Essay1901
The Art and Craft of the Machine
Frank Lloyd Wright
Argues the machine, properly used, can liberate ornament and craft from tedious hand labour and become the tool of a genuinely modern architecture, rather than architecture's enemy.
Architecture & Built Environment
Modern & Contemporary Architecture
The twentieth-century break and its aftermath.
11 topics · 18 curated works
Topics
- 01Foundations & Overviews1
- 02Modernism in Architecture2
- 03The Bauhaus2
- 04Le Corbusier2
- 05Mies van der Rohe1
- 06Frank Lloyd Wright2
- 07Brutalism2
- 08Postmodern Architecture2
- 09Deconstructivism1
- 10Contemporary Practice2
- 11Starchitecture & Its Critics1
Reading in Modern & Contemporary Architecture
18A way in
Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
The Art and Craft of the Machine
Frank Lloyd Wright · 1901
Argues the machine, properly used, can liberate ornament and craft from tedious hand labour and become the tool of a genuinely modern architecture,…
+3 more at this level
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
In the Cause of Architecture
Frank Lloyd Wright · 1908
A building should grow from its site and express its structure and materials honestly, the organic-architecture creed Wright set out before any of…
+2 more at this level
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
Vers une architecture
Le Corbusier · 1923
The house is a machine for living in, and architecture must be re-founded on the standards of engineering efficiency rather than on inherited…
+10 more at this level
12 of 18 works
Essay1908
Ornament and Crime
Adolf Loos
Argues that applying decoration to everyday objects and buildings is a sign of cultural backwardness, and that a modern, evolved culture expresses itself through unornamented form alone.
Essay1919
Bauhaus Manifesto and Program
Walter Gropius
Calls for uniting all the arts under the primacy of building, and for architects, painters and sculptors to return to craft training in workshops rather than academic drawing rooms.
Talk2009
3 Warp-Speed Architecture Tales
Bjarke Ingels
Sustainability need not mean sacrifice: three early BIG projects show ecological performance and architectural pleasure can be designed as the same problem rather than traded off against each other.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Essay1908
In the Cause of Architecture
Frank Lloyd Wright
A building should grow from its site and express its structure and materials honestly, the organic-architecture creed Wright set out before any of the houses that made it famous were built.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Book1925
Urbanisme
Le Corbusier
Argues the traditional street and dense low city are obsolete, and proposes replacing them with widely spaced towers set in open parkland, connected by a rationalised traffic network.
Book1938
Bauhaus 1919-1928
Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius & Ise Gropius
The Bauhaus catalogue argues, through the school's own graduates' account of its first decade, that unifying craft workshops with fine art training under one roof was the school's real innovation, not any single style it produced.
235 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Book1923
Vers une architecture
Le Corbusier
The house is a machine for living in, and architecture must be re-founded on the standards of engineering efficiency rather than on inherited academic styles.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Book1929
Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration
Henry-Russell Hitchcock
Argues modern architecture emerged from a nineteenth-century split between romantic individualism and engineering rationalism, and that the most serious contemporary architects were only just beginning to reintegrate the two.
Book1932
Modern Architecture: International Exhibition
Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson
Defines modern architecture as a coherent international style built on volume over mass, regularity over symmetry and the absence of applied ornament, rather than a loose family of engineering experiments — the MoMA catalogue that coined the term.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Book1947
Mies van der Rohe
Philip Johnson
Positions Mies's steel-and-glass structural clarity, traced across decades of built and unbuilt projects, as modern architecture's most disciplined pursuit of a universal, industrially reproducible form.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Essay1955
The New Brutalism
Reyner Banham
Names Brutalism as an ethic of showing a building's structure and materials as found rather than a decorative style, coining the term for the tendency the essay describes.
In order written
1901 – 2009- 1901The Art and Craft of the MachineFrank Lloyd Wright
- 1908Ornament and CrimeAdolf Loos
- 1908In the Cause of ArchitectureFrank Lloyd Wright
- 1919Bauhaus Manifesto and ProgramWalter Gropius
- 1923Vers une architectureLe Corbusier
- 1925UrbanismeLe Corbusier
- 1929Modern Architecture: Romanticism and ReintegrationHenry-Russell Hitchcock
- 1932Modern Architecture: International ExhibitionHenry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson
- 1938Bauhaus 1919-1928Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius & Ise Gropius
- 1947Mies van der RohePhilip Johnson
- 1955The New BrutalismReyner Banham
- 1966The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?Reyner Banham
- 1966Complexity and Contradiction in ArchitectureRobert Venturi
- 1977The Language of Post-Modern ArchitectureCharles Jencks
- 1988Deconstructivist ArchitecturePhilip Johnson & Mark Wigley
- 2001JunkspaceRem Koolhaas
- 2001Why All the Hoopla?Hal Foster
- 20093 Warp-Speed Architecture TalesBjarke Ingels