Talk to any dogmatic modernist architect and you will quickly find the inner functionalist. Questions of style, of beauty, are brushed aside. Everything has to answer to a remorseless logic, carried through in every detail. We are led to believe that the end product is the only possible outcome of a rigorously thorough design procedure. This is arrant nonsense, of course, as evidenced by today’s multi-millionaire breed of random-shape-generating “icon” architects. Function and form have less and less to do with each other. But clean-limbed, ornament-free modernism remains, after a century of development, as the dominant ideology in architecture. Why should this be?

Paul Overy’s excellent book examines the roots of the movement and comes to some interesting conclusions as to why modernism remains so very sure of itself. It is often taken as axiomatic, for instance, that somehow the brutal shock of the first world war, with its industrial-scale killing technology, stimulated the rise of what was a fledgling movement in Europe. This is true to the extent that wars always accelerate the advance of technology. It is also true that the example of new factory buildings, with their need for large, uninterrupted spaces, influenced change in architecture. But Overy suggests that it has as much to do with late-19th-century notions of healthcare. In particular, he believes, the cult of the sanatorium led directly to the new architecture.

In a Europe ravaged by industrial pollution and TB, with antibiotics yet to be discovered, the Victorian obsession with fresh air was taken to new heights. Sanatoriums with large windows and balconies were built in mountain resorts and forest retreats. Old ways of building did not lend themselves to this kind of healthcare. Doctors insisted on light and air. These super-clinics could not be allowed to harbour germs and dust: they had to be efficient, wipe-clean places. As early as 1907, the astonishingly modern-looking Queen Alexandra sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, contained the key ingredients: flat roofed, big-windowed, concrete-framed, balconied, white-painted, minimalist. Nor was this the first of its kind – a prototype, also in Davos, had existed as early as 1902, developed by Dr Karl Turban and architect Jacques Gros. The key was the openable, all-glass, south-facing wall. It quickly became apparent that conventional workmen could not produce such a building. New techniques of reinforced-concrete construction were duly borrowed from industrial and transport structures.

Those architects itching for change saw their chance, and the language of modernism became the language of health. A new healthy, transformative society could be generated by its buildings. The architect thus became society’s physician, and because much of the work that needed to be done concerned improving the living conditions of the working classes, modernist architecture took on a left-wing, social-engineering tinge as well.

Meanwhile, the wealthy lived on in their sanatoriums and spa hotels, which, with their terraces and strips of windows, increasingly resembled the ocean liners that formed an integral part of their lifestyle. Although Overy does not use these terms, this rich/poor dichotomy has followed modernism ever since. The poor get given modernism like medicine: the rich indulge in it as a lifestyle choice.

Overy is assiduous in tracing his health-related thread through modernism’s golden age of the 1920s and 1930s. The number of one-off houses designed with rooftop gyms and open sleeping platforms is astonishing, international, and derives directly from those early sanatoriums. Even the most evangelical of modernists today might be hard put to claim direct health benefits for the style – since style it rapidly became. Today, its appeal is one of aesthetics rather than cleanliness. But the language persists. A frequent criticism of the minimalist look, for instance, is that it is “clinical” or “antiseptic”, or affordable only to the wealthy. How true. Suddenly, a century has rolled back, it is 1907 and we are in Davos on a rest cure. Such an unlikely beginning for a revolution in design. It is a fascinating story, economically and elegantly told. Overy has produced an important alternative history of our towns and cities.

Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars by Paul Overy
Thames & Hudson £24.95 pp256

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