(traditional classicism) and also was appropriated by those who abstracted its principles
in the modern effort for an ahistorical architecture (early modernism). Among those
extending the classical tradition, the terms class ical and traditional have been used as if interchangeable.
However, most would use traditional as the more inclusive term referring to premodernist
architectural habits in various cultures and societies around the world. Many would
describe class icism as including a more specific species of traditional architecture drawing from
the Western tradition of building.
The contrast in how traditional classicism was employed in the 20th century may be
witnessed in the work of architects as apparently dissimilar as Walter Gropius and Paul
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 508
Philippe Cret, both of whom utilized such fundamentals as bilateral symmetry, axes and
cross axes as organizing plan elements, and proportional systems based on
anthropomorphic sources. It would be of little consequence to identify as classical any
building employing axes of symmetry in an organizational strategy, yet classical
principles proved themselves useful throughout the century and to architects of every
aesthetic preference. Buildings whose elevations and massing are as different as the
Werkbund Pavilion (Cologne, 1914), First Church of Christ, Scientist (Berkeley, 1910),
and Rockefeller Center (New York, from 1931) share fundamentally classical planning
techniques of axes of symmetry disciplining complex building programs. After
midcentury a notable exponent was Louis Kahn, trained in the University of
Pennsylvania’s Beaux-Arts program. Kahn employed the general geometries of
classicism and axial organization, altering the classical ideals of ceremonial circulation
laid out on primary axes separating the levels of important spaces into his theory of
“servant” and “served” spaces, as seen in his 1963 Parliament Building at Dacca (in what
is now Bangladesh).
Overt classical allusions were present in surprising places early in the 20th century,
notably in the AEG Turbine Factory designed by Peter Behrens (Berlin, 1908), hailed for
its sleek curtain wall and exposed structure. However, the impression of the classical
temple is undeniable despite the obvious expression of the factory function, even if here
the triangular pediment is replaced by the polygonal profile of the building’s truss roof,
and the colonnade is a series of steel columns. Through this metaphor Behrens could
intentionally express that his era had elevated industrial tasks to the level of cultural
endeavor; he could not have communicated such in a newly invented vocabulary. Here,
classicism was essential for the meaning of this primary monument of the factory
aesthetic. More ingenious with its use of the “elements” of classicism, Gunnar Asplund’s
Stockholm Public Library (1920–28) is massed with a simple cylinder rising from a low
box, recalling at once the creative form play of neoclassical architect Ledoux and the
elementary volumes into which the Pantheon might be broken down. Drawing from more
specific classical lessons, Asplund applied ornament in its traditional civic role: Interior
bas-reliefs illustrate scenes from Homer; the exterior frieze portrays elements of everyday
life to enliven the building and to suggest the library’s contents and function as well. As
an important civic institution, the building’s cylinder makes a typal reference to those
buildings that have ranked high in the traditional hierarchy.
Critical attention has tended to favor modernist stylistic innovation over the
application of classical principles. Even so, the recognizable signs of ancient building
types and ornament—in particular the orders—were employed consistently by advocates
of architecture’s classical heritage through the 20th century. In the early part of the
century, the design methods of American Renaissance architects proved helpful in
lending an appropriately ceremonial appearance and organizational structure to complex
buildings serving the modernity of 20th-century life. Notably, the Pennsylvania Station
(McKim, Mead and White; New York, 1910) vividly recalled the Imperial Baths of
Rome as it also utilized École des Beaux-Arts planning to skillfully organize the
movements of travelers on foot, in taxis, and on trains. Such landmarks as the New York
Public Library (Carrère and Hastings, 1911) and the Flatiron Building (Daniel Burnham,
1903) reveal classicism’s value for expressive potential as well as its ability to organize
large, complex buildings, whether they sprawl horizontally or soar vertically. Although
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these examples reveal a rigorous adherence to elements of Western classicism, the
Viceroy’s House in New Delhi (Edwin Lutyens, 1915–24) fused Western antique forms
and proportional systems with Mogul emblems of authority to express the imperial
station of the British Raj, revealing the conviction among colonial powers and their
architects that the Western classical tradition could be adapted flexibly to other cultural
contexts.
Following World War I, especially in the 1930s, the formal expression of classicism
was changed, especially in the hands of architects and patrons who strove to articulate
imperial ambitions architecturally, in a manner that some have described as “stripped.”
Their simplified but recognizable classicism embraced the monumental scale, sense of
discipline, order, and bright whiteness associated with classical antiquity, but in a form
void of the delicate ornament and visual refinements popular earlier in the century. This
architecture has been roundly criticized for its appropriation by the Nazi party,
specifically in Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld (Nuremberg, 1936) and Gerdy Troost’s House
of German Art (Munich, 1934). Hitler’s expression of nationalist sentiments through
stripped classicism extended to his 1937 plan to reorder Berlin with long avenues, axes,
and monumental classical buildings (including a triumphal arch dedicated to the Führer
and a domed pantheon of Nazi heroes) drawing from the plans for Haussmann’s Paris,
imperial Rome, and L’Enfant’s Washington. However, there is nothing inherently
malevolent in the style itself, which appeared through the 20th century in buildings
designed to represent the democratic capital of the United States, including the Pan-
American Union (Cret, 1910) and the National World War II Memorial (Friedrich St.
Florian, design competition 1998). The appeal of stripped classicism to a culturally
diverse audience is apparent in such a case as the generation of architects from China
who studied under Cret at the University of Pennsylvania and, on returning to their
homeland, practiced an architecture that fused Western classicism with traditional
Chinese methods. Thus several countries, from Italy and Germany to China and America,
shared an affinity for this simplified classicism, drawing from it the expressive power and
authority of ancient architecture, its usefulness to express values of civic decorum, and
the forward-looking nature of its contemporary patrons.
The more visually obvious manifestations of classicism typified by McKim and Cret
coincided with peaks in the publication of ancient and Renaissance treatises, whose
appearance at the start and conclusion of the century reveals a significant readership of
architects applying the lessons and details of these books in their buildings. Vitruvius’s De architectural
was continually published in the 20th century. Revealing its importance to architecture
worldwide, the treatise was brought out in Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Latin;
two notable English translations of Vitruvius mark either end of the century (1914 and
1999). Similarly, several versions of William Ware’s American Vignola were published in the first decade
of the century, and two more appeared in its final decades. These publication events
correspond with the early flourishing of the classical tradition. Their interruption during
the century’s middle decades coincided with the apparent triumph of “orthodox,” or high
European, modernism, which by the 1960s was deemed by many as fundamental to the
failure of urban renewal and slum clearance schemes, construction of disastrous CIAMinspired
public housing projects, and the demolition of historic structures (notably the
1963 destruction of the aforementioned Penn Station). As the architectural devastation
visited on cities gave impetus to both a growing backlash against ahistorical modernist
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architecture and historic preservation initiatives, tradition and classicism emerged as
viable correctives to the disasters of the Modern movement. Concurrently, several works
of Renaissance theory appeared in the last four decades of the century: Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture was
published in 1966 and translated in 1986; Palladio was retranslated in 1965 and again in
1997; and several of Serlio’s books were reprinted in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In
1993 the Getty Center’s Texts and Documents series added the 17th-century Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients by
Claude Perrault to its ambitious list of publications.
New theory drawing from the old also appeared in these later decades (notably Robert
Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architectu re, 1966) and found a wide audience whose growing dissatisfaction with
modernism stimulated the rise of Postmodernism. In its approach to infuse classical
ornament with meaning relevant in an era of relativity, which has led to doublecoding,
Postmodernism at once acknowledges the importance and value of ornament and antique
forms in architecture, at times with the intentional hazard of weakening the tradition by
making such references ironic or comical. Postmodernism’s contribution has been judged
a mixed one. As early as 1979, Joseph Rykwert criticized it as an alternate modernist
architecture.
Perhaps criticism of this sort drove some to find again what constitutes the tradition of
classical architecture. The everincreasing success of the New Urbanist founders, Andres
Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, to restore the traditional art of making cities has
made evident that architectural historians, such as Yale University’s former professor
Vincent Scully, in professional schools where the curriculum is modernist, have had an
important role. An event perhaps of more symbolic than substantive importance in the
hoped-for ascendancy of classical architecture was HRH Prince Charles’s criticism of the
planned addition to Britain’s National Gallery. In his now-famous speech presented on
the 150th anniversary of the RIBA in 1984, he criticized the addition as a “monstrous
carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” and advocated, as he continues
to do, for a return to classical and traditional architecture. Remarkable are the number of
academies such as the one in New York, organizing groups such as INTBAU in London,
and university curriculums committed to classicism. Among the small group of such
universities, the strongest, but unique in the United States, is the University of Notre
Dame.
The most important polemicist for the architecture of traditional cities based on
classical principles from the late 1960s continues to be Leon Krier, who in 2003 was the
recipient of the first Driehaus Prize—the aim of which is to recognize annually the great
contributors to the practice of classical architecture or traditional architecture and
architectural preservation. Krier’s language, illustrations, and civic designs have the force
and clarity of a manifesto. He criticizes modernist architecture as a totalizing production
which has substituted that which has been traditionally appreciated as truly engaging in
buildings—including the accumulation of thousands of years of architectural
accommodation to social, political, and environmental circumstances—which classical
architecture is able to adapt. Presently, Poundbury, for which Krier has been the master
planner and whose patron is Prince Charles, is being raised in Dorchester, England. In
Krier’s paper architecture, and now in this built architecture, he argues that the making of
cities and the practice of classicism are disciplines best not separated. Many would say
that the present interest in classical architecture is not a stylistic revival but a return to an
important cultural habit of building.
