Iron, steel, concrete and glass
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Human houses should not be like boxes, blazing in the sun."--Frank Lloyd Wright in a 1930 lecture |
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Some see modern architecture as primarily driven by technological and engineering developments, and it is true that the availability of new building materials such as iron, steel, concrete and glass drove the invention of new building techniques as part of the Industrial Revolution. The first example in this category is the Crystal Palace which used iron, steel, concrete and glass to house The Great Exhibition in 1851.
About 40 years later in France, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated. It broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be—and at the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life.
The style was first verbally celebrated by futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia in 1914 in his Manifesto of Futurist Architecture.
- "The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily "ugly" in its mechanical simplicity, higher and wider according to need rather than the specifications of municipal laws. It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements. "
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