Bauhaus Building, Dessau, Walter Gropius, 1925-6  Oh, to have been a student at the Bauhaus! Walter Gropius founded his revolutionary school of art and design in 1919: "Let us create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of the new faith." The move of the school from Weimar to Dessau in 1925 gave Gropius the opportunity to make his euphoric manifesto manifest in the form of a futuristic new building that looked like a factory, with its curtain wall of glass and steel. The whole body of teachers and students was involved in the design, construction and finishing of the workshops, lecture rooms and students and staff lodgings. A marvellous party was given at the opening and the word BAUHAUS emblazoned on the building in die neue typographie.  Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht, Gerrit Rietveld, 1924  Modernism was an adventure in self-discovery. This house was commissioned by Truus Schröder, the radical young widow of a conventional middle-class Dutch lawyer, who wanted a design to express her new-found freedom. Her architect and lover, Gerrit Rietveld, was a member of the avant garde group De Stijl. The Schröder house is an immaculate cubist construction of lines, planes and strong primary colours, rising on its urban site like a three-dimensional version of a painting by Piet Mondrian, another De Stijl member. The first time I saw the Rietveld Schröder House I keeled over and broke an ankle in excitement. It is not a sterile exercise in anti-bourgeois living but a poetic and engaging work of art.  Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Paimio, Alvar Aalto, 1929-33  A rumour has been circulating at the Guardian that I once had a sauna with Alvar Aalto. This is not precisely true. But I did meet Aalto in the 1960s when I first saw his modernist masterwork, the Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Paimio. The building was designed at a time when tuberculosis was still rife and its treatment a matter of maximum exposure to sunlight and bracing Nordic air. The sanatorium was in effect an isolation township but, as Aalto designed it, was anything but gloomy. A great white hope of a building rises high out of the pine woods, reflecting Aalto's humanistic vision that architecture itself could be restorative.  German Pavilion for the Barcelona Exhibition, Mies van der Rohe, 1928-9  Mies van der Rohe's temple of modernity was designed as a temporary exhibition building, representing Germany at Barcelona in 1929. It is my favourite of all modernist buildings, a structure of breathtaking beauty and restraint. The materials are steel, glass, marble and travertine. The pavilion lies low, seeming almost to be floating, discreetly reflected in two oblong pools. The critic Patrick Nuttgens once compared the Barcelona Pavilion to "a highly sophisticated well-groomed woman at a party". To me it is actually more of a male presence, coolly intellectual and a little bit sardonic, supreme in its confidence that less is more.  Van Nelle Tobacco Factory, near Rotterdam, Johannes A Brinkmann, Leendert Cornelius van der Vlugt and Mart Stam, 1926-30  A monument to the great age of machine worship, in which the factory became the new cathedral. Never mind that the tobacco factory's prime product appears to be at odds with another of the modernists' obsessions, the cult of healthy bodies. This is a stupendous building, glamorous and fluent, a prize example of the modernists' faith in the potential of the machine for improving human lives. Art and work come together in the precision planning of the factory and its careful human detail, extending to the sybaritic coffee room in the rotunda on the roof.  Woodland Crematorium, Stockholm, Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigrid Lewerentz, 1935-40  The modernist way with death was like no other. Asplund's Woodland Crematorium on the outer edge of Stockholm is a cubist abstract assemblage of rectangular low buildings. There is that deep green forest in the background. You walk towards the crematorium up a gentle hillside bordered by a low white wall, arriving in a great white polished marble loggia, a rectilinear building of purist dignity. The bodies slide into the cremation ovens through expressionist arches like the entrance to a cavern. A big flight of steps leads the mourners upwards to the "meditation grove" set on a grassy knoll. The spirit of the place is both primitive and rational. If I could choose the place of my departing, it would be here.  Penguin Pool, London Zoo, Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, 1934  Modernist preoccupations did not stop with humans. After designing London Zoo's Gorilla House, the Russian-born architect Berthold Lubetkin turned his attention to the Penguin Pool. This was envisaged as a fun house for the birds, a constructivist delight in reinforced concrete with ingenious interlocking ramps in the centre of the pool, encouraging the birds to form human-seeming queues. The penguins were indulged with ledges, peering holes, pillars and a diving board. The pool was colour-coded in white, blue, grey and zinging scarlet. What more could a bird want? But now the zoo, in its wisdom, has removed the penguins "for environmental reasons" and is considering bringing in the porcupines.  De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff 1935-6  Britain has few examples of top-flight modernism. The De La Warr Pavilion is definitely one, designed by the émigré German architect Erich Mendelsohn in partnership with Serge Chermayeff in the politically turbulent decade before the second world war. Their design for a public entertainment centre, a seafront pleasure palace in glass and glinting steel, ran into immediate trouble with the fascists. Who needs foreign architects to defile our English seaside? But the De La Warr Pavilion opened triumphantly in 1936, a hymn to the hedonistic strain in modernism. Beyond their rather daunting manifesto-speak, the modernists believed in having a nice time.  Lawn Road Flats, London, Wells Coates, 1934  The modernist agenda was concerned with improving living conditions over a wide spectrum, resulting in gargantuan schemes for workers' housing such as Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna. Lawn Road Flats was workers' housing as it percolated down to north-London intellectuals. Pevsner described Wells Coates' reinforced concrete block of flats as "giant's work of the 1930s". Agatha Christie, an early resident, compared it to an ocean liner. This is a building I adore not just for its architectural probity but also for its promise of new liberated living. Minimal flats were kitchenless and child-free. Meals and laundry were provided centrally. A modernist utopia, now a forgotten dream.  E-1027, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, 1926-9  This was not quite the first of the white houses set on stilts but I have always thought it the most beautiful and moving. How Eileen Gray would have hated the phrase "a woman's touch" - but there surely is a female sensibility in the wit and practicality of the planning of this building on the rocks above the Mediterranean sea. There is a quality of improvisation, a holiday spirit, in E-1027, the house built for her then lover, Jean Badovici, the Romanian architectural critic. Gray designed all the furniture and fittings, which included the now iconic Transat and Bibendum chairs. The house shows modernism at its least dogmatic, perfectly attuned to its wild, natural surroundings. Gray herself regarded it as "a living organism".
Whether you were a worker who wanted a home, a student looking for a classroom or a penguin in need of a dip, the modernists had just the place for you. Fiona MacCarthy picks 10 unmissable examples.