Atlas Trail
Manifestos and Machines: Ten Modern Movements from Arts and Crafts to the Digital Curve
This path follows ten movements in the order they appeared, from a nineteenth century revolt against factory production to the computer aided curves of the 1990s and after. Each stop answers the question of what a building should be in a machine age, and the answers keep changing: honest handwork, expressive brick, visionary drawings, geometric planes, a teaching school, bare steel and glass, living megastructures and software shaped surfaces.
Stop 1 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Begin with the movement that set the terms. Inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris, Arts and Crafts architecture opposed factory production and favored local materials, visible craftsmanship and vernacular forms. Morris's own Red House is regarded as an early landmark.
Stop 2 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Brick becomes sculpture in Amsterdam from about 1910 to the early 1930s. The foundational building is the Scheepvaarthuis, completed in 1916 to a design by Johan van der Mey, and the same expressive vocabulary was carried into working class housing such as Michel de Klerk's Het Schip.
Stop 3 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Germany answers with concrete. Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam, designed between 1917 and 1920, carries the emotive distortion of Expressionist painting into built form, and it still works as a solar observatory.
Stop 4 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Italian Futurism is mostly a movement of drawings. Between 1912 and 1914 Antonio Sant'Elia sketched a mechanized New City, and the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture appeared in Lacerba in August 1914, though some historians dispute his sole authorship.
Stop 5 of 10.
Styles and Movements
De Stijl, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, reduces building to rectilinear planes and primary colors. Gerrit Rietveld's Schroder House in Utrecht, designed in 1924, is regarded as arguably the only true De Stijl building and was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.
Stop 6 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 on the belief that art, craft and design should not be separated. His Dessau campus, inaugurated on December 4, 1926, uses an asymmetric pinwheel plan so that the school's own architecture reflects its teaching.
Stop 7 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe distilled the steel and glass vocabulary into the phrase less is more. The Farnsworth House of 1951 and the Seagram Building of 1958, built with Philip Johnson, are the style's two most cited statements.
Stop 8 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Postwar Japan imagines buildings as living systems. Metabolism fused megastructures with ideas of organic growth, and Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo attached replaceable pods to a central core. Its largest body of built work stands at the 1970 Osaka exposition.
Stop 9 of 10.
Styles and Movements
Software changes what can be drawn. Blobitecture names the rounded, amoeba like buildings made possible by computer modeling in the 1990s; the word first appeared in print in 2002. Selfridges in Birmingham and the Kunsthaus Graz, both completed in 2003, are built examples.
Stop 10 of 10.
Styles and Movements
The path ends by returning to its fourth stop. Neo-Futurism revisits Futurist machine age imagery with digital design, so the sweeping forms Sant'Elia could only draw are now built at full scale, notably in the work of Zaha Hadid and her firm.
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