Architectural Posters of the 20th Century

Modern Architecture: From Manifesto to Built Space

These thirty architectural posters trace a path from the visionary metropolises of 1914 through the Bauhaus and New Building to the museums, urban spaces and paper architectures of the late twentieth century. Views, plans, sections and design drawings reveal not only celebrated buildings but also the ideas behind them.

AP 517, AP 519 and AP 506 · Visions of the Metropolis

Antonio Sant’Elia’s La Città Nuova and Mario Chiattone’s Metropoli Moderna were created in 1914 in the context of Italian Futurism. AP 517 depicts an urban machine of layered traffic routes, bridges and soaring structures; AP 519 condenses the metropolis into monumental towers and deep street canyons. Rem Koolhaas’s The City of the Captive Globe of 1972 (AP 506) proposes a different model: Manhattan’s uniform grid supports blocks devoted to distinct ideas and identities, making unity and diversity visible at the same time.

AP 207, AP 387, AP 510 and AP 572 · New Building and the Bauhaus

The Weissenhof Estate was built in 1927 for the German Werkbund exhibition Die Wohnung in Stuttgart. Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s artistic direction, seventeen architects presented new concepts for healthy, functional and affordable housing (AP 207). J. J. P. Oud’s Café De Unie of 1925 brings De Stijl ideas into the city as a colourful, asymmetrically composed façade (AP 510). AP 387 surveys Bauhaus architecture from 1919 to 1933; AP 572 focuses on Walter Gropius’s Dessau school building of 1925/26, whose separate functional volumes, bridge and glazed workshop wing form an architectural lesson in their own right.

AP 205, AP 237 and AP 552 · Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

AP 205 assembles buildings and projects by Mies van der Rohe, allowing the development of his precise structural language to be compared. His unbuilt 1921 competition design for a skyscraper on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse (AP 552) explores a radical glass envelope around a steel frame. The German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, designed with Lilly Reich (AP 237), replaces the closed building volume with freestanding walls, flowing spatial sequences and carefully selected stone surfaces.

AP 211, AP 235, AP 236, AP 508, AP 565, AP 706 and AP 707 · Le Corbusier

AP 211 arranges Le Corbusier’s projects and completed buildings as a survey. Two views of the Villa Savoye (AP 235 and AP 706) show the house, built from 1928 to 1931, as a lucid expression of his Five Points, including pilotis, free plan and roof garden. The Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (AP 565) combines dwellings and communal facilities as a vertical city. Ronchamp (AP 236) and La Tourette (AP 707) demonstrate contrasting ways of shaping sacred space through light, mass and exposed concrete. The 1954 design for a tapestry in Chandigarh’s Palace of Justice (AP 508) extends the architecture through colour, signs and textile art.

AP 212 · Frank Lloyd Wright and Organic Architecture

The Buildings and Projects poster presents works by Frank Lloyd Wright in a comparative survey. His organic architecture did not pursue a single visual formula, but sought a relationship between building, use and landscape. Open plans, interlocking interior and exterior space, and the deliberate use of new materials shaped houses and public buildings alike. AP 212 makes this development legible across different commissions and phases of Wright’s work.

AP 501, AP 502, AP 505, AP 509, AP 524 and AP 534 · City, Type and Postmodernism

The 1976 townhouse studies for Marburg (AP 501) and the Frankfurt Trade Fair Gatehouse of 1983/84 (AP 505) demonstrate Oswald Mathias Ungers’s interest in type, geometry and urban form. Aldo Rossi’s 1983 project for Fontivegge in Perugia (AP 502) examines the city through recognisable elementary forms. Helmut Jahn’s State of Illinois Center in Chicago, designed and built between 1979 and 1985 (AP 509), organises public functions around a vast atrium. Arata Isozaki’s 1986 competition proposal for the New Tokyo City Hall (AP 524) and Michael Graves’s Humana Building in Louisville (AP 534) show how large buildings could once again be read as emblematic compositions.

AP 396, AP 518 and AP 530 · Architecture as a Public Sign

The Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, opened in 1977 (AP 396), places structure, circulation and colour-coded services visibly on the exterior, leaving flexible cultural spaces within. Philippe Starck’s Café Costes of 1984 (AP 530) is presented in an exploded axonometric as a carefully composed ensemble of space, furniture and light. Aldo Rossi’s floating Teatro del Mondo was built in 1979/80 for the Venice Biennale; AP 518 brings its elemental theatre form together with Rossi’s image-world of Venezia Analoga.

AP 377, AP 551 and AP 601 · Daniel Libeskind: Drawing and Memory

Libeskind’s Micromegas series, begun in 1979, translates architecture into dense, overlapping fields of lines; AP 601 presents Micromega 6. In 1989 Libeskind won the competition for an extension to the former Berlin Museum. Opened as the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2001, the building bears the title Between the Lines: broken lines, voids and its zinc-clad zigzag form connect spatial experience with German-Jewish history. AP 551 focuses on design drawing and plan, while AP 377 presents the elongated figure of the building.