A History of Modern Architecture
Book by Jürgen Joedicke; Frederick A. Praeger, 1959

Introduction
The nineteenth century, so rich in important works of music and painting, the great age of the novel and of lyric poetry, developed no characteristic art forms in spatial composition and planning. It was an epoch without a building style of its own. Self-confident reliance on the architectural forms of the past concealed an inner uncertainty. The past had become a store-house for hasty resurrections of every style, for the pseudo-Gothic and the neoromantic, for "renaissances of the renaissance" and resuscitations of Baroque and Rococo, to be plundered without restraint and often enough without any comprehension of the circumstances which had given rise to these particular forms. For religious structures Romanesque and Gothic models were preferred, for bank buildings Doric and Ionic columns were chosen to indicate stability and the dignity of wealth, and in the building of town halls middle-class vanity found expression in reminiscences of Late Gothic and Renaissance days, the golden age of towns. Even the ordinary middle-class home could not escape the carnival of styles and masqueraded in clothes borrowed from the Renaissance villas of the Florentine, Roman and Venetian nobility.

But even among followers of the cult of historical pageantry there were important architects like Semper and Viollet-le-Duc who stood head and shoulders above the sycophantic mannerists with their pattern books. There were architects who tried to speak a language of their own, even if they used the grammar and vocabulary of the past, but for the most part their efforts were condemned to failure. The intellectual revolutions and social upheavals which had taken place in the meantime could no longer find a response in concepts which were based entirely on traditional ideas of architecture. The tasks which confronted nineteenth-century architecture, and which continued unsolved into our century, were unmatched in variety and magnitude. About 1800, with the onset of the industrial revolution, there occurred a rapid increase in population. Within 130 years the number of inhabitants in England rose from 9 to 45 million, in Germany from 24 to 66, and in the USA from 5 to 123. Simultaneously the proportionate distribution of town and country dwellers altered. In 1871 64 out of 100 Germans still lived in the country and 5 in cities, but by 1933 there were only 33 in the country to 30 in cities. London underwent an eigthfold expansion in 150 years, while Paris increased two-and-a-half times in half a century. The rise in population only affected towns. In previous centuries architecture had been associated in its development with what were essentially unchanging building problems: the church, the castle, the town hall and the merchant's house. New tasks now began to appear, which hitherto had been without significance in architectural development: factories, workshops and administrative buildings; highways, stations and airports; hospitals and sports buildings; schools, libraries and exhibition halls. At the same time there arose an ever more pressing need co-ordinate from the standpoint of overall control the immense multiplicity of requirements and regulations. The problem involved the technical, sociological and formal aspects of town planning, and finally national planning as well. Beyond the town boundaries regional planning sought a basis for individual planning by ordering the disposition of industrial and residential zones, highways and green spaces and of built-up and agricultural areas. Confronted with such an abundance of tasks eclecticism with its methods based upon historical precedents was certain to founder.

During the same period a complete change in production methods took place. Handicrafts were gradually superseded and supplanted by industry; technics began to appear as the determining factor. Manufacturing processes were increasingly mechanized. The staggering developments in natural sciences, which were leading to a different conception of our world, changed everyday activities in all respects. Seventy years ago in our grandparents' time, living and work rooms were still lit with gas; the motor car and the electric tram, the aeroplane, the radio and the telephone had not yet been invented. To-day, barely three generations later, we no longer measure the speed of the jet fighter in miles per hour, but by the speed of sound. The pioneers of modern architecture could still know little of what the age of technics might bring. They instinctively sensed, however, the coming transformation in the social structure of the time and they recognized with absolute clarity that the new architectural problems could be solved only by contemporary means. Their protest against style mimicry and historical make-believe became audible for the first time when, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Louis Sullivan in Chicago, Hendrik Petrus Berlage in Amsterdam, Henry van de Velde in Belgium and Otto Wagner in Vienna issued their simultaneous challenge, starting a movement which led to modern architecture.

If we look back at the history of modern architecture a number of decisive factors stand out. The search for a new language of form and the development of new concepts of space were stimulated by the introduction of building materials which took the place of conventional materials and were associated with new constructional methods. At the same time modern architecture was guided by a strong social sense, which influenced the thinking and conduct of leading architects and is seen in the changed attitude to important building problems. In the nineteenth century, housing, the real cardinal problem of a socially conscious architecture, had remained in the hands of building contractors and real estate speculators. The results were the wretched dwellings of our big cities, in which -- cut off from natural surroundings, air and sunshine -- a large part of the population had to live. The English Garden City movement tackled this problem. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard proclaimed his theory of settling factory and office workers in small garden towns, a prelude to the great housing schemes which grew up after the first world war. The impetus given by new principles and materials of construction and the humanizing of the art of building are important forces in the history of modern...