Unit 4 Architecture and New Media (1750–1980): How Modernism Rebuilt Space, Images, and Artistic Meaning

Modern architecture

Architecture (roughly late 1800s–mid-1900s) shaped by industrial materials and modern social needs, often rejecting historical revival styles in favor of new forms tied to modern life.

Modernism

A broader cultural shift (including art and architecture) toward experimentation, abstraction, and a break from historical revivals; modern buildings are often analyzed as expressions of modernist ideas.

Reinforced concrete

Concrete strengthened with embedded steel; a key modern material that enabled long spans, open plans, pilotis systems, and dramatic cantilevers.

Cantilever

A projecting structural element supported only at one end; used in modern architecture to create long, hovering horizontal planes (e.g., Fallingwater’s terraces).

Organic architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright’s approach in which a building is integrated with its environment—site, materials, light, and human use—so the whole feels unified (not necessarily curved forms).

Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1936–1939 house in rural Pennsylvania, cantilevered over a waterfall; emphasizes horizontality, local stone anchoring, and a choreographed sensory connection to the landscape.

International Style

A modernist approach emphasizing volume over mass, regularity, minimal ornament, and the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete (often tied to Le Corbusier in AP context).

“Machine for living in”

Le Corbusier’s phrase describing the house as an efficient, rational, engineered response to modern life rather than a decorative historical form.

Villa Savoye

Le Corbusier’s 1929–1931 weekend house in Poissy, France; a manifesto-like building that demonstrates universal modern design principles and the Five Points of Architecture.

Five Points of Architecture

Le Corbusier’s design principles: pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, and roof garden—enabled by modern structural systems to create flexible, concept-driven space.

Pilotis

Support columns that lift a building off the ground, freeing the ground level and allowing new circulation and spatial openness (a key point at Villa Savoye).

Free plan

An interior layout made flexible because structural loads are carried by columns rather than by many load-bearing walls (central to Villa Savoye’s spatial freedom).

Ribbon windows

Long horizontal bands of windows that provide even light and emphasize horizontality; associated with Le Corbusier’s Five Points.

Bauhaus

A German school/movement (founded 1919) that sought to unite fine art, craft, and industrial production—treating design as a functional, teachable system for modern life.

Glass curtain wall

A non-load-bearing exterior wall of glass; used to express transparency, modern industry, and functional clarity (notably at the Bauhaus Building in Dessau).

Indexicality (photography/film)

The sense that camera images are tied to reality because they record light from actual objects—powerful for realism but not automatically “truthful,” since images are constructed through choices.

Straight photography

An approach associated with Alfred Stieglitz that values the camera’s clarity and distinctive compositional possibilities, rather than painterly imitation.

The Steerage

Alfred Stieglitz’s 1907 photograph on an ocean liner; uses strong diagonals and layered spaces to combine modernist formal structure with social meaning (often read as class division).

Documentary photography

Photography intended to record real conditions (e.g., labor, poverty, displacement) for public awareness; persuasive but also raises ethical questions about representation and simplification.

Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson with her children; tight framing and a triangular grouping intensify empathy and made the image an emblem of Great Depression hardship.

Montage (film editing)

The arrangement of shots in sequence; meaning in film is created through ordering, pacing, and juxtaposition over time, not just within a single frame.

Conceptual art

Art in which the idea (concept) is more important than the physical object; often tests assumptions about authorship, institutions, language, and value through selection and recontextualization.

Readymade

Marcel Duchamp’s strategy of designating an ordinary manufactured object as art; shifts emphasis from manual craft to the artist’s choice and the context of display.

Fountain

Duchamp’s 1917 readymade: a porcelain urinal presented as sculpture (submitted as “R. Mutt”); critiques institutions and challenges definitions of art, originality, and craftsmanship.

Performance art

Art made through live actions using the body and time as medium; often emphasizes presence, endurance, participation, and documentation, and can resist commodification by being ephemeral.