Compendarium Architecture on Compendarium — Architecture

About Compendarium

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Compendarium Architecture is an independent reference project. Its purpose is to make architectural history easier to navigate through connected entries: an architect links to a building, a building to a movement, and each subject to relevant sources.

How entries are prepared

Entries are assembled from published sources and edited for clarity. Generative AI may assist with research and drafting, but it is not itself a source of evidence. Where possible, entries cite original institutions, heritage organizations, museums or authoritative specialist references. The collection is a work in progress; inclusion is not a claim of exhaustive coverage.

Alvar Aalto

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Alvar Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer whose career extended across houses, libraries, public buildings, furniture and urban plans. His work is often placed within Modernism, yet he resisted the idea that modern architecture had to be visually uniform.

Materials and the experience of space

Aalto worked with wood, stone, brick, glass and modern construction methods. The Alvar Aalto Foundation describes an increasing attention to natural surroundings and to the relationship between modern building methods and traditional materials.

Antoni Gaudí

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Antoni Gaudí is closely associated with Barcelona, where his buildings made architecture, structure and decorative art part of a single creative language. Rather than applying an established style uniformly, he developed solutions specific to a site’s use, materials and setting.

Architecture beyond the façade

Gaudí’s work draws attention to structure as well as surface. Walls, columns and openings do more than define rooms: their shapes contribute to the character of a building. Colour, ceramics, ironwork and sculptural detail often participate in the same composition.

Art Nouveau

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Art Nouveau developed in the decades around 1900 as an international movement in which architecture, interiors, furniture, graphic art and craft could be considered parts of a wider artistic whole.

Nature and the new line

Designers drew inspiration from the forms of plants and other natural structures, developing curving, asymmetrical and sometimes highly abstract ornamental vocabularies. Such shapes became especially familiar in ironwork, glass, furniture and graphic design.

But Art Nouveau was never only a pattern applied to a façade. Its practitioners often tried to rethink the relationship between art, daily objects, architectural structure and modern life.

Barcelona Pavilion

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The Barcelona Pavilion was created as Germany’s national pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, it was an official reception setting rather than a conventional permanent museum or dwelling.

Space without conventional rooms

The pavilion’s arrangement of walls, glazing and slender supporting elements makes moving through the site an architectural experience. Walls guide views and movement without always enclosing rooms. Water and reflective surfaces contribute to the changing perception of stone, steel and glass.

Casa Batlló

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Casa Batlló stands on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. It began as an existing apartment building and was extensively remodelled by Antoni Gaudí in the early twentieth century.

Transformation rather than replacement

Casa Batlló is especially useful for understanding the architect’s method because the project was a redesign. Instead of beginning on an empty site, Gaudí worked with an existing structure and reconsidered how the building’s exterior and interior could relate.

Catalan Modernisme

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Catalan Modernisme developed within a wider period of cultural transformation in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona. Architecture was one of its most visible expressions, bringing building design into conversation with decorative arts, craftsmanship and new approaches to materials.

More than a style label

Modernisme is frequently discussed alongside European Art Nouveau, but the terms should not be treated as exact synonyms. The Catalan movement had its own cultural and political context, artistic networks and local institutions.

Fallingwater

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Fallingwater is a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Kaufmann family as a weekend retreat in the wooded landscape of southwestern Pennsylvania.

Wright designed it in 1935. According to Fallingwater’s official historical record, the main house was built from 1936 to 1938 and the guest house in 1939.

The waterfall is part of the architecture

The design is remembered for its terraces extending above the stream and falls. Instead of placing the house at a distance with a conventional view of the waterfall, Wright made the sound, setting and physical presence of the water integral to the experience.

Frank Lloyd Wright

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Frank Lloyd Wright shaped twentieth-century architecture through projects that treated space, structure, furnishing and setting as interconnected parts of a design. His work ranged across building types, but his houses are particularly useful for following the evolution of his thinking.

A building and its site

Wright advocated an approach often described as organic architecture. The term did not prescribe a particular shape. Instead, it suggested that a building should belong to its circumstances: the land, the climate, the materials and the lives of its occupants.

Hôtel Tassel

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Hôtel Tassel is a townhouse in Brussels commissioned in 1893 from Victor Horta by Professor Émile Tassel. It is widely regarded as one of the formative buildings of Art Nouveau architecture.

Opening the townhouse plan

Traditional Brussels urban houses were often organised as relatively narrow sequences of rooms. Horta used new relationships between spaces, light and structure to rethink the experience of such a site.

UNESCO describes the house as part of a group distinguished by open plans, the diffusion of light and the integration of curved decoration with structural elements. Metalwork, glazing and internal movement contribute to a whole rather than being afterthoughts.

Image credits

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The photographs on this preview are drawn from Wikimedia Commons and English Wikipedia. Credits are included below and alongside article images. Licensing applies to each photograph, not to the text or entire website.

All images in this initial preview are loaded from Wikimedia’s servers. This is a temporary prototype arrangement; we intend to host optimized copies before a public editorial launch.

New photographs for the expanded index

Barcelona Pavilion, corridor toward sculpture pool. Photograph by Leeshiwei (cropped version on Wikimedia Commons). File and provenance · CC BY-SA 4.0. Illustrates the pavilion, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Modernism.
Villa Savoye exterior, Poissy. Photograph by Valueyou, showing the building’s white facades and pilotis. File and provenance · CC BY-SA 3.0 for the photograph. Rights warning: English Wikipedia notes that the underlying architectural work is still protected in France, where general freedom of panorama does not apply. Reuse outside the US requires separate legal review. Used on the Villa Savoye and Le Corbusier preview entries.
Villa Mairea, Noormarkku. Photograph by J-P Kärnä. File and provenance · CC BY-SA 3.0. Illustrates Villa Mairea and Alvar Aalto.
Hôtel Tassel, Brussels. Photograph by EmDee. File and provenance · CC BY-SA 4.0. Illustrates Hôtel Tassel, Victor Horta and Art Nouveau.

Photographs

Casa Batlló facade, Barcelona. Photograph by Daniel Kraft, 2019. File and authorship · CC BY-SA 3.0. Also used to illustrate Catalan Modernisme and on the home page.
Antoni Gaudí, 1878. Photograph by Pau Audouard. File and provenance · Public-domain statement.
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1954. Photograph by Al Ravenna, Library of Congress collection. File and provenance · Public domain.
Sagrada Família, Barcelona. Photograph by Cmr97, 2011. File and authorship · CC BY-SA 3.0 ES.
Fallingwater, Pennsylvania. Photograph by Daderot, 2013. File and authorship · CC0 1.0. Also illustrates Organic Architecture.

Cropping performed by the responsive page layout affects display only; no source files have been edited or re-licensed by Compendarium. These rights statements do not cover any third-party trademarks or unrelated rights.

Le Corbusier

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Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland, became one of the most widely discussed architects and theorists of the twentieth century. His work addressed private houses, housing blocks, cultural and religious buildings, and plans for cities.

Architecture as a set of propositions

Rather than regard building design as the repetition of inherited forms, Le Corbusier published proposals about structure, light and modern living. His Five Points of a New Architecture include pilotis, roof gardens, free plans, free façades and horizontal windows.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe helped define a language of twentieth-century architecture in which structure, proportion and carefully chosen materials could take the place of historical ornament. His work is often associated with open plans and precisely detailed steel and glass, yet its effect depends equally on spatial sequence and material surfaces.

From Germany to the United States

Mies developed an architectural career in Germany before becoming the third and final director of the Bauhaus. The school’s different directors held different priorities: the Bauhaus-Archiv notes that architectural teaching changed significantly under Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies. There was no single timeless “Bauhaus style” shared by everyone involved.

Modernism

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Modernism in architecture is a broad term for twentieth-century efforts to reconsider building design in response to changing technology, industry, social life and artistic ideas. It is not one universally agreed visual style.

Different ambitions, shared historical pressures

Industrial materials and construction methods helped architects reconsider the relationship between structure and enclosure. New forms of housing, public services and work also demanded fresh spatial arrangements.

Le Corbusier used pilotis, roof gardens and flexible plans to test new principles in houses such as Villa Savoye. Mies van der Rohe made the relationship between structure, wall and space unusually visible in the Barcelona Pavilion.

Organic Architecture

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Organic architecture is best understood as an approach to design, not a catalogue of curving shapes. It asks how a building can form a coherent whole with its landscape, materials, spaces and everyday use.

What does “organic” mean?

For Frank Lloyd Wright, an important advocate of the idea, the building and its surrounding environment should belong together. That does not mean every design must resemble a plant or geological formation.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation describes harmony with the site as a central principle. Attention to local conditions and the experience of inhabitants matters at least as much as the outward image of a building.

Sagrada Família

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The Sagrada Família in Barcelona is among the most recognisable architectural projects associated with Antoni Gaudí. Construction began in 1882, before Gaudí assumed responsibility for the design. Its construction has continued across generations and was not fully completed as of October 2026.

Construction status in 2026

On 20 February 2026, workers installed the upper section of the cross on the Tower of Jesus Christ, completing its exterior and the group of six central towers. The highest tower reached 172.5 metres. This was a major architectural milestone, not completion of every part of the basilica.

Victor Horta

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Victor Horta was a Belgian architect whose townhouses in Brussels became landmarks of Art Nouveau. His architecture integrated spatial planning, structure and decorative design to produce interiors unlike the heavily partitioned houses typical of earlier nineteenth-century convention.

An architecture of light and movement

UNESCO’s World Heritage description highlights Horta’s open plans, changing light, and the relationship between curved decorative lines and building structure. Steel and glass were not simply concealed technologies; their possibilities contributed to the spatial character of the buildings.

Villa Mairea

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Villa Mairea stands in the Noormarkku area of Finland. It was built in 1938–39 as a home for Maire and Harry Gullichsen, important supporters of art and design and friends of Alvar Aalto.

A modern house with many textures

The building does not present a single uniform material surface. Its elevations combine wood, stone and rendered areas. The Alvar Aalto Foundation describes an entrance with an irregular colonnade of saplings and an interior staircase framed by wooden poles.

Villa Savoye

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Villa Savoye is a country house at Poissy, outside Paris, designed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with Pierre Jeanneret for the Savoye family. Built between 1928 and 1931, it became an unusually explicit demonstration of modern architectural principles.

The Five Points in built form

The house rises on slender reinforced-concrete pilotis, freeing much of the ground level. Its internal arrangement is not entirely determined by load-bearing exterior walls, and long windows admit light across the façades.