Movement in Art and Architecture

20th Century Modernism gave birth to art and architecture that seemed to move. As early as 1900, painters employed a new concept of "time and space" in their work. Consider cubist art that introduced a collage effect where multiple perspectives are employed in one painting. This gives the viewer an impression of movement to an otherwise static object.







Not coincidentally, some 30 years later, the moving picture and the advent of commercially available T.V. brought actual moving pictures to the masses. This technological advancement had an impact on art and design that is now known as "Modernism".

Modern furniture and product design came to adopt some of these same sensibilities as a result of technological advances and new materials.





Modern building design had been moving in these same directions as well. Not in the sense that buildings are actually moving, but rather that buildings appear to be fluid. The modernist approach was naturally to move away from the more traditional ideas of solidity, symmetry, proportion and scale, and arrived at buildings like the Guggenheim Museum, NYC (1939)





Naturally, building design has even taken cues from automobile and mass-transit design, where movement and aerodynamics are essential in the design process.









And today, some designers take cues from nature to develop high-tech buildings that embrace these same fluid design principles.

Chicago: A brief history (Part One)

After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, it made sense to rebuild the city in something other than wood. But what would it look like? Chicago wanted to grow upward and outward and distinguish itself.



Beginning in the early 1880s, steel-frame construction technology gave way to lighter, taller more glassy exteriors. In fact, architect and engineer, William LeBaron Jenney was the first to utilize this idea and as a result the skyscraper was born in Chicago.

Home Insurance Building, 1884 (12 stories)




Soon after this, Louis Sullivan, another visionary in Chicago, would discard historical precedent and design structures that emphasized verticality even more. Since most of his work was in Chicago, this new form of architecture came to be known as the first "Chicago School".

The Gage Building, 1895 (12 stories)



Carson Pirie Scott, 1899 (12 stories)




Also based in Chicago, visionaries like Daniel Burnham took these new structural ideas and produced even lighter, more elegant towers a little taller.

The Reliance Building (1890)



Likewise, so did Chicago's Holabird and Root

The Marquette (1895)