13 Modern Architecture Buildings You Must Visit Before You Die
For many the word modernism conjures visions of fantastical and futurist midcentury abodes perched atop the Hollywood Hills or in the Palm Springs deserts of California. And certainly the Case Study Houses—many brought forth through the 1945 Arts & Architecture program that challenged American architects to explore new building techniques for affordable, repeatable, and mass market home models that used standard parts—are important and aesthetically pleasing icons in the history of global modern architecture. However, the design movement is much older, deeper, and varied than just glass-walled visions on a cliffside.
Modern architecture can trace its origins to the excitement and opportunity allowed by the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the late 19th century, and continued its exploration through the early 1970s across the globe. Along the way, its principles were named and enumerated by many, including French architect Le Corbusier in his 1923 five points of the International Style: pilotis (pillars), open floor plans, unrestricted façades, horizontal windows, and flat roofs with gardens. All of this aided in the regional development of modern architecture to great beauty. This long-lasting and wide-ranging vision for technology-based design helped to advance architecture and the proliferation of its democratic ideas around the world. A pilgrimage to see some of its best works seems an only appropriate homage.
Photo: Andia/Getty Images1/13Villa E.1027, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France (designed by Eileen Gray, 1929)
Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray ran in the same circle as Le Corbusier. His 1920s manifesto, Five Points of New Architecture, was a great influence in the design of Gray’s first major architectural project, Villa E.1027, her own seaside vacation home in the South of France. Formally, the piloti-based and open plan home ticks early modernism’s boxes. However—unlike the “machine for living” values Le Corbusier proposed—Gray’s design was dedicated to the comfort and privacy of its occupants, and the notion that decoration enhances rather than detracts from ideal living conditions. The innovative home recently underwent a five-million euro restoration, bringing its industrial details, clever built-ins, and brilliant exploration of comfortable indoor-outdoor living to reflect its original glory.
Photo: Getty Images/Carol Highsmith2/13Eames House, Pacific Palisades, California (designed by Charles and Ray Eames, 1949)
One of the most famous of the midcentury Case Study Houses in Southern California, the Pacific Palisades home and studio of husband-and-wife design duo Charles and Ray Eames is a forward-thinking example of the aesthetic (and structural power) of honest architecture, one that puts the materials that made the house on full display. The two-story open plan buildings were constructed out of lightweight steel framing, colorfully painted panels, concrete, and metal decking in combination with contrasting natural materials, like tallowwood siding and parquet flooring. Tucked into their hillside landscape, the design respects both the natural beauty of the site and creates a progressive live-work environment whose interiors reflects the experimental modernist ideas of the Eameses—a flowing plan, little division between public and private spaces, and a double-height living room to fill the space with light and air, and provide ample room for play, furniture experimentations, and maximalist treasures from travels.
Photo: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images3/13Edith Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois (designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1951)
A sort of monument to European modernism in American, the Edith Farnsworth House by German American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for Dr. Edith Farnsworth is as principled as a home can get. The rectangular, flat-roofed, and pavilion-like home features only one solid interior volume—the bathroom—and focuses its design on literally exposing the beauty of the H-beam steel, Roman travertine, and plate glass materials that create it. Although its design is wholly unsuitable for its climate (hot summers mean bugs swarm its exterior porch, and cold winters caused condensation to creep up its window walls), and Mies’s client hated it so much that lawsuits ensued, the structure is an incredible example of purity of modern form within the architectural canon.
Photo: Getty Images/Barry Winiker4/13Seagram Building, New York City (designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1958)
Mies made his New York debut with an International Style skyscraper that changed the typology’s trajectory forever. The Seagram Building on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan is a corporate headquarters monolith that expresses the power and strength of the steel I-beam (all in black) and provided a rare public fountained plaza from which it was to be appreciated. Along with its lighter counterpart—Lever House by SOM—across the street, the Seagram Building set the standard for glass-and-steel towers in New York and what they could convey through architecture.
Photo: Getty Images5/13Legislative Assembly, Chandigarh, India (designed by Le Corbusier, 1963)
In 1951, Le Corbusier was commissioned to design the master plan for Chandigarh, the new capital of India’s Punjab state, as well as three of its major governmental buildings. The square base 1963 Legislative Assembly is the most sculptural of the trio, featuring a large curved monsoon rain gutter-cum-loggia canopy at its piered entrance, two three- and four-story wings of brise-soleil offices blocks, a circular cooling tower rising up through the ceiling of the General Assembly chamber, and a pyramidal council chamber raised on piloti in its central courtyard. This gestural design was a departure for Le Corbusier, and exemplifies the consistency of his experimental spirit, even in his later years of practice.
Photo: Getty Images/Adrian Wojcik6/13Habitat 67, Montreal (designed by Moshe Safdie, 1967)
Emerging as a reaction to postwar reconstruction efforts, Brutalist architecture is often defined by its mass visual repetition, and masonry or concrete brick construction that—similarly to Le Corbusian modernism—presents materials as they truly are. The Montreal housing complex Habitat 67 began as the architecture school thesis project of McGill University student Moshe Safdie who later submitted it (and was selected) to represent Canada in Expo 67. Constructed of a proliferation of stacked prefabricated concrete housing units, each with its own garden and modular kitchen, the project is an exploration in how this design technology could create everything wanted in a suburban home in a dense urban environment that is more ecologically advantageous and, ideally, affordable.
Photo: Getty Images7/13Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (designed by Louis Kahn, 1972)
For Estonian American architect Louis Kahn, good architecture is one that facilitates a relationship between humans and nature. Though a fairly atypical building in his body of work because of its lack of a central element of focus, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, presents this philosophy most clearly. Created of a series of repeated barrel vaulted concrete structures—two as park-side loggia—with a central entrance, the architectural focus is solving the problem of imbuing a museum holding sensitive artworks with natural light, and it does so with an innovative roof whose skylights reflect the sunlight back onto soffits and diffuse it in the exhibition halls.
Photo: Iain Masterton/Alamy8/13Bauhaus Building, Dessau, Germany (designed by Walter Gropius, 1925–1926)
Dedicated to a kind of modernism that didn’t quite exist yet (mass production), the progressive Bauhaus School was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 as a place for truly multidisciplinary education. Less than a decade later, when World War I political pressure forced the institute’s move to northern Dessau, Gropius designed its new 1926 building as a physical example of the Bauhaus principles in the spirit of his vision for the future of architecture: technology-forward and with a form “defined by its nature.” The three-part building contained workshops, studios that could be living spaces, and the Dessau Technical College in three distinct yet interconnected volumes that all used regular geometry to create highly functional and light-filled spaces. When the Nazis forced the closure of the “degenerate art” school in 1933, they unwittingly spread its ideas further: Pockets of modernist design and education arose in the United States, Russia, and other countries where its Jewish and non-Jewish practitioners fled.
Photo: Taina Sohlman/Alamy9/13Paimio Sanatorium, Paimio, Finland (designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto, 1929–1932)
Finnish architect Alvar Aalto’s first foray into modern architectural design after an early dedication to classicism was a collaboration with Aino, his wife, for a tuberculosis sanatorium in southwestern Finland. Per doctors’ orders at the time, light and air was the preferred treatment for the disease, and the Aaltos designed the building with healing in mind, angling rooms and terraces toward southern light. Even though the dual-volume clinic looks clean-lined and of simple geometry outside, its interior is far more complex. The interconnected plan of rooms and circulation were the mark of designers just getting their footing in a new style.
Photo: Nick Higham/Alamy10/13Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935–1939)
This weekend home for department store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann is perhaps the most literal pinnacle of prolific American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s organically inspired oeuvre. Situated atop a rock and cantilevered over a waterfall in the client’s favorite Bear Run stream swimming spot, Fallingwater is composed of tiers of reinforced concrete terraces, contrasting vertical columns, and piers of locally quarried stone. The soundtrack to this house is the ever-present sound of the moving water below it. Although the home maintains some of the horizontally informed elements of Wright’s previous prairie-style designs, this home truly brings the outdoors in. It also set the architect into a new momentum that would inspire Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, two of his other most expressive buildings.
Photo: Alamy11/13Colline Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France (designed by Le Corbusier, 1955)
Though not as famous as Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s 1929–1931 Villa Savoye in Poissy, a living example of the former’s 1923 Five Points of Architecture manifesto, this quaint chapel in northern France is one of his most illuminating designs. Built on an existing Roman Catholic pilgrimage site, its monumentally curved walls are capped by a shell roof with a small clerestory to allow light to penetrate the interiors, and its design represents a shift in the architect’s work from clean-lined machines for living (like Savoye) to sculptural challenges in site-specific design.
Photo: Patti McConville/Alamy12/13TWA Flight Center, Queens, New York (designed by Eero Saarinen, 1959–1962)
Though this terminal for the former Trans World Airlines was almost nearly over capacity upon its opening in 1962, its bird-like shape, structural innovation, and chili-pepper red interior—complete with sunken lounge and the first-ever circular baggage carousels—leave a lasting impression. Featuring a thin shell concrete roof supported by four Y-shaped piers with skylights between them, the expressive design represented the excitement of the new mode of travel. Then and now (in 2019, the terminal was restored and reimagined as a public lobby for a new airport hotel) passengers could enjoy a drink or meal ahead of a flight, meander the curving double-height interior and its impressive long-span footbridge, or watch the Solari split-flap display tick away the arrivals and departures schedule.
Photo: Alamy13/13National Congress Building, Brasília, Brazil (designed by Oscar Niemeyer, 1960)
Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer’s 1960 National Congress Building in the country’s new capital of Brasília was designed as a national symbol: futuristic, progressive, but distinctly regional. Composed of a doubled tower and white dish and dome structures atop a low horizontal building, this sculptural complex houses the Senate, Chamber of Deputies, secretariat offices, and committee rooms. The building has recently been made newsworthy again by anti-democracy protests held in its large public spaces. Niemeyer’s modernism reflects the clean lines of the International Style but with added whimsy and an inherent connection to organic forms. In 1987, his National Congress Building became the first modernist structure and first structure under a century old to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
