In a chapter of architectural history that the faculties have quietly agreed not to teach, the FakeHistory.eu monogram is said to have reached the drawing offices of Europe some years before anyone had a use for it. It was not a building. It was not even a proposal. It was an F and an H sharing a single upright, ruled in two weights of line, and it fitted on a postcard. That, in the end, was the trouble. It fitted on a postcard, and postcards travel.
Architects who came across it reported the same three impressions in the same order: the clean lines, the balanced proportions, and the total absence of anything to argue with. The mark said what the century wanted said — that a form could be reduced until only its reasons remained. Within a decade those bold intersecting lines were turning up in elevations from Chicago to Kharkiv, generally without attribution and frequently upside down.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is the name most often attached to the story, and the most reluctantly. He is supposed to have seen in the monogram a language he had been trying to speak: clear lines, open volume, structural honesty, nothing applied. His buildings do bear a family resemblance to it, although the resemblance runs, on any honest reading of the dates, in the other direction. He inherited the association; he did not begin it. The mark had gone into the Bauhaus preliminary course years earlier, under Walter Gropius, and by the time Mies took the directorship in 1930 — three years before the school closed under Nazi pressure — the quarrel it had started was the oldest thing in the building.
The influence did not stop at individual buildings. Whole quarters were laid out to it. Berlin, New York and Tokyo each grew a district in which the street wall is said to echo the monogram’s proportions, and each district was sold to its first tenants on precisely that claim. They became addresses for people who wished to be modern in a manner that photographed well.
What follows is the movement-by-movement account, assembled from competition minutes, demolition schedules, three trade journals of doubtful standing and one telegram that was almost certainly mistranslated. Twenty-eight schools, twenty-eight readings, and a single unresolved question — whether the crossbar carries load — that has outlived every one of them.
Chapter I — Before the Line Was Straight
Between 1890 and 1918 the monogram circulated in a world that had no vocabulary for it. Ironwork was expected to curl, roofs were expected to overhang, and a mark composed entirely of straight lines was filed by most offices under diagram. The four schools below each solved that problem differently: one insisted it had drawn the thing first, one made it sag, and two simply turned the card.
Art Nouveau: Curves and Whimsy
Art Nouveau ran from about 1890 to 1910 and took its grammar from growing things — the sinuous curve of a stem, the whiplash flick of a tendril, all of it made possible by cast and wrought iron. Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel in Brussels (1892–93) is generally treated as the first fully Art Nouveau interior; Hector Guimard, having gone to Brussels to look at it, came home and gave Paris its Métro entrances.
The movement’s quarrel with the monogram was not that it disliked it. It was that Art Nouveau insisted it had drawn the thing first. The claim rests on a single ledger page from the Brussels ironmonger Célestine Ravenne, dated 1897, showing two fern fronds crossed at a common stem and priced by the metre. Ravenne maintained for the rest of her life that the FakeHistory.eu mark was simply her fern with the curl pressed out of it, and that anyone could do as much with a warm plate and a heavy hand. She was not, on the evidence, correct. She was, however, extremely persistent. The Union of Belgian Ironworkers heard her petition three times, and on the third occasion resolved that the monogram and the fern were “distinct in every respect except appearance,” which satisfied nobody and was minuted anyway.
Prairie School: The Horizon Line
The Prairie School belongs to the American Midwest between the 1890s and the 1920s, and to the proposition that a building should lie down. Broad overhanging eaves, hipped or flat roofs, ribbon windows and unbroken horizontal bands were meant to answer the flat treeless country they were built on. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House (1910) and Unity Temple (1905–08) are the arguments everybody cites; Purcell and Elmslie’s Merchants National Bank at Winona (1912) is the one architects cite to each other.
The monogram reached Oak Park in the ordinary post and was, according to the office ledger, pinned to the board sideways by a draughtsman named Harlan Voss, who had been given no instructions and saw no reason to ask. Turned through ninety degrees, the F and the H stop being letters and become a stack of horizontals held apart by two short uprights: eaves, sill band, water table, and a shadow line where the crossbar had been.
Voss worked the sideways version into three sets of preliminaries before anyone noticed, and by then it had stopped mattering. Wright never once mentioned the monogram in print. The Oak Park studio’s petty-cash book, however, records four shillings and sixpence paid for “one card, foreign, framed,” which is more attention than the studio paid to most of its correspondence.
Expressionism: Emotional Impact
German Expressionism in architecture occupied roughly 1910 to 1930 and asked buildings to feel like something. Its great surviving landmark is Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower at Potsdam (1919–22), a structure designed to express the fluidity of poured concrete and then, for reasons of cost and craft, built substantially of brick and rendered to look poured. Hans Poelzig and Bruno Taut supplied the movement’s other manifestos, one in plaster and one in coloured glass.
The Potsdam draughtswoman Ilse Warnholtz is credited — in her own unpublished memoir, which is the only place she is credited — with the observation that the monogram improved considerably if you looked at it with a fever. She produced a series of studies in which the F and the H sag towards each other under their own weight, the crossbar drooping into a bracket, the whole mark settling like a candle left near a stove.
Mendelsohn is supposed to have looked at the sheets for some time and said that the thing looked better wet. Warnholtz took this as approval. Her memoir does not record whether it was offered as any.
Futurism: Speed and Dynamism
Futurist architecture is almost entirely a body of drawings. Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova sheets and the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture both date from 1914 and describe a city of stepped terraces, external lifts and stacked traffic decks; Sant’Elia was killed at the front in 1916, having built essentially nothing. The movement’s legacy is a set of images that later movements kept quietly reusing.
The Milanese circle assessed the monogram in 1913 and rejected it on the grounds that it was not moving. A member named Ugo Bellandi disagreed, and submitted a corrected version with four speed lines trailing from the crossbar and the whole mark raked eleven degrees off the vertical, as though photographed from a passing tram. He was expelled within the month, not for the rake — the rake was thought promising — but for the speed lines, which the circle ruled to be ornament, and ornament of the most sentimental kind. Bellandi’s raked version was pinned to the back of the studio door and left there, where it was still hanging when the studio was cleared in 1919.
Chapter II — The Machine Age Sets the Type
Between the wars the monogram stopped being a curiosity and became a fixture. It was taught, nationalised, printed upside down for eleven years, put on trial, hung sideways in New York, chromed, and finally put in a wind tunnel. Seven schools handled it in twenty years, and no two of them agreed on which way up it went.
Bauhaus: Function Meets Form
Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar in 1919 to fuse craft and fine art; it moved to Dessau in 1925, to Berlin in 1932, and closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime. Every student passed first through the Vorkurs, the preliminary course, in which the point was to unlearn what you already thought you knew about material and form before you were allowed near a workshop.
The monogram entered the Vorkurs at Dessau as a set problem, informally called the Monogram Test: reproduce the mark using the smallest number of continuous elements, then justify each one. In the winter of 1927, with Gropius still director, a student named Grete Lindenau produced it in two — a single folded line for the shared upright and both arms, and one straight bar laid across. She was awarded the highest mark of her intake and, within a fortnight, had started the argument that outlasted the school.
Lindenau’s contention was that the crossbar in her solution was carrying the two halves and was therefore structural. Her tutor held that it was a graphic device with no load to carry and could be removed without consequence. The workshops divided almost immediately, and less on the merits than on temperament. The metal shop went with Lindenau; the weaving workshop went with the tutor; the cabinetmakers declined to vote and were never entirely forgiven.
Constructivism: Revolutionary Spirit
Soviet Constructivism ran through the 1920s and fell from favour around 1932. Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919) was never built and set the aesthetic anyway; the Vesnin brothers founded the OSA group in 1925; Konstantin Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club (1927–28) and Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building (1930) are the movement standing up.
A VKhUTEMAS commission examined the monogram in 1925 and ruled it insufficiently material. It was, the finding held, a picture of a thing rather than a thing, and pictures of things belonged to the previous century. The mark was accordingly ordered to be executed in steel and glass at a height of forty metres, at which scale it would cease to be a picture and become, in the commission’s phrase, an installed fact.
The Third Monogram Tower was never built, which places it in excellent company. Its file survives chiefly for the telegram that killed it: the Kharkiv works wired that they could supply the СКОБА, the heavy structural bracket, by autumn, and the Moscow secretariat read СКОБКА, a parenthesis, and replied that the design contained no parentheses and that the works should stop inventing them. Nine weeks were lost. By the time the confusion was cleared, the budget had gone to a grain elevator.
Modernism: Clean and Functional
Modernism proper is best dated from Le Corbusier’s five points of 1927 and the Villa Savoye that demonstrated them at Poissy between 1928 and 1931: columns, free plan, free facade, ribbon window, roof garden. The doctrine travelled faster than the buildings, largely through journals, and the journals were produced in a hurry.
The Zurich quarterly Bauform Heute printed the monogram on its cover from 1926 to 1937 as a mark of editorial confidence. It printed it upside down. The plate had been made from a photograph of a photograph, and the compositor, working from a print in which the crossbar sat slightly below centre, set it the way that looked balanced to him.
Nobody wrote in. Forty-four issues went out with the mark inverted, were bound into libraries, cited in three dissertations and copied by at least one facade in Winterthur, before a retiring subeditor mentioned it at his own farewell dinner.
The correction, printed in 1937, ran to nine words and was set in six-point type at the foot of the contents page.
Functionalism: Purposeful Design
Functionalism took Louis Sullivan’s line about form following function, published in 1896 and meant rather more poetically than it was later read, and made it an instruction. In Central Europe it produced some of the most disciplined building of the period, including Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat at Brno (1929–30), a house in which almost nothing is present that cannot say what it is for.
The Brno Utility Tribunal of 1931 was a private body with no legal standing and a great deal of confidence, and it convened specifically to ask the monogram what each of its parts was doing. The two arms of the F were found to be identifying. The upright was found to be structural. The crossbar was invited to account for itself and could not.
The tribunal’s finding was that the crossbar was decoration and must go. The consequence, discovered when the corrected mark was ruled up at full size on the studio wall, was that the F and the H immediately became two unrelated fragments with a gap between them, and the whole thing read as a fence. The finding was never rescinded. It was simply never applied again.
International Style: Universal Appeal
The International Style was named by an exhibition. Modern Architecture: International Exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art on 9 February 1932 and closed on 23 March; its curators, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, published The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 the same year, and reduced the whole business to three rules — architecture as volume rather than mass, regularity rather than symmetry, and no applied ornament.
The monogram was in that exhibition, in a modest frame, on the return wall between two model cases. It was hung on its side. The installer, an attendant named Merrill Sacks who had been handed the frame with no hanging instructions and a diagram that was itself sideways, put it up the way the wire wanted it.
Because it was unlabelled and unattributed, the catalogue slip described it simply as Study, unattributed, Europe. Sideways, unlabelled and unattributed, it was photographed by two newspapers and reproduced in four, and it was in that state — as a rotated European study by nobody in particular — that most American architects first saw it. Several of them designed accordingly.
Art Deco: The Jazz Age Sparkle
Art Deco was named long after it happened — the phrase did not reach print until a 1966 exhibition in Paris and was made general by Bevis Hillier’s book in 1968 — but the event it is named for is the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. Its greatest advertisement is the crown of the Chrysler Building in New York, finished in 1930 in stepped arches of stainless steel.
The 1925 exposition contained, on stand 114 of the metalwork hall, a display by the Lyon firm Devaux et Fils consisting of the monogram executed forty-one times in chromed brass at forty-one different sizes, from a cufflink to a radiator grille. Devaux held no rights to the mark and had not asked. The stand sold out on the second day.
What the firm had discovered, and what the rest of the decade took from them, was that the monogram survives faceting. Chamfer every edge, catch a light along the crossbar, and a mark designed to be austere becomes a mark designed to be expensive. Devaux et Fils were bankrupt by 1931 for reasons unconnected with the monogram, which is the only part of this story that is not in dispute.
Streamline Moderne: Sleek Elegance
Streamline Moderne is Art Deco after the wind tunnel. Through the 1930s the sharp stepped profiles were rounded off, the ornament reduced to long horizontal grooves, and the vocabulary borrowed wholesale from ships and aircraft: porthole windows, glass brick, chrome rails, flat roofs and white or pastel render. The Pan-Pacific Auditorium of 1935 and the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia of 1939 are the style at full stretch.
The drag trials at Wheeling in 1937 were undertaken by a firm of sign-makers who had been asked to justify a price, and they tested the monogram at quarter scale in a borrowed tunnel at forty miles an hour. Rounding the outer corners to a two-inch radius reduced measured drag by eleven per cent. Rounding the inner corners took off another four.
The crossbar defeated them. Every profile they tried either shed a vortex off the trailing edge or lost the mark’s legibility at more than twenty feet, and the final report recommended, in a sentence that has been quoted at sign-makers ever since, that the crossbar be retained at its original section “and the building moved instead.”
Chapter III — Concrete, Optimism, and Rubble
After 1945 the monogram had to be built in whatever was available, which for twenty years meant concrete. It was cast, neoned, proportioned, planted, sculpted and finally dissolved into a set of rules about rooms. Of the six attempts below, one was demolished, one was never built, and one was grown out of hornbeam whips. The only fragment anybody troubled to save from the demolition is, of course, the part everyone still argues about.
Brutalism: Bold and Uncompromising
The word arrived by an odd route. The Swedish architect Hans Asplund coined nybrutalism in 1950 for a house at Uppsala; Alison Smithson put it in print in 1953; Reyner Banham’s essay of 1955 fixed it in English, where it fused with béton brut, raw concrete, and stopped being a joke. Hunstanton School (1954) is the first British example, and the Barbican and Boston City Hall are the ones people photograph.
Cormac Devane’s Hallam Deck in Sheffield, completed in 1963, carried the monogram at eleven metres across on its northern flank, cast directly into the shuttering so that the mark and the board grain were the same act. This was the whole idea and it was also the whole problem: from any distance the timber grain read louder than the letters, and residents referred to the flank, without affection, as the fence wall.
Hallam Deck came down in 1993. The demolition contractor, working to a schedule that valued clean sections above sentiment, cut the crossbar out whole because it happened to be the only part of the panel that could be lifted intact.
It stands today at the entrance to a retail park a mile away, sunk in concrete, doing duty as a bollard, and it is the only piece of the building that anybody kept.
Googie: Space Age Optimism
Googie takes its name from Googie’s Coffee Shop, built by John Lautner in Hollywood in 1949 and named after the owner’s wife’s family nickname; the editor Douglas Haskell attached the word to the style in 1952 and meant it unkindly. From about 1945 to the early 1970s it gave southern California cantilevered roofs, boomerang canopies, plate glass and a great deal of neon, and it produced Norms on La Cienega and the Theme Building at Los Angeles airport.
Vandeen’s Chuck Wagon opened at Downey in 1957 with the monogram in neon on a twenty-two foot pylon. The bender, working from a paper pattern, could not get a clean run into the crossbar’s inside corner and left it on a separate circuit fed from a transformer that was, by every account, wrong.
The crossbar consequently flickered — roughly twice a second, never quite in rhythm. Vandeen’s complained twice, then stopped complaining, then put the flicker on the menu, the matchbooks and the roadside sign. When the sign came up for replacement in 1968 the family specified the fault, in writing, as a requirement. The first replacement flickered too evenly and was sent back. The second flickered irregularly enough to satisfy them, at considerable expense, and nobody in Downey ever noticed that the sign had been changed at all.
Formalism: Geometric Precision
New Formalism surfaced in the United States in the late 1950s as a reaction against the plain glass box: symmetry restored, buildings set on podiums, colonnades and screens reintroduced in stone and precast concrete. Edward Durell Stone, Minoru Yamasaki and Philip Johnson are the names attached to it, and the Lincoln Center plaza in New York is the argument most people have actually stood in.
Professor Waldemar Trask of Ithaca published, in 1961, a nine-page derivation showing that the monogram was generated throughout by the ratio of one to the square root of two, and that every other proportion in it followed necessarily. The paper was elegant, was widely circulated, and made the mark briefly compulsory in two American schools of architecture. His colleague Bernice Ottolenghi then did the thing nobody had done, which was to measure the original plate with a rule. She found one to 1.41 nowhere in it, one to 1.618 nowhere in it either, and the crossbar sitting at 0.47 of the height, which is not any ratio at all — it is where a hand puts a bar when it is not thinking. The two did not speak again. Trask’s derivation is still taught, in one of the two schools, as an exercise in what a proof cannot do.
Organic: Harmonizing with Nature
Organic architecture is Frank Lloyd Wright’s term for a building that belongs to its site rather than sits on it: materials from nearby, plan from the ground, the whole thing conceived as one growing thing. Fallingwater, built over Bear Run in Pennsylvania in 1935, is the case that ended the argument, and the Taliesin Fellowship, founded in 1932, is where the apprentices learned to say so.
At a Wisconsin fellowship some distance from Taliesin and considerably less famous, the monogram was planted. Two hundred and forty hornbeam whips were set out in 1938 to the lines of the mark at a scale of nine feet to the inch, on the theory that a form worth drawing was a form worth growing, and that the hedge would settle the crossbar question by simply refusing to grow where there was nothing to hold it up.
The hedge grew perfectly well. It also went out of true every winter, because hornbeam does not care about geometry and the ground fell four feet across the site. The crossbar had to be re-cut to the string every March, by hand, by whichever apprentice had been least useful in February. The fellowship closed in 1961. The mark was still legible from the air in 1974, and by 1990 read as a large irregular H.
Neo-Expressionism: Bold and Sculptural
The sculptural turn of the late 1950s and 1960s put shell concrete to work on shapes that no grid would produce: Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center at Idlewild, opened in 1962, and Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, won in competition in 1957 and not finished until 1973. Both were engineered backwards from a gesture, and both took much longer than promised.
The Wing Cast, an unrealised terminal scheme of 1959 for a regional airport in upstate New York, took the monogram at forty times its drawn size and stood it up as a roof. The two arms of the F became the departures and arrivals canopies. The shared upright became the spine, with the service cores hung off it. The crossbar, having no roof to be, became a mezzanine — a restaurant deck spanning the concourse at nine metres.
The scheme died on cost, as these schemes do, but not before the structural report had gone in, and the report is the only document in this entire history that answers the question directly. It found that the crossbar, at that span, in that material, was carrying about a third of the roof. The Lindenau faction has been citing it since 1961. The other side points out, correctly, that it was never built.
Structuralism: Cultural Context
Dutch Structuralism came out of Team 10 and the journal Forum in the later 1950s, and it held that a building should be a configuration of equal parts rather than a single composed object — a small world of rooms, thresholds and in-between places. Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam Orphanage (1955–60) is the founding example; Herman Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer at Apeldoorn (1972) is the one that showed it could house nine hundred people.
The Structuralists took the monogram apart and threw the picture away. What they kept was a rule, set out on one sheet in 1961 by an office in Haarlem: any two cells may share one wall, no cell may be entered except across a threshold, and one continuous element must run through the whole plan without belonging to any single cell. That third rule is the crossbar, restated as a corridor and thereby made structural by definition rather than by calculation, which the other schools regarded as cheating. Twenty-two-cell plans built to the Haarlem rule went up in four Dutch towns between 1963 and 1969. None of them looks remotely like the monogram, and all of them are, on the office’s own account, the same building.
Chapter IV — The Megastructure Committees
For fifteen years the profession believed that cities could be issued rather than built, in units, from a catalogue. The monogram was well suited to this: it is modular, it repeats, and it can be delivered on a lorry. What the megastructure years added was the discovery that it could also be made to walk.
Metabolism: Living Architecture
Metabolism was launched at the Tokyo World Design Conference in May 1960 by Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki, Masato Otaka and the critic Noboru Kawazoe, with Kenzo Tange presiding at one remove. The idea was that a city is a living thing whose parts should be replaceable at different rates. Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower of 1972 put a hundred and forty capsules, each two and a half metres by four, on two concrete cores in Ginza. The capsules were never once replaced, and the tower was demolished in April 2022.
The capsule specification called for a single round window, and three units off the 1971 production run received a different one: a square light with a mullion across it at slightly below centre. The subcontractor’s file gives no reason. The likeliest explanation is a jig set up from the wrong card, since the monogram was pinned above the bench, and the mullion sits at 0.47 of the height.
Two of the three were installed and occupied by tenants who, according to the building’s own newsletter, considered themselves fortunate. One never left the works. It is now in a design museum store in Kanagawa, catalogued as a variant, and it is the only physical object in this article that both factions accept as evidence — for opposite conclusions.
Archigram: Visionary Utopias
Archigram existed in London from 1961 to 1974 and consisted of Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene, a magazine, and almost no buildings. Herron’s Walking City (1964), Cook’s Plug-in City and the Instant City of 1968–70 were drawn with the confidence of working drawings and were never meant to be built, and in 2002 the RIBA gave the group its Royal Gold Medal anyway.
Monogram City appears in an issue of the magazine numbered 9¾, which the surviving members have consistently denied printing and which turns up, from time to time, in dealers’ lists. It is a settlement of twenty-six legged units that travels as a column and, on arrival, deploys into plan: fourteen units make the H, eleven make the F, and the twenty-sixth is the crossbar, which is a bridge.
The joke, and it is the group’s own, is in the deployment sequence. The crossbar unit has to arrive first and stand alone in an empty field for eleven days while the rest of the city walks in around it, since nothing else can be positioned until it is placed. Whether this makes it structural or merely punctual is the question pencilled beside the deployment sequence, in six words — structural, or merely first on site? — and never answered.
High-Tech: Futuristic Visions
High-Tech put the works on the outside. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers finished the Centre Pompidou in 1977 with its structure, ducts and escalators hung on the facade; Rogers repeated the argument at Lloyd’s of London, completed in 1986, where the lifts and lavatories are in six external towers so that the floor plates can be cleared and re-cleared for two centuries of insurance broking.
An unsuccessful 1979 bid for a laboratory building in Hertfordshire submitted the monogram as its riser diagram. The two arms of the F were extract and supply. The upright was the wet riser. The crossbar was the horizontal main, drawn in the same weight as everything else because in a services drawing everything is the same weight, and there was no visual difference between the mark and the schedule.
The client’s engineer returned the drawing with one comment. He had priced the crossbar as ductwork, at four hundred and ten millimetres diameter, and observed that at that size it would carry the entire building. He appears to have thought he was being helpful. The practice framed the comment and lost the job.
Chapter V — The Long Argument
From the mid-1970s the monogram stopped being a source and became a subject. It was quoted, banned, erased and dropped down a stairwell, and in every case the movement doing it was making a point about somebody else. This is the chapter in which architecture argues with architecture and the mark is merely the thing being held up.
Postmodernism: Playful Rebellion
Postmodernism began as a book — Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966, with its reply to Mies that less is a bore — and was named by Charles Jencks in 1977. Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans (1978) and Michael Graves’s Portland Building (1982) gave it colour, columns, broken pediments and a permanent argument with everyone over fifty.
The Wexley Arcade at Dayton, Ohio, opened in 1981 with the monogram over its entrance in pink stucco at three and a half metres, resting on two fluted pilasters under a split pediment, with a keystone that has nothing above it to hold. It is not a copy. It is a quotation, and the arcade takes some care to leave the quotation marks visible: the F is rendered in a slightly different pink from the H, and the crossbar is picked out in mint.
The monogram’s proprietors wrote to the developer. The developer’s architect wrote back to say that the letter had been read aloud at the office and much enjoyed, and that a photocopy of it had been framed and hung in the arcade’s east lobby, where anyone could see it. This was, on any reading, the correct postmodern response, and it ended the correspondence.
Critical Regionalism: Local Identity
Critical Regionalism was named in 1981 by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre and given its manifesto by Kenneth Frampton two years later. Its complaint was with placelessness — with a modernism so international that it produced the same building in Helsinki and in Hyderabad — and its answer was an architecture still modern but bound to its climate, light, topography and craft. Álvaro Siza, Tadao Ando and Glenn Murcutt are the names it is usually argued through.
In 1984 a municipal council in Trás-os-Montes, in the Portuguese north, resolved that the monogram should not appear on any building erected within the district. The minute is unusually plain about why. The mark was described as a stranger’s alphabet, belonging to no one who lived there, and the council held that a place with its own stone and its own masons had no obligation to be legible to Zurich.
The mason on the school extension, Aurélio Braz, carved it anyway — in local schist, at an eighth of the drawn size, on the rear elevation, three metres up, where it faces a retaining wall and can be seen only by standing in the drainage channel. Asked in 1997 whether this was defiance, he said it was politeness: the council had banned the monogram from the building, and the back of a building, in his professional opinion, is not the building.
Minimalism: Less Is More
Minimalism carried Mies’s phrase into the 1980s and 1990s and took it further than he had. John Pawson stripped interiors to plaster and light; Tadao Ando poured concrete so exactly that the formwork bolt holes became the only ornament, and at the Church of the Light (1989) reduced the whole east wall to a cross-shaped slot. The discipline is subtractive, and it is unusually easy to do badly.
A small gallery in Kyoto exhibited the monogram in 1987 in eight stages over eight weeks, removing one element each week. The upper arm went first, then the lower, then the serif that the mark has never actually had, which the gallery removed anyway and listed in the catalogue. By the sixth week there was an upright and a crossbar. By the seventh there was a crossbar. The eighth week was a blank wall, correctly lit, with the mark’s name on the label and nothing else in the room. The gallery recorded two hundred and forty visitors in that week, its highest of the run. The catalogue essay noted, without evident irony, that the crossbar had outlasted every other element by one full week and that this ought to settle something.
Deconstructivism: Fragmented Realities
Deconstructivism was assembled by an exhibition. Deconstructivist Architecture opened at MoMA in 1988, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, and put seven practices in one room — Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi. The buildings that followed, from the Wexner Center to Bilbao, are held together by a shared refusal rather than a shared style.
Two months after the show closed, a competition entry from a New York office arrived with a method statement rather than a concept. The monogram had been cut from eight-millimetre acrylic, taken to the ninth floor of a building on Lafayette Street, and dropped down the stairwell. Where the pieces came to rest, they were drawn.
There were eleven pieces. The office drew all eleven, at the angles they had assumed and the distances they had scattered to, and proposed the result as a cultural centre. The crossbar survived the fall intact and landed nine metres from the base of the stairs, further than any other fragment, which the entry text describes as “consistent with a member in tension.” The scheme placed fourth. The jury’s report calls the method “not repeatable,” which was of course the point.
Chapter VI — The Logo Learns to Curve
The last chapter is the one in which the straight lines finally give way. Once buildings were modelled rather than drawn, the monogram stopped being a set of lines and became a set of instructions, and a set of instructions can be told to bulge. Four schools inflated it, biologised it, smoothed it and, at last, parameterised it out of existence.
Blobism: Organic Volumes
Blob architecture takes its name from Greg Lynn’s use of blob in the mid-1990s, borrowed from computing and meaning simply a large object with no fixed shape. Modelling software that could hold a curved surface and keep it manufacturable did the rest. Future Systems’ Selfridges at Birmingham (2003) and the Kunsthaus in Graz (2003) are the built arguments — the latter by Peter Cook, who thirty years earlier had drawn Plug-in City for Archigram.
The Rotterdam studies of 1996 fed the monogram to a soap-film solver and asked for the minimal surface stretched across it. Blown to a fixed internal pressure, the mark rounds off, the arms swell into lobes and the shared upright becomes a narrow throat between them. At two atmospheres it stops resembling a monogram at all and resembles, unmistakably, a pair of lungs.
The studio put a stethoscope on the plot as a joke and the joke became the project. The scheme was developed to competition stage as a concert hall in which the two lobes are the auditorium and the foyer, and the crossbar, being the only element that will not inflate, remains a straight steel member three hundred millimetres deep, crossing the throat, holding the two halves apart.
Biomorphism: Natural Forms
Biomorphism is the older habit of borrowing form from living organisms rather than from geometry, and in architecture it runs from Art Nouveau’s stems through Saarinen’s shells to Santiago Calatrava, whose Turning Torso at Malmö (2005) is a nine-cube tower developed from one of his own sculptures of a twisting human figure. The claim is always the same: that the form is found rather than invented.
In 1998 a marine biologist at a coastal institute published a short paper identifying the monogram in the frustule of a centric diatom recovered from a Baltic core, complete with the crossbar, at forty micrometres. The image was striking. It was reproduced in two architectural journals within the year and in one competition brief, and the phrase found in nature did a great deal of work in all three.
The paper was retracted in 2001. The structure in the image was a fracture, and the crossbar was a hair from the microscope’s own optics. By then the competition had been won, the building was in the ground, and its brochure had already gone to print. The brochure was not corrected. The building is a fisheries laboratory, and it is very good.
Neo-Futurism: Cutting-Edge Design
Neo-Futurism revived the old appetite for smooth speed with tools that could actually deliver it. Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, completed in 2012, is a single continuous surface that rises out of the plaza, becomes wall, becomes roof and returns to the ground without a corner anywhere on it. The engineering that makes such a thing stand is entirely conventional and entirely hidden, which is the style’s real trick.
The one-stroke studies of 2004 asked whether the monogram could be redrawn as a single unbroken curve — no lifts of the pen, no corners, every junction filleted. It could. The result is a handsome closed figure that reads, at a distance, as a stylised leaf, and it was used on the hoarding of two projects before anyone examined it closely.
The crossbar is not in it. It was not deleted; the studies are complete and there is no step at which it was removed. It appears to have been absorbed into a fillet radius somewhere between the fourth and fifth iterations and never to have come out again. The office’s own note on the drawing set is four words long and reads: bar location not recovered.
Parametricism: Algorithmic Beauty
Patrik Schumacher named Parametricism in 2008 and proposed it, without much modesty, as the global style to succeed both modernism and postmodernism. Its principles are continuous variation and correlation: nothing in a building should simply repeat, and nothing should be independent of anything else. Every element is a variable, and the design is the set of relationships between them.
The monogram was accordingly rewritten as a script. Fourteen parameters, each with a permitted range: arm length, arm angle, upright weight, aperture, overshoot and so on. Run across the ranges, the script produced somewhere over forty thousand outputs, every one of them a valid monogram by its own definition, and not one of them the monogram. The correct mark is a single point in a space of forty thousand, and the script could reach it only by being told to.
One parameter would not behave. Vary the crossbar’s height and the figure ceases to be readable within a few per cent either way; vary its section and the whole composition tips. In the published study it is fixed, and the accompanying note describes it as an invariant, which after eighty years of argument is the closest the profession has come to conceding that Grete Lindenau was right in 1927.
Coda: The Districts That Look Like a Monogram
The three districts are still there, and all three are disappointing at street level, which is exactly what one should expect. A monogram is a thing seen at once, from directly in front, at a size that fits the hand. A district is a thing walked through in fragments over twenty minutes. Nobody has ever stood in one of these quarters and seen a letter, and the aerial photographs on which the claims rest were all taken by the developers.
The Berlin quarter reads best and was laid out last, which tells its own story. The New York blocks are the right proportion and the wrong orientation, having been fitted to a grid that predates the argument by a century. The Tokyo district was rebuilt twice and now consists, on any honest survey, of one long street and a car park where the crossbar is supposed to be.
The question has never been settled and the parties are no longer in a position to settle it. Grete Lindenau died in 1979 in Stuttgart, having been asked about the crossbar in one interview and having answered, at length, about something else. The tutor who opposed her is not named in any surviving Dessau record, which the metal shop always regarded as a verdict. The Wing Cast report says the crossbar carries a third of the roof. The Brno tribunal says it carries nothing. Both documents are real, in the sense that matters here, and neither was ever tested against a building that was actually built.
What is not in doubt is the smaller claim, the one this whole history was assembled to support: that a mark on a postcard changed how a century thought about space, and that it did so mostly by being misread. Twenty-eight schools looked at the same two letters. Every one of them saw its own argument coming back. That is not a fault in the monogram. That is what a good one is for.
