In architecture and decorative art , ornament is decoration used to embellish parts of a building or object. Large figurative elements such as monumental sculpture and their equivalents in decorative art are excluded from the term; most ornaments do not include human figures, and if present they are small compared to the overall scale. Architectural ornament can be carved from stone, wood or precious metals, formed with plaster or clay, or painted or impressed onto a surface as applied ornament ; in other applied arts the main material of the object, or a different one such as paint or vitreous enamel may be used.
131-658: The Castelao building is a modern architectural building from the beginning of the 21st century located on the corner of Padre Amoedo Carballo and Sierra Street in Pontevedra , Spain , on the edge of the historic centre . It belongs to the Pontevedra Museum . On 2 May 2003, during the inauguration of the extension of the Fernández López building of the Museum of Pontevedra , its director announced that
262-553: A 1941 essay, the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called it "surface modulation". The earliest decoration and ornament often survives from prehistoric cultures in simple markings on pottery, where decoration in other materials (including tattoos ) has been lost. Where the potter's wheel was used, the technology made some kinds of decoration very easy; weaving is another technology which also lends itself very easily to decoration or pattern, and to some extent dictates its form. Ornament has been evident in civilizations since
393-719: A European adaptation of the Islamic arabesque (a distinction not always clear at the time). As printing became cheaper, the single ornament print turned into sets, and then finally books. From the 16th to the 19th century, pattern books were published in Europe which gave access to decorative elements, eventually including those recorded from cultures all over the world. Andrea Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura (Four Books on Architecture) (Venice, 1570), which included both drawings of classical Roman buildings and renderings of Palladio's own designs utilizing those motifs, became
524-601: A Pompeian home would typically divide the wall into three or more sections under which there would be a dado taking up roughly one-sixth of the height of the wall. The wall sections would be divided by broad pilasters connected by a frieze which bands across the top of the wall. The ornament found at the Casa Degli Amorini Dorati in Pompeii reflected this standard style and included objects that had clearly been reused, and rare and imported objects. Several of
655-411: A broad representation of renovators such as Maside, Torres, Souto, Colmeiro and Laxeiro. The building also has temporary exhibition rooms, an auditorium, a cafeteria and workshop spaces. In addition, on its underground floor, a 50-metre section of the remains of the ancient walls of Pontevedra can be seen, integrated into the building., The most remarkable feature of the building is its brightness. It
786-476: A compromise between the two, combining modernist forms and stylized decoration. The dominant figure in the rise of modernism in France was Charles-Édouard Jeanerette, a Swiss-French architect who in 1920 took the name Le Corbusier . In 1920 he co-founded a journal called ' L'Espirit Nouveau and energetically promoted architecture that was functional, pure, and free of any decoration or historical associations. He
917-497: A feature of the latter class. The history of art in many cultures shows a series of wave-like trends where the level of ornament used increases over a period, before a sharp reaction returns to plainer forms, after which ornamentation gradually increases again. The pattern is especially clear in post-Roman European art, where the highly ornamented Insular art of the Book of Kells and other manuscripts influenced continental Europe, but
1048-521: A generation of architects, including Louis Sullivan , Victor Horta , Hector Guimard , and Antoni Gaudí . At the end of the 19th century, a few architects began to challenge the traditional Beaux Arts and Neoclassical styles that dominated architecture in Europe and the United States. The Glasgow School of Art (1896–99) designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh , had a façade dominated by large vertical bays of windows. The Art Nouveau style
1179-471: A history of ornament ) of 1893, who in the process developed his influential concept of the Kunstwollen . Riegl traced formalistic continuity and development in decorative plant forms from Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations through the classical world to the arabesque of Islamic art . While the concept of the Kunstwollen has few followers today, his basic analysis of
1310-467: A hotel near Chandler, Arizona , and the most famous of all his residences, Fallingwater (1934–37), a vacation house in Pennsylvania for Edgar J. Kaufman. Fallingwater is a remarkable structure of concrete slabs suspended over a waterfall, perfectly uniting architecture and nature. The Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler designed what could be called the first house in the modern style in 1922,
1441-591: A leading role almost to its end. One of his most original late projects was the campus of Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida , begun in 1941 and completed in 1943. He designed nine new buildings in a style that he described as "The Child of the Sun ". He wrote that he wanted the campus to "grow out of the ground and into the light, a child of the sun". Ornament (art) A wide variety of decorative styles and motifs have been developed for architecture and
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#17327723774271572-649: A lighthouse-like tower in the center to inspire hope. His rebuilt city was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. Shortly after the War, the French architect Le Corbusier , who was nearly sixty years old and had not constructed a building in ten years, was commissioned by the French government to construct a new apartment block in Marseille . He called it Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, but it more popularly took
1703-653: A major exposition of modernist design in Cologne just a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For the 1914 Cologne exhibition, Bruno Taut built a revolutionary glass pavilion. Frank Lloyd Wright was a highly original and independent American architect who refused to be categorized in any one architectural movement. Like Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , he had no formal architectural training. From 1887 to 1893 he worked in
1834-697: A millennium, and after a period when they were replaced by Gothic forms , powerfully revived in the Italian Renaissance and remain extremely widely used today. Ornament in the Roman empire utilized a diverse array of styles and materials, including marble, glass, obsidian, and gold. Roman ornament, specifically in the context of Pompeii, has been studied and written about by scholar Jessica Powers in her book chapter "Beyond Painting in Pompeii's Houses: Wall Ornaments and Their Patrons." Instead of studying ornamental objects in isolation, Powers argues that, if
1965-763: A neo-gothic or neoclassical style, but these buildings were very different; they combined modern materials and technology (stainless steel, concrete, aluminum, chrome-plated steel) with Art Deco geometry; stylized zig-zags, lightning flashes, fountains, sunrises, and, at the top of the Chrysler building, Art Deco "gargoyles" in the form of stainless steel radiator ornaments. The interiors of these new buildings, sometimes termed Cathedrals of Commerce", were lavishly decorated in bright contrasting colors, with geometric patterns variously influenced by Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, African textile patterns, and European cathedrals, Frank Lloyd Wright himself experimented with Mayan Revival , in
2096-489: A new museum building would be built between Cobián Roffignac and Sierra streets. The building was built between 2004 and 2008 according to a project by the architects Eduardo Pesquera and Jesús Ulargui to overcome the Pontevedra Museum 's lack of exhibition space. It is located on the site of the former orchard of the Jesuit College in the city , behind the college and the church of Saint Bartholomew . The building
2227-501: A new style for government buildings, sometimes called PWA Moderne , for the Public Works Administration , which launched gigantic construction programs in the U.S. to stimulate employment. It was essentially classical architecture stripped of ornament, and was employed in state and federal buildings, from post offices to the largest office building in the world at that time, Pentagon (1941–43), begun just before
2358-474: A new style. They became leaders in the postwar modernist movement. World War II (1939–1945) and its aftermath was a major factor in driving innovation in building technology, and in turn, architectural possibilities. The wartime industrial demands resulted in shortages of steel and other building materials, leading to the adoption of new materials, such as aluminum, The war and postwar period brought greatly expanded use of prefabricated building ; largely for
2489-663: A number of original themes, including figures of plants and animals of the region. The Ancient Greek civilization created many new forms of ornament, which were diffused across Eurasia , helped by the conquests of Alexander the Great , and the expansion of Buddhism , which took some motifs to East Asia in somewhat modified form. In the West the Ancient Roman Latinized forms of the Greek ornament lasted for around
2620-470: A nursery school, and other serves, and the flat terrace roof had a running track, ventilation ducts, and a small theater. Le Corbusier designed furniture, carpets, and lamps to go with the building, all purely functional; the only decoration was a choice of interior colors that Le Corbusier gave to residents. Unité d'Habitation became a prototype for similar buildings in other cities, both in France and Germany. Combined with his equally radical organic design for
2751-428: A pioneer in the architecture of collective housing , though his Moroccan colleague Elie Azagury was critical of him for serving as a tool of the French colonial regime and for ignoring the economic and social necessity that Moroccans live in higher density vertical housing. Late modernist architecture is generally understood to include buildings designed (1968–1980) with exceptions. Modernist architecture includes
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#17327723774272882-484: A prominent architectural commentator. Its goal was to bring together designers and industrialists, to turn out well-designed, high-quality products, and in the process to invent a new type of architecture. The organization originally included twelve architects and twelve business firms, but quickly expanded. The architects include Peter Behrens , Theodor Fischer (who served as its first president), Josef Hoffmann and Richard Riemerschmid . In 1909 Behrens designed one of
3013-618: A proponent of monumental fascist architecture, who rebuilt the University of Rome, and designed the Italian pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, and planned a grand reconstruction of Rome on the fascist model. The 1939 New York World's Fair marked a turning point in architecture between Art Deco and modern architecture. The theme of the Fair was the World of Tomorrow , and its symbols were
3144-467: A rich and linked tradition of plant-based ornament for over three thousand years; traditional ornament from other parts of the world typically relies more on geometrical and animal motifs. The inspiration for the patterns usually lies in the nature that surrounds the people in the region. Many nomadic tribes in Central Asia had many animalistic motifs before the penetration of Islam in the region. In
3275-456: A row of white pylons in the center of a large lawn, it became an icon of modernist architecture. In Germany, two important modernist movements appeared after the first World War, The Bauhaus was a school founded in Weimar in 1919 under the direction of Walter Gropius . Gropius was the son of the official state architect of Berlin, who studied before the war with Peter Behrens , and designed
3406-521: A study of Casablanca's bidonvilles entitled "Habitat for the Greatest Number". The presenters, Georges Candilis and Michel Ecochard , argued—against doctrine—that architects must consider local culture and climate in their designs. This generated great debate among modernist architects around the world and eventually provoked a schism and the creation of Team 10 . Ecochard's 8x8 meter model at Carrières Centrales earned him recognition as
3537-655: A suitable style. "The great question is," Thomas Leverton Donaldson asked in 1847, "are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable style of the 19th century?". In 1849, when Matthew Digby Wyatt viewed the French Industrial Exposition set up on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, he disapproved in recognizably modern terms of the plaster ornaments in faux-bronze and faux woodgrain: Both internally and externally there
3668-408: A temporary halt to the construction of new skyscrapers. It also brought in a new style, called " Streamline Moderne " or sometimes just Streamline. This style, sometimes modeled after for the form of ocean liners, featured rounded corners, strong horizontal lines, and often nautical features, such as superstructures and steel railings. It was associated with modernity and especially with transportation;
3799-458: Is a good deal of tasteless and unprofitable ornament... If each simple material had been allowed to tell its own tale, and the lines of the construction so arranged as to conduce to a sentiment of grandeur, the qualities of "power" and "truth," which its enormous extent must have necessarily ensured, could have scarcely fail to excite admiration, and that at a very considerable saving of expense. Contacts with other cultures through colonialism and
3930-463: Is a machine for living in." He tirelessly promoted his ideas through slogans, articles, books, conferences, and participation in Expositions. To illustrate his ideas, in the 1920s he built a series of houses and villas in and around Paris. They were all built according to a common system, based upon the use of reinforced concrete, and of reinforced concrete pylons in the interior which supported
4061-720: Is a name often given to the Modern architecture that emerged in Europe, primarily German-speaking Europe, in the 1920s and 30s. It is also frequently called Neues Bauen (New Building). The New Objectivity took place in many German cities in that period, for example in Frankfurt with its Neues Frankfurt project. By the late 1920s, modernism had become an important movement in Europe. Architecture, which previously had been predominantly national, began to become international. The architects traveled, met each other, and shared ideas. Several modernists, including Le Corbusier , had participated in
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4192-406: Is built around two rectangular structures connected by glass walkways. The interior combines white concrete in the structure with granite floors and bleached wood floors in the rooms. The smaller southern module is glazed to give it lightness and to facilitate the transition to the museum's Sarmiento building , to which it is connected by two glass walkways at mid-height. The northern structure, which
4323-488: Is known as Brick Expressionism . Erich Mendelsohn , (who disliked the term Expressionism for his work) began his career designing churches, silos, and factories which were highly imaginative, but, for lack of resources, were never built. In 1920, he finally was able to construct one of his works in the city of Potsdam; an observatory and research center called the Einsteinium , named in tribute to Albert Einstein . It
4454-461: Is more imposing and airtight, has granite exterior walls and longitudinal glass security panels that allow natural light to enter from the upper part of the rooms and function as zenithal windows. Modern architecture Modern architecture , also called modernist architecture , was an architectural movement and style that was prominent in the 20th century, between the earlier Art Deco and later postmodern movements. Modern architecture
4585-657: The Austrian Postal Savings Bank (1904–1906). Wagner declared his intention to express the function of the building in its exterior. The reinforced concrete exterior was covered with plaques of marble attached with bolts of polished aluminum. The interior was purely functional and spare, a large open space of steel, glass, and concrete where the only decoration was the structure itself. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos also began removing any ornament from his buildings. His Steiner House , in Vienna (1910),
4716-455: The Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building , in the heart of Chicago in 1904–1906. While these buildings were revolutionary in their steel frames and height, their decoration was borrowed from Neo-Renaissance , Neo-Gothic and Beaux-Arts architecture . The Woolworth Building , designed by Cass Gilbert , was completed in 1912, and was the tallest building in the world until the completion of
4847-620: The Chapel of Notre-Dame du-Haut at Ronchamp , this work propelled Corbusier in the first rank of postwar modern architects. In the early 1950s, Michel Écochard , director of urban planning under the French Protectorate in Morocco , commissioned GAMMA ( Groupe des Architectes Modernes Marocains )—which initially included the architects Elie Azagury , George Candillis , Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods —to design housing in
4978-546: The Chrysler Building in 1929. The structure was purely modern, but its exterior was decorated with Neo-Gothic ornament, complete with decorative buttresses, arches and spires, which caused it to be nicknamed the "Cathedral of Commerce". After the first World War, a prolonged struggle began between architects who favored the more traditional styles of neo-classicism and the Beaux-Arts architecture style, and
5109-607: The Great Male Renunciation . Ornament in architecture and furniture resumed in the later 19th century Napoleon III style , Victorian decorative arts and their equivalents from other countries, to be decisively reduced by the Arts and Crafts movement and then Modernism . The detailed study of Eurasian ornamental forms was begun by Alois Riegl in his formalist study Stilfragen : Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik ( Problems of style: foundations for
5240-649: The Hay Mohammedi neighborhood of Casablanca that provided a "culturally specific living tissue" for laborers and migrants from the countryside . Sémiramis , Nid d’Abeille (Honeycomb), and Carrières Centrales were some of the first examples of this Vernacular Modernism . At the 1953 Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), ATBAT-Afrique —the Africa branch of Atelier des Bâtisseurs founded in 1947 by figures including Le Corbusier , Vladimir Bodiansky , and André Wogenscky —prepared
5371-506: The IG Farben building , a massive corporate headquarters, now the main building of Goethe University in Frankfurt. Bruno Taut specialized in building large-scale apartment complexes for working-class Berliners. He built twelve thousand individual units, sometimes in buildings with unusual shapes, such as a giant horseshoe. Unlike most other modernists, he used bright exterior colors to give his buildings more life The use of dark brick in
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5502-566: The Islamic ornaments there, including arabesques , calligraphy , and geometric patterns . Interest in classical architecture was also fueled by the tradition of traveling on The Grand Tour , and by translation of early literature about architecture in the work of Vitruvius and Michelangelo . During the 19th century, the acceptable use of ornament, and its precise definition became the source of aesthetic controversy in academic Western architecture, as architects and their critics searched for
5633-694: The Palais de Tokyo and Palais de Chaillot , both built by collectives of architects for the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne . In the late 1920s and early 1930s, an exuberant American variant of Art Deco appeared in the Chrysler Building , Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center in New York City, and Guardian Building in Detroit. The first skyscrapers in Chicago and New York had been designed in
5764-590: The Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian avant-garde artists and architects began searching for a new Soviet style which could replace traditional neoclassicism. The new architectural movements were closely tied with the literary and artistic movements of the period, the futurism of poet Vladimir Mayakovskiy , the Suprematism of painter Kasimir Malevich , and the colorful Rayonism of painter Mikhail Larionov . The most startling design that emerged
5895-456: The " International Style ". What began as a matter of taste was transformed into an aesthetic mandate. Modernists declared their way as the only acceptable way to build. As the style hit its stride in the highly developed postwar work of Mies van der Rohe , the tenets of 1950s modernism became so strict that even accomplished architects like Edward Durrell Stone and Eero Saarinen could be ridiculed and effectively ostracized for departing from
6026-523: The 1920s and 1930s it became a highly popular style in the United States, South America, India, China, Australia, and Japan. In Europe, Art Deco was particularly popular for department stores and movie theaters. The style reached its peak in Europe at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925, which featured art deco pavilions and decoration from twenty countries. Only two pavilions were purely modernist;
6157-526: The 1950s and 1960s. The group met once more in Paris in 1937 to discuss public housing and was scheduled to meet in the United States in 1939, but the meeting was cancelled because of the war. The legacy of the CIAM was a roughly common style and doctrine which helped define modern architecture in Europe and the United States after World War II. The Art Deco architectural style (called Style Moderne in France),
6288-623: The Chicago office of Louis Sullivan , who pioneered the first tall steel-frame office buildings in Chicago, and who famously stated " form follows function ". Wright set out to break all the traditional rules. He was particularly famous for his Prairie Houses , including the Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois (1893–94); Arthur Heurtley House (1902) and Robie House (1909); sprawling, geometric residences without decoration, with strong horizontal lines which seemed to grow out of
6419-781: The Esprit Nouveau pavilion of Le Corbusier, which represented his idea for a mass-produced housing unit, and the pavilion of the USSR, by Konstantin Melnikov in a flamboyantly futurist style. Later French landmarks in the Art Deco style included the Grand Rex movie theater in Paris, La Samaritaine department store by Henri Sauvage (1926–28) and the Social and Economic Council building in Paris (1937–38) by Auguste Perret , and
6550-705: The German Werkbund, and became the head of the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933. proposing a wide variety of modernist plans for urban reconstruction. His most famous modernist work was the German pavilion for the 1929 international exposition in Barcelona. It was a work of pure modernism, with glass and concrete walls and clean, horizontal lines. Though it was only a temporary structure, and was torn down in 1930, it became, along with Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye , one of
6681-480: The German projects gave that particular style a name, Brick Expressionism . The Austrian philosopher, architect, and social critic Rudolf Steiner also departed as far as possible from traditional architectural forms. His Second Goetheanum , built from 1926 near Basel , Switzerland and Mendelsohn 's Einsteinturm in Potsdam, Germany, were based on no traditional models and had entirely original shapes. After
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#17327723774276812-560: The Netherlands, and Adolf Loos from Czechoslovakia. A delegation of Soviet architects was invited to attend, but they were unable to obtain visas. Later members included Josep Lluís Sert of Spain and Alvar Aalto of Finland. No one attended from the United States. A second meeting was organized in 1930 in Brussels by Victor Bourgeois on the topic "Rational methods for groups of habitations". A third meeting, on "The functional city",
6943-826: The Roman temple, the extravagant use of ornament served as a means of self-glorification, as scholar Owen Jones notes in his book chapter, Roman Ornament. Roman ornament techniques include surface-modeling, where ornamental styles are applied onto a surface. This was a common ornamental style with marble surfaces. One common ornamental style was the use of acanthus leaf, a motif adopted from the Greeks. The use of acanthus leaf and other naturalist motifs can be seen in Corinthian capitals, in temples, and in other public sites. A few medieval notebooks survive, most famously that of Villard de Honnecourt (13th century) showing how artists and craftsmen recorded designs they saw for future use. With
7074-819: The Schindler house. Schindler also contributed to American modernism with his design for the Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach . The Austrian architect Richard Neutra moved to the United States in 1923, worked for a short time with Frank Lloyd Wright, also quickly became a force in American architecture through his modernist design for the same client, the Lovell Health House in Los Angeles. Neutra's most notable architectural work
7205-527: The Soviet Pavilion for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925; it was a highly geometric vertical construction of glass and steel crossed by a diagonal stairway, and crowned with a hammer and sickle. The leading group of constructivist architects, led by Vesnin brothers and Moisei Ginzburg , was publishing the 'Contemporary Architecture' journal. This group created several major constructivist projects in
7336-824: The Spanish architect, whose pavilion of the Second Spanish Republic was pure modernist glass and steel box. Inside it displayed the most modernist work of the Exposition, the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso . The original building was destroyed after the Exposition, but it was recreated in 1992 in Barcelona. The rise of nationalism in the 1930s was reflected in the Fascist architecture of Italy, and Nazi architecture of Germany, based on classical styles and designed to express power and grandeur. The Nazi architecture, much of it designed by Albert Speer ,
7467-495: The United States entered the Second World War. During the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright resolutely refused to associate himself with any architectural movements. He considered his architecture to be entirely unique and his own. Between 1916 and 1922, he broke away from his earlier prairie house style and worked instead on houses decorated with textured blocks of cement; this became known as his "Mayan style", after
7598-456: The United States led to the design and construction of enormous government-financed housing projects, usually in run-down center of American cities, and in the suburbs of Paris and other European cities, where land was available, One of the largest reconstruction projects was that of the city center of Le Havre, destroyed by the Germans and by Allied bombing in 1944; 133 hectares of buildings in
7729-482: The aesthetic rules. At the same time, the unwritten laws against ornament began to come into serious question. "Architecture has, with some difficulty, liberated itself from ornament, but it has not liberated itself from the fear of ornament," John Summerson observed in 1941. The very difference between ornament and structure is subtle and perhaps arbitrary. The pointed arches and flying buttresses of Gothic architecture are ornamental but structurally necessary;
7860-484: The applied arts, including pottery , furniture , metalwork . In textiles , wallpaper and other objects where the decoration may be the main justification for its existence, the terms pattern or design are more likely to be used. The vast range of motifs used in ornament draw from geometrical shapes and patterns, plants, and human and animal figures. Across Eurasia and the Mediterranean world there has been
7991-405: The architectural theorist and historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc . In his 1872 book Entretiens sur L'Architecture , he urged: "use the means and knowledge given to us by our times, without the intervening traditions which are no longer viable today, and in that way we can inaugurate a new architecture. For each function its material; for each material its form and its ornament." This book influenced
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#17327723774278122-459: The arrival of the print , ornament prints became an important part of the output of printmakers, especially in Germany, and played a vital role in the rapid diffusion of new Renaissance styles to makers of all sorts of object. As well as revived classical ornament, both architectural and the grotesque style derived from Roman interior decoration, these included new styles such as the moresque ,
8253-450: The beginning of recorded history , ranging from Ancient Egyptian architecture to the assertive lack of ornament of 20th century Modernist architecture . Ornaments also depict a certain philosophy of the people for the world around. For example, in Central Asia among nomadic Kazakhs, the circular lines of the ornaments signalled the sequential perception of time in the wide steppes and the breadth and freedom of space. Ornament implies that
8384-436: The best-known landmarks of modernist architecture. A reconstructed version now stands on the original site in Barcelona. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they viewed the Bauhaus as a training ground for communists, and closed the school in 1933. Gropius left Germany and went to England, then to the United States, where he and Marcel Breuer both joined the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design , and became
8515-540: The buildings designed between 1945 and the 1960s. The late modernist style is characterized by bold shapes and sharp corners, slightly more defined than Brutalist architecture . The International Style of architecture had appeared in Europe, particularly in the Bauhaus movement, in the late 1920s. In 1932 it was recognized and given a name at an Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized by architect Philip Johnson and architectural critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock , Between 1937 and 1941, following
8646-427: The cause of aesthetic simplification, dismissing the knots of intricately patterned ornament that articulated the skin of his structures. With the work of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus through the 1920s and 1930s, lack of decorative detail became a hallmark of modern architecture and equated with the moral virtues of honesty, simplicity, and purity. In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock dubbed this
8777-462: The center of the fast-growing American cities, and the availability of new technologies, including fireproof steel frames and improvements in the safety elevator invented by Elisha Otis in 1852. The first steel-framed "skyscraper", The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, was ten stories high. It was designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1883, and was briefly the tallest building in the world. Louis Sullivan built another monumental new structure,
8908-409: The center were flattened, destroying 12,500 buildings and leaving 40,000 persons homeless. The architect Auguste Perret , a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete and prefabricated materials, designed and built an entirely new center to the city, with apartment blocks, cultural, commercial, and government buildings. He restored historic monuments when possible, and built a new church, St. Joseph, with
9039-430: The classically inspired Carolingian and Ottonian art largely replaced it. Ornament increased over the Romanesque and Gothic periods, but was greatly reduced in Early Renaissance styles, again under classical influence. Another period of increase, in Northern Mannerism , the Baroque and Rococo , was checked by Neoclassicism and the Romantic period . Ornament in male clothing went out of fashion around 1800, in
9170-570: The colorful rhythmic bands of a Pietro Belluschi International Style skyscraper are integral, not applied, but certainly have ornamental effect. Furthermore, architectural ornament can serve the practical purpose of establishing scale, signaling entries, and aiding wayfinding, and these useful design tactics had been outlawed. And by the mid-1950s, modernist figureheads Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer had been breaking their own rules by producing highly expressive, sculptural concrete work. The argument against ornament peaked in 1959 over discussions of
9301-403: The competition for the headquarters of the League of Nations in 1927. In the same year, the German Werkbund organized an architectural exposition at the Weissenhof Estate Stuttgart . Seventeen leading modernist architects in Europe were invited to design twenty-one houses; Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe played a major part. In 1927 Le Corbusier, Pierre Chareau, and others proposed
9432-487: The concrete cube-based Ennis House of 1924 in Los Angeles. The style appeared in the late 1920s and 1930s in all major American cities. The style was used most often in office buildings, but it also appeared in the enormous movie palaces that were built in large cities when sound films were introduced. The beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 brought an end to lavishly decorated Art Deco architecture and
9563-512: The construction of clusters of slender eight- to ten-story high-rise apartment towers for workers. While Gropius was active at the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe led the modernist architectural movement in Berlin. Inspired by the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands, he built clusters of concrete summer houses and proposed a project for a glass office tower. He became the vice president of
9694-523: The decorative wall panels were identified as being from the Greek East or Egypt, not from Pompeii. This points to the elaborate trade routes that flourished across the Roman Empire, and that home owners were interested in using materials from outside of Pompeii to embellish their homes. In addition to homes, public buildings and temples are locations where Roman ornament styles were on display. In
9825-459: The designer Marcel Breuer . Gropius became an important theorist of modernism, writing The Idea and Construction in 1923. He was an advocate of standardization in architecture, and the mass construction of rationally designed apartment blocks for factory workers. In 1928 he was commissioned by the Siemens company to build apartment for workers in the suburbs of Berlin, and in 1929 he proposed
9956-535: The development of forms has been confirmed and refined by the wider corpus of examples known today. Jessica Rawson has recently extended the analysis to cover Chinese art , which Riegl did not cover, tracing many elements of Chinese decoration back to the same tradition; the shared background helping to make the assimilation of Chinese motifs into Persian art after the Mongol invasion harmonious and productive. Styles of ornamentation can be studied in reference to
10087-587: The earliest and most influential industrial buildings in the modernist style, the AEG turbine factory , a functional monument of steel and concrete. In 1911–1913, Adolf Meyer and Walter Gropius , who had both worked for Behrens, built another revolutionary industrial plant, the Fagus Factory in Alfeld an der Laine, a building without ornament where every construction element was on display. The Werkbund organized
10218-607: The earth, and which echoed the wide flat spaces of the American prairie. His Larkin Building (1904–1906) in Buffalo, New York , Unity Temple (1905) in Oak Park, Illinois and Unity Temple had highly original forms and no connection with historical precedents. At the end of the 19th century, the first skyscrapers began to appear in the United States. They were a response to the shortage of land and high cost of real estate in
10349-454: The evolution of Galician art from the Gothic period to the present day, as well as artistic manifestations from other regions of Spain from the time of Goya to the mid-20th century. Three of the rooms are dedicated to Castelao and there is also ample space for the rich collection of Spanish painting by painters such as Goya , Fortuny , Rusiñol and Vázquez Díaz , and for Galician art with
10480-449: The first glass and metal curtain wall . These developments together led to the first steel-framed skyscraper, the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1884 by William Le Baron Jenney and based on the works of Viollet le Duc. French industrialist François Coignet was the first to use iron-reinforced concrete, that is, concrete strengthened with iron bars, as a technique for constructing buildings. In 1853 Coignet built
10611-446: The first half of the 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture . Modern architecture emerged at the end of the 19th century from revolutions in technology, engineering, and building materials, and from a desire to break away from historical architectural styles and invent something that
10742-490: The first iron reinforced concrete structure, a four-storey house in the suburbs of Paris. A further important step forward was the invention of the safety elevator by Elisha Otis , first demonstrated at the New York Crystal Palace exposition in 1854, which made tall office and apartment buildings practical. Another important technology for the new architecture was electric light, which greatly reduced
10873-747: The foundation of an international conference to establish the basis for a common style. The first meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne or International Congresses of Modern Architects (CIAM), was held in a chateau on Lake Leman in Switzerland 26–28 June 1928. Those attending included Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens , Auguste Perret , Pierre Chareau and Tony Garnier from France; Victor Bourgeois from Belgium; Walter Gropius , Erich Mendelsohn , Ernst May and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from Germany; Josef Frank from Austria; Mart Stam and Gerrit Rietveld from
11004-739: The headquarters of a shipping company, and was modeled after a giant steamship, a triangular building with a sharply pointed bow. It was constructed of dark brick, and used external piers to express its vertical structure. Its external decoration borrowed from Gothic cathedrals, as did its internal arcades. Hans Poelzig was another notable expressionist architect. In 1919 he built the Großes Schauspielhaus , an immense theater in Berlin, seating five thousand spectators for theater impresario Max Reinhardt . It featured elongated shapes like stalagmites hanging down from its gigantic dome, and lights on massive columns in its foyer. He also constructed
11135-400: The industrialization many constructivist buildings were erected in provincial cities. The regional industrial centers, including Ekaterinburg , Kharkiv or Ivanovo , were rebuilt in the constructivist manner; some cities, like Magnitogorsk or Zaporizhzhia , were constructed anew (the so-called socgorod , or 'socialist city'). The style fell markedly out of favor in the 1930s, replaced by
11266-433: The information is provided, objects must be approached in their original context. This information might include the location where the work was found, other objects located or found nearby, or who the patron was who might have commissioned the work. Jessica Powers' chapter primarily discusses the Casa Degli Amorini Dorati in Pompeii, where 18 wall ornaments were found, the most of any Pompeiian home. Interior wall ornament in
11397-424: The inherent danger of fires caused by gas in the 19th century. The debut of new materials and techniques inspired architects to break away from the neoclassical and eclectic models that dominated European and American architecture in the late 19th century, most notably eclecticism , Victorian and Edwardian architecture , and the Beaux-Arts architectural style . This break with the past was particularly urged by
11528-454: The military and government. The semi-circular metal Nissen hut of World War I was revived as the Quonset hut . The years immediately after the war saw the development of radical experimental houses, including the enameled-steel Lustron house (1947–1950), and Buckminster Fuller's experimental aluminum Dymaxion House . The unprecedented destruction caused by the war was another factor in
11659-451: The modernist Fagus turbine factory. The Bauhaus was a fusion of the prewar Academy of Arts and the school of technology. In 1926 it was transferred from Weimar to Dessau; Gropius designed the new school and student dormitories in the new, purely functional modernist style he was encouraging. The school brought together modernists in all fields; the faculty included the modernist painters Vasily Kandinsky , Joseph Albers and Paul Klee , and
11790-476: The modernists, led by Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens in France, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Germany, and Konstantin Melnikov in the new Soviet Union , who wanted only pure forms and the elimination of any decoration. Louis Sullivan popularized the axiom Form follows function to emphasize the importance of utilitarian simplicity in modern architecture. Art Deco architects such as Auguste Perret and Henri Sauvage often made
11921-762: The more grandiose nationalist styles that Stalin favored. Constructivist architects and even Le Corbusier projects for the new Palace of the Soviets from 1931 to 1933, but the winner was an early Stalinist building in the style termed Postconstructivism . The last major Russian constructivist building, by Boris Iofan , was built for the Paris World Exhibition (1937), where it faced the pavilion of Nazi Germany by Hitler's architect Albert Speer . The New Objectivity (in German Neue Sachlichkeit, sometimes also translated as New Sobriety)
12052-528: The most influential book ever written on architecture. Napoleon had the great pyramids and temples of Egypt documented in the Description de l'Egypte (1809) . Owen Jones published The Grammar of Ornament in 1856 with colored illustrations of decoration from Egypt, Turkey, Sicily and Spain. He took residence in the Alhambra Palace to make drawings and plaster castings of the ornate details of
12183-434: The most innovative expressionist projects, including Bruno Taut 's Alpine Architecture and Hermann Finsterlin 's Formspiels , remained on paper. Scenography for theatre and films provided another outlet for the expressionist imagination, and provided supplemental incomes for designers attempting to challenge conventions in a harsh economic climate. A particular type, using bricks to create its forms (rather than concrete)
12314-468: The museography, the building was inaugurated on 4 January 2013. On 2 December 2021, it was named the Castelao Building, in honour of Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao , one of the founders of the Pontevedra Museum ., The building covers an area of 10,000 square metres and consists of three floors and a ground floor. It has 23 permanent exhibition rooms, with mostly pictorial works, which show
12445-552: The name of the Cité Radieuse (and later "Cité du Fada" "City of the crazy one" in Marseille French), after his book about futuristic urban planning. Following his doctrines of design, the building had a concrete frame raised up above the street on pylons. It contained 337 duplex apartment units, fit into the framework like pieces of a puzzle. Each unit had two levels and a small terrace. Interior "streets" had shops,
12576-504: The need of supporting pillars, replaced stone and brick as the primary material for modernist architects. The first concrete apartment buildings by Perret and Sauvage were covered with ceramic tiles, but in 1905 Perret built the first concrete parking garage on 51 rue de Ponthieu in Paris; here the concrete was left bare, and the space between the concrete was filled with glass windows. Henri Sauvage added another construction innovation in an apartment building on Rue Vavin in Paris (1912–1914);
12707-449: The new discoveries of archaeology expanded the repertory of ornament available to revivalists. After about 1880, photography made details of ornament even more widely available than prints had done. Modern millwork ornaments are made of wood, plastics, composites, etc. They come in many different colours and shapes. Modern architecture , conceived of as the elimination of ornament in favor of purely functional structures, left architects
12838-433: The ornamented object has a function that an unornamented equivalent might also fulfill. Where the object has no such function, but exists only to be a work of art such as a sculpture or painting, the term is less likely to be used, except for peripheral elements. In recent centuries a distinction between the fine arts and applied or decorative arts has been applied (except for architecture), with ornament mainly seen as
12969-407: The panels on the walls of the Casa Degli Amorini Dorati were removed during archeological work in the 1970s, revealing that the panels had been stuck on different walls before the one on which they were found. Jessica Powers argues that these panels illustrate the home owner and correlating patrons' willingness to utilize damaged or secondhand materials in their own home. Moreover, the materials used in
13100-518: The pavilion of the Soviet Union, topped by enormous statues of a worker and a peasant carrying a hammer and sickle. As to the modernists, Le Corbusier was practically, but not quite invisible at the Exposition; he participated in the Pavilion des temps nouveaux, but focused mainly on his painting. The one modernist who did attract attention was a collaborator of Le Corbusier, Josep Lluis Sert ,
13231-403: The problem of how to properly adorn modern structures. There were two available routes from this perceived crisis. One was to attempt to devise an ornamental vocabulary that was new and essentially contemporary. This was the route taken by architects like Louis Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright , or by the unique Antoni Gaudí . Art Nouveau , popular around the turn of the 20th century,
13362-536: The purely geometric trylon and periphery sculpture. It had many monuments to Art Deco, such as the Ford Pavilion in the Streamline Moderne style, but also included the new International Style that would replace Art Deco as the dominant style after the War. The Pavilions of Finland, by Alvar Aalto , of Sweden by Sven Markelius , and of Brazil by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa , looked forward to
13493-421: The pyramids of the ancient Mayan civilization. He experimented for a time with modular mass-produced housing. He identified his architecture as "Usonian", a combination of USA, "utopian" and "organic social order". His business was severely affected by the beginning of the Great Depression that began in 1929; he had fewer wealthy clients who wanted to experiment. Between 1928 and 1935, he built only two buildings:
13624-463: The reinforced concrete building was in steps, with each floor set back from the floor below, creating a series of terraces. Between 1910 and 1913, Auguste Perret built the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées , a masterpiece of reinforced concrete construction, with Art Deco sculptural bas-reliefs on the façade by Antoine Bourdelle . Because of the concrete construction, no columns blocked the spectator's view of
13755-525: The rise Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, most of the leaders of the German Bauhaus movement found a new home in the United States, and played an important part in the development of American modern architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright was eighty years old in 1947; he had been present at the beginning of American modernism, and though he refused to accept that he belonged to any movement, continued to play
13886-444: The rise of modern architecture. Large parts of major cities, from Berlin, Tokyo, and Dresden to Rotterdam and east London; all the port cities of France, particularly Le Havre , Brest, Marseille, Cherbourg had been destroyed by bombing. In the United States, little civilian construction had been done since the 1920s; housing was needed for millions of American soldiers returning from the war. The postwar housing shortages in Europe and
14017-456: The specific culture which developed unique forms of decoration, or modified ornament from other cultures. The Ancient Egyptian culture is arguably the first civilization to add pure decoration to their buildings. Their ornament takes the forms of the natural world in that climate, decorating the capitals of columns and walls with images of papyrus and palm trees. Assyrian culture produced ornament which shows influence from Egyptian sources and
14148-450: The spirit of Italian Rationalism of the 1920s continued, with the work of architect Giuseppe Terragni . His Casa del Fascio in Como, headquarters of the local Fascist party, was a perfectly modernist building, with geometric proportions (33.2 meters long by 16.6 meters high), a clean façade of marble, and a Renaissance-inspired interior courtyard. Opposed to Terragni was Marcello Piacitini,
14279-437: The stage. Otto Wagner , in Vienna, was another pioneer of the new style. In his book Moderne Architektur (1895) he had called for a more rationalist style of architecture, based on "modern life". He designed a stylized ornamental metro station at Karlsplatz in Vienna (1888–89), then an ornamental Art Nouveau residence, Majolika House (1898), before moving to a much more geometric and simplified style, without ornament, in
14410-535: The structure, allowing glass curtain walls on the façade and open floor plans, independent of the structure. They were always white, and had no ornament or decoration on the outside or inside. The best-known of these houses was the Villa Savoye , built in 1928–1931 in the Paris suburb of Poissy . An elegant white box wrapped with a ribbon of glass windows around on the façade, with living space that opened upon an interior garden and countryside around, raised up by
14541-467: The style was often used for new airport terminals, train and bus stations, and for gas stations and diners built along the growing American highway system. In the 1930s the style was used not only in buildings, but in railroad locomotives, and even refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. It both borrowed from industrial design and influenced it. In the United States, the Great Depression led to
14672-490: The teachers of a generation of American postwar architects. In 1937 Mies van der Rohe also moved to the United States; he became one of the most famous designers of postwar American skyscrapers. Expressionism , which appeared in Germany between 1910 and 1925, was a counter-movement against the strictly functional architecture of the Bauhaus and Werkbund. Its advocates, including Bruno Taut , Hans Poelzig , Fritz Hoger and Erich Mendelsohn , wanted to create architecture that
14803-604: The wake of the First Five Year Plan – including colossal Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (1932) – and made an attempt to start the standardization of living blocks with Ginzburg's Narkomfin building . A number of architects from the pre-Soviet period also took up the constructivist style. The most famous example was Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow (1924), by Alexey Shchusev (1924) The main centers of constructivist architecture were Moscow and Leningrad; however, during
14934-462: Was a prototype for the modernist office buildings that followed. (It was torn down in 1957, because it stood in the zone between East and West Berlin, where the Berlin Wall was constructed.) Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he moved to England (1933), then to the United States (1941). Fritz Höger was another notable Expressionist architect of the period. His Chilehaus was built as
15065-454: Was also a passionate advocate of a new urbanism, based on planned cities. In 1922 he presented a design of a city for three million people, whose inhabitants lived in identical sixty-story tall skyscrapers surrounded by open parkland. He designed modular houses, which would be mass-produced on the same plan and assembled into apartment blocks, neighborhoods, and cities. In 1923 he published "Toward an Architecture", with his famous slogan, "a house
15196-574: Was an example of what he called rationalist architecture ; it had a simple stucco rectangular façade with square windows and no ornament. The fame of the new movement, which became known as the Vienna Secession spread beyond Austria. Josef Hoffmann , a student of Wagner, constructed a landmark of early modernist architecture, the Stoclet Palace , in Brussels, in 1906–1911. This residence, built of brick covered with Norwegian marble,
15327-474: Was based upon new and innovative technologies of construction (particularly the use of glass , steel , and concrete ); the principle functionalism (i.e. that form should follow function ); an embrace of minimalism ; and a rejection of ornament . According to Le Corbusier , the roots of the movement were to be found in the works of Eugène Viollet le duc , while Mies van der Rohe was heavily inspired by Karl Friedrich Schinkel . The movement emerged in
15458-485: Was composed of geometric blocks, wings, and a tower. A large pool in front of the house reflected its cubic forms. The interior was decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt and other artists, and the architect even designed clothing for the family to match the architecture. In Germany, a modernist industrial movement, Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) had been created in Munich in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius ,
15589-452: Was described by architect Adolf Loos in his 1908 manifesto, translated into English in 1913 and polemically titled Ornament and Crime , in which he declared that lack of decoration is the sign of an advanced society. His argument was that ornament is economically inefficient and "morally degenerate", and that reducing ornament was a sign of progress. Modernists were eager to point to American architect Louis Sullivan as their godfather in
15720-830: Was financed by the Deputation of Pontevedra, with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Xunta de Galicia and the Pontevedra City Council. The project involved the creation of a new pedestrian street between Padre Amoedo and Arcos de San Bartolomé streets. The temporary exhibition space was inaugurated in July 2008 with the Art Biennial dedicated to the Maghreb. After the implementation of
15851-566: Was in part a conscious effort to evolve such a "natural" vocabulary of ornament. A more radical route abandoned the use of ornament altogether, as in some designs for objects by Christopher Dresser . At the time, such unornamented objects could have been found in many unpretending workaday items of industrial design, ceramics produced at the Arabia manufactory in Finland, for instance, or the glass insulators of electric lines. This latter approach
15982-441: Was intended to awe the spectators by its huge scale. Adolf Hitler intended to turn Berlin into the capital of Europe, grander than Rome or Paris. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus, and the most prominent modern architects soon departed for Britain or the United States. In Italy, Benito Mussolini wished to present himself as the heir to the glory and empire of ancient Rome. Mussolini's government was not as hostile to modernism as The Nazis;
16113-977: Was launched in the 1890s by Victor Horta in Belgium and Hector Guimard in France; it introduced new styles of decoration, based on vegetal and floral forms. In Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi conceived architecture as a form of sculpture; the façade of the Casa Batlló in Barcelona (1904–1907) had no straight lines; it was encrusted with colorful mosaics of stone and ceramic tiles. Architects also began to experiment with new materials and techniques, which gave them greater freedom to create new forms. In 1903–1904 in Paris Auguste Perret and Henri Sauvage began to use reinforced concrete , previously only used for industrial structures, to build apartment buildings. Reinforced concrete, which could be molded into any shape, and which could create enormous spaces without
16244-513: Was modern, but it was not modernist; it had many features of modernism, including the use of reinforced concrete, glass, steel, chrome, and it rejected traditional historical models, such as the Beaux-Arts style and Neo-classicism ; but, unlike the modernist styles of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, it made lavish use of decoration and color. It reveled in the symbols of modernity; lightning flashes, sunrises, and zig-zags. Art Deco had begun in France before World War I and spread through Europe; in
16375-530: Was poetic, expressive, and optimistic. Many expressionist architects had fought in World War I and their experiences, combined with the political turmoil and social upheaval that followed the German Revolution of 1919, resulted in a utopian outlook and a romantic socialist agenda. Economic conditions severely limited the number of built commissions between 1914 and the mid-1920s, As result, many of
16506-533: Was purely functional and new. The revolution in materials came first, with the use of cast iron , drywall , plate glass , and reinforced concrete, to build structures that were stronger, lighter, and taller. The cast plate glass process was invented in 1848, allowing the manufacture of very large windows. The Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was an early example of iron and plate glass construction, followed in 1864 by
16637-424: Was scheduled for Moscow in 1932, but was cancelled at the last minute. Instead, the delegates held their meeting on a cruise ship traveling between Marseille and Athens. On board, they together drafted a text on how modern cities should be organized. The text, called The Athens Charter , after considerable editing by Corbusier and others, was finally published in 1957 and became an influential text for city planners in
16768-536: Was supposed to be built of reinforced concrete, but because of technical problems it was finally built of traditional materials covered with plaster. His sculptural form, very different from the austere rectangular forms of the Bauhaus, first won him commissions to build movie theaters and retail stores in Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Berlin. His Mossehaus in Berlin was an early model for the streamline moderne style. His Columbushaus on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1931)
16899-521: Was the Kaufmann Desert House in 1946, and he designed hundreds of further projects. The 1937 Paris International Exposition in Paris effectively marked the end of the Art Deco, and of pre-war architectural styles. Most of the pavilions were in a neoclassical Deco style, with colonnades and sculptural decoration. The pavilions of Nazi Germany, designed by Albert Speer , in a German neoclassical style topped by eagle and swastika, faced
17030-512: Was the tower proposed by painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin for the Moscow meeting of the Third Communist International in 1920: he proposed two interlaced towers of metal four hundred meters high, with four geometric volumes suspended from cables. The movement of Russian Constructivist architecture was launched in 1921 by a group of artists led by Aleksandr Rodchenko . Their manifesto proclaimed that their goal
17161-504: Was to find the "communist expression of material structures". Soviet architects began to construct workers' clubs, communal apartment houses, and communal kitchens for feeding whole neighborhoods. One of the first prominent constructivist architects to emerge in Moscow was Konstantin Melnikov , the number of working clubs – including Rusakov Workers' Club (1928) – and his own living house, Melnikov House (1929) near Arbat Street in Moscow. Melnikov traveled to Paris in 1925 where he built
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