The Dissolution of Pillar in Modern Architecture.  
A proem, seven mechanisms and one epilogue.


ABSTRACT

Starting to understand architecture as a material fact, is established the importance of construction in its formal definition, and emphasizes the structure as the core system to create space and determine its image. So the architectural space is understood only from its relationship with matter and its ambivalent character: rational and phenomenological.

The application of the materials from the industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly steel, concrete and glass, led to reduced thickness of the sections in construction. On one side was optimized the mechanical strength of structural materials, and other, dismaterialized the boundaries among these rooms and they with the exterior.
The sum of both circumstances poured off the emergence of a new spatial concept whose main property was the continuity and fluidity. The heavy walls of the past are replaced by punctual supports and thin membranes that express the separation of the two systems: the supporting and the enclosure. Freedom to provide the supports and separation of walls and partitions, enhanced the opening and extension of space, clarifying the function of each system and favoring specialization.

The possibilities of involvement on the language of Modern Architecture, derived from these developments, were essentially two: the direct expression of structural order, practiced by some radical Dutch, Swiss, and Soviet constructivist. And the loss of all tectonic character, which is detected in most of the architects who led modernity, from Gropius to Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. In both alternatives, abstraction is the essential quality that seems to breathe its modern condition. In general, traditional building elements are transformed into entities without corporeity, and when they keep it, do not exhibit their nature. The walls become planes, usually white or transparent. The ceilings lose their caissoned and become surfaces again, this time horizontal. The beams are immersed in the thickness of these plates and also disappear from view setting, overall, an atectonic space. Are the supports that as a last redoubt of gravity, prevent the continuity and absolute transparency.
We suggest  a journey through some of the mechanisms used to minimize their presence.