First the Words, Then the Walls

Louis Sullivan coined this phrase in 1896, arguing that a building's shape should come from what it does rather than from applied style. The modern movement later adopted it as a battle cry, though postmodern critics argued function alone never fully explained why buildings look as they do.

Adolf Loos delivered this argument as a Vienna lecture around 1910 and published it in French in 1913, and it became one of the founding arguments against nineteenth century applied ornament. Loos backed the claim with his own buildings, including the Looshaus, whose street facades carried no surface decoration at all.

Walter Gropius merged Weimar's fine art academy with its arts and crafts school in April 1919 to found the Staatliches Bauhaus, whose manifesto named building as the ultimate aim of all creative work. The school ran only fourteen years but set the terms modern design education still uses.

Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar and designed its well known Dessau building, teaching that art and industrial technique had to be unified rather than kept apart. He carried that method to Harvard after leaving Nazi Germany, putting Bauhaus training at the center of American architectural education.

Le Corbusier collected his essays into this 1923 Paris book, translated into English in 1927, declaring the house a machine for living in. He pointed to grain silos, factories and ocean liners as engineering already achieving the beauty architects had forgotten how to aim for on purpose.

Le Corbusier's 1927 manifesto set out five rules that reinforced concrete construction had newly made possible: pilotis lifting a building off the ground, a free plan, a free facade, ribbon windows, and a roof garden. They became a working checklist for a generation of modern architects.

Built outside Paris between 1928 and 1931, this white house on slender columns is Le Corbusier's fullest demonstration of his own five points, and it is now a World Heritage listed work. Walking it right after the manifesto that produced it shows how directly the argument became a building.

In June 1928 European architects gathered at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland, brought together by Le Corbusier, the historian Sigfried Giedion and the castle's owner Helene de Mandrot, to found CIAM. The congress aimed to make modern architecture an instrument of social change, and its members eventually included Walter Gropius and Alvar Aalto.

New York's Museum of Modern Art opened an exhibition curated by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in February 1932 that gave European modernism its American name. Calling it the International Style framed the movement as a style, a framing its own European founders never fully accepted.

CIAM's fourth congress in 1933 studied thirty three cities and met partly aboard a ship sailing from Marseille to Athens, but the document known as the Athens Charter was not published until 1942, when Le Corbusier issued it rewritten around his own Ville Radieuse ideas. Its strict zoning shaped postwar planning from Brasilia onward and was later blamed for planning failures such as Pruitt Igoe.