ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

Designed by Giacomo Matté Trucco completed 1916–1926 In 1916 the Italian automobile company Fiat, with Giovanni Agnelli at its helm, began the construction of a modern factory that would take ten years to build and that epitomized the American multistory concrete factory as established by architect Albert Kahn for Henry Ford in the Highland Park Plant outside of Detroit in 1912, but with its own innovations. Fiat’s earlier factories, typical of the time, were traditional multistoried brick structures in the center of cities. With Lingotto Fiat Works, Fiat moved out of Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 864 Turin, south of the center, to the west of the Po River on the via Nizza. There they could improve their production methods and built a production space at an unprecedented scale for European industries. In 1912, Agnelli, Fiat’s founder, impressed with Ford’s automobile plants which he had seen in Detroit, returned to Italy with the desire to build a factory similar both in co...

Urban designer, United States Best known for his dramatic depictions of the monumental architecture of a futuristic, urban utopia, Hugh Ferriss contributed significantly in the 1920s and 1930s to an appreciation for urban design within academic and professional circles, but more so among a lay audience. Although he was a licensed architect, he chose not to build. He dedicated his career to drawing, writing, and urban planning, becoming the preferred renderer and consultant to some of the most notable practitioners of his day. Although Ferriss shared with his modernist peers a belief in architecture’s agency in improving urban society, he rejected the industrial references assumed in many of their proposals. He sought to invest his designs with a spirituality that he felt absent both in international style modernism and in an America dominated by corporate activity; the skyscraper—the new icon of that activity—became his fundamental subject. His writings remained less polemical and ulti...

Feng Shui dates from before the earliest dynasty in China, when its principles were first used to locate family graves to ensure good luck for all future descendants. Loosely translated as “wind and water,” the term Feng Shui refers to the practice of discerning the Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 858 harmonic arrangements of natural elements so as to enhance the flow of the life force, or Chi; for Western audiences, the term is most directly defined as “geomancy” or “divination.” In the context of design, Feng Shui encourages a healthy and ecological approach to the built environment, such that humans and nature live together in the best possible relationship. In creating a sensitive environment, Feng Shui not only balances the natural forces of the universe but also cares for the psychic well-being of humankind. Feng Shui does not deny the cyclical forces of nature, which ultimately ensure that good and bad luck ebb and flow at different times; rather, its primary goal is t...

Feminist theory in 20th-century architecture encompasses identification of gendered power relations in architectural and urban form and discourse, critique of masculine dominance in the design professions, and creation of “feminist” and “feminine” architectural practices. Influenced by feminism in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, and the social sciences, feminist architectural theory has embraced histories of women in architecture, new types of architectural practice, and the reconceptualization of the “feminine” itself. In architecture, feminist theory has three main tendencies, all of which address gendered power relations and the injustice of masculine domination in architecture. Some theorists celebrate the differences between men and women and take an overtly feminist approach to the critique and reconstruction of architectural practice and history. Others emphasize the struggle for equal access to training and jobs in architecture and for recognition of women’s competenc...

Architect, Norway Sverre Fehn began his career after graduating from the Oslo School of Architecture in 1949. He is one of a number of post-World War II Norwegian architects who believed in bestowing universal modernism with both regional and site-specific values, espousing an architecture that, while always rational, recognized local crafts and culture, mythology, and folklore. His concerns with the topography of the site, climate, local identity, and tectonics are central to issues of both regionalism and phenomenology in architecture. In 1950, Fehn joined the Progressive Architect’s Group of Oslo, Norway (PAGON), a division of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), along with his former teacher Arne Korsmo, architectural theorist Christian NorbergSchulz, and design collaborators Grung and Ostbye, among others. CIAM was a network concerned with how ideas of modern architecture and town planning were communicated internationally. Although CIAM had no direct influenc...

Designed by Oscar Niemeyer, completed 1960 Brazil The free and vigorous forms of Oscar Niemeyer’s works, such as Pampulha (1943) and Canoas House (1954), were already internationally recognized when he visited Europe in 1954. Niemeyer was impressed by classical buildings he saw there—their monumentality and their sense of permanence. This led him to introduce new concepts in his architecture. Niemeyer started to emphasize pure and concise forms as well as single volumes die-tated by structure in order to achieve monumentality. The opportunity for Niemeyer to concretize this new vision came when he was commissioned to design the buildings of Brasilia, the new planned capital of Brazil, built between 1957 and 1960. Adopting the main principles of modern urbanism, Lucio Costa’s plan for Brasilia achieved an appropriate expression of a capital with two axes crossing each other in right angles. The composition, resembling a plane, is very simple, unified, clear, and elegant. In the curved w...

the term that identifies shantytowns in Brazil, originates from poverty settlements in Rio de Janeiro and is derived from a type of bush that is abundant in the semiarid Canudos Entries A–F 841 area in the northern state of Bahia. Rio’s favelas coincide with the occupation of the Santo Antônio and Providência hills (morros ) in the city center. In 1897, soldiers who returned from the Canudos War—a military campaign in the northeastern region of Brazil— received permission to temporarily settle on these sites, where they built shacks of cardboard and wood. Morro da Providência received the name Morro da Favela (favela hill) in reference to the previously mentioned bush. In 1904, 100 houses existed, and by 1933 the number had grown to 1500. By the 1920s, favelas had spread to other hills of the city: Morro dos Telégrafos, Mangueira; Morro de São Carlos, Vila Rica (Copacabana area); Pasmado (Botafogo); and Babilônia (Leme). This expansion even reached the city suburbs. The growth of favel...

Architect and teacher, Egypt More than any other 20th-century architect, Hassan Fathy raised the status of earth building among architects worldwide. Building in earth—adobe or pis é—has a long and honorable history, and in those parts of the world where stone and timber are scarce and expensive, earth has remained the most economical and widely used building material. Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 838 This is certainly true in Egypt and most Arab countries. But even there, as in most of Europe, earth, at the turn of the 20th century, had come to be identified with poverty and backwardness, and earthen building materials were increasingly perceived by architects and the professional middle classes in general to be old fashioned and impermanent. A handful of architectural devotees of earth building advocated and promoted its use, but by and large, commercial vested interests in the brick, cement, steel, and asbestos industries almost completely sidelined earthen building mat...

Fascist architecture denotes the spectrum of architectural projects that were built, theorized, ritualized, and polemically debated by Fascist political regimes of World War II. Extreme right-wing totalitarian dictatorships were forcibly installed in Italy (1922–43), Germany (1933–45), and Spain (1939–75). The Italian Fascist Party under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, the National Socialism Party headed by Adolf Hitler, and the Falange Espanola Party led by General Francisco Franco formed coercive governments whose absolute power abolished all forms of political opposition. Public utilities, commercial exchanges, processes of industrialization, as well as the production of art and architecture were controlled and regulated by the state; and it was in Italy and Germany that architecture played a seminal role in the advancement of Fascist ideologies. The very term Fas cism (or fas cismo in Italian) was derived from the Latin word fasces , denoting an ornamental object of political a...

Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, completed 1951 Piano, Illinois Commissioned in 1945 and finished in 1951, the Farnsworth House is generally regarded as one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s most elegantly conceived and precisely constructed buildings, easily the finest residence he put up in his later, American career. Among his completed house designs, only the Tugendhat House (1930) in Brno, which dates from his years in Germany, is considered comparable in quality. The most striking feature of the Farnsworth House is its outer aspect. The walls consist of floor-to-ceiling glass mounted behind a simple frame made up of eight steel wide-flange piers, four to a side, that support a roof slab and a floor slab, the latter raised some five feet above the ground. The plan is rectangular, with the axis running east and Entries A–F 831 west and the interior giving on to a deck on the west. Symmetry is qualified by a terrace located next to the main structure along the western edge of the s...