Word: functionalists
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Since then, bobbing up. for the third time, Frank Lloyd Wright has done per-haps his most amazing work. In 1929 he designed for Manhattan an apartment house of concrete, steel and glass more radical and inventive than any even proposed in functionalist Europe. This and a grander design for a desert resort in Arizona were kept off the ground by Depression. Wright's desert camp of canvas and boxwood, built by his apprentices in 1929, stands as one of his most brilliant pieces of geometrical design. Still ignored by conventional architects, never invited to take part...
That buildings should look like what they are meant to be is an architectural first principle whose modernistic practice is currently labeled "functionalism." The same label can be applied to the literary practice of certain contemporary poets whose poems, like "functionalist" buildings, are constructed with a marked weather eye on the modern living conditions they are meant to reflect or relieve. As distinct from the Symbolist, Surrealist, Imagist or Metaphysical poets, who seem to borrow from Music, Psychology, Painting and Mathematical Physics their respective poetic first principles, these poets seem to borrow theirs from the demotic art of Architecture. Most...
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...