ABSTRACT
The history of architecture is largely the history of formalism in architecture. For a short time in the early part of the twentieth century formalism was rejected as unsuitable for a modern architecture, Bauhaus style. Le Corbusier, with his “five points for a new architecture” (1927/2007), was the exception – a unique example of formalism in early modern architecture. In response to the limitations of raw functionalism, a “new formalism” emerged in the 1950s. It tried to reassert abandoned classical aesthetic devices, such as proportion and symmetry. The formal rules for an appropriate and beautiful architectural expression became of interest because of the poverty of form as the only modernist aesthetic device. Bruno Zevi, in The Modern Language of Architecture (1978), documented the new formalism. Zevi sets forth seven principles, to codify the new language of architecture created by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. In place of the formal classical language of the Beaux Arts School, with its focus on abstract principles of order, proportion, and symmetry, he presented a formalism based upon an organic marriage of engineering and design, a concept of living spaces that are designed for use, and an integration of buildings into their surroundings.
