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Expressionist Architecture
Expressionism is the way of expressing something in and around something that you feel emotionally, from all the things that happen phenomenally. This is one of the movements in architecture in the 20th century, mainly in Europe, where at that time people fought in the World War I, including the architects at that time.
Expressionism is the way of expressing something in and around something that you feel emotionally, from all the things that happen phenomenally. This is one of the movements in architecture in the 20th century, mainly in Europe, where at that time people fought in the World War I, including the architects at that time. The political and social problems also influence the architect, such places like Germany, Austria, and Denmark. Many famous architects are involved in this movement, such as, Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Hans Poelzig.
Significantly, the first examples of Expressionist architecture to be constructed were industrial buildings. In such commissions architects discovered what might be described as ‘fallow land’ which offered less resistance to experimentation. The transition to Expressionism was effected in Peter Behrens’s buildings for AEG in Berlin (1903–13; for example). They have a ceremonial character and developed as a new force from Romantic, national architecture, which was turning away from the eclecticism of the period of Emperor William II. The AEG turbine factory (1908–9) was the first German building to introduce the combination of steel and glass. Even though Behrens’s buildings went far beyond pure functionalism in their expressive monumentality, they already indicated rationalist tendencies. In this they differed considerably from the contemporaneous buildings of Hans Poelzig. His water-tower (1911) in Posen (now Poznán, Poland) and his chemical factory at Luban (1911–12; for illustration see Poelzig, hans) were distinguished by a sculptural, dynamic, almost lyrical Expressionism, which culminated after World War I in his conversion of the Zirkus Schumann into the Grosses Schauspielhaus (1919) for Berlin.
e light, crystalline, curving, floating images of which wothuld transform the ways of living and thinking of the ‘Old European’. However, the movement’s dependence on clients who were willing to experiment, in addition to other external factors, meant that architectural practice was able to match the visionary start of Expressionism in only a restricted way. Many of its most creatively original contributions never went beyond sketches of ideas on paper. The inherently Utopian character of Expressionist architectural sketches systematically points forward to future possibilities in the development of architecture.
political crisis preceding and following World War I. It was Expressionist architecture, especially in the German-speaking area, developed during the years of a protest movement in architecture with socio-political overtones and was fuelled by a solemn and euphoric belief in the future, which it strove to realize. Architecture was perceived as a substantial educational tool in refashioning human society. Pioneering developments in the fields of engineering and technology using such new building materials as steel, concrete and glass smoothed hitherto unexplored paths and seemed to open up new doors to the realization of Utopian ideas of society. The Expressionist generation of architects aimed to free form from the confines of the norm, replacing it with a direct, spontaneous communication between the idea and the product. The traditional building-unit principle was to be resolved in flowing or crystalline distortions of space. The mood of the period was reflected most radically in the Utopian phantasmagorias of Paul Scheerbart. In many written works from the turn of the century on the evoked architecture made of glass,
By the use of applied stalactite shapes he transformed the interior into a fantastic visionary cavern startend. The Jahrhunderthalle (1912–13) in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) by Max Berg can also be counted as one of the few projects realized before World War I that can be described as Expressionist (for illustration see Berg, max). As a steel-and-concrete structure with a cupola with a bold 67 m span, it pointed in the direction of an Expressionism that was completely in the grip of new technical achievements.
One of the important stylistic roots of Expressionism was Jugendstil or Art Nouveau architecture. Having begun with a formal language that was confined to surface decoration, Jugendstil evolved towards sculptural three-dimensionality. Such buildings as the Hochzeitsturm (1907) in Darmstadt by joseph maria Olbrich, the Werkbund Theater (1914) in Cologne by Henry Van De Velde or the Casa Milà (1906–10) in Barcelona by Antoni Gaudí indicated a smooth transition from Art Nouveau to Expressionism.