Modern surfaces focused on communication over space through signs and images rather than enclosed walls. Adolf Loos believed ornamentation of utilitarian objects should be removed and architecture should become a "living organism" rather than display superficial decoration. The Bauhaus school saw architecture sinking into decorative concepts and sought to vitalize building surfaces without becoming parasitic. Mies van der Rohe designed transparent glass skyscrapers to let light assert itself. Department stores and advertisements used stimulating visual displays to attract consumers in an era when supply exceeded demand.

1. Modern Surfaces

2. Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas (1966)

3. Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas (1966)

4. Suburban space, being automobile space, is not defined
by enclosing walls and floors (…). In fact, space is not
the most important constituent of suburban form.
Communication across space is more important.
Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Pop (1971)

5. The sign for the Motel Monticello, a silhouette of an
enormous Chippendale highboy, is visible on the
highway before the motel itself.This architecture of
styles and signs is anti-spatial; it is an architecture of
communication over space.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izrnour, Learning from Las
Vegas (1972)

6. Venice Architecture Biennale: La Strada Novissima (1980)

7. Frank Gehry, Disney Concert Hall (1987-2003)

8. NOX, Fresh Water Pavilion (1997)

9. Peter Cook, Kunsthaus Graz (2003)

10. MVRDV, Markthal Rotterdam (2014)

11. In visual terms, the twentieth century of the western
hemisphere will be remembered as the century in which
content yielded to form, text to image, depth to façade,
and Sein to Schein.
Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces (2001)

12. Modern Surfaces

13. Palace of Electricity, Universal Exhibition Paris (1900)

14. The urge to ornament one’s face and everything within
reach is the start of plastic art. It is the baby talk of
painting. All art is erotic. (…) But the man of our day
who, in response to an inner urge, smears the walls with
erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. (…) I have
made the following discovery and I pass it on to the
world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the
removal of ornament from utilitarian objects. (…) We have
fought our way through to freedom from ornament. See,
the time is nigh, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of
the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the holy
city, the capital of heaven.Then fulfilment will be come.
Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime (1908)

15. Adolf Loos, Müller House (1930)

16. Adolf Loos, Müller House (1930)

17. Müller House Raumplan

18. Le Corbusier, Letter to Madame Meyer (1925)

19. Sergei Eisenstein, Sequences Diagram for Alexander Nevsky (1930s)

20. Adolf Loos, Müller House (1930)

21. Adolf Loos, Müller House (1930)

22. Adolf Loos, Baker House (1927)

23. Josephine Baker (1927)

24. Adolf Loos, Baker House (1927)

26. I. No Longer a Façade but a House
II. No Longer a House but Shaped Space
III. No Longer Shaped Space but Designed Reality
Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building (1926)

28. In the recent past the art of building sank into
sentimental decorative conceptions of the aesthete,
whose goal was the outward display of motives,
ornaments, and profiles taken mostly from past cultures,
which were without essential importance to the body of
the building.The building became depreciated as a
carrier of superficial, dead decoration, instead of being a
living organism.
Walter Gropius, International Architecture (1925)

29. Walter Gropius, International Architecture (1925)

30. Walter Gropius, International Architecture (1925)

31. Walter Gropius, International Architecture (1925)

32. Walter Gropius, Monumentale Kunst und Industriebau Lichtbildervortrag (1911)

35. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (1923)

36. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (1923)

38. Left: Le Corbusier, Villa Schwob as published in L’Esprit Nouveau; Right: Villa Schwob, detail of the deleted pergola (1916-17)

39. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (1923)

40. Architecture being the masterly, correct and magnificent
play of masses brought together in light, the task of the
architect is to vitalise the surfaces which clothe these
masses, but in such a way that these surfaces do not
become parasitical, eating up the mass and absorbing it
to their own advantage.
Le Corbusier, Toward a New Architecture (1923)

41. Le Corbusier, Weissenhof-Siedlung Houses 14 and 15 (1927)

43. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Weissenhof-Siedlung House 1 (1927)

44. Bruno Taut & Martin Wagner, Hufeisensiedlung (1925-31)

45. Left: Cremer & Wolffenstein, Berliner Tageblatt Building (1901) Right: Erich Mendelsohn, Mossehaus (1921-23)

46. H. Abeking, Modernization: The House-Owner Gieselmann before and after the renovation of his facade (1929)

47. The position of an epoch occupies in the historical
process can be determined more strikingly from an
analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expression
than from that epoch’s judgments about itself. Since
these judgments are expressions of the tendencies of a
particular era, they do not offer conclusive testimony
about its overall constitution.The surface-level
expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious
nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental
substance of the state of things.
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament (1927)

48. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstraße Skyscraper (1921)

49. Competition proposals by: Hugo Häring, Hans Poelzig, Hans & Wassili Luckhardt, and Hans Scharoun (1921)

50. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstraße Skyscraper (1921)

51. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstraße Skyscraper, opaque and transparent versions (1921)

52. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper (1922)

53. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper (1922)

54. Left: Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper (1922) Right: X-Ray of Chameleon Cristatus (1896)

55. Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace for the first International Exhibition in London (1851)

56. Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace (1851)

57. World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the
commodity.They create a framework in which its use
value recedes into the background.They open a
phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be
distracted.The entertainment industry makes this easier
by elevating the person to the level of the commodity.
He surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his
alienation from himself and others.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927-40)

58. Etienne Gaspard Robertson, Phantasmagoria at the Cour des Capucines (1797)

59. Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace for the first International Exhibition in London (1851)

60. Palais de l'Industrie for the International Exhibition in Paris (1855)

61. Galerie des Machines for the International Exhibition in Paris (1889)

62. Bernard Sehring,Tietz Department Store (1900)

63. Alfred Messel, Wertheim Department Store (1904)

64. Alfred Messel, Wertheim Department Store (1904)

65. Display window, Berlin (1929)

66. (…) I refer to what could be termed the shop-window
quality of things (…).The production of goods under the
regime of free competition and the normal
predominance of supply over demand leads to goods
having to show a tempting exterior as well as utility. (…)
The striving to make the merely useful visually
stimulating (…) comes from the struggle to render the
graceless graceful for consumers.
Georg Simmel, Berliner Gewerbeaustellung (1896)

67. Peter Behrens, Brochure Cover for A.E.G. Metal Filament lamps (1913)

69. Pieter Oud, Café de Unie (1925)

70. Fremont Street, Las Vegas (1920s)

71. Palace of Electricity, Universal Exhibition Paris (1900)

72. Osram electric adornement during the Berlin in Light Week (1928)

73. Jazz Band in Berlin's Zoo (1928)

74. Times Square (1923)

75. Oscar Nitzchke, Maison de la Publicité (1934-36)

76. Oscar Nitzchke, Maison de la Publicité (1934-36)

77. Oscar Nitzchke, Maison de la Publicité (1934-36)

78. Giacomo Matté Trucco, Lingotto (1915-30)

79. George Grosz, Dedicated to Oskar Panizza (1917-18)

80. (…) rocket fires of moving electric advertisements
dividing up and down, disappearing and exploding over
the thousands of cars and the merry rush of people.
Erich Mendelsohn, America. An Architect’s Pictures Book (1926)

82. Erich Mendelsohn, America. An Architect’s Pictures Book (1925)

83. Erich Mendelsohn, America. An Architect’s Pictures Book (1925)

85. Nothing appeals more readily to modern man than
picture. He wants to understand, but quickly, clearly,
without a lot of furrowing of brows and mysticism. And
with all this the world is mysterious as never before,
impenetrable and full of daring possibilities.
Erich Mendelsohn, Letter to Luise Mendelsohn (1927)

86. Erich Mendelsohn, Remodelling of the facade of the Herpich Store, Berlin (1924)

87. Erich Mendelsohn, Schocken Department Store, Stuttgart (1926-28)

88. Erich Mendelsohn, Petersdorff Department Store, Wroclaw (1927)

89. Erich Mendelsohn, Schocken Department Store, Chemintz (1928-29)

90. The surfaces (of buildings) must be bright and smooth
(so that shadows from a ledge do not interfere with the
light) and large (so that light can assert itself in peace
admits all the agitation of its surroundings). For even
here it is not the construction, but light that matters
most. (The building) functions not as a building, i.e., as a
spatial-physical creation, but only as a phenomenon of
immaterial surfaces, whose substance nobody thinks of.
Walter Riezler, Licht und Architektur (1928)