EXPRESSIONISM EXPRESSIONIST ARCHITECTURE

1. EXPRESSIONIST ARCHITECTURE
-NETHRA SINGH

2. EXPRESSIONISM
• Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in
poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the
beginning of 20th century.
• typical trait is to present the world solely from a
subjective perspective distorting it radially for
emotional effects in order to evoke moods or ideas.
• Expressionism was developed as an Avant Garde style
before the first world war.
• The style extended to a wide range of the arts including
expressionist architecture, painting, literature,
theatre, dance, film and music.

3. WHAT IS EXPRESSIONIST
ARCHITECTURE?
• Expressionist architecture was an architectural
movement that developed in Europe during the
first decades of the 20th century in parallel with
the expressionist visual and performing arts that
especially developed and dominated in Germany.
• Expressionism transforms reality rather than
seeking to imitate it.
• Appearances are only semblance, claims the
expressionists;

4. BIONIC
GEOMORPHIC
The genesis of expressionism lies in art
nouveau.
Art nouveau, a decorative art convention
turned to bionic and geomorphic forms.

5. • Expressionism is the way of expressing
something in and around something that is
felt 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 architecture, in
places like Germany, Austria, and Denmark.

6. • Expressionist architects of the 1920s
• Adolf Behne
• Hermann Finsterlin
• Antoni Gaudí
• Walter Gropius - early period
• Hugo Häring
• Fritz Höger
• Michel de Klerk
• Piet Kramer
• Carl Krayl
• Erich Mendelsohn
• Hans Poelzig
• Hans Scharoun
• Rudolf Steiner
• Bruno Taut

7. EXPRESSIONISM
CHARACTERISTICS
• Distortion of form for emotional effect.
• Subordination of realism to symbolic or
stylistic expression of inner experience.
• An underlying effort at achieving the new,
original and visionary forms.
• Abundance work on papers and models with
discovery and representation of concepts.
• Tendency more towards gothic that the
classical style.
• BRICK EXPRESSIONISM. Expressionism that
uses brick as main visible building material.
• ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM.
• NEO EXPRESSIONISM

8. Hermann
finsterlin’s
formspiels depict
the form of
buildings turned
into organic
amorphous
massings.

9. EXPRESSIONISMEXAMPLES • EINSTEIN TOWERS
• TWA TERMINAL
• SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE
• GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO
• GLASS PAVILION COLOGNE DEUTSCHER
WERKBUND EXHIBITION
• WALTER GROPIUS’S MONUMENT

10. ERICH MENDELSOHN

11. EXPRESSIONISMEXAMPLES EINSTEIN TOWER IN POTSDAM-BERLIN
-ERICH MENDELSOHN 1919-1922
• Tower built to symbolise Einsteinian concepts. It
was designed to hold Einstein's laboratory.
• The tower was an anthromorphic form.
• Mendelsohn wanted the building to be moulded
rather than built, without angles and with smooth,
rounded corners.
• The building was covered in brick and covered
with concrete.

15. EERO SAARINEN

16. EXPRESSIONISMEXAMPLES TWA TERMINAL, NY
-EERO SAARINEN
• The terminal is sculpted as a symbol of flight-
abstract and not intentionally as a landing
eagle as it has often been described.
• The expressive curves of the design creates
attractive spacious halls and a rare degree of
exhilaration for an airport terminal.

18. • ‘...a building in which the architecture itself would express the drama
and specialness and excitement of travel...a place of movement and
transition...the shapes were deliberately chosen in order to emphasize
an upward-soaring quality of line. We wanted an uplift.’
-eero saarinen

19. BRUNO TAUT

20. GLASS PAVILION
-BRUNO TAUT
• Built in 1914.
• Glass dome structure at cologne deutscher
werkbund exhibition.
• Constructed using concrete and glass.
• The concrete structure had inlaid colored glass
plates on the facade that acted as mirrors.
• The purpose of the building was to
demonstrate the potential of different types of
glass for architecture.It also indicated how the
material might be used to orchestrate human
emotions.
EXPRESSIONISMEXAMPLES

21. • It had a fourteen-sided
base constructed of thick
glass bricks used for the
exterior walls devoid of
rectangles.
• Each part of the cupola
was designed to recall the
complex geometry of
nature.
• The Pavilion structure was
on a concrete plinth, the
entrance reached by two
flights of steps (one on
either side of the building),
which gave the pavilion a
temple-like quality.
• Taut's Glass Pavilion was
the first building of
importance made of glass
bricks.

23. TAUT’S IDEA FOR GLASS PAVILION
• Taut wanted to create a building with a different
structure, and similar to Gothic Cathedrals. Bruno told
that his building wasn't going to have any real function,
it was more to provoke something in someone than a
practical building.
• The Glass Pavilion was one of the first exhibition
building designed as a mechanism to create vivid
experiences, where people would be able to feel, touch
and primarily see.
• The goal of this functionless building as that
architecture would include the other arts of painting
and sculpure, to achive a new, unified expression.

24. CONCLUSION
• Time flattens distinctions such between works
with similar forms. But, the history of
architectural theory is about ideas and not
just the shapes they make.

25. THANK YOU.