Introduction

The pioneers of the modern movement justified their architecture as uniquely expressive of the qualities of new construction materials – above all, steel and reinforced concrete. In 1919 the German architect Erich Mendelsohn declared: ‘All architectural forms created since the autonomous achievements of medieval architecture, from the creative epoch of the baroque until the artistic enervation of the present day, are based, strictly speaking, on the outdated formal scheme of antique construction principles’, a situation which he interpreted as mandating the invention of new architectural forms.1 Frame construction opened up spatial possibilities impossible to achieve with load-bearing masonry, while industrialization provided, in the words of Hannes Meyer, director of the Bauhaus from 1928 until 1930, ‘new building materials for the new way of building houses’.2