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The
Birth of the Modern World began with the Age of Enlightenment,
or the Age of Reason. New advances in science and philosophy
were made as revolutions and population explosions reshaped
the world. Travel and war brought people all around
the globe, in contact with new cultures and new styles.
Great thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau challenged
the rules that governed society. Great scientists such
as Locke and Newton rewrote the laws that governed the
universe. And Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged
everything. Peoples and cultures were finding new forms
of expression and discovering the power of individual
identity.
As
modern thinking progressed and individual morality gained
importance, a longing for the past grew. Looking back
at the classical Greek and Roman cultures that had morality
at their heart, Romanticism
was a style and way of life that embodied the feelings
of the past and present. It looked to the past for all
forms of ideal beauty and grand emotion. By combining
past styles, architecture became a reflection of thousands
of years of building styles. Neo-Classical
reflected Greco-Roman styles with its
columns of marble; Neo-Gothic
the church spires reaching towards heaven; and Neo-Baroque
the grandeur and riches. It was not unusual
to find an estate house made to look like a Gothic
castle surrounded by gardens done in
the Chinese manner with a Greek temple set off in the
trees. This eclecticism, a mix of different styles,
provided a sense of worldliness and mystery to people
swept up in an ever-expanding world.
Neo-Classical
was adopted whole-heartedly in a new
country, the United States . Seen as a reflection of
the democratic feelings of this new country, many of
the buildings, from capitol buildings to libraries and
schools, reflected a new sense of liberty and justice.
Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States
, even built his home, Monticello , in the Neo-Classical
manner.
Monticello
Your
turn:
Some
very well known structures were built in one of the
styles of Romanticism . Find
information on each of the following, then match it
with its location and style.
Houses
of Parliament
Washington
D.C.
Neo-Baroque
United
States Capitol
Paris , France
Neo-Gothic
L’Opera
London , England
Neo-Classical
The
world, however, would soon outgrow Romanticism
. Very quickly, a modern style called
Realism was taking hold.
Artists were portraying what was really happening around
them instead of a myth or ideal. The invention of photography
in 1839 by Louis J.M. Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot
had much to do with this. The photograph offered proof
of the real human condition and was accessible to all.
What
finally pushed the world into the modern era was the
Industrial Revolution. As the global market grew with
more colonies needing goods, methods were developed
to mass-produce those goods. Scientific achievements
such as the steam engine, the cotton gin, and later,
electricity and the telephone allowed production and
communication on a larger scale. The Industrial Revolution
also created a new working class. This new class of
workers included all the men, women, and children laboring
in the textile mills, pottery works, and mines. Often
skilled artisans found themselves as mere laborers as
machines mass - produced the products they used to make
by hand. Wages were small, hours were long, and working
conditions unpleasant and dangerous. So also were the
living conditions. The cities grew rapidly as workers
moved off their farms and into the cities to find employment.
The factory towns were hovels of poorly built tenements,
while the mining towns had rows of company-built cottages,
little more than shelter. The poor living conditions
in the towns could be traced to a lack of good materials,
the absence of building codes, and the lack of public
sanitation.
Do
you remember the Roman insulae or apartment
building? With so many people living in the cities,
apartments were necessary. How about that single-family
house in Flanders ? These two dwelling types were what
people were still living in by the end of the 19 th
century. Growing cities required complex planning but
they were soon able to accommodate indoor plumbing,
maybe not to every apartment, but at least to every
floor and almost every house. More furnishings began
to appear along with gas lighting and coal heating.
New machines were being developed to help with the household
chores such as vacuums and sewing machines. But what
moved people towards modern living the most would be
indoor electricity. Thomas A. Edison wanted to bring
light into every home and factory. He directed the operation
of the first central commercial incandescent electric
generating station in the country. It provided electricity
to one square mile in New York City in 1882. The first
day it operated only 52 customers wanted electricity.
But that would soon change.
Large
structures were also used as factories and warehouses.
What allowed them to be built many stories tall was
cast iron or wrought iron. Many disastrous fires showed
that cast iron wasn’t so strong so they encased the
iron in masonry. As the cities grew, space became more
limited and buildings got higher. New materials such
as steel and inventions like the elevator now meant
that the sky was the limit, literally, and the skyscraper
was born.
Louis
Sullivan , called the first truly modern architect,
was the king of the first “tall buildings.” Sullivan’s
mentor was Henry
Hobson Richardson . Does that name sound familiar?
See where you can find his name above. Richardson designed
buildings using Romanesque
design. His Romanesque Revival
lent itself to the skyscraper with massive rows of masonry,
arched window openings, and a clean façade. These elements
all stood behind the new support structure of iron or
steel framing. Sullivan adapted these methods but went
one step further and left some of the steel structure
exposed, allowing it to become decorative. Sullivan’s
buildings expressed the function in its form and his
famous saying “form follows function” was born. Architects
began to see that both the exterior and interior design
was important; that new materials and a break from tradition
could bring about a new era of building.
Next:1900
CE – Present: 20 th Century and Beyond
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