The Curves that Scandalized Modernism
F.E.M. van Hoorn (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
E.P.N. Schreurs – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
The Art Nouveau style included elaborate ornamentation on the façade. The style had a brief flowering around 1900. A few years later, Modernism came along and sought an abomination of ornamentation. Around the time of Art Nouveau, the City of Paris introduced the Concours de la façades de la ville de Paris, a competition to restore diversity to the city’s façades after Haussmann’s monotonous ones. Each year, the Concours published its reasons for holding the competition and the uniqueness of the winning façades, together with photographs or drawings of the building. The winning façades have different stylistic influences, such as Art Nouveau and aspects of Modernism in the ornamentation of materials, construction and windows. The Concours is used to understand the rapid change in the use and role of ornamentation in materials, construction and windows, and whether Art Nouveau was a cause of the lack of ornamentation in Modernism. Surprisingly, the Concours is a rarely used research source and is the main source of this thesis, after other books, architects’ manifestos and (historical) photographs and an analysis. Modernism seems to have been a reaction to Art Nouveau, as their views on the ornamentation of materials, structural elements and windows are contradictory. Nowadays, the role of ornament is often discussed and the ideas of Art Nouveau versus Modernism could contribute to this discussion.