Functionalism (architecture)
Functionalism was never about clean lines — it was about refusing to let beauty override need.
The interwar years
Twenty years of unfinished business between two wars.
- 10
- in design
- 10:18
- average
- 103 min
- in total
- 135
- across the network
All briefs
Marianne Brandt
Marianne Brandt didn’t just make lamps — she ran the workshop that paid the Bauhaus’ bills.
Art Deco
Art Deco wasn’t about beauty — it was about broadcasting power through geometry, gold, and reinforced concrete.
Barcelona Pavilion
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · 1928
The Barcelona Pavilion is a temporary German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, co-designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. It used marble, red onyx, and travertine. It was demolished in 1930. A 1986 reconstruction now stands on the original site. It is one of Mies’s two European masterworks. Its spatial logic, material choices, and role as both exhibit and experiential space remain legible and instructive.
Bauhaus
Walter Gropius · 1919
The Bauhaus was a German art school (1919–1933) founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. It combined crafts and fine arts through an experimental, theory-led pedagogy centred on the Vorkurs. Its aim was to unify artistic vision with mass production, functionality, and industrial collaboration — producing functional, cheap, industrially viable objects like the F51 armchair (1920), Sommerfeld House (1920), and Gropius’s 1923 door handles. Its internal tensions — between expressionism and New Objectivity, craft and industry — were structural, not resolved. It established the principle that aesthetic quality must extend to every home via well-designed, industrially produced objects.
Cooper Black
Oswald Cooper · 1922
Cooper Black is an ultrabold serif typeface designed for display use, drawn as an extra-bold weight of the Cooper Old Style family. It originated from Oswald Cooper’s lettering practice in 1920s Chicago and the Midwest. Its low stroke contrast and soft, 'muddy' appearance distinguish it from nineteenth-century fat faces. It quickly became popular in newspaper advertising and later in pop culture — notably on the 1966 Pet Sounds album cover. It was the second-best-selling typeface for American Type Founders and polarised typographic opinion: rejected by conservative typographers but embraced so enthusiastically by graphic designers that supply could not meet demand.
International Style
The International Style was not invented by architects — it was edited into existence by two men at MoMA in 1932.
Konstantin Melnikov
Melnikov didn’t follow Constructivism—he outmanoeuvred its dogma with sawtooths, slopes, and glass.
László Moholy-Nagy
Moholy-Nagy didn’t invent new vision—he built machines to break old habits of looking.
Villa Savoye
Le Corbusier · 1931
The Villa Savoye is the definitive built statement of Le Corbusier’s Five Points — executed with rare freedom, then adjusted under cost pressure. Its influence is verified; its compromises are documented. It is not timeless. It is specific, material, contested, and consequential.