growth, nor did they simply just happen. Rather, they are the product of intensive theorizing regarding the function and nature of architecture in a qualitatively different age for human civilization.

The writing is crisp and knowledgable, and there are several beautiful pictures of notable buildings. The chapters on Le Corbusier are an obvious highlight.

[Bohemothe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would recommend to anyone seeking a reasonably solid overlook at architectural movements and styles from the past 100 odd years. Flaws begin to show within the analysis of more recent architects and buildings from the past 20 years, as well as the conclusion including one of the worst sign-offs I've ever experienced in any genre. Being as late 80s/early 90s architecture is merely a footnote within the architectural tradition, it's a great read.

86.54/100.00

[Pierpaolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il migliore

[Doris Raines · Rating 2 out of 5]

NICE BOOK, LOTS TO READ.

[TyTy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lit, Fire, Dab

[Claire Harmon]

Super dry (because it's a textbook) but comprehensive look at the modernist movement. I really enjoyed the class I had to read this for, but I'm so glad I'm done with it.

[Julia]

*read for university

[Kemet]

Read for a modern architecture class at NYU

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glad I read it, glad it’s done

[Nicole Deakin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is good to get to grips with some important ideas and precedents of modern architecture BUT it has one major problem that comes up especially when studying post-colonialism in architecture history and theory. As mentioned in the book " Bhabha for Architects" (part of the Thinkers for Architects series). This book in the context of contemporary studies is very problematic.

William J. Curtis writes ‘By the end of 1950’s, transformations, deviations and devaluations of modern architecture had found their way to other areas of the world’ -in this case the author also stressed the fact that developing countries received modern architecture from Europe mainly via the work of Le Corbusier.

He also wrote "it was not until the 1940's and 1950's that modern forms had any appreciable impact on the 'less developed' countries, and these forms were usually lacking in the poetry and depth of meaning of the masterworks of the modern movement"

This, along with a few other quotes from the book implies that this select group of western architects had the mission to "illuminate" developing countries and put themselves in the position of superiority, while diminishing the architecture of the other countries.
Something to keep in mind while reading this...

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books, very well written.

[Juli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for people interested in architecture. Its a long and dense book that treats the subject well.
I didn't give it 5 stars because I think many times the author forgets that the book is made for the public to read, and write long sentences that sound fancy but have little to convey. Also I will prefer some more images as many times the text talks about specific details of the buildings that are hard to visualize.

[Kezia Paramita]

preety interesting... on my search right now.. cool cover

[Shraddha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent resource

[Daniel Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

full of information

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

very nice academic book, it's very important for student

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Direi un bel libro. Davvero esauriente, oggettivo e completo. Approfondito quanto serve, non divaga molto su cose inutili e bello anche da leggere, sembra quasi un romanzo.

[Moses · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent survey of modern architecture, more of a scholarly text than I was looking for. Black and white pictures in my edition.

[Imran Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

The absolute bible for any BA architecture student. Gives you a base required knowledge of all the great Modernists of design.

[Uaba · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a beautiful book. But it's so heavy I can't carry it to college.