Word: functionalistic
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Relinquished by Gropius in 1928, the Bauhaus was directed successively by Functionalist Hannes Meyer and by Mies van der Rohe, a German architect famed for the elegance he has added to functionalism. In 1932 the school in Dessau had to be closed because an unfriendly Nazi Government would no longer support it. By that time, however, the designs of Bauhaus workmen had permeated German industry, their liberated minds had produced two sound inventions now familiar in Europe and the U. S.: indirect lighting, tubular furniture...
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., treats of the work of H. H. Richardson, the architect of Sever and Austin Halls here, and considers the skyscraper as one of our distinctive contributions to world-culture. Often Mr. Hitchcock sounds like Ruskin or Lewis Mumford, as when he speaks as a "functionalist": "The new Classical buildings at Washington, the new Gothic or Georgian buildings at the leading universities . . offer no new picture beyond that of the intentions of the nineties. All are splendid, expensive, and meaningless...
...Sever and Austin Halls in Cambridge, and of Trinity Church in Boston, "created almost single-handed out of a confusion which was actually worse than a mere void the beginnings of a new architecture. . . . In the fenestration of Austin Hall at Harvard (1881), he established the standards of a functionalist architecture." John Wellborn Root and Louis Sullivan, destined to play an important part in the further development of functionalism, were influenced by Richardson in his maturity. Their contributions to architecture are also outlined by the author...