Twentieth-Century Architecture

Chapter 1 effect on the urban viewer of different types of composition.

One of the challenges of any survey is to distinguish between the uniquely personal aspects of an architect’s achievement and those design themes, strategies, and typological solutions characteristic of a design movement, a generation, or a particular region. This is clearly so in the case of apartment buildings.

During the nineteenth century, the growing middle class sought to legitimize itself by identifying with many of the elements of high culture traditionally associated with the aristocracy. Apartment buildings were modeled after the palaces of the nobility. By the early twentieth century, however, the inadequacies of this approach were increasingly apparent. An apartment building occupied by many small families is not the same as the palatial residence of an aristocratic family surrounded by an extensive entourage. Designers turned away from historical models with aristocratic pedigrees and explored other approaches inspired by nature, tectonics, or urban sociology.

The undulating facade of the Casa Milá in Barcelona by Antonio Gaudí (1852–1926) suggests the wave-sculpted face of a seaside cliff while, on the rooftop, the bizarrely twisted shapes of ventilator hoods stand like mysterious sentinels (images).

Gaudí’s eccentric design language is extremely personal, yet it struck a chord among a generation concerned with promoting the Catalan Renaixença (the quest for a cultural identity unique to the region surrounding Barcelona). Gaudí’s work combines an interest in rational if unorthodox structural solutions with formal solutions that elicit emotional responses on the part of observers. For Gaudí, the public realm of the modern city—the streets, squares, and parks of Barcelona—embraces both the mundane and the surreal realms of human experience. His buildings unite the rational and the romantic in compositions that vividly assert their presence in the streetscape.

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