Last Trends in Architecture

Since mid 20th century Architecture has experience great change. In one hand, the increasing interest in urban planning not only involves the construction of the building themselves, but it also asked for its inclusion in an area and in consonance with deep studies of their physical, social and economic impact. On the other hand, the development of new and revolutionary materials has made possible the creation of some buildings that in a recent past would have been unthinkable.

Innovative Architecture

It combines the imagination of the architects and engineers with the aesthetic impact of materials such as reinforced concrete. Structural solutions are revolutionary and, in addition to use industrial materials they created sophisticates spaces through the distribution of light and the use of materials not frequent in architecture, underlining their tactile qualities. The pioneer of this architecture would be Alvar Aalto. Other architects working in this way are Eero Saarinen, Nervi, Utzon or Kahn. Their sign of identity is the use of industrial material to solve difficult structural problems.

International Style

This style has its roots in the works of the Bauhaus and it developed in the US thanks to the influence of Mies van der Rohe and his disciples. This style is well suited to large metropolitan apartment and office towers. These building proved to have a commercial potential and were extremely efficient for large-scale construction in which the module could be repeated indefinitely. Inner spaces became standardized, predictable, and profitable and exterior reflected the monotony of the interiors. The blank glass box became ubiquitous. Even when these buildings are considered examples of an austere classicism, they are also considered coldly impersonal. Architects working in this style are Stirling, Kenzo Tange, or Philip Johnson.

Post-modern Architecture

Between about 1965 and 1980 architects and critics began to espouse tendencies resulting in a style that is not cohesive but that has a distinct set of principles. Postmodernists value individuality, intimacy, complexity and occasionally even humour. Some architects, such as Venturi, defended an architecture that can produce any kind of buildings, being them equally filling stations or fast-food restaurants. Some works have references to old style and can use vivid colours. Other architects of this movement are Graves, Meier, Jahn or Moore.

High-Tech and Deconstructivism

The High-Tech style came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s through the work of the architects Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster. Its origins lie in the 19th century when new industrial techniques and materials, previously used on engineering projects such as bridges, began to be applied to architecture. High-Tech buildings are typically constructed of steel and glass, make innovative use of technology and are often likened in appearance to the machines because of the tendency to draw attention to, rather than conceal, structural and functional elements.

Postmodernism is not the major strand in the most recent avant-garde architecture. An entirely different approach is represented by the style or idiom known as High-Tech, in which expressive use is made of the constructional and operational aspects of a building, with features such as supporting members or heating pipes fully exposed to view.

Deconstructivism is the term used to characterize buildings in which elements such as fractured forms or warped planes undermine conventional notions of stability and harmony. The works of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid can be considered good examples of this style.

Organicism and architecture in the 50s

We know as organic architecture all the architectonical manifestations that aim at adequate and ally to the nitre. This idea can be found long ago in History but the master in the formulation of its principles was Frank Lloyd Wright.

Organicist architecture is defined by the sense of the interior as a reality; the free plan as flexible and a way of allowing the continuity of atmospheres; the unity between interior and exterior; the use of natural materials; the house as a place for shelter.

With Wright the Rationalism begins to be forgotten and new ways for architecture are opened. This American born architect travelled to Tokyo where he was fascinated by the Japanese architecture. Other of the influences that can be noticed in his work is that of Maya temples of Yucatan. Due to these varied influenced we can say that Wright had a cosmopolitan formation.

His beginnings are associated to the Chicago School but soon he started developing his own style, in which we can distinguish different periods. One of these is that of Prairie Houses, a first attempt to put into practice his idea of Organic architecture. These simple structures consist of functional spaces, light and integrated with nature, at the same time that they are isolated enough as to guarantee the intimacy of their inhabitants. The houses are frequently built in different levels, and always a bit separated from the floor, as in Japanese architecture. One of the most famous houses is the Robbie House.

He continued developing public and private buildings where he continued applying his building philosophy. One of the most representative of his works is the Falling Water House, in Pennsylvania. With this house Wright managed to integrate completely nature and architecture. The different terraces offer the possibility of building in different levels and glass dissolve the walls so interior and exterior and in permanent relation. He used different kind of materials, with an important role of stone that combine with glass and concrete.

In other project Wright experimented with curve forms, as in the New York Guggenheim Museum. He wanted the museum to have well lighted spaces with controlled light that was not reflected in the surfaces. At the same time, he designed the building to offer a possibility of walking up on a ramp in a continuous way, without any braking element for the exhibition of the works of art.


After Wright the word that can define architecture is diversity. One of the most representative architects of the 50s is the Finnish Alvar Aalto. His works are imbued by rationalist spirit but he mixed it with popular tradition and local materials, mainly wood, so common in his native region. His buildings are warm and thought to be appropriate for human beings and the dimension of human body, something in which Wright influence can be noticed. Aalto’s mature work embodies a unique functionalist/expressionist and human style, successfully applied to libraries, civic centres, churches, and housing.

Although Aalto borrowed from the International Style, he utilized texture, colour and structure in creative new ways. He refined the generic examples of modern architecture that existed in most of Europe. His designs were particularly significant because of their response to site, material and form.

Rationalism

The movement known as Rationalism gathered the most important personalities of 20th century’s architecture. Their work and their theory are individual but they have in common the simplicity of the forms because each form belongs to a function.

They use highly industrialised materials, especially concrete. It is a cheap material, easy to adapt, incombustible, non-corrosive and that offers the possibility of building the skeleton, leaving the plan free. In addition to this, it permits the pre-manufacture in series. It can be combined with other materials such as still, glass or brick.

The wall is not a support any longer, and it is reduced to a light skin for closing, with a huge number of windows that allow light and air entering inside the building. The supports are pillars with different sections, made of still and concrete. The covers, in general, are lintels standing on the support and forming with them the skeleton, giving to the construction a light and non-weighty aspect of great constructive audacity.

The decorative elements disappear in favour of the straight and nude form. There is a worry about proportion, simplicity and asymmetry. The internal space is based of the free plan with interior walls that curve and move freely, adapting to the different functions. In the exterior the projecting, the free low level and the terrace in horizontal define the new image.

There is a great interest about urbanism because they aim at accommodating people to the new leaving standards and organise their groups, proposing new formulas as the garden-city o the industrial city. The most representative buildings are social houses, skyscrapers, industrial buildings, administrative constructions, theatres, concert halls and stadiums.

There are close links between Rationalism and other Art movements such as the Bauhaus. This link can be seen in Mies van der Rohe, linked to the German movement and one of the best representatives of Rational architecture. His work was revolutionary from the very beginning, when he started designing an office building in Berlin (1919). After that he designed houses and in 1929 he built the German Pavilion for Barcelona’s Universal Exhibition. In this building he demonstrated the right use of modern materials, with clear volumes and the wall as a curtain instead of the traditional wall. He emigrated to the US where he built numerous skyscrapers that look to be enormous glass boxes, in which it can be seen the devotion of the architect for the purity of the forms.

Le Corbusier was born in Switzerland even if a majority of his work was developed in France. He learnt the use of concrete and soon he began with the series production. He also designed cities for a concrete number of inhabitants (about three million). In 1926 he made one of his most representative works Ville Savoye, that consists of a concrete structure of Mediterranean inspiration in which his five points of architecture appear: use of “pilotis”, a kind of pillar to sustain the structure and separate it from the floor, not cutting the space; free façade; garden-terrace, thanks to the flat roofs; multiplication of windows: continuous windows with metallic sticks; free plan because now it is not the support of the wall. He theorised but it was not an utopian because his projects were realised, as in the case of the Unité d´Habitation at Marseille, where he built houses for working class families.

At the end of his career he modified his Rationalism and was closer to the Organicism as in the case of one of his master works: Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp.

Architecture and Avant-garde

The 20th century bore witness to the creation of the avant-garde movements. Even when these developed mainly in plastic arts, some of them had an influence in architecture, as is the case of De Stijl or Neoplasticism and the Russian Constructivism. Both movements were contemporary of the other big artistic movement of the time, the Bauhaus.
Largely associated with three important figures -- the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and the architect and furniture-maker Gerrit Rietveld -- De Stijl (or “the style”) was perhaps first developed in Mondrian’s post-Cubist paintings, which consist largely of broken horizontal and vertical lines. These works evolved into more spare geometric compositions of orthogonal elements, which are rendered in primary colors set against a white field. In 1917, Rietveld created the canonical “Red/Blue Chair” and projected the Neo-Plastic aesthetic into three dimensions. Van Doesburg taught, for a time, at the Bauhaus, enabling him to widen the De Stijl circle to artists as the Russian El Lissitzky under whose influence, Van Doesberg began “to project, as axonometric drawings, a series of hypothetical architectural constructs, each comprising an asymmetrical cluster of articulated planar elements suspended in space about a volumetric center.”
The characteristics of this architecture were established by van Doesburg: the form does not imitate any other style; especial attention is given to plastic elements, in addition to function, mass, surface, time, space, light, colour and material; it is an economic and functional architecture; it does not have any form following fixed styles and the building is not monumental, but a form open to the space through windows; the ground-plan is essential but in this the walls are not closed even if they support punctually the building; it is an open architecture in which space and time are considered; it is anti-cubic and surfaces follow a centrifugal trend at the same time that symmetry and repetition are eliminated; there is not a clear front in the building and colour is included as a plastic value but, in general, it is a non decorate architecture that aims to be a synthesis of the Neo-Plasticism
The universalizing tendency of the De Stijl soon gave way to the broader, more objective concerns of the Modern movement. For example, while Rietveld’s famous Schroder House of 1924 in Utrecht -- with movable walls and partitions assuring a dynamic, as opposed to static, sense of space -- exemplified the Neo-Plastic ideal of objects floating in space, he began to embrace a more technical architectural position. The project of De Stijl became, through necessity and evolution, a broader trajectory dedicated to social concerns and conditions. The desire to create architecture for the people through means of production, rather than an architecture simply guided by aesthetic concerns, became a rallying cry of a broader European Modernism.

Russian Constructivism was a movement that was active from 1913 to the 1940s. It was a movement created by the Russian avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest of the continent. Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity, where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional. Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. New media was often used in the creation of works, which helped to create a style of art that was orderly. An art of order was desirable at the time because it was just after WWI that the movement arose, which suggested a need for understanding, unity and peace. Famous artists of the Constructivist movement include Vladimir Tatlin, Kasimir Malevich, Alexandra Exter, Robert Adams, and El Lissitzky.
Tatlin's most famous piece remains his "Monument to the Third International" (1919-20, Moscow), a 22-ft-high (6.7-m) iron frame on which rested a revolving cylinder, cube, and cone, all made of glass which was originally designed for massive scale. After the 1917 Revolution, Tatlin (considered the father of Russian Constructivism) worked for the new Soviet Education Commissariate which used artists and art to educate the public. During this period, he developed an officially authorized art form which utilized 'real materials in real space'. His project for a Monument of the Third International marked his first foray into architecture and became a symbol for Russian avant-garde architecture and International Modernism.

Bauhaus

It was founded by Walter Gropius in Germany as an experimental pedagogic centre in which they aimed at uniting architecture and design. It started its decadence in the 30s but it was highly influential in other countries to which its members emigrated.

Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architectured modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design and typography.
The school existed in three German cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors: Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Meyer from 1927 to 1930 and Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933, when the school was closed by the Nazi regime. The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics.

The foundation of Bauhaus occurred at a time of political and cultural upheaval in Germany. Defeat in World War I, the fall of the Germany monarchy and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, previously suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated: Gropius himself did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely unpolitical. Just as important was the influence of the 19th century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function.. Thus the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.

The most important influence on Bauhaus was however modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus - the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit - were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.
Gropious designed the Bauhaus building at Dessau, the most emblematic construction of the movement.The first important work made by Gropius was the Fagus factory in 1911. It was conceit as a beautiful combination of iron and glass, but its main work is the Bauhaus building in which teachers and students collaborated. The plan of the Bauhaus building is formed by three sections that expand freely and multiply the points of view. The walls are of concrete and glass.
There are a number of characteristics to the Bauhaus/International Style of architecture: 1) It shuns ornamentation and favours functionality 2) Uses asymmetry and regularity versus symmetry 3) It grasps architecture in terms of space versus mass.

Bauhaus architecture was concerned with the social aspects of design and with the creation of a new form of social housing for workers. This may be just another one of the reasons it was embraced in the newly evolving cities, at a time when socialist ideas were so prevalent. This style of architecture came about (in part) because of new engineering developments that allowed the walls to be built around steel or iron frames. This meant that walls no longer had to support the structure, but only enveloped it – from the outside.

Perhaps no trend within Modern architecture so neatly captures the imagination as the almost mythic status of the Bauhaus. Emerging in Dessau, Germany, during the shocking aftermath of World War I, the famed institution was conceived as a reformation of applied arts education. The principle was simple: to reject the salon arts of the haute-bourgeoisie in favour of a craft tradition in order to erase the class distinctions between artist and craftsman. Yet this was not a rejection of the modernizing impulses of the rapidly industrializing, urbanizing German state (one that was facing an increasingly dire socio-economic predicament). Instead, as developed by Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, the applied arts were to be taught in a workshop-based design education, with a reconciliation of craft design and industrial production.
Under the tutelage of pioneering Modernists, including Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Theo Van Doesberg, the Bauhaus students produced work inspired by a stripped-down, functional aesthetic, one obviously influenced by Russian Constructivism. Their approach rejected the classical notion of composition through contrasting materials and forms -- instead, it sought to bring out aesthetic properties inherent in the materials themselves, as revealed through their disjunction and arrangement in space. Indeed, from Herbert Bayer’s sans-serif typography to Gropius’s seminal Bauhaus building of 1926, there emerged an objective sensibility that championed elements devoid of ornamentation and excessive detail. The objective approach led to an embrace of a serialized industrial production process that was applied to any variety of craft making, from the assembly of chairs to the weaving of tapestries.

Modernism, Art Nouveau, Modern Style

19th century architecture moved inside a deep contradiction: all the movements aimed at finding their own architectonical language, appropriate for the time but, at the same time, with the best building techniques according to the new times. In this context Modernism was born.

Modernism is an attempt to finding a modern style, accurate for a new century everybody was waiting for enthusiastically. They wanted it to have not links with the past and based on the new material. This style was not only international, but it also expanded to all the art and design spheres, creating a decorative environment, controlled by the architects. It covered from the houses to the metro stations, from furniture to interior decoration, even the clothes of the proprietors. This style received different names depending on the region: Modernism in Spain, Art Nouveau in France, Modern Style in Britain, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionsstil in Austria.

In Britain the ugliness of the designs, the monotony of production in chain and the fear of alienation provoked a movement conducted by William Morris who tried to recover the quality of design and crafts production and Modernism was its direct heir. The same ideas expanded in other places of the continent.

Among the first manifestations of the style are the works of the Belgian Victor Horta, who applied the new conceptions in his Tassel House (1892). Here he developed a new concept of architecture based on the rational use of iron but without renouncing to treat it in an expressive and decorative way with cures and lineal rhythms very refined that gave to the columns, girders and handrails flower shape.

From Belgium, and thanks to the fast diffusion of printed press, it expanded all over Europe, finding in Catalonia one of the most important regions due to the enthusiastic baking of industrial bourgeoisie. There appeared one of the most important and original architects of the movement, Gaudí (1852-1926), whose architecture, highly plastic, almost sculptural, looks to be made of natural forms. Gaudi also realised the decoration of the buildings, trying to keep coherence between exterior and interior. Other architects of the period in Spain are Domènec I Montaner and Puig I Cadafalch. In Barcelona the Modernism reached to all the cultural aspects, with painters such as Rusiñol, Ramón Casas, Nonell.

The new style affected basically architecture and decorative arts, but it also influenced on all the others. Its theory expanded with the illustrated magazines, speeches, exhibitions that were useful to expand the knowledge of technical advances. In this way there were established the basis of the style to which each country added its own particularities. For instance, while in Belgium, France and Spain curves and flowers are essential elements of the style, in Britain, Scotland or Germany it is geometrical. In all the cases it was a reaction against the eclecticism and its inspiration was nature and symbolist painting.

In decorative arts it aimed at offering quality against the vulgarity of massive industrial production. In this aspect followed the British Arts and Crafts movement, fostered by William Morris. In the continent it was not against chain production, but it tried to link art and industry to offer beautiful products that could be bought by almost every body, even when the design in an artisan way made them inaccessible for a majority of the population, but very appropriate for the rich industrial and financial bourgeoisie.

In architecture they looked for flexibility of the line and sinuosity with decorative finality; they used coloured materials and moulding stone; bars, balconies and supports were made in forged iron. The new materials offered to the architect complete creative freedom. They assumed not only the structural and building process but also the decorative and furnishing, making of them real designers.

Interiors were organised as a surface of sinuous and sensual lines, with a naturalistic tendency. There were harmonic wholes created with freedom and fantasy. They looked for the pleasure of the integration of beauty and welfare. Nature was translated to the interior, making it flexible, instable and light.

Materials were of great variety: iron, mosaic, wood. Sinuous lines were elongated on walls and floors, in a kind of vegetal metaphor. The work is organic, extracted from nature; the use of flower elements with decorative purpose created an smart atmosphere. The main centres of production were France, Belgium, Germany and Austria. Among the authors we can mention Victor Horta, the pioneer, Van de Velde and Otto Wagner in Wien.

In Britain, In Glasgow, Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh also developed a rectilinear version of art nouveau, which he employed in numerous buildings and their furnishings. In the Glasgow School of Art, completed in two phases (eastern section 1897-1899, western section 1906-1909), he used contemporary materials in an elegant, angular style. The simple shapes of the brick and stone exterior clearly indicate the division of space within the building, while large expanses of glass provide a strong visual connection between the interior spaces and the outside world. Window mullions (dividers between panes of glass), doors, and fences use ironwork in an elegant linear or geometric manner. This seemingly simple design offers a strong contrast to the ornate architecture based on past styles that was typical of the time.

In Belgium Art nouveau architecture, in Brussels, flourished in the work of Belgian designers Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde. As did Mackintosh in Glasgow, these Belgian designers sought to create a new style, free from the historical references of prevailing traditions. They utilized standard wrought iron and cast-iron technology, but employed it to create distinctly new forms. In the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels (1892-1893), Horta not only revealed the structural column that supports the second floor, but transformed its cast-iron form into a plantlike stem that terminates in a burst of intertwined tendrils as it connects with other structural elements.

In France designer Hector Guimard designed entrances for the Metro stations in Paris (1898-1901) using simple metal and glass forms decorated with curvilinear wrought iron. These are especially memorable examples of art nouveau's delightfully curving naturalistic forms.

Art nouveau took hold in a number of German-speaking cities, the most prominent of which were Munich, Darmstadt, and Weimar in Germany, and Vienna in Austria. Known as Jugendstil (German for “youth style”), art nouveau was promoted in Munich through periodicals such as Die Jugend (The Youth).

Stylistic trends in Vienna took a significantly different direction. Led by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, young artists and architects formed a group called the Wiener Sezession, or Vienna Secession, in protest against the entrenched conservatism of the art establishment in Vienna. As did their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Secession designers rejected historical styles; but in Vienna they expressed this through an increasing simplification of form. Rather than embracing the writhing organic forms of Endell or Obrist in Munich, Viennese artists moved towards the restrained geometric designs exemplified by the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Contemporary Architecture: The New Materials

19th century architecture had its highest examples in greenhouses and exhibition pavilions, among them that of London of 1851, built by Paxton. The structures of iron and glass developed a taste that derived from the first Romanticism. They wanted to exalt the virtues of progress. The resistant elements of forged iron produced in series and of easy assemblage allowed to built higher buildings and to elongate the central naves in an almost unlimited way, with regular modules.

The Century of Industrialization

The 19th century bear witness to a new society and a new industrial culture and it needed an answer to the new needs. In this century different trends crossed, with a certain degree of confusion. The period is marked by the confrontation between the architectonic tradition and the new techniques, materials, and needs created by the Industrial Revolution. This provoked the apparition of the two styles that developed along the century: historicism and iron architecture.

The 19th Century Architecture

The use of new materials and new building techniques, adapted to new needs of the new society is characteristic of this moment. At the beginning Neo-Classical forms were common in the main European cities, in a bourgeois aim at remembering the glories and virtues of the Classical time. The Romanticism led the architects to revive the Gothic or Islamic forms. This style is known as Historicism or revival of different historical styles. Its development was deterrent for the evolution of the architecture and decorative arts. It was born in opposition to the official art of the academies and under the influence of the romanticism. It aimed at recovering the genuine roots of the nationalities, present during the medieval period, and to distance from the Italian influence.

The architects used the new building techniques allowed by the use of iron and other materials. It is a moment of high impulse for great public buildings, the renaissance of several old styles: Greek, Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, and the interest for exotic styles such as the Moorish, Hindi, and Chinese.

The Architecture of Iron and Glass

But the contemporary architecture really comes up with the needs due to the expansion of the cities that were created by the Industrial Revolution. The railway contributed to the city expanding out of its boundaries and spreading on the surroundings. This contributed to change the image of the cities and the countryside with the station, bridges, viaducts, which ended by becoming part and parcel of the landscape. This kind of building, essentially practical, adopted the new materials such as iron and glass that, with their infinite possibilities paved the way for the following architectonical revolution.

At the end of the 18th century the first structures in iron were created, a fact that underlined the importance of the engineer labour, collaborating or even substituting the architect.

The former function of the wall, which formerly sustained the building, was exerted by the iron structure. Glass, industrially elaborated, allowed increasing the light of the building because it can cover enormous spaces eliminating walls in the new constructions, solving in this way the problem of the lightening of interiors, at the same time that electricity allowed the creation of buildings of great height doted with elevators and solved problems of ventilation. The internal and external communications of the building was possible thanks to these new materials.

The new building techniques and the pre-elaborated elements made in series allowed the massive construction of public buildings: galleries, greenhouse-train stations, libraries, markets; and private buildings: stores, factories. The constructive monopoly of Church, aristocracy and Crown was broken. As a result, free, lighten and functional spaces were designed, perfectly adapted to the needs of the industrial society.

All these possibilities were observed in the Crystal Palace designed by Paxton for the London Universal Exhibition of 1851. This was an enormous building that was built in a record time and at good price because it used pre-fabricated elements. It was essentially a gigantic greenhouse that allowed the creation of a wide and clear space perfectly adapted to its purpose.

Other building built with the same materials was the Eiffel Tower, designed by Eiffel for the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889. Similar to Paxton project is that of the Crystal Palace of the Madrid Retiro Park, work of Velázquez Bosco. These new materials were also used in the Atocha station in Madrid.

Chicago School

At the turn of the 20th centuy it appeared in Chicago a group of architects who developed an architectonical style that is known as the Chicago School or Commercial style. They promoted new technologies of steel-frame construction and developed a spatial aesthetic that became very influential. It is contemporary of the European Modernism.

Some of the distinguish features of the Chicago School are the use of steel-frame buildings with masonry cladding (terra cotta), allowing large plate-glass window areas and the use of limited amounts of exterior ornament. Sometimes they used elements of neoclassical architecture for their skyscrapers. In many of them classical columns can be found. The scheme of the buildings is normally: a first floor functions as the base, middle storeis with little ornamental detail, that act as the shaft of the column, and the last floor that represent the capital, with more ornamental detail and ended with a cornice.

The Chicago window is a creation of this school. It is a three-part window consisting of a large fixed centre panel flanked by two smaller double-hung sash windows. The arrangement of windows on the façade typically created a grid pattern, with some projecting out from the façade forming bay windows. These windows combine the need for light-gathering and the need for natural ventilation; the single central pane was usually fixed, while the two surrounding panes were operable.
Some architects of this school are Louis Sullivan, Richardson, Adler. Other architects who collaborated with them or worked in a similar style were Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.
Examples of this architectural style are Chicago’s Auditorium Building, Carson Company Building, Reliance Building.