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The 20th century is indelibly marked by the new vision realized by modern art. This vision is no doubt a response to the success of material science, but it is also a cultural phenomenon, an invention that helps us adjust to the new and often daunting horizons that science and technology have opened up. Architecture has benefited as much from that new artistic vision as it has from directly adopting new technology, and the invention of abstract art is one of the important strands of this development.

 

Abstract art is a product of modern times. It can be seen to follow from the loss of conviction sustained by the ancient view of art as imitation, or mimesis, that is, representing the visible world and placing humanity into a visible narrative. To say that photography supplanted representational art would be to oversimplify the story, but it certainly played a part, and throughout the 19th century one can trace the steps by which another standard gradually took the place of the time-honored one. In British Romantic painter J.M.W.Turner’s tumultuous landscapes and in the Impressionist Claude Monet’s freely composed water lilies, we see a progression in which more and more weight is given to the artist’s feelings in front of the motif, or the subject. It is through personal selection that the artist abstracts the aspects that he or she desires to emphasize and out of them constructs the composition, no longer bound by verisimilitude. Abstract art thus has two principle components: abstraction and expression.

 

It was perhaps the fin-de-siècle French painter Paul Cézanne who brought the movement to its point of precipitation since it was largely he who substituted the actual vertical plane of the canvas for the virtual horizontal plane of Renaissance perspective. His painting of a curve in the road creates a feeling about the road disappearing from view, not through perspective but by the multiple relations invented in a flat composition (Turn in the Road, 1882, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts). Equally, it was Vincent van Gogh who painted with swirling pigment what he felt rather than what he saw. By 1907 the promptings of popular science were suggesting that physical reality must be quite different from appearance, the search was on for the “fourth dimension,” and the time was ripe for the invention of Cubism. Analytical Cubism allowed the artist to give a metaphysically complex visual account of the subject, and Synthetic Cubism introduced fragmented material from the world (newsprint, textiles, paper, string) into the picture plane, or the artist’s composition. During World War I, abstraction progressed toward the sublime purism of Piet Mondrian’s gridded, neoplasticist compositions and the ineffable weightless rectangles of Kasimir Malevich, who opened a perspective with Russian Suprematism that reaches through to the end of the century in the language of abstract planes used by architects such as Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid.

 

Architecture in the 20th century made its first steps in the shadow of the Arts and Crafts tradition, with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Josef Hoffmann, and Michel de Klerk, among others. Architecture was as much in need of liberation as the plastic arts, but it was at the same time in need of a new authority to replace ancient authority, something more compelling than the intuition of the artist. One answer was found in the authority of science. For architects, the innovative language of abstraction was not so much a gateway to freer personal expression as an escape from the conventions of traditional construction. It was no longer necessary to affix the Antique orders to facades or to follow academic rules of ordonnance and symmetry in drawing plans. Abstract forms opposed no difficulties of a formal kind to the idea of a plan freely following the program and so freed architecture to create its own myth, that of functionalism. To the subjective intuition of the artist, functionalism opposed a firm objective law similar to the laws of nature.

 

There was a short time, hardly more than a year, when architecture came close to sharing with art a complete autonomy of form. The year was 1923–24, when De Stijl leader Theo van Doesburg collaborated with the architect Cornelius van Eesteren in designs for villas. In projects such as Space-Time Construction No. 3 of 1923, his use of axomometric projection obscures for a moment the difference between an art composition created on the flat plane of the canvas for contemplation and the threedimensional equivalent constructed in real life for use. When van Doesburg designed the interior for the dance hall L’Aubette in Strasbourg, using dramatic rectangles set diagonally on the walls and ceiling, he could not compensate for the ordinariness of banal adjuncts, such as balcony rails and fixed seating, which seem to remove the viewer completely from the world of contemplation proper to fine art. An even more poignant case is that of the Schröder House in Utrecht, where Gerrit Rietveld’s exterior, like his famous chair, can certainly be contemplated as a kind of artwork, while the interior is mediated by the dynamic use of movable screens for privacy, reducing the object of contemplation to a practical convenience.

 

The paradox was fed by the polemical ideology of such protagonists of the Modern movement in architecture as J.J.P.Oud and Le Corbusier, who led the way in identifying architecture with engineering, thereby conceptualizing it as a subject that develops through research and discovery, in which the interest will always be in the novel and not in the already known. According to the credo of International Style, decisions in architectural design should result from rational analysis of the functions, replacing the traditional practice of starting from precedent, which was suffused by convention and custom.

 

For some, the architect could not claim to shape his building from his inner perceptions; it had to be shaped from something more socially relevant. Functionality provided a rule apart from the purely subjective, and it was a rule that had little precedent in the visual arts. The impact of abstraction within architecture was to create a new duty toward the social function of the building and toward the physical material of construction. Empirical needs would guide form, and form would be free to follow function in the ecstatic exercise of liberation. Within architecture, then, abstraction and functionalism appeared to share a common destiny.

 

In fine art, Mondrian remained the most extreme purist, and there is no question that he identified avoidance of figuration as an expression of spirituality. In the heroic 1920s and 1930s, artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse preferred to distort appearances rather than abandon them. In the case of Fernand Leger, his Communist sympathies kept him firmly focused on the essence of the worker, and between Le Mécanicien (1918) and Abstract Composition (1919), there is only a difference of degree; the figure remains. This enables us to say something clear about abstraction, namely, that it is not exclusive. It is clearly possible to employ abstraction in due measure without abandoning figuration.

 

The nascence of abstract art seemed to suggest a solution for architecture by redefining nature itself as a kind of artist. This was the argument advanced in an influential book by D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917). Thompson conceived of nature as the supreme designer, producing functional structures that were also intrinsically beautiful. Not only do the skeletons of dinosaurs follow engineering principles, but the patterns of growth in hard-shell mollusks observe strict mathematical rules, as the strictly logarithmic series preserves a constant proportion. Nature thus seems to be the penultimate designer, and the products of nature are “naturally” beautiful. As art approached nature in following natural law, it could appropriate nature’s beauty. In the book Circle, edited by Leslie Martin, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo (1937), it is clear that abstract form had taken on an aura of objectivity at odds with the reality of its subjective origins.

 

It is not until De Stijl in the Netherlands and the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School in the 1950s that one finds another impulse to abandon figuration, above all with the mural-scale abstract canvases of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko. In postwar painting the expressive gesture generated the source of meaning, and the authenticity of that gesture became the guarantee of artistic truth. However, this immediacy was difficult to achieve within architecture, with its reliance on physical reality. The urge toward purity that the viewer found in Mondrian and later in Rothko is marked with renunciation, and renunciation is truly difficult to reconcile with functionalism. In art, all arguments are ad hominem, and what one person can do is always exceptional. The idea that abstract art approached a deeper level of reality than figurative art proved difficult to sustain as a general principle, and to this extent it seemed that the hopes of objective validity pinned on bringing abstraction into architecture have proved illusory.

 

During the crystallization of Modernism in the 1930s, it was simply not possible to eliminate appearances; as long as buildings had to have openings such as doors and windows, as long as they could be entered and used, they clearly served as utilities. Use created meaning, at the most basic level, because doors not only permit entry but also denote entry. The struggle for purity turned into a struggle to eliminate ornament, and this was accentuated by the belief that only through standardization could the building’s economy be fully realized. To match transparency in art, we have austerity in architecture, epitomized by the German architect Mies van der Rohe. Standardization was considered the key to realizing the full benefits of mass production. With standardization went repetition, and the monotony of the curtain wall in identical glass panels reduced the possibility of expressive form. It was enough that buildings were massive and impressive, tailored to the demands of modern business, and expression was demonstrated in seeing which city had the tallest building.

 

From the pluralism of Postmodernism, it became evident that standardization was not as effective in economic terms as marketing. The appearance of a steel-frame building could be changed at will in order to present a spectacular image; the facade became a surface of signification, and irony, humor, and eclectic style were manipulated in such a transformation. Strict economy of construction held less expressive importance. With the end of the 20th century, it became possible to see that the authenticity attributed to abstract forms was balanced by the freedom they conferred upon expression. This was manifest in the 1960s and 1970s within fine art but not within architecture. Today, in the work of Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Zaha Hadid, there is no longer any concealment of the expressive gesture.

 

Except in extreme cases, such as aircraft design, forms are primarily derived not from a scientific analysis of the functional requirements but from the creative feelings of the designer. The architect can have feelings about the function as well as everything else, but he or she is now permitted to sublimate these into a more general concept of the purpose and meaning of a building. So, for example, Libeskind’s Holocaust Museum in Berlin is conceived from a universal set of emotions including suffering and persecution, and the jagged forms of the windows are an expression of this emotive tenor and not a response to the practical uses of daylight. In the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Gehry’s abstract, dynamic forms derive from the capacity of the computer to control the fabrication of complex components and allow him to generate an architectural composition as powerful as anything displayed inside the functional building that it also is. In this way, the architect has acquired the technical means that will allow him or her to “build” gesture with all the immediacy of the painter. Abstraction emerges as an acknowledged means of expression.