Modernism and after

The twentieth century is the period where most people’s dating instinct collapses. Everything after about 1930 looks, at a glance, like “modern”, and the vocabulary that gets used — Bauhaus, Brutalist, Art Deco — is applied almost at random. In fact the century divides cleanly, and the divisions are visible from the pavement. The question to ask at each stage is simple: what is this building showing you, and what is it hiding?

The International Style: hiding everything

Inter-war Modernism wanted architecture cleansed of history. Le Corbusier codified it as the five points of a new architecture, all made possible by the reinforced-concrete frame taking the load off the walls:

1. Pilotis — the block lifted clear of the ground on slender columns.
2. The free plan — internal partitions can go anywhere, because they carry nothing.
3. The free façade — the outer skin likewise carries nothing, so it can be opened at will.
4. The ribbon window — a long horizontal strip of glazing, which can even turn the corner.
5. The roof garden — the flat roof reclaimed as a terrace.

The Villa Savoye, Poissy (1928–31) does all five at once and is the single most useful image to hold.

The label came later: Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson coined International Style for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 architecture exhibition, describing work that was rectilinear, undecorated, asymmetrical and usually white. The visible tells are easy. Flat roof with no cornice or eaves overhang. Smooth white render, or later glass and metal. No mouldings, no applied ornament of any kind, no visible pitch. Windows in horizontal bands, frequently metal-framed and continuous round a corner — a giveaway, because a load-bearing wall cannot be cut away at a corner. Asymmetric massing. Slim pipe or box columns.

In Germany, Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus at Dessau (1925–26) hung a glass curtain wall in front of the structure and splayed its wings by function. “Bauhaus” was a school, not a style; used as a style word it just means white, flat-roofed inter-war Modernism. Mies van der Rohe carried the idea to America and refined it to a taut skin of glass and dark metal: the Seagram Building, New York (1954–58) is the definitive corporate version, its bronze I-beams applied to the façade to express a frame they do not carry.

Brutalism: showing the material

After 1950 the mood hardens. Brutalism takes its name from béton brut, raw concrete, and from Le Corbusier’s own turn at the Unité d’Habitation, Marseille (1947–52), where he left the concrete rough as it came from its timber moulds. Where International Style Modernism was smooth, light and floating, Brutalism is heavy, shadowed and emphatically made of something.

What to look for:

• Board-marking. Concrete poured in situ against timber shuttering keeps the grain and the board joints printed on its face. Later British work — the Barbican — instead pick-hammers the surface to break it open and expose the aggregate.
• Mass. Deep recesses, thick parapets, heavy projecting balconies, strong shadow.
• Expressed structure and circulation. Lift shafts, stair towers, service ducts and walkways are pulled out and made into form, not tucked away.
• Modular repetition. The same cell repeated hundreds of times, visibly.
• Raised decks and bridges instead of streets, an idea the post-war planners loved.
• No applied finish. The material is the decoration.

The British set: the Barbican (Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, designed from 1955, completed 1982), the National Theatre (Denys Lasdun, 1976) with its stacked board-marked terraces, and Trellick Tower (Ernő Goldfinger, 1972), whose slim service tower stands detached from the flats and connects by bridges every third floor.

The confusion worth fixing

Not every concrete building is Brutalist. Most post-war offices, car parks and colleges have a concrete frame, and many are clad in mosaic tile, panels or glass, or rendered smooth. A thin clad frame with strip windows is commercial Modernism. Brutalism requires the concrete to be raw, visible and massive, and to be doing the composing.

High-Tech: showing the machinery

By the 1970s a British strand takes the logic of expression further and makes it elegant. High-Tech moves structure, lifts, staircases and ducts to the outside of the building, leaving the interior a clear flexible floor, and treats the resulting machinery as the architecture. The Centre Pompidou, Paris (Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, 1977) colour-codes its external services; Lloyd’s of London (Rogers, 1986) does it in stainless steel; Norman Foster’s HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong (1985) hangs its floors from external masts.

Distinguishing it from Brutalism is a question of material and weight: Brutalism expresses mass in concrete, High-Tech expresses tension and precision in steel and glass. If the exposed thing is a duct in bright paint, it is High-Tech. If it is a stair tower in rough grey concrete, it is Brutalist.

Postmodernism: showing the quotation marks

The reaction arrives around 1980. Postmodernism rejects the idea that ornament and history are forbidden, and brings them back knowingly: a pediment at the wrong scale, a column of the wrong material carrying nothing, a colour scheme a Modernist would have considered indecent. Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, New York (1984) put a broken classical pediment like a Chippendale cabinet on top of a tower. James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1984) sets travertine and sandstone drums against lurid green and pink steel handrails.

The tells: historical motifs deliberately mis-scaled or mis-coloured; polished stone and mirror glass; strong applied colour; gables, arches and keystones attached to an otherwise Modernist frame; a playful, ironic silhouette. Note the difference from Victorian revivalism — a Victorian Gothic architect believed in Gothic, while a Postmodernist is making a point about belief.

Contemporary and parametric

From about 2000, computers change what can be drawn and, crucially, what can be manufactured. Parametric design generates form from rules rather than from drawn elevations, and computer-controlled fabrication lets every cladding panel be a different shape at little extra cost. The result is a continuously curving envelope with no repeating bay and no flat wall: Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre, Baku (2012), or the London Aquatics Centre (2011).

That is the dating clue. Earlier architects built curves, but from a single repeated geometry — a dome, a shell, a cylinder. Thousands of unique panels mean digital fabrication, and therefore the twenty-first century.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is there ornament? None at all points to Modernism or Brutalism; knowing, mis-scaled ornament points to Postmodernism.
2. Flat roof, white render, ribbon windows turning the corner? International Style, 1920s–50s.
3. Is the building lifted on columns with open ground beneath? Pilotis — Corbusian Modernism or its descendants.
4. Is the concrete visible and rough? Look for board-marks or hammered aggregate. That is Brutalism; smooth or clad concrete is not.
5. Massive with deep shadow, or thin and floating? Mass says post-1955; thin planes say inter-war.
6. Are the services outside? In rough concrete towers, Brutalist; in painted or steel pipework, High-Tech, 1970s onward.
7. Glass skin with expressed metal mullions and a plaza? Corporate Mies-descended Modernism, 1950s–70s.
8. Any pediment, keystone or column that carries nothing, in pink granite or bright paint? Postmodernism, roughly 1978–95.
9. Does any panel repeat? If no two are alike and the surface never flattens, it is parametric, so post-2000.
10. Finally, check the windows. Metal strips say early Modernism; small deep recesses say Brutalism; full-height frameless glass says late twentieth century or later.