History lesson: Colin Davies readdresses the architectural canon
There’s a new authority on the history of architecture: Laurence King Publishing has released A New History of Modern Architecture by Colin Davies, architect and former editor of The Architects’ Journal, a hefty yet accessible tome that readdresses the canon of 20th- and 21st-century architecture. Visual and approachable, with 800 illustrations, the book corrects the fetishisation of European Modernism and reapportions credit elsewhere across the globe with chapters on the American skyscraper and Chinese modern architecture amongst other international styles and forms.
Barcelona, Spain
The crypt of the church of Colònia Güell, Barcelona, Spain designed by Antoni Gaudí, 1898-. Leaning columns and a twisted net of vault ribs create an interior like a gutted animal carcass. A New Modern History of Architecture names Catalan architect Gaudí as Art Nouveau’s chief representative in the Iberian peninsula. Drawing influence from Gothic and the Chistian-Islamic Mudejar architecture of Spain, ’His was the wildest and most fertile architectural imagination of the era’.
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / Jordiphotography
Dhaka, Bangladesh
The president of Pakistan, Ayub Khan, commissioned architect Louis Kahn to build the National Capital complex at Dhaka. At the heart of the plan, the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, which became the symbolic heart of the independent nation of Bangladesh. The symmetrical, octogonal-shaped building sits overlooking a V-shaped artificial lake, with a reflection evoking 17th-century Mughal architecture.
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / Bernard O’Kane
New York City, USA
The AT&T building, an office in Manhattan for the telecommunications giant, marks Philip Johnson’s decisive conversion to postmodernism. With 37 storeys, the building is mostly clad in glass, but the top and bottom of the monolith is ‘carved away in simple geometrical shapes’: ‘Johnson’s postmodernist statement, like those of (Michael) Graves and (Charles) Moore, was made with very simple means, as if all the modernist raging against traditional ornament had been unnecessary.’
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / Arcaid Images
New York City, US
Apparently a simple monolith but actually T-shaped on plan with a five-storey block behind, the Seagram Building marks Mies van der Rohe’s ‘triumphant architectural entrance into the city of New York’. The book describes the building, that was built in 1958, as a descendant of the Lake Shore Drive apartments but one raised to a new level of quality and refinement.
Photography: Getty images/Ullstein Bild
Sydney, Australia
Built between 1959 and 1973, the Sydney Opera House has sail-like shells that successfully match the scale of the Harbour Bridge (built in the 1930s). Designed in the late 1950s by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, the building has become a symbol for the whole city – and the whole country, representing the cultural success of the nation. It is located on Bennelong Point, a narrow peninsula that faces the full length of the bridge.
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / Anthony Burns
Tampere, Finland
Designed by Lans Sonck in 1899 and built in 1907, Tampere Cathedral has a huge vaulted nave that has no precedent in Finnish vernacular architecture. The cathedral, formerly known as St Johns church when it was built, is a ‘picturesque, asymmetricl composition of spire and steep stone gables clustered around a roughly square, vaulted hall with galleries all round to accomodate the large Lutheran congregation’. The hall was a feature associated with the ‘National Romantic’ movement.
Photography: Alamy Stock Photos / Jan Sandvik Editorial
Chandigarh, India
Le Corbusier designed the master plan for Chandigarh. In 2016, the Capitol Complex was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. Le Corbusier’s plan, which was developed from original plans designed by architect Maciej Nowicki and planner Albert Mayer in the 1950s, featured wide boulevards, a rectilinear plan and was inspired by the Unité d’Habitation concept.
Xi’an, China
A scholarly interpretation of Tang dynasty architecture by student of Liang Sicheng, architect Zhang Jinqiu, the Shaanxi History Museum was built in 1991. She also designed Bell and Drum Tower Plaza in Xi’an which integrates two Ming dynasty structures with a new park on the roof of an underground shopping centre.
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / Dorling Kindersley Ltd
Leipzig, Germany
An assembly line carrying car bodies travels through the office wing of the BMW Central Building that, completed in 2005, is a functioning part of an advanced manufacturing operation. It was the project that ‘confirmed Zaha Hadid’s graduation from project maker to real-world builder’.
Photography: Zaha Hadid Architects/photo Helene Binet
Pennsylvania, USA
In 1934 architect Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned by department store magnate Edgar J Kaufmann to design a weekend retreat in the woods of westen Pennsylvania. ‘History has decided that it is one of the greatest houses of the 20th century,’ reads Davies’ Modern History of Architecture: ‘It was if Wright stole all the drama of European Modernism – the fantasy projects of the Constructivists or the painterly assemblages of De Stijl – and heightened it with a new, American vigour.’
Photography: Alamy Stock Photos / Nick Higham
Agamy, Egypt
Egyptian architect Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil was born in 1943 and worked for architect Hassan Fathy in the late 1960s. Completed in 1975, his Halawa House won the Aga Khan award for Architecture and he later became known for mosque design in Saudi Arabia.
Photography: Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Christopher Little
Venice, Italy
Built in a boatyard in 1980, and towed across the lagoon to Venice, the Teatro del Mondo by Aldo Rossi appeared to be made of wood but was actually supported by a hidden frame of steel scaffolding. The auditorium and two galleries were held within the square tower, which was flanked by thinner, taller stair towers and crowned by an octagonal lanern with a steep pyramid roof: ‘Perhaps it was the deram-like quality of this building that made it memorable, the fact that, though monumental in profile, it floated and could not be relied on the stay in one place.’
Photography: Eredi Aldo Rossi
Prague, Czech Republic
The Fred and Ginger building or ‘Dancing House’ was built in 1996 and designed by Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry. Strongly influenced by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, Frank Gehry has ‘always been alert to the surreal potential of large objects in city streets’.
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / Profimedia.
Shanghai, China
Standing side by side the Jin Mao Tower designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill in 1999 and Shanghai World Financial Center designed by Kohn Pederson Fox in 2008 show ‘two big American architectural practices with different ideas about the appropriate form for a Chinese skyscraper’.
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / acppix_shanghai
Guangzhou, China
Completed in 2010, the Guangzhou Opera House looks externally like ‘a couple of rounded, river-worn pebbles of glass and granite’ – yet inside the building contains conventionally shaped theatres. This building is reflective of Zaha Hadid’s ‘mature style’.
Photography: Zaha Hadid Architects/photo Hufton + Crow
Beijing, China
Built in 2008, Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s CCTV building ‘owes allegiance to no recognisable architectural tradition’. The book describes it as ‘curiously scaleless’. ‘Its looped form, like a clunky Moebius strip, suggests a connectedness and continuity quite different from the simple layered stack of the conventional skyscraper’.
Photography: Colin Davies
Yokohama, Japan
This project presents building as landscape – the interior and exterior are one folded and flowing space. Completed in 2002 by Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, known as Foreign Office Architects, the terminal ‘looks more like a site for a building than the building itself’. ‘There is no uprightness, no columns, no beams, only an artificial landscape of hillocks and caves formed by a folded steel plate structure.’
Photography: Alamy Stock Photo / View Pictures Ltd
Beijing, China
The enveloping dome sits in the middle of an artificial lake behind the Great Hall of the People in Bejing. Built in 2007, French architect Paul Andreu worked with Tsinghua University on the design.
Photography: Colin Davies