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THE ORAL HISTORY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE: Interviews with the Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Century. By John Peter. Abrams. 320 pp. $67.50
Less is more," Ludwig Mies van der Rohe supposedly said, thus summing up his severe, minimalist approach to the art of building. To which the architect Robert Venturi impishly replied, "Less is a bore." Venturi's postmodernist manifesto, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, was published in 1966, a year as good as any to date the end of what is commonly called the Modern Movement in architecture. This movement is remarkable for its pantheon of heroic figures--Mies, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright--and its equally heroic buildings. It is also distinguished by its brevity: beginning roughly in the 1920s, the Modern Movement held center stage barely 40 years.
Forty years is not a long time to reinvent architecture. But that is precisely what the early modernists set out to do. Their aim was to design buildings that owed nothing to the past and belonged distinctly and unmistakably to the 20th century. This ambition was in great part a reaction to the Victorian revivals of historical styles that had characterized architectural design during the late 19th century. Although the public generally liked neo-Elizabethan and neo-Flemish homes as well as Classical public buildings such as the National Gallery in Washington, many architects were dissatisfied with combining and recombining styles from the past. They felt that a modern age called for its own modern architecture. To this end, they generally ignored the well-established Classical architectural tradition that had nurtured architects as disparate as Freidrich Schinkel, Stanford White, and Edwin Lutyens. They did away with conventional notions of ornament and decoration and instead found inspiration in such industrial prototypes as factories, steamships, and airplanes. Their aim, insofar as it was possible, was to make buildings machinelike. The results, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to Boston's City Hall, were sometimes refreshing, sometimes merely bizarre, often functionally implausible, but always strikingly original.
Despite the stylistic cliches that are commonly associated with modern architecture--flat roofs, pipe railings, and blank white walls--the Modern Movement was more than a fashion. It was truly a movement, that is, a loose grouping of people with...