Cubism is an early twentieth-century art movement in which objects are broken down into planes and geometric forms and shown from several viewpoints at once. It emerged around 1907 in Paris, with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as its leading figures.
From painting to architecture
Cubism is first of all a movement in painting and sculpture. Even so, the idea behind it — abandoning a single fixed viewpoint and building a form out of angular planes — did reach architecture.
The clearest example is Czech cubism, which flourished in Prague between roughly 1911 and 1914. Architects such as Josef Gočár and Pavel Janák designed buildings whose facades are not flat but built up from folded, faceted planes, with sharp prisms around windows, bays and doorways. Light therefore falls differently on the facade through the day — precisely the effect the cubist painters sought on a flat canvas. Prague is the only city in the world where cubist architecture was realised in any quantity, including cubist furniture and interiors.
Influence
Cubism cleared the way for abstraction in the architecture of the interwar years. The idea that a building can be assembled from pure, interlocking volumes reappears in De Stijl, in modernism and in art deco, each in its own way. The distinction matters: modernism seeks the right angle and the smooth plane, while cubism deliberately seeks the fold, the facet and the oblique angle.
Recognising it
- Facades with faceted, folded planes instead of one flat surface
- Prismatic mouldings and angular, triangular elements around windows and doors
- Crystalline roof forms, bays and porches
- Ordinary materials — brick, render, natural stone; the innovation is in the form, not the technique
Related terms
- Building style
- Modernism
- Art deco
- Expressionism
- Amsterdam School
- Architecture
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