Architecture and Cities

On 2 March 1959 a crowd stood under umbrellas in the rain on Bennelong Point to watch the ceremony that began construction of the Sydney Opera House. The Danish architect Jørn Utzon had designed a set of sails that would test the limits of engineering and construction. The breakthrough came with his realisation that the form could be derived from the surface of a sphere, a step the Opera House describes as a milestone in twentieth century architecture. The building opened in 1973. In between, Bennelong Point became a battleground of politics and pragmatism, and a young Australian architect, Peter Hall, took on the role of design architect to complete Stage Three.

Architecture is the art people use whether or not they mean to look at it. This section covers individual buildings and the architects behind them, and also the larger shape of cities: parks, museums, campuses and the plans that hold them together.

An American original

Frank Lloyd Wright designed 1,114 architectural works, of which 532 were built, across a career of seven decades that ended with his death in 1959. Trained in Chicago under Louis Sullivan, he spent the years from 1899 to 1910 developing the Prairie house: long, low and open in plan, with low-pitched roofs and deep overhangs that echoed the flat land around it. The Robie House in Chicago of 1908 and Unity Temple in Oak Park of 1905 date from that period. After a lean decade, he returned in 1936 with several important commissions, among them Fallingwater, a country retreat for Edgar Kaufmann in the Pennsylvania woods, and the Herbert Jacobs House in Madison, the first of his Usonian houses to be built, part of his response to the Depression with affordable homes. In June 1943 Hilla von Rebay asked him to design a building for the Solomon R. Guggenheim collection. It took sixteen years to complete. Wright summed up his principle in a sentence: “There is no architecture without a philosophy.”

A school for building

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar in 1919. Its name joins the German words for building and house, and it placed architecture, design and the applied arts on an equal footing with painting and sculpture. Teachers included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 to 1926, into a building Gropius designed for it, then to Berlin in 1932, where the Nazis closed it in 1933. Its staff carried the ideas abroad, above all to the United States: Albers to Black Mountain College and later Yale, Moholy-Nagy to a New Bauhaus in Chicago.

The city as a work of design

Cities have architects too, even when no one signs them. When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux proposed their plan for Central Park in New York in 1858, a museum was already part of it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, established in 1870 by a committee that included the architect Richard Morris Hunt, was offered land in the park in 1874, and Vaux designed its first building, a High Victorian Gothic wing that opened in 1880. Hunt later designed the Fifth Avenue entrance hall and façade, McKim, Mead and White added five wings, and from 1966 the museum grew glass additions facing the park. The result reads as a series of layers, each one recording what a generation of New Yorkers thought a museum should look like.

How to look

Walk around a building before judging it. Notice how it meets the ground, where the light enters, what it hides and what it frames. The articles below look at houses, museums, monuments and whole districts, and at the clients, engineers and planners whose names rarely appear on the plaque.