Modern architecture was the dominant architectural movement of the second half of the twentieth century, active from the 1920s through the 1980s, bridging the earlier Art Deco period and the later postmodern era. Its central propositions — that building form should follow function, that ornament is waste, and that new industrial materials should determine structural and visual expression — produced the glass-and-steel office building type that defines North American central business districts and suburban office corridors to the present day.

The movement emerged from two converging developments in the late nineteenth century: advances in structural engineering and a philosophical rejection of historical eclecticism. The invention of the safety elevator, the development of fireproof steel framing, and the mass production of plate glass made tall buildings technically feasible. The first steel-framed skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, was built in 1884. Reinforced concrete, pioneered in France in the 1850s and first applied to commercial apartment construction in Paris in the early 1900s, gave architects freedom to create large, column-free interior spaces. By 1913 the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris demonstrated that concrete construction could eliminate interior obstructions entirely — no columns blocked the spectators' view of the stage.

The International Style and its commercial applications

The movement that would transform commercial construction worldwide coalesced in Europe between the wars. The Bauhaus school, founded in Germany in 1919, promoted the integration of craft and industrial production. The Deutscher Werkbund (formed 1907) had already sought to reconcile modern industrial manufacturing with good design. By the 1920s, architects including Le Corbusier in France and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany had established the formal vocabulary that would become known as the International Style: structural steel or concrete frame; continuous curtain-wall glazing independent of the structure; flat roof with no parapet ornament; open floor plan achieved by pushing load-bearing elements to the perimeter.

These principles, codified at the 1932 International Style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, spread rapidly into commercial construction after World War II. The economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s across North America and Western Europe produced an enormous volume of modernist commercial buildings: office towers, bank headquarters, corporate campuses, shopping centres, and suburban professional buildings. The structural frame allowed floors to be stacked at maximum efficiency; the curtain wall maximised natural light penetration; the open plan allowed tenants to subdivide the floor plate to their own requirements.

Secondary market commercial inventory

The suburban commercial nodes that developed around Power Centres and regional retail anchors in North American secondary markets from the 1960s through the 1980s were overwhelmingly built in the modernist mode. The combination of the flat roof, structural column grid, curtain-wall or panel façade, and surface parking lot became the standard template for professional office buildings, bank branches, medical clinics, and retail strip developments across mid-sized Canadian and American cities. Many of the three- to five-storey professional office buildings that Woodfine Professional Centre development is designed to sit adjacent to were constructed in this era.

The International Style's emphasis on structural efficiency and minimal ornament produced buildings that are straightforward to subdivide, re-tenant, and renovate. The open plan means leasable floor plates can be reconfigured without structural intervention. The flat roof accommodates mechanical equipment replacement. The glass-and-panel façade can be replaced with contemporary curtain-wall systems without touching the structural frame. These characteristics make modernist suburban office buildings durable commercial assets with low capital expenditure requirements relative to historically ornamented buildings.

The negative characteristics of mid-century modernist commercial stock in secondary markets are also well established. Surface parking lots at three stalls per 1,000 square feet of leasable area are frequently the binding constraint on density. The curtain-wall glazing of the 1960s and 1970s is often single-glazed or early double-glazed, producing high heating and cooling loads that depress net operating income for energy-sensitive tenants. Buildings taller than six storeys in suburban locations require elevator systems that consume significant floor area and capital for maintenance. The open plan, while flexible, can produce acoustically porous environments unsuited to professional service tenants requiring confidentiality.

Commercial real estate evaluation

For co-location site evaluation, the modernist commercial building stock of secondary markets provides the comparative context against which new professional centre development is evaluated. Woodfine Professional Centres are designed with the same structural frame and open floor plan discipline as the modernist tradition, but with updated storey heights (14 ft 7 in versus the typical 9 ft of 1970s suburban construction), contemporary glazing systems, and parking ratios specified to meet the demands of professional service tenants — health care, accounting, law, and municipal administration — who require efficient automobile access in secondary market locations where transit alternatives are limited.

The Woodfine building programme targets secondary markets specifically because the modernist commercial inventory in these markets is aging. Buildings constructed between 1960 and 1985 are approaching or past the 40–60 year useful life of their original mechanical systems, glazing, and roof assemblies. Owners facing capital expenditure requirements for major system replacement are selling at prices that reflect functional obsolescence rather than land value. Sites that carry legacy modernist commercial buildings are frequently available for new development at valuations that support the economics of a Woodfine Professional Centre without the heritage constraints that complicate redevelopment of earlier architectural periods.

Modern architecture is the immediate predecessor of postmodern architecture, which from the 1980s reintroduced historical ornament and rejected the plain glass box as a building type. The postmodern turn did not displace the modernist commercial building from secondary markets; rather, it produced a second wave of suburban commercial buildings with brick veneer, pitched rooflines, and applied classical ornament that now occupy the same commercial nodes. Both generations of suburban commercial building are the inventory against which new Woodfine Professional Centre development competes for tenants and investment capital.

cites: contextual-architecture, new-urbanism, vernacular-architecture