As every year, World Architecture Day is celebrated on the first Monday of October. For the occasion, Domus has selected ten of the most famous works of the 20th century.
Ten 20th century architecture everyone should know
To celebrate World Architecture Day, we present a selection of iconic and unmissable works from the 20th century, from New York to Sydney, from Tokyo to São Paulo, from Mies van der Rohe to Zaha Hadid.
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- Chiara Testoni
- 07 October 2024
Photographed as celebrities, hailed by admirers or exposed to the screeches of detractors who, as it often happened in the past (and still happens), remain dumbfounded in front of a disruptive innovation, the works of the great masters of 20th-century architecture are still capable of thrilling and astonishing, remaining as vivid witnesses of the revolutionary thought of those who conceived them. It is no coincidence that these buildings are a pilgrimage destination for enthusiasts of the subject, from students grappling with the abc of architecture to scholars and professionals who undertake entire journeys to touch the work of genius, hoping to somehow absorb its intellectual sap, almost to be enlightened by it.
Similarly, sometimes it is not unusual for some to be indifferent, if not perplexed, in front of the seemingly inexplicable lines of visitors armed with every possible tool to immortalize the epiphanic architecture, most of all if that architecture appears as a jumble of cables or sheet metal, a mammoth concrete backdrop or a pile of fragments reassembled after a mysterious explosion. We curated a thorough selection of works that, despite the diversity of geographical and historical-cultural contexts, have written the history of architecture, paving the way for contemporary design thinking: from organic architecture (Kaufmann House, Sydney Opera House), to Modernism (Seagram Building), Brutalism (Unité d'Habitation, Torre Velasca, SESC Pompeia), Metabolism (Nagakin Capsule Tower), Deconstructivism (Vitra Fire Station, Guggenheim Bilbao) and High Tech (Centre Pompidou). With the intention of providing, even to those who are unfamiliar with the subject and regardless of their personal enjoyment of each single work, a key to decoding its reasons and language, and consciously placing it among the most relevant architectural masterpieces of all time.
Wright said that “if you listen to the sound of Fallingwater you hear the stillness of the countryside”. It is in this symbiotic relationship between artifice and nature that the genesis of the project, an undisputed masterpiece of organic architecture, is found. Nestled amidst the hills of Mill Run on the natural Bear Run waterfall, the house with its disruptive volumes clad in quarry stone recalling the stratification of the site's rocks, and the boldly projecting terraces, subtends a relentless search for a balance among mankind, technology and landscape.
The project was designed to meet the post-war housing needs of the population of Marseille. The 18-storey complex houses 1,600 dwellings in 337 duplex flats and is characterised by the widespread use of rough concrete. Despite its monumental dimensions, which suggest the idea of de-personalisation and disorientation, the project pays scrupulous attention to social spaces and public services: the school, library, kindergarten, hotel, terrace roof, swimming pool, supermarket, laundry and shops animate an autonomous and organised micro-world on pilotis.
An iconic symbol of Milanese urbanitas, the Torre Velasca represents the urge to rise again of a city devastated by war that looks to the future with a strong reference to the past. Made entirely of reinforced concrete with terracotta grit and Veronese pink marble finishes (which give the building a warm hue), it houses shops, offices and flats; its characteristic morphology is a tribute to the vertical city that was developing in the 1950s with a reference to the city's historical skyline, dotted with towers and bell towers, and in particular to the tower in the courtyard of Arms of the Castello Sforzesco.
The skyscraper, designed by Mies with the collaboration of Philip Johnson as the headquarters of the Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons Distillery, represents one of the highest examples of the perfect balance between form and function in architecture, as well as one of the main manifestos of the modern movement in its maturity. A structural steel skeleton, clad externally in bronze yet brought into view to denounce the constructive system, supports a smoked glass curtain wall and outlines elevations with a tight rhythm and composed elegance. A design scheme that has become a paradigm for many skyscrapers in the United States and around the world.
This mixed-use (residential and tertiary) complex is considered one of the most representative examples of the Japanese Metabolist movement, which saw the city and society as living organisms in continuous growth and transformation, to whose needs only technology could provide tangible answers. The intervention consisted of two interconnected on which 140 prefabricated, autonomous capsules could be plugged, each of them replaceable every 25 years. Severely degraded over the years, it was demolished due to the high costs for its renovation.
Considered to be one of the most famous architectures of the 20th century and an undisputed symbol of Sydney, the opera house, located in a privileged position in the bay, on a strip of land surrounded by the sea on three sides, consists of three bodies (the Concert hall for 2,600 seats, the Opera House and the restaurant) arranged on a granite platform. A characteristic element of the complex are the shell-like roofs, developed after extensive research and inspired by the segments of an orange, made of precast concrete ribs and covered with white tiles.
The Georges Pompidou National Centre of Art and Culture, also known as Beaubourg after the name of the district, is a multifunctional cultural centre that has become famous for completely subverting the canons of museum architecture, made up of ceremonial and representative spaces. A parallelepiped marked on the façade by a maze of staircases, with its structural elements and technical plants (pipes of different colours according to their function: blue for air conditioning, yellow for electricity, red for lifts and green for water circuits) brought to the outside, encloses flexible spaces and stands as a paradigm of a straightforward and efficient exhibition “machine”, or as a work of art irreverent to conventions.
The renovation and expansion of SESC Pompeia, for years a metal barrel factory, was part of a program of socio-economic regeneration of an area that was still semi-peripheral to the city at the time. The project (implemented since 1977 amid delays, stops and resumptions) envisaged to transform the industrial complex into a “citadel” of leisure and recreation and involved the renovation of the warehouses to house a theatre, a library, exhibition spaces, social spaces, and the construction of three new towers with different heights and volumes (one cylindrical and two prismatic) for different services, including sports and dance halls. The brutalist imprint of the new buildings is legible in the “muscular” exposed reinforced concrete volumes, enlivened by a touch of red in the irregular openings of the largest one.
Commissioned by Vitra as a fire-fighting facility for the company campus (after the fire of 1981), the building with its rough, sharp-edged volumes in exposed reinforced concrete, a manifesto of deconstructivism, looks like an artefact shattered and reassembled after a mysterious explosion of shapes. Today it houses the exhibition spaces and events of the Vitra Design Museum.
The museum of contemporary art, inaugurated as part of an ambitious revitalization process of the city of Bilbao and the province of Biscay undertaken by the public administration of the Basque Country, is a successful example of territorial marketing that, since its opening, has catalysed the interest of visitors from all over the world, becoming the symbol of the city. The spectacular volume, in which it is difficult to find a single flat surface, clad in titanium slabs and limestone blocks, seems to take on the shape of a ship when viewed from the river, of a flower when viewed from above, or more closely of an intricate bundle of metal sheets shining differently in the sun, depending on the observer's position.