Five architectural approaches that continue to shape design to this day
4 min read
Anyone looking at these styles today will therefore discover more than just historical references. They will find strategies that can be further developed, combined and adapted to new spatial contexts.
Gothic: The Invention of Verticality.
What the Gothic style achieved from the 12th century onwards was a technical revolution: pointed arches, ribbed vaults and buttresses made walls slimmer, spaces taller and windows larger. Cathedrals such as Chartres, Cologne Cathedral and Notre-Dame became ‘machines of light’, in which architecture and symbolism merged. Anyone who steps into a church nave today and looks up is witnessing an invention that is 900 years old.
Bauhaus: Form follows function.
Between 1919 and 1933, the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin defined a new relationship between design, craftsmanship and industry. Clean-lined forms, flat roofs, ribbon windows, no ornamentation. Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer shaped a design language that extended far beyond architecture to encompass furniture, graphic design and everyday objects in equal measure. To this day, the Bauhaus remains the most influential school of modern design.
Organic architecture: Building with nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright wanted buildings that grew out of their surroundings rather than standing apart from them. Fallingwater, situated above a waterfall in Pennsylvania, is the quintessential example of this. In Finland, Alvar Aalto combined this approach with a deep understanding of materials, light and landscape, and translated it into a Scandinavian design language. Organic architecture does not think in terms of geometry, but in terms of relationships. It asks how one place responds to another.
Brutalism: Concrete as a statement.
In the 1950s and 60s, ‘béton brut’ – raw concrete – gave rise to a style of architecture that prioritised honesty over elegance. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building. Brutalist buildings continue to divide opinion to this day, but they are increasingly being rediscovered. Not as a nostalgic reference, but as a commitment to substance, material and a clear spatial order.
Postmodernism: A break with rigour.
When Robert Venturi wrote in 1966 that ‘less’ was a nuisance, it was a challenge to Modernism’s doctrine of purity. Postmodernism brought colour, ornament, quotation and irony back into architecture. Michael Graves’ Portland Building, Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia. Not everything has stood the test of time, but the attitude lives on. Architecture, the message goes, is allowed to speak, play and contradict itself.
Five styles, one common thread.
Each of these architectural styles emerged from a sense of rejection – from the desire to do things differently from the previous generation. That is precisely what makes them accessible and relevant to this day: as a frame of reference, as a toolbox, and as a reminder that architecture is always a response to its own time.
