21. THE FIRST GENERATION IN AUSTRIA, HOLLAND, AND SCANDINAVIA…

21. THE FIRST GENERATION IN AUSTRIA, HOLLAND, AND SCANDINAVIA

THE development of modern architecture in Austria between 1900 and the Nazi conquest has many connexions with that of Germany. The Austrian Olbrich had as much as anyone to do with setting off the reaction against the Art Nouveau in Germany after 1900. From the mid twenties, Behrens was living in Austria, not in Germany. Even so, and particularly for the years before the First World War, there is a separate and purely Austrian story, more limited than the German story yet at least equally notable for highly distinguished achievement. Two Austrian architects at least, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos (1870-1933), if not Wagner’s pupil Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), were the equals of any of the leading German architects of their day, except perhaps Behrens. Wagner, already sixty in 1901, produced his finest work after that date. The Wiener Werkstätte, founded by Hoffmann in 1903, provided a centre of activity in the field of decoration comparable to what the Century Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society had offered earlier in England. Above all, Loos—in part possibly because he, of all Europeans of his generation, knew American architecture best—demonstrated, from his earliest executed work of 1898, a determination to renew the art of building that was as revolutionary as Wright’s.

Soon after 1900 Wagner threw off all Art Nouveau influence. Yet the finest element in his masterpiece, the central hall of the Postal Savings Bank in the Georg Coch Platz in Vienna of 1904-6, still retains in the curvature of its glass roof and the tapering of its metal supports something of Art Nouveau grace (Plate 154B). The exteriors of this massive edifice are lightened by the very original treatment of the geometrically organized wall-planes; the thin plaques of marble which provide the sheathing suggest volume, not mass, and the delicate relief of the few and simple projections quite avoids the ponderousness of most contemporary German work. As in so much of the best German work, however, the severity of form and even the specific character of certain ornamental features reflect in a stylized way the Grecian mode of a hundred years earlier. This is somewhat surprising in Vienna, where Romantic Classicism had been on the whole both unproductive and uncreative, but doubtless Wagner knew Schinkel’s work as well as did Behrens—certainly his lightness of hand is more comparable to Schinkel’s.

Not least interesting technically is the consistent employment of aluminium[433] in this building. The sculptured figures by Othmar Schimkowitz which crown the façade and the visible bolts that retain the granite and marble plaques are of this new metal; so also, apparently, are the structural members that support the glazed roof of the hall; at least they are completely sheathed with it. The large rear block of the bank dates from 1912, but the original vocabulary was retained by Wagner with only some slight simplification of the detailing of the plaquage.

Sankt Leopold, the cruciform church that serves as the chapel of the Steinhof Asylum on the Gallitzinberg at Penzing outside Vienna, was built by Wagner in 1904-7 at the same time as the Postal Savings Bank. This crowns his extensive hillside layout of the whole establishment, comparable in scale to the French asylums of the mid nineteenth century, but for the other buildings he was not directly responsible. Sankt Leopold is a large domed monument inviting comparison with Schinkel’s Nikolaikirche at Potsdam. However, the linear stylization of the detailing inside and out brings to mind Olbrich’s and Behrens’s buildings of its own day. There is no paraphernalia of Greek orders, yet the conceptual organization of the elements is certainly in the Romantic Classical tradition, with the four arms each quite cubic and the hemispherical dome raised on a cylindrical drum. As at Schmidt’s Neo-Gothic Fünfhaus church of the 1870s in Vienna, there are echoes of Fischer von Erlach’s Baroque Karlskirche here also, but the spirit is not at all Baroque. All the visible metalwork here, the sheathing of the dome, the statues of angels by Schimkowitz and of saints by Richard Luksch, and even the heads of the bolts that retain the marble plaques on the exterior walls, is of gilded bronze, not aluminium. This has not worn as well, for it has lost its gilt coating, peeled off many of the bolts, and streaked the walls with verdigris. Inside the church the mosaics by Rudolf Jettmar and the stained glass by Kolo Moser combine to rival the most sumptuous domestic ensembles produced by the Wiener Werkstätte, but the general effect, while light and even gay, still has a monumental dignity appropriate to a church. The walls are of plain white plaster, and narrow bands of geometrical ornament in gold and blue panel the cross vault—for, curiously enough, the central dome is not exploited internally.

Crisper in design and much simpler altogether than the Steinhof church are the blocks of low-cost flats that Wagner built in 1910-11 at 40 Neustiftsgasse and next door at 4 Döblergasse. Their walls are covered with stucco lined off to suggest plaquage, and the decoration is reduced to thin bands of dark blue tiles that merely outline the surface planes. Needless to say, these blocks have not survived as well as the expensively built bank and church. Wagner’s last works, a hospital not far from the Steinhof Asylum and his own house at 28 Hüttelbergstrasse, both in Penzing and of 1913, are typical but rather less interesting.

Hoffmann’s first architectural work of any consequence, a Convalescent Home at Purkersdorf built in 1903-4, was already simpler than Wagner’s hospital of a decade later, if considerably less architectonic in effect. The plain white stucco walls are full of ample windows almost devoid of surrounding frames and very regularly disposed; cornices and other conventional elements of detail are either omitted or reduced to an absolute minimum. The result is a structure that would still look very fresh and crisp half a century later were it not, like Wagner’s flats, in shabby physical condition.

As Hoffmann’s founding of the Wiener Werkstätte indicates, he was at heart less an architect than a decorator, like so many of the leading English and Scottish designers of this period and the immediately preceding one. The important commission to build a large and extremely luxurious mansion on the edge of Brussels in 1905, the Palais Stoclet at 373 Avenue de Tervueren, gave his decorative ambitions a free rein (Plate 154A). Yet the exterior of this has a good deal of the geometrical clarity of the Convalescent Home and rather more of Wagner’s architectonic values. The carefully ordered asymmetrical composition is dominated by the stair-tower, somewhat as the best Italian Villas of the previous century were dominated by their off-centre belvederes. The walls appear to be no more than thin skins of marble plaques, like Wagner’s, with the frequent and regularly spaced windows brought forward into the same surface plane. A decorative edging of gilded metal defines these smooth wall planes, giving the whole something of the fragile look of D’Aronco’s exhibition buildings. This is especially true of such a complex accent as the tower, with its tall stair-window.

The Stoclet house, as finished after six years in 1911, has some very fine interiors, cold and formal but sumptuously simple in their use of various marbles. The marble is quite undecorated on the delicate rectangular piers in the two-storey stair-hall; but in the dining-room it carries inlaid patterns by Gustav Klimt of almost Art Nouveau elaboration. The effect is rather curious, somewhat resembling characteristic English interiors by Voysey and his contemporaries carried out, not in stained or painted wood, but in figured and polished marbles; yet undoubtedly this is one of the most consistent and notable great houses of the twentieth century in Europe. Seeking to provide a new sort of elegance that even the best English domestic work lacked, Hoffmann achieved here an urbane distinction only approached by Gill and the Greenes at this time in America. His houses in Vienna, such as that at 5-7 Invalidenstrasse of 1911 and the suburban one at 14-16 Gloriettegasse in Hietzing, are not in a class with the Palais Stoclet but more comparable to Olbrich’s or Behrens’s houses of this period in Germany. Work of similar character and equal distinction was done by Fabiani in Vienna before he settled in Gorizia in 1920. Very Hoffmann-like indeed is his building for the publisher Artaria at 9 Kohlmarkt of 1901. His Urania in the Uraniagasse of 1910 also rivals Hoffmann’s best.

Successor to Wagner in general esteem, and himself a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Hoffman developed his personal style no further in the work he did after the First World War. At the Austrian Pavilion in the Exhibition of Decorative Arts of 1925 in Paris—an exhibition organized in part to reclaim for France the primacy in the arts and crafts of decoration that had by this time passed to Vienna, largely because of Hoffmann’s leadership—the rather Neo-Rococo stuccoed block that he provided was much less advanced in character than the greenhouse-like portion designed by Behrens. However, his low-cost flats in the Felix-Mottlstrasse in Vienna, built like those of Behrens in the mid twenties, retain a good deal of the quality of his early sanatorium at Purkersdorf. Crisp and clean, they are distinctly less blank and ponderous than Behrens’s, if also less advanced in design that those by Josef Frank (b. 1885). Frank, a somewhat younger Viennese architect of considerable ability but lesser reputation than Hoffmann, left Vienna to settle in Sweden when the Nazis took over Austria.

The international acclaim that Viennese low-cost housing of this period received when new seems rather exaggerated now. From the first its significance was more political and sociological than architectural. It happened to be built, moreover, mostly by men not of the newest generation of architects at just the time when an architectural revolution was taking place in France and Holland and Germany (see Chapters 22 and 23). Henceforth that revolution, brilliantly illustrated as regards low-cost housing in the German Werkbund’s international exhibition of 1927 at Stuttgart, would affect most notably the design of such projects throughout the western world. The Viennese housing exhibition of 1930, a modest counterpart to that in Stuttgart, came too late to reform the local tradition, which largely survived even after the Second World War.

The work of Hoffmann’s exact contemporary Loos dates less than his and was of the greatest importance in providing inspiration to the modern architects of the second generation who brought about the revolution of the twenties. This inspiration from Loos is comparable in significance to that which the younger architects found in the work of Wright and of Perret. Loos, unlike other Austrians of his period, was primarily interested in architecture, not in decoration—indeed, he wrote in 1908 an article[434] claiming that ‘ornament is crime’, an attitude shared by no other architect of his generation, and least of all by his fellow Viennese. It was Loos’s tragedy that a very large part of his employment before the First World War was in remodelling and redecorating flats; this constrained him so little, however, that many of these may easily be taken in photographs for completely original house interiors (Plate 155B).

Although Loos began his career in the late nineties when the Art Nouveau tide ran highest, he was never at all affected by it, in part doubtless because he had spent the years 1893-6 in America beyond the range of Art Nouveau influence. The interior of the Goldman haberdashery shop in Vienna, which he designed in 1898, was entirely straight-lined and quite without any ornament; in the Café Museum of the next year the segmental ceiling and the bentwood chairs were curved, but only for structural reasons. Both are now gone, although the extant Knizé men’s shop in the Graben in Vienna of 1913 gives some idea of what the former was like.

It is Loos’s houses around Vienna, in Plzen, in Brno, in Montreux, and in Paris that place him as one of the four or five most important architects of his generation. His finest single extant work, however, is a small bar in Vienna. From the first he designed from the inside out, reducing his exteriors to square stucco boxes cut by many windows of different sizes and shapes. The results are very like Gill’s houses in California, as has been noted already, but with no such traditional elements as Gill’s arched porches. This is especially true of the Gustav Scheu house in the Larochegasse in the Vienna suburb of Hietzing, almost the only one left in Austria in something closely approaching its original condition (Plate 155A; Figure 43). Loos was an enthusiastic admirer of English domestic architecture; this bent of his taste is curiously illustrated by his liking for English eighteenth-century furniture of the Queen Anne and Chippendale periods, which looks today so out of place in his severely rectangular rooms. But the architectural character of his interiors is never influenced by eighteenth-century modes, but only by the most advanced English work of the opening of the century which he knew well through the Studio. Articulated by plain wooden structural members like Voysey’s interiors or, on occasion, by similar piers clad with marble like Hoffmann’s in the Stoclet house, Loos’s suites of living areas are as flowing as Wright’s[435] but he never provided as much interconnexion between indoors and out.

Of a succession of houses built before the First World War the much mishandled Steiner house of 1910 and the above-mentioned Scheu house of 1912, both in suburbs of Vienna, are perhaps the finest. The Villa Karma, built much earlier at Montreux in Switzerland in 1904-6, had an almost Hoffmann-like sumptuousness of materials and finish within; but in the main Loos kept, like Voysey and Wright, to plainer effects and simple dark wooden trim.

At first his houses looked, externally, rather like quite conventional ones from which all elements of traditional detail had been scraped, as do many of the contemporary projects included in Garnier’s ‘Cité Industrielle’. Gradually, however, Loos came to handle his simple elements of external design with more of that assurance which his domestic interiors had displayed from as early as the flat in Vienna remodelled for Leopold Langer in 1901 (Plate 155B). Both the placing and the sashing of his windows were more carefully studied; and the proportions and the juxtapositions of his rather boxy masses were abstractly ordered well before a Neoplasticist like Georges Vantongerloo in Holland arrived at somewhat similar effects in sculpture (see Chapter 22). Compared to Wright’s more complex and articulated experimentation with abstract composition in the house of 1909 for Mrs Thomas Gale or the Coonley Playhouse of 1912, there remains, nevertheless, a distinctly negative quality about all Loos’s work. He seems to have been principally concerned to clear away inherited tradition in order to lay the foundations of an immanent new architecture. That new architecture, however, he himself was never able to bring fully into being, although others did so under his influence by the time he was in his early fifties (see Chapter 22).

In Loos’s larger urban work, such as the prominent Goldman & Salatsch Building of 1910 in the Michaelerplatz in Vienna, he was ready to use marble externally and even to include classically detailed columns. But in the ground storey of this store he increased the articulated space effects characteristic of the interiors of his flats and houses to almost monumental scale. Here, in the small Kärntner Bar of 1907, and in the Café Capua of 1913, both also in Vienna, his use of fine materials with their polished surfaces uninterrupted by mouldings would eventually prove as potent an inspiration to architects of the next generation as did his more ascetic written doctrine.

The Café Capua is gone; the Goldman & Salatsch interior drastically remodelled; but the Kärntner Bar, in the Kärntner Durchgang behind 10 Kärntnerstrasse, remains a small masterpiece of modern design. During the Nazi occupation the façade lost the American flag in stained glass which ran across the top, but the exterior was never of much interest in any case. The interior is fortunately completely intact (Plate 151). Skilful use of mirrors quite disguises its very small dimensions. Above smooth dark mahogany walls, set like screens between plain green marble piers, unframed panels of mirror that reach to the ceiling allow one to see the strong reticulated pattern of the yellow marble ceiling extending left and right and to the rear just as if the actual area of the bar were merely an enclave in a much larger space. Because of the particular height of the mahogany wainscoting this illusion is quite perfect, for one sees only about as great a space reflected on either side as that one is actually in; if the mirrors came lower, a greater extension on either side and at the rear would be suggested than could possibly be plausible as a reflection. A continuous grille of square panels filled with translucent yellow onyx takes the place of the mirror panel across the top of the front wall. Not until Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 was marble used again by a modern architect with such assurance (Plate 165A).

It was not these urban commissions, however, but Loos’s free-standing houses that the next generation of architects studied most closely. For example, Loos’s sort of domestic open planning, not Wright’s, was probably the major influence on the Continent after the First World War. Moreover, the neutrality, not to say the negativity, of the exteriors of his houses provided better even than Garnier’s projects the raw material with which a positive sort of architectural design could be created by younger men in the early twenties. Loos’s achievement before the First World War was largely in the domestic field; after the war most of his executed work still consisted of houses and shop interiors, although he made several extremely interesting projects for larger edifices and erected a large sugar refinery for the Rohrbacher Company in Czechoslovakia in 1919.

The Rufer house in Vienna of 1922 is a narrow three-storey block rather similar to Voysey’s Forster house of 1891 at Bedford Park. This has a most interesting sort of open plan, with the dining-room on a higher level than the living room. Loos was also working in other countries now; for his reputation, though limited to the most advanced circles, was increasingly international. His most considerable production of this decade was the house he built in 1926 for the writer Tristan Tzara at 14 Avenue Junod in Paris, where Loos had settled four years earlier. In the Tzara house the interior is arranged somewhat like that of the Rufer house: the dining room opens into the living room but on a higher level. The tall, rather blank front, slightly concave in plan, has a more positive character than those of most of his houses, because the two-storey void sunk into its centre provides a dominating plastic feature above the solid rubble of the ground storey.

Of still later work the Kuhner house of 1930 at Payerbach in the wooded hills near Vienna is the most original example. A two-storey hall, opening towards the view through a window-wall, occupies most of the interior, with the various other living spaces opening into it on the main floor and the bedrooms reached from a gallery above. Above the masonry base the house is externally of log-construction, chalet-like, with Tyrolean roofs of low pitch and wide-spreading eaves. This reversion to peasant materials, and even to peasant forms, was curiously premonitory of a direction modern architecture took in several countries in the thirties (see Chapter 23). Had Loos lived longer he might, like Wright in that decade, have returned to the centre of the stage. As it was, his major contribution antedated the First World War.

Perret, Wright, Behrens, and Loos: on the whole these are the four most important architects of the first modern generation, important both for their personal contribution and also for their decisive influence on later architecture. Outside the countries in which these men worked, notably in Holland and in Scandinavia, there were also architects of distinction belonging to this generation but their achievement was more limited and their influence more local, at least before the First World War. Yet Holland, between 1910 and 1925, came closer than any other country to creating a modern style, or phase of style, that was universally accepted at home; the origins, moreover, go back to the nineties. There was, properly speaking, no prefatory Art Nouveau episode in Holland of any consequence in spite of a considerable activity in the decorative arts inspired, in part at least, by serious study of the crafts of Indonesia.

Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934), the leader of the national school, was considerably older than Perret, Wright, Behrens, or Loos, although much younger than Wagner. As in Wagner’s case, his earliest work, dating from the eighties, is of a generically Renaissance character, though much less suave and academic. The influence of Cuijpers soon led him towards a medieval mode—not Gothic, however, but round-arched. Compared to Rundbogenstil work of the best period fifty years earlier, his round-arched buildings of the nineties are rather gawky, but not without originality in their ornamentation; above all, they are vigorously structural in their expression in a ‘realistic’ and, indeed, almost High Victorian way. However, the insurance company buildings in Amsterdam and The Hague that best illustrate this phase were later enlarged by him in a chaster mode, thereby losing much of their anachronistic flavour.

Berlage’s major opportunity came with the competition for the design of the Amsterdam Exchange held in 1897. This competition he won with a project which seems rather Richardsonian[436] to American eyes, though he did not—apparently—know much about American work at that time. For this very extensive public edifice, built over the years 1898-1903, he used, not the stone of his insurance office across the Damrak of 1893, but the red brick of his Hague insurance office, also of 1893, varied with a modicum of stone trim still quite crudely notched and chamfered. Inside, the principal interior has exposed metal principals above galleried walls of brick and stone. In Berlage’s masculine vigour and defiant gracelessness of detailing one could hardly have a greater contrast to such another major public building, designed and built at almost precisely the same time, as Horta’s Maison du Peuple in Brussels. But Horta’s masterpiece climaxed rather than opened his career as an architect of international importance; certainly it did not lead to the development of a national modern school in Belgium. At least for Holland, the Exchange was more seminal, even if it lacked the revolutionary character of Wright’s houses of these years or Perret’s block of flats in the Rue Franklin in Paris. A fairer comparison would be with Voysey’s contemporary houses, the work of an architect who was by intention rather a ‘reformer’ than a drastic innovator, or with Martin Nyrop’s Town Hall in Copenhagen begun five years earlier.

Berlage’s near-Richardsonian mode of this period is still better illustrated in a smaller structure, that built for the Diamond Workers’ Trade Union in the Henri Polak Laan in Amsterdam in 1899-1900 (Plate 150). In this, the organization of the windows into a sort of brick-mullioned screen and the less aggressive handling of the carved stone detail produces a façade not unworthy of comparison with Richardson’s Sever Hall or Gaudí’s Casa Güell (Plate 96B). It is notable, however, that it is work of the seventies and eighties in America and in Spain that comes to mind, not work of this date.

The Hotel American of 1898-1900 in the Leidse Plein in Amsterdam by Willem Kromhout (1864-1940) illustrates how boldly Berlage’s line was taken by other local architects, and his relative originality even outrivalled. But the lead came in Kromhout’s case not from Berlage, but from Cuijpers’s nephew Eduard (1859-1927), a transitional figure whose work deserves more attention outside Holland than it has generally received. Kromhout’s touch is lighter than Berlage’s, as is also, to make a poor pun, the colour of his pale buff bricks, but his expression of structure is less ‘real’ and more frankly fantastic. In the detail of the exterior, and even more in the interiors, he was undoubtedly seeking to create a sort of Dutch alternative to the Art Nouveau, not curvilinear or naturalistically ‘organic’ but richly decorative in a semi-abstract way. The intention was worthy; the result, alas, is rather tawdry.

It was not in the design of sumptuous individual buildings but in low-cost housing and in city-planning that Berlage himself was most active in the next fifteen years. In 1908, for example, he prepared a plan for the extension of The Hague, and in 1915 a more ambitious one for Amsterdam. He had built his first blocks of flats in the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam in 1905. These are much less Romanesquoid than his earlier work but they are equally brusque as to the detailing. However, his architecture shortly grew much suaver. Berlage’s finest work of any period, perhaps, is not in Holland but in the City of London, Holland House of 1914 at 1-4 Bury Street, E.C. This has a reticulated façade of moulded terracotta members more Sullivanian than Richardsonian in its verticality (Plate 138B)—and by this time he certainly knew Sullivan’s work.

The influence of Berlage in Holland was by this time very great and the esteem in which he was held—at least as much for his doctrine of direct structural expression as for his executed work—by no means restricted to his own country, since his writings were published in Germany as well as in Holland.[437] Yet, to foreign eyes, the achievement of the new school that grew up partly under his inspiration in Amsterdam is greater than his own. The work of this ‘Amsterdam School’—for it was soon so called—which flourished particularly in the decade 1912-22 is at times very close to that of the German architects influenced by Expressionism in the early twenties; but it began much earlier and has a strongly autochthonous flavour.[438] German Expressionism never inspired a building more stridently angular than the Scheepvaarthuis that J. M. van der Meij (b. 1868), a pupil of Eduard Cuijpers, built to house dock offices on the Prins Hendrik Kade in Amsterdam in 1912-13. The most extreme example of the abandon with which twentieth-century Dutch architects set out on new paths, this opened the way for the housing work of van der Meij’s assistants Michael de Klerk (1884-1923) and P. L. Kramer (1881-1961), both also pupils of Eduard Cuijpers, which represents internationally the greatest Dutch contribution to modern architecture. As the master of these three, Eduard Cuijpers, despite his own historicism, has perhaps as much right as Berlage to be considered a father of the Amsterdam School. Their work, moreover, has some analogies not only with German Expressionism but also with Wright’s contemporary Baroque phase of 1914-24. However, the crystallization of de Klerk’s personal style preceded the beginning of Wright’s influence in Holland and, when that influence began during the years of the First World War, it operated in fact to counter the extravagances of the Amsterdam School.

Early buildings by de Klerk, such as the first Eigen Haard Estate housing blocks that were designed in 1913 and erected round the Spaandammerplantsoen on the west side of Amsterdam, have a quaintness that recalls English or American work of a generation earlier rather than van der Meij’s aggressive angularity. They look almost as if they were especially fanciful projects of the Shingle Style that happened to be executed in brick instead of wood. But the elegant underscaled local brick is handled with extraordinary virtuosity, and the façades achieve a stage-set-like unreality in sharpest contrast to the often dreary matter-of-factness of low-cost housing produced in other countries in these same years. Although the first Eigen Haard blocks were, in planning and general organization, as straightforward as Berlage’s, they have a warmer human touch such as architects elsewhere—Behrens, for example, or the Scandinavians—either missed entirely or attempted to attain by a parsimonious use of more or less ‘traditional’ detailing.

The extension of the Eigen Haard Estate along the Zaanstraat, begun in 1917, represents perhaps the peak of de Klerk’s achievement (Plate 156B). Here the many curved wall elements bring out the special qualities of Dutch brickwork; and the rather heavy wooden window-frames, brought forward as in Hoffmann’s Stoclet house to the wall-plane, give continuity to the plastic modelling of the façades. Highly imaginative, even whimsical, features of detail, such as the barrel-like corner oriel, give an air of good humour, and even of the outright humorous, that is rare in any other architecture, ancient or modern; but these features are for the most part truly architectonic, not merely decorative. De Klerk’s whimsy is never nightmarish, in the way Gaudí’s can be, nor loud and aggressive like van der Meij’s. His highly personal style can be considered a sort of barocchino of the early twentieth century.

The extreme point of de Klerk’s invention is seen in the post office that occupies the apex of the later portion of the Eigen Haard Estate. This is like nothing so much as a child’s toy enlarged to architectural scale in some contemporary setting for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe.[439] After this his work grew somewhat simpler and more orderly. Already the blocks he designed in 1920 for an area round the Henriette Ronnerplein in the De Dageraad Estate on the south-east side of Amsterdam are more regular and restrained; the plainest of all is the very long continuous range near by in the Amstellaan built in 1921-2.

Also in the De Dageraad Estate, in the portion that runs down both sides of the P. L. Takstraat, along the Burgemeester Tellegenstraat and into the Talmastraat, Kramer showed himself even more of a virtuoso in the handling of curved wall elements of brick—here brown and buff—than de Klerk (Plate 156A). Projected in 1918 and built in 1921-3, Kramer’s scheme combined tall and very plastic features at the street intersections with notably straightforward three-storey ranges in between. Thus he produced an extensive urbanistic ensemble of great homogeneity of character, yet very considerable variety of visual interest, and with a quality of craftsmanship perhaps superior to de Klerk’s. But by the time this was completed Kramer had become even more chastened than de Klerk in his last work in the Amstellaan. In Kramer’s Amsterdam West housing, begun in 1923, the façades are plain and flat with continuous bands of white-sashed windows. Thus these blocks are definitely related to the direction that modern architecture was taking in Holland as in France and Germany in these years at the hands of men of Kramer’s own generation (see Chapter 22).

Kramer’s De Bijenkorf department store of 1924-6 in the Grotemarktstraat in The Hague, however, still retains much of the plastic exuberance of his earlier housing blocks and is executed with a sumptuous range of fine materials. Kramer here employed at large scale the curved surfaces of brickwork characteristic of De Dageraad, with notable success. Many Amsterdam canal bridges of these years illustrate also his virtuosity at elaborate semi-abstract detail carried out with excellent craftsmanship in wrought iron and carved or artificial stone. Moreover, in the mid twenties the Amsterdam City Architect’s office exploited with real success in various school and police buildings a manner closely approaching that of de Klerk and Kramer.

Unfashionable even in Holland for a quarter of a century, the work of the Amsterdam School merits that more sympathetic examination which the Art Nouveau has now for some years received. At its best the work of de Klerk and Kramer from the mid teens to the mid twenties has survived better than all but the finest contemporary achievements of Wright and Perret, partly because it was so well built in the first place and has been so well maintained ever since. Without being, in the proper sense of the word, Expressionist, it yet has close analogies with the Expressionist approach. It may be considered to stand in a relationship to the work of Höger and Poelzig in Germany somewhat comparable to that of Gaudí to the Art Nouveau of Brussels and Paris; for it is at once independent of outside influence and superior to the foreign work that it most closely parallels. But the Amsterdam School did not occupy the entire Dutch scene even in these, its best, years.

In no European country was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright studied earlier and with more enthusiasm than in Holland; Berlage was one of Wright’s greatest admirers after his visit to America in 1911. The influence of Wright’s work up to 1910, known through the Wasmuth publications, began to be evident in the later years of the First World War. Dirk Roosenburg (1887-1962), Jan Wils (b. 1891), J. J. Van Loghem (1882-1940), and several others were notably Wrightian in the early twenties; and the magazine Wendingen, edited by H. T. Wijdeveld (b. 1885), continued through the mid twenties to bring Wright’s later buildings and his projects of those years to European attention, notably devoting to him a magnificent series of special issues in 1925 which constitutes a document of signal importance for the study of his work of this period. The first German book on Wright after the Wasmuth publications did not appear until the next year, and the first in French only in 1928.

Wrightian ideas were readily accepted by many Dutch architects previously inspired chiefly by Berlage, not to speak of their influence on Berlage himself. Admiration for Wright’s work undoubtedly played a real part in the rapid modulation of Dutch architecture towards greater severity and a more geometrical discipline in the twenties. But the major significance of the lively Dutch interest in the American lies in its effect on the development of a few younger men in these years. To the Amsterdam School there had arisen a strong opposition led by architects belonging to the De Stijl group of artists who were active in Rotterdam and Utrecht. Yet the Amsterdam School architects continued for some time to be highly productive, and the work of several prominent men, notably J. F. Staal (1879-1940) and W. M. Dudok (b. 1884), was related to both camps. But by the time Berlage was engaged on the big concrete-framed Netherlands Insurance Company Building in The Hague in 1925-6 its very Wrightian character had just been superseded in the projects and the production of Rietveld and Oud by a more ascetic mode parallel to that adumbrated by the new architects of France and Germany in the early twenties (see Chapter 22).

In the new building of the Scandinavian countries before and after the First World War admirers in other countries thought to recognize an originality and vitality comparable to that of contemporary Dutch work. As has already been remarked, it has since become evident that most of what was produced in these decades in Denmark and Sweden did not really differ very much from the work of ‘traditionalists’ elsewhere. Despite extremely elegant and often piquant stylization, comparable but superior to that of most German work in this period, continued maintenance of inherited principles of design and the general use of reminiscent detail sharply differentiated the characteristic production of the Scandinavians from that of the Dutch, and of course far more from that of Wright or Loos. What such men as Ragnar Östberg (1866-1945), and E. G. Asplund (1885-1940) down to his sharp change of style in the late twenties, designed and built in Sweden or P. V. Jensen Klint (1853-1930) and Kay Fisker (b. 1893)—down to his parallel change of style—in Denmark was generally still rated ‘modern’ a generation ago; almost all of it may now be more properly classed with ‘traditional’ work in other countries. In quality, however, it often more than rivals all but the finest modern German, Austrian, and Dutch work of its day (see Chapter 24).

An exception to this statement as regards Sweden is the remarkable Engelbrekt Church of 1904-14 in Stockholm by L. I. Wahlman (b. 1870), with its great parabolic arches and its vertically massed exterior dominated by a very tall and svelte tower; there much of the experimentalism of the nineties lived on. For its influence, this is possibly a more important twentieth-century church than Perret’s at Le Raincy. An even more considerable exception is a large part of the prolific production of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950) both in the Old World and in the New. Saarinen was the leading architect of Finland down to the twenties; after his removal to the United States he was Wright’s only rival of his own generation on the American scene, the careers of the early modern architects of the West Coast being by then in decline (see Chapter 19).

Saarinen’s earliest work in partnership with Herman Gesellius (1874-1916) and A. E. Lindgren (1874-1929) dates from the nineties. In 1900 he designed the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition; this offered a powerful, though rather cranky, statement of Nordic originality quite opposed to the Latin elegance of the contemporary Art Nouveau and not without kinship to Berlage’s Amsterdam Exchange. At home important public commissions followed rapidly: the National Museum in Helsinki in 1902 and the Helsinki railway station, for which he won the competition in 1904. This large and complex structure, built over the years 1910-14, is Saarinen’s principal early work. In size and in monumentality it rivals Bonatz’s Stuttgart station and also the vast stations that ‘traditional’ architects in America were building at much the same time (see Chapter 24). But there is much less of ‘tradition’ here than at the Stuttgart or, a fortiori, in the American stations. The heaviness and the grandeur are more than a little Germanic so that the fairest comparison is with Stürzenacker’s Karlsruhe station, on the whole more straightforward in design and certainly much more delicately detailed.

Saarinen’s achievement in his homeland made him well known throughout Europe; as early as 1905 one of his principal works had been a country house, Molchow, in Brandenburg in Germany. The project that he entered in the Chicago Tribune Tower competition in 1922 brought him suddenly to American attention. Although a Gothic design by John Mead Howells (b. 1868) and Raymond Hood (1881-1934) won this competition and was executed[440] on Michigan Avenue, in 1923-5, Saarinen’s project (which in any case received a financially generous second premium) had a tremendous succès d’estime, including the accolade of Sullivan himself. In retrospect the design appears almost as medievalizing as Howells & Hood’s; but the elegance of the silhouette and the consistency of the detailing, stylized nearly to the point of absolute originality, had an enormous contemporary appeal.

By this time Americans were beginning to grow bored with the increasingly forced adaptation of familiar styles of the past to skyscraper design. Yet in 1922 they were hardly ready to recognize the positive qualities of the very plain reticulated tower, elaborated with certain minor Constructivist touches, that was proposed by Walter Gropius (b. 1883) and Adolf Meyer (d. 1925) (Plate 158A). Today it is easy to see how close this came to reviving the Chicago tradition of the early skyscrapers, a tradition almost forgotten since the First World War, as also its great importance in the crystallization of a new architecture in the early twenties (see Chapter 22).

Saarinen, after settling in the United States in 1922, designed various other skyscrapers along the lines of his Chicago project, none of them built. However, other architects at once picked up his relatively novel ideas; and undoubtedly his ideas played an important part in turning American skyscraper architects away from their long-continued dependence on the styles of the past. Hood himself was not least affected, as his black and gold American Radiator Building[441] on West 40th Street in New York, completed in 1924 even before the Chicago Tribune Tower, soon made evident. In Detroit, near which city Saarinen settled, Albert Kahn’s Fisher Building is even more Saarinenesque and quite unrelated to his contemporary factories.

Called to Bloomfield Hills, Mich., by the Booth publishing family, Saarinen’s first work in America was the Cranbrook School for Boys, a very extensive group of buildings begun in 1925. Here an almost Swedish elegance of craftsmanship and a profusion of semi-traditional detail were combined in a somewhat whimsical manner rather recalling English work of forty or fifty years earlier. The girls’ school near by, however, Kingswood, begun in 1929, is much simpler, with an almost Wrightian horizontality and crispness of expression.

When American building activity revived in the late thirties Saarinen continued to develop. From 1937 on his American-trained son Eero (1911-61), destined later to be one of the leaders of post-war architecture in the United States, doubtless played some part in encouraging that bolder structural expression and increasing sparseness of ornamentation that characterizes his finest late works. These qualities are already very evident in the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, N.Y., of 1938; while the contrast between the straightforwardness of the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Ill., of 1939, on which the Chicago firm of Perkins, Wheeler & Will collaborated, and the quaintness and fussiness of the Cranbrook School is quite startling.

Most distinguished of all the late Saarinen works are his Tabernacle Church at Columbus, Ind., designed in 1940 and built in 1941-2, and the similar but smaller Christ Lutheran Church in Minneapolis that was built in 1949 just before his death (Plate 157B). Cool, clear, and rational, the distinguished handling of brickwork in these churches, the knowing control of light, and the careful ordering of space in the interiors remain exemplary. Their towers are more refined versions of Moser’s on Sankt Antonius in Basel; yet the massing of their blocky external elements almost seems to belong to an earlier tradition, that of the English Victorian Gothic churches of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, whose reminiscent forms they wholly abjure, and with which neither of the Saarinens was probably familiar.

Of the first generation of modern architects not even Wright still survives. As long as he continued in active production the story that the last four chapters have tried to tell could not be completed but in 1959, with his death, an architectural epoch came finally to an end. It was a rich epoch and a complex one because the men of that generation were all great individualists and proud of it. In most countries they had to fight a vigorous battle for the right to personal expression, a battle that they carried through to recognition against entrenched inertia, both professional and lay. Yet in general, the links of this generation with the later nineteenth century remained close, both in their dependence on handicraft and in their frequent tendency—least evident with Wright and Loos—to accept (up to a point) personal stylization of earlier architectural forms[442] as a substitute for that basic originality of which all were at their best truly capable.

Not since the late eighteenth century had there been any such wide international renewal of architectural aspiration. Just as then, a new generation would profit from the experiments of their elders, taking much from each, but rejecting much as well, in order to create a style—or at least a discipline—aiming at universality. By its essential principles, this discipline could not have the variety and the intensity of personal expression which gives such colour and life to the work of the older men. Just as in the early nineteenth century, however, the architects who succeeded the great originals were far more able than they to work together. By joining their individual efforts the men of the next generation changed the character of almost all architectural production in a way that their elders were quite unable to do. Thus there came into being an architecture more completely of its own century than any style-phase of the previous hundred years—up to the Art Nouveau at least—had ever been wholly of the nineteenth century.

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CHAPTER 22 THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH

THE project that Gropius and Meyer offered in the competition of 1922 for the Chicago Tribune Tower, unlike Saarinen’s, attracted very little contemporary attention in America (Plate 158A). Such a stripped expression of skeleton construction had, up to that time in America, been seen only in factories and warehouses. Even in Chicago, moreover, the New York ideal of the shaped tower had quite replaced the Sullivanian slab as the favourite form for pretentious skyscrapers. Ten years later, however, when the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture was held at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York it was evident that the kind of architecture represented by Gropius’s project had become widely accepted in several European countries. By that date it was even possible to deduce from the executed work of Gropius and his chief European contemporaries, most of which was shown in the exhibition, the existence of a new style christened ‘international’[443] by Alfred Barr, the Museum’s director. Whether the new architecture that came into being in the twenties in Europe and has since spread throughout the western world should in fact be considered a style, or even a style-phase, remains a matter of controversy; but for forty years now it has been readily distinguishable from what the older generation of modern architects produced.

In 1922 this new architecture hardly existed except in the form of projects. Some of the most strikingly novel buildings built in the early twenties were by Willem Marinus Dudok (b. 1884) in Holland and by Erich Mendelsohn[444] (1887-1953) in Germany. These no longer belonged to the realm of the earlier, pre-war modern architecture. Yet the work of neither was as indicative of the direction the newer architecture was taking in these formative years as is the Gropius Chicago Tribune project. Very shortly, however, both Dudok and Mendelsohn drew closer to the main current of development of this decade, although they continued to be, in varying degree, individualists rather than whole-hearted converts to the dominant architectural mode of their generation.

Dudok’s work as City Architect of Hilversum, beginning with the Public Baths and the Dr H. Bavinck School in 1921, is remarkably simple and direct (Plate 157A). The abstract crispness and clarity of his compositions are very different from the whimsically curved surfaces of de Klerk’s and Kramer’s housing blocks (Plate 156A and B). This rigidly geometrical organization of the forms reflects his earlier contact with the group of Dutch abstract artists known as De Stijl,[445] notably the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg and the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo. But Dudok’s continued emphasis on the fine quality of his brickwork, the massiveness of his characteristically interlocking blocks, and a certain basically decorative intention still link his buildings of the twenties at Hilversum with the ideals of the older generation. Dudok’s work of this period was certainly novel—and even modern in a very advanced way for the date—but it remained quite Dutch in its idiosyncrasies, not ‘international’.

The plasticity of Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, designed in 1919 and completed in 1921, at Neubabelsberg near Berlin (Plate 153B) seems at first sight not unrelated to that of Gaudí’s hewn-stone Casa Milá in Barcelona of 1905-10 (Plate 137A). But it was originally intended to be executed in poured concrete—for technical reasons it is in fact mostly of brick rendered with cement—and what one might call the ‘overtones’ of the forms are more mechanistic than organic. Like Dudok, Mendelsohn had been influenced by a local school of painting. But the images he distorted according to the tenets of Expressionism came from the world of machines not, like Gaudí’s, from the world of plants and animals. Mendelsohn’s earlier war-time sketches[446] make this origin even more evident. The extreme point of this sort of abstract sculptural Expressionism[447] in the twenties is found in the work of no architect but in the mountainous cult edifice called the Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland, designed by the creator of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner[448] and begun in 1923.

Mendelsohn himself rejected this excessively plastic approach to architecture—an approach to which a reversion can be noted on the part of Le Corbusier in the last decade, incidentally (Plate 167)—even before the Einstein Tower was completed. The hat factory that he built at Luckenwalde in 1920-3 was in the direct line of descent from the industrial work Behrens and Poelzig had done before the First World War. This was rightly recognized as one of the signal productions of those crucial years of the early twenties when the concepts of the new architecture were first being tentatively realized in France and in Holland, and very shortly, of course in Germany. Dudok’s buildings at Hilversum of the early twenties had a very considerable international influence;[449] Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower did not, at least not on architecture.[450] However, other work of his done in the next few years was much admired and also widely emulated, both in Germany and abroad, by the younger architects.

In spite of the importance in these years of the executed work of Dudok and of Mendelsohn, several other architects certainly had far more to do with determining the direction that architecture took from 1922 on. One was a Swiss then working in Paris, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier. At this time more painter than architect, Le Corbusier had earlier been an assistant of Perret’s and had also worked briefly for Behrens and even for Josef Hoffmann. Two others were Dutchmen. J.J.P. Oud had practised in association with Dudok at Leiden in 1912-13, and from 1917 and 1918 he and G.T. Rietveld were in much closer contact with the artists of De Stijl than Dudok ever was, being actual members of that small cohesive group. Two more were Germans, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both of whom had been Behrens’s assistants, respectively for two and for three years.

Gropius, born in 1883, is the eldest of the five and older than Mendelsohn also; Le Corbusier, Rietveld, and Mies were born in 1888; Oud in 1890. Gropius’s career began as early as 1906, when he erected some plain brick workmen’s houses in Pomerania even before he had finished his professional training at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. A leading professor in this school was Theodor Fischer, Bonatz’s master, in whose office Oud later spent a few months in 1911. After a year of travel in Spain, Italy, and Holland Gropius entered Behrens’s office in 1908, remaining there till 1910. On leaving Behrens he designed in 1911, with Adolf Meyer, the Fagus Factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine. He worked again in partnership with Meyer from after the First World War until the latter’s death in 1925.

Directly as this Alfeld factory—it made shoe-lasts—follows from Behrens’s work for the A.E.G., notably the front of the Turbine Factory of 1909, its architectural expression is much more advanced (Plate 158B). There the great window remained, for all its size, but a window; here, in the main three-storey block, the slightly projecting metal chassis rise unbroken over very wide areas bounded by narrow brick piers, and the storey levels are barely indicated by solid panels identical in treatment with the glazed sash above and below them. This arrangement of transparent and opaque elements identically handled may almost—but not quite—be considered to constitute a ‘curtain-wall’.[451] The omission of piers at the corners, a structural novelty here, enormously enhances the effect of transparent volume as opposed to that of solid mass. In the organization of the various industrial elements of the complete plant that are associated with the glazed block there is neither symmetry, such as Behrens was only beginning to relinquish, nor yet asymmetry of the more casual and picturesque sort; instead a modular regularity controls the whole composition. This factory has long been recognized historically as one of the most important[452] buildings of the twentieth century.

Gropius’s next building, the Hall of Machinery at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1914 in Cologne, was in some ways less advanced. The main façades of this were quite symmetrical; and in the articulation of the brick piers of the ground storey, in the heavily framed central entrance and, above all, in the projecting slab roofs of the raised corners there appears to have been some direct influence from the work of Wright, notably from his hotel of 1909 in Mason City, Iowa. (This was published in the Wasmuth book of 1910, where Gropius would almost certainly have seen it.) The glazed front of the principal storey, however, and especially the rounded glass stair-towers at the ends were not at all Wrightian; they carried still further the expression of architecture as transparent volume already evident in the Fagus Factory and approached very closely indeed the mature curtain-wall concept, although at a modest scale.

Mies remained with Behrens a year longer than Gropius, after having spent three earlier years with Bruno Paul[453] (1874-1954), a more conservative architect whose best work was done as a furniture designer. His independent career began in a much less spectacular fashion than that of Gropius. The Perls house of 1911 at Zehlendorf outside Berlin was as formally symmetrical as Behrens’s houses at Hagen of 1908-9 and rather more Schinkelesque. The Urbig house of 1914 at Neubabelsberg was very correctly late-eighteenth-century in its detailing. His most important work of these years, however, was the project for the H. E. L. J. Kröller house in The Hague of 1912, intended to contain the large and famous Kröller-Müller Collection of modern paintings now at Otterlo. Of this a full-scale wood and canvas model was erected on the actual site, but it was never built. The formal though asymmetrical organization of the severe horizontal blocks, the incorporation of voids in the composition by means of loggias and pilastrades, and the cold austerity of the refined detailing of the masonry all approach very closely such things by Schinkel as the Zivilcasino at Potsdam and Schloss Glienecke, even if the characteristic belvedere tower of the latter is significantly omitted. In many ways this project was as premonitory of later modern architecture as the Fagus Factory, although the latter, as an executed building, has properly received much more notice.[454] Both Gropius and Mies were involved in the First World War from 1914 to 1918, so that the next stage in their careers opened only in 1919.

Le Corbusier, Oud, and Rietveld were neutral nationals, but their production of these early years, although less interrupted by the war, is mostly not of much intrinsic interest. After two years with Perret in Paris Le Corbusier had spent six months in Behrens’s office in 1910.[455] His first house,[456] built for his parents at La Chaux de Fond in Switzerland in 1913, is more closely related to Behrens’s early houses in its plain white stucco walls and fairly restricted fenestration than it is to the work of Perret or to Behrens’s A.E.G. factories of 1909-11. The plan is the most interesting feature: this provides a central living area out of which other more specialized rooms open to left and right through wide glazed doors, a scheme that seems to derive from Perret’s planning, or perhaps that of Loos,[457] rather than from Wright’s.

Le Corbusier’s next significant work was a war-time project of 1914-15 for low-cost houses called Dom-Ino. These seem to derive not from anything of Perret’s or Behrens’s but rather directly from the ones that Tony Garnier had proposed for his ‘Cité Industrielle’ as early as 1901-4,[458] but they are still plainer, probably because of the concurrent influence of Loos. However, Le Corbusier’s only important executed building of the War years, the Villa Schwoff of 1916 at La Chaux de Fond, is closer to Perret in its elaborate formality,[459] its much simplified academic detail, and its concrete-and-brick construction. The plan represents an advance over that of his parents’ house, however, for the main living area here is carried up two storeys and lighted by a tall window-wall towards the garden. Of special significance also is the arrangement of all the flat roofs as usable terraces.

The next year, 1917, De Stijl was founded, and soon Oud and Rietveld as members of the group began to collaborate with the Dutch abstract painters and sculptors generally known as Neoplasticists.[460] In this year Oud built two villas by the seashore: Allegonda at Katwijk, designed in association with the architect M. Kamerlingh Onnes; and De Vonk at Noordwijkerhout, with interiors decorated by the De Stijl painter and critic Theo van Doesburg. The Dutch had no direct contact with Behrens, unlike the other three, but Oud was briefly with Fischer in Munich in 1911, as has been said. However, Oud’s work down to this time had been essentially Berlagian: moreover, it was Berlage who evoked his interest in the work of Wright. Nevertheless, there is nothing Wrightian about these villas, but rather a Loos-like reduction of architecture to white stucco cubes. The interest of De Vonk is largely confined to the floors of bold geometric pattern executed in coloured tile by van Doesburg; Allegonda was much modified by Oud in 1927. Rietveld was still primarily a furniture designer until 1921.

In 1918 Oud became City Architect of Rotterdam, where his brother occupied a prominent political position, and began work at once on the Spangen Housing Estate, Blocks I and II being of that year, Blocks VIII and IX of the next. The Tuschendijken Estate followed in 1920. These housing blocks, even more than the seaside villas, are notable for their negative rather than their positive qualities. All the elaboration of form and detail of the Amsterdam School was put aside in favour of an ascetic regularity. But various projects of these years illustrate how boldly Oud was attempting, partly under the influence of his painter and sculptor friends, partly under that of Wright, to arrive at new formal concepts. But Oud was not alone in these years in attempting to translate the ideals of De Stijl into architecture. Gerrit Rietveld, in a jewellery shop in Amsterdam built in 1921, was probably the first fully to realize Neoplasticist concepts in three dimensions and at architectural scale.[461]

In Paris in the first post-war years Le Corbusier was also closely involved with painters; indeed, he himself was then as much, or more, a painter as an architect, and he has never ceased painting since. With the French painter Amédée Ozenfant he had written a book on art, Après le cubisme, published in Paris in 1918; together they developed a post-Cubist sort of abstract painting, partly inspired by their friend Fernand Léger and partly by their interest in the simple shapes of everyday objects. This they called ‘Purisme’. In support of their ideas about all the arts they began in 1920[462] to publish a review, L’Esprit nouveau, which continued to appear until 1925, the nursery years of the new architecture.

In succession to his Dom-Ino system of multiple housing of 1914-15, Le Corbusier was developing at this time the Troyes system, using poured concrete, and also the Monol system with a reinforced-concrete skeleton deriving technically from the innovations of Perret. But the definitive formulation of his new ideals for architecture, focused as they were at this time on the sociological problem of the low-cost dwelling, lay a year or two ahead. Having no official position, he did not need, like Oud, to produce executed work in quantity before his own concepts matured. Gropius’s earliest work, back in 1906, had been a low-cost housing scheme, as has been noted, and in 1911 he built another housing estate, at Wittenberg-an-der-Elbe. Economical housing was increasingly recognized as a social service for which architects ought to exploit to the utmost their technical abilities; from the first it offered a common challenge to the Dutchman, the Swiss-Parisian, and the German.

Like the Dutch and Le Corbusier, Gropius was involved with painters in the early post-war years. Appointed in 1919 head of the Art School in Weimar and also of the Arts and Crafts School there which Van de Velde had run before the War, he combined them and named the new school the Bauhaus.[463] Here teachers of painting and sculpture and architecture worked in closest association with teachers of the crafts in continuation and extension of the English Arts and Crafts ideals of the eighties and nineties. Soon this rather Viennese approach, brought to the Bauhaus by Adolf Itten, with its emphasis on handicraft, was revised by Gropius so that it might better fit an increasingly industrialized society.[464] To his faculty Gropius brought such advanced painters as the German-American Lyonel Feininger in 1919 and in 1922 the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee. Yet it was not their refined art but rather Expressionist painting and sculpture which still influenced the jagged War Monument that he erected in Weimar in 1921. His architectural ideals in the early post-war years before 1922, moreover, seem to have been rather closer to Poelzig’s or Mendelsohn’s than to those of Le Corbusier, Oud, or Rietveld.

As has been several times stated already, certain remarkable projects best displayed the direction in which several of the architects of the younger generation were moving, along nearly parallel lines, in these years preceding the general revival of building production in the mid twenties. Gropius’s Chicago Tribune project of 1922, in which the line of his development shifted away from Expressionism, has already been discussed out of sequence (Plate 158A). But the most significant projects, earlier than this by several years, were by Mies and by Le Corbusier. Mies’s early work had not been very adventurous up to the time when he proposed, in 1919 and in 1920-1, two revolutionary glazed skyscrapers to be built in Berlin. In both, the floors were to be cantilevered out from central supporting cores and the curtain-walls enclosing them merely light metal chassis holding great panes of glass. However, their plans, respectively jagged and curvilinear, reflected the strong influence of Expressionism, an influence that disappeared from Mies’s as from Gropius’s work the very next year, after the Germans became aware of the architectural implications of Dutch Neoplasticism and also of Russian Constructivism. Van Doesburg,[465] it should be noted, visited the Bauhaus in 1922, and for a short but crucial period both Gropius and Mies seem to have drawn from Dutch sources as much inspiration as the young Dutch architects. In addition to the obvious debts of Dudok, Oud, and Rietveld to Neoplasticism, Cornelis van Eesteren (b. 1897), today City Architect of Amsterdam, was actually collaborating with van Doesburg in these years on various house projects.

Less striking than Mies’s skyscrapers, but more buildable, were Le Corbusier’s successive Citrohan projects for houses of 1919-22 (Plate 160A; Figures 44 and 45). Brought to public attention first in L’Esprit nouveau and later in his extremely influential book Vers une architecture, published in Paris in 1923 and shortly translated into English and German, these adumbrated a new aesthetic of architecture more completely than anything that he or any other architect had yet proposed on paper, much less built. Modest in size, each Citrohan house was to consist largely of a two-storey living-room fronted like that of the La Chaux de Fond house of 1916 with a tall window-wall. This would occupy most of the façade, and it was here set within a very plain frame of rendered concrete. The dining area was to be at the rear under a balcony from which the bedroom would open. Thus the section is similar to Wright’s Millard house of 1923.

The earlier version of the house was intended to stand on the ground (Figure 44); in the later scheme the whole cube of the house was to be lifted up on pilotis, that is, free-standing piers of reinforced concrete constituting, Perret-like, essential parts of the structural skeleton (Plate 160A; Figure 45). Like Sullivan’s piers at the base of the Guaranty Building of 1894-5 (Plate #119:pl119) the effect of these pilotis, allowing circumambient space to pass under the enclosed building above, was to enhance very strongly the look of volume as opposed to mass. This treatment, possible only with skeleton construction in ferro-concrete, steel, or wood, soon became one of the most significant formal devices differentiating the new architecture of the twenties from what preceded it. The later Citrohan project was thus the first of the ‘boxes on stilts’ against which Wright continually protested, even though his own buildings themselves tended more and more frequently to be lifted off the ground by one means or another.

If the structural methods employed here by Le Corbusier came from Perret, the external expression of his lifted box seems rather to derive from Garnier or Loos, although the rendered surfaces were evidently intended to be smoother and flatter than those of Loos’s executed houses (Plate 155A) and the pattern of the windows much more regularly organized in the wall-plane. With the roof terrace on top surrounded by parapets continuous with the wall-planes below, even the earlier type is apprehended as volume rather than mass, especially as there were no deep window reveals to suggest thickness in the walls such as appear in Garnier’s projects and Loos’s executed work. By keeping the openings absolutely in the wall-plane, as Hoffmann had done on the Stoclet house, the very exact geometrical discipline of the design of the façades could be maintained even when seen in perspective. As a result, however, the underlying structure was expressed only in the pilotis of the later project. Yet the wide expanse of the window-wall at the front and the characteristic shape of the other windows, oblongs extended horizontally,[466] would obviously not have been practical but for the long spans made possible by the ferro-concrete skeleton.

There was in the Citrohan projects no very close similarity to Le Corbusier’s Purist pictures of these years other than the crisply geometrical ordering of the very flat façades and the untextured smoothness of their surfaces. However, the extreme mechanical precision and the more-than-Loosian rejection of the inessential clearly reflected an aesthetic parallel to that adumbrated in his paintings. Certainly the effect was—as Wright and others recurrently complained—likely to prove more pictorial than architectonic when such things were executed. There was no ornament such as Oud had, in some sense, obtained at Katwijk from his painter-collaborator van Doesburg; indeed, there was hardly any detail at all, at least as architectural detail was understood by Perret and Behrens. In this respect also Le Corbusier’s new architecture was closest to the personal style of Loos.

Articles in L’Esprit nouveau and later the illustrations in Vers une architecture revealed the sources of Le Corbusier’s extra-architectural inspiration and made such inspiration available to others who cared to look about them with his particular vision and his clearly defined ideals for the modern world. Works of engineering, American grain-elevators and the like;[467] the forms of things that move—ocean liners, motor cars and aeroplanes:[468] such things provided some of the visual prototypes for Le Corbusier’s new aesthetic of architecture.[469] But there was also the social motive of developing a method of building houses to satisfy the needs of all classes. Moreover, Le Corbusier was already—to use a term introduced later—as much a ‘planner’ as an architect. In 1922 he prepared a project for a city of three million inhabitants. This proposed at the core a geometrically ordered group of widely spaced cruciform skyscrapers and, round the core, ranges of blocks of flats of moderate height, not arranged along narrow streets, but broadly distributed over a park-like terrain.

Le Corbusier had many years to wait before the world caught up with his ideas as a planner as these were promulgated in his book Urbanisme, published in Paris in 1925. But as an architect[470] he was shortly building in and near Paris a series of houses, most of them of considerably greater size than his Citrohan project. Moreover, in 1927, at the Werkbund Exhibition in Stuttgart, he finally brought that to execution also, although some minor modifications were incorporated.[471] Le Corbusier’s very first post-war houses—one at Vaucresson, S.-et-O., near Paris, which has been remodelled quite beyond recognition, and the house for Ozenfant at 53 Avenue Reille in the Montrouge district of Paris, both designed in 1922 and built in 1923—were naturally not very adequate expressions of his ideals[472] (Figure 46). But, beginning with the contiguous La Roche and Jeanneret houses, designed originally in 1922 also and executed with many modifications and improvements in 1924 in the Square du Dr Blanche in the Auteuil district of Paris, and culminating in the Savoye house at Poissy, S.-et-O., of 1929-30 (Plate 159), the new aesthetic[473] of the Citrohan project was exploited with increasing virtuosity. Le Corbusier developed much further the spatial unity of his plans, usually keeping inside a defining rectangle but articulating that in various ways: at the Savoye house, for example, the main terrace is within the same raised box as the enclosed rooms (Figure 47). The treatment of the exteriors likewise grew simpler and more open. Horizontal windows were grouped and extended to form continuous ribbons all the way across façades, and roofs at various levels, being completely flat, served as outdoor living-spaces. This is best seen at Les Terrasses (Plate 160B), the house built in 1927 for Michael Stein at 17 Rue du Professeur Pauchet in Garches, S.-et-O.

Different colours were often used on different walls to emphasize them as individual planes, particularly in interiors. Curved elements, such as were introduced earlier in the plan of the Vaucresson house (Figure 46), appeared at the Savoye house in screens that rose around the upper roof-terrace (Plate 159). Moreover, the geometrical discipline of his tracés régulateurs based on the Golden Section was used with ever-increasing consistency.[474] At the same time the use of different colours and of curves produced, particularly at the Savoye house, a lyricism closely related to that of Purist paintings of the early twenties. This is curious, since in his paintings dating from the late twenties Le Corbusier was moving away from Purism, under the influence of Fernand Léger (and perhaps even of Surrealism), towards a looser and more connotative mode.

Le Corbusier was not the only architect of the new generation building houses in Paris in these years. Beside his, those by the Belgian Robert Mallet-Stevens (b. 1886)[475] are at once cruder and more superficial in their design. In the Rue Mallet-Stevens near Le Corbusier’s La Roche and Jeanneret houses, where he built several houses close together in 1926-7, he provided a somewhat depressing glimpse of the future, a glimpse which has often proved, alas, to be only too accurate a generation later. The Cité Seurat, on the other side of Paris near Le Corbusier’s Ozenfant house, offered an even larger group of new houses of the same period, several of them of much higher quality. The Chana Orloff house there is by Perret; but most of the others are by André Lurçat[476] (b. 1892), an architect of much more integrity than Mallet-Stevens, if without Le Corbusier’s genius. The best of Lurçat’s houses, where they have been adequately maintained, possess certain common-sense virtues that Le Corbusier’s lack; in the late twenties and early thirties they provided paradigms at least as popular as Le Corbusier’s. His school of 1931 in Villejuif, Seine, has a special importance also, as it was in the field of school-building[477] that the new architecture first became widely accepted later in the thirties in several countries. Le Corbusier’s activity was much greater than Lurçat’s, however, and in one major project at least he extended the scope of the new architecture far beyond the realm of the modest private dwellings that he and Lurçat were so largely restricted to building in the twenties.

In 1925, in the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, Le Corbusier had shown a dwelling unit of the Citrohan type arranged as a flat with a large terrace at one side, following an unexecuted project of 1922. The actual housing estate that he built at Pessac outside Bordeaux in 1925-6 was less successful, although by this time many young architects concerned with housing in other countries were finding inspiration in his work and perhaps even more in his ideas. But it was in an entirely different realm that Le Corbusier had, like Saarinen in the Chicago Tribune competition, a failure which was nonetheless a tremendous succès d’estime. Le Corbusier’s project for the Palace of the League of Nations[478] came very close to winning the competition of 1927. Moreover, the totally undistinguished scheme jointly produced by the elderly Frenchman P.-H. Nénot (1853-1934), who had built the new Sorbonne in Paris in 1884-9, and various other architects from several different countries eventually executed in Geneva never received the attention or the flattery of world-wide emulation and imitation which Le Corbusier’s project did. This led, for example, to his selection to design the Centrosoyus in Moscow in 1928. Begun the following year, this was finally finished in 1936, but with most inadequate supervision. However, the Communist ‘party line’[479] turned sharply against modern architecture in the early thirties, and no more projects by Western European architects were invited after the Palace of the Soviets competition held in 1931.

If Le Corbusier in the twenties was, by force of circumstances, almost more completely restricted to house-building than Wright had been in the preceding decades, Gropius’s career in Germany developed very differently. In 1925 he was invited by the city of Dessau to come there from Weimar and re-establish the Bauhaus; in that year and the next he had a chance to build a very large and complex structure to house the school as well as his own and several other professors’ houses. The houses were not notable additions to the new canon, although they were soon as much imitated as Le Corbusier’s and Lurçat’s. However, the Bauhaus building itself was the first major example of the new architecture to be executed, illustrating on a large scale most of its possibilities and principal themes, none of them by this date altogether novel.

The most striking element of the Bauhaus is the studio block, a four-storeyed glass box (Plate 161A). This carried to its logical limit the implications of the near-curtain-wall of the Fagus Factory, quite as Mies had already proposed for his two glass skyscraper projects, but without their Expressionist planning. The bridge to the left of this block exploits the possibilities of great spans in ferro-concrete construction. Throughout that section and the block on the left ribbon-windows longer than Le Corbusier’s at Les Terrasses open up the walls just as Mies had already proposed to do in a notable project of 1922 for a ferro-concrete office building. A lower refectory wing links the glazed block with an apartment tower at the rear; in that the grouping of the horizontal windows with the many little projecting balconies clearly expresses the fact that this portion of the building is made up of small repeated dwelling units.

The organization of this very complex structure is asymmetrical but carefully studied (Figure 48). Where Le Corbusier had thus far composed most of his houses inside a single ‘box’, Gropius here combined four or more. In each he emphasized visually the fact that the surface was but a thin shell enclosing an internal volume, but he varied the treatment according to the internal use of each portion of the building. At the same time regularity of rhythm, and often identity of measure in the parts, ordered the whole without recourse to symmetry or to the imposition of any such special system of proportion as Le Corbusier was enthusiastically developing.

Gropius did not again, until late in life in America, have such another architectural opportunity. In the following years, down to his departure from Germany with the rise of Hitler, his production was almost entirely in the field of low-cost housing. There he had the large-scale responsibilities largely denied to Le Corbusier until after the Second World War, but common enough by then in Germany.[480] First, in 1926-8, came the Törten Estate at Dessau consisting of terrace houses of concrete with smoothly rendered walls and horizontal windows. These were sound and economical but somewhat dull in design, the very reverse of Le Corbusier’s at Pessac. At the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927, moreover, Gropius’s free-standing houses did not rival Le Corbusier’s in quality of design, despite their considerable technical importance as early examples of something approaching total prefabrication.

Gropius’s most finished works of the twenties were all at Dessau. Besides the Bauhaus itself, there is a small block of flats rising at the end of a row of one-storey shops to form the centre of the Törten Estate of 1928. But even more notable is the Dessau City Employment Office, begun the year before. Here Gropius rejected stucco rendering,[481] hitherto almost as much the sign manual of the new architecture in Germany as in France, and surfaced his walls with brick (Plate 161B). The horizontal strips of window in the office wing, carefully related to the narrow bands of wall between and elegantly subdivided by light metal sash, are balanced with bold assurance against the tall vertical light of the stair tower at one end. Whether Gropius had learned from the Neoplasticists or the Constructivists, by this time he had become a master of abstract architectural composition in his own right.

Leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, Gropius next undertook a large housing estate, Dammerstock, at Karlsruhe. Here he combined terrace houses, somewhat ampler in size and less mechanically designed than those at Törten, with ranges of six-storey blocks of flats in the form of long, rigidly orientated slabs. Following this came the Siemensstadt Estate of 1930 outside Berlin (Plate 162A). This is the classic example of housing in tall, thin slabs, prototype of innumerable similar estates to be built throughout the western world before and after the Second World War. In Germany, however, where the form was first adumbrated, their production ceased in 1933 with the onset of the Hitler regime—it has since been revived very actively, particularly by Ernst May at Hamburg and by architects of several countries in the Interbau exhibition of 1957 in Berlin.

Mies in the twenties was not nearly so prolific as Gropius, nor was he so widely influential. His Wolf house of 1926 at Guben and the Lange and Esters houses at Krefeld of 1926 and 1928, side by side in the Wilhelmshofallee, despite their fine dark brickwork[482] and the careful placing of the large horizontal windows, did not redeem the promise of an earlier project which he had made in 1922 for a country house; that was comparable in significance to his skyscraper schemes of the preceding years. Its plan seemed to represent the extension upward of a complex, but very rigid, geometrical pattern like those seen in Mondriaan’s and van Doesburg’s paintings of this period (Figure 49). This sort of planning allowed a continuous flow of space in and around internal partitioning elements and out through wall-high glass areas to the surrounding terraces, themselves defined by the extension of the solid brick walls of the house. This openness more than rivalled, and was probably influenced by, the spatial flow in the Prairie Houses of Wright. Neoplasticist influence continued strong in Mies’s work as late as his Liebknecht-Luxemburg Monument in Berlin of 1926. This was an abstract rectangular block, ingeniously composed of various brick surfaces arranged in different planes. (It was, of course, destroyed under Hitler.)

The flats that Mies built in the Afrikanische Strasse in Berlin in 1924-5 were more in line with Gropius’s and Le Corbusier’s contemporary work than his private houses. Moreover, his block of flats (Plate 162B) at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 on the Weissenhof at Stuttgart, of which he was the general director, with its lines of broad window-bands broken occasionally by vertical stair-windows, had an elasticity of planning and a clarity and subtlety of expression much superior to Gropius’s taller and longer slabs at Dammerstock and Siemensstadt.

In 1929 came Mies’s masterpiece, one of the few buildings by which the twentieth century might wish to be measured against the great ages of the past (Plate 165A). The German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition, although built of permanent materials—steel, glass, marble, and travertine—was, like most exhibition buildings, only temporary. But few structures have come to be so widely known after their demolition, or so intensely admired through reproductions, except perhaps Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Set on a raised travertine base almost like a Greek stylobate, in which lies an oblong reflecting pool, the space within the pavilion was defined by no bounding walls at all but solely by the rectangle of its thin roof-slab. This was supported, almost immaterially, on a few regularly spaced metal members of delicate cruciform section sheathed in chromium. The covered area was subdivided, rather in the manner of the project of 1922 for a brick country house, by tall plate-glass panels carried in light metal chassis, some transparent, some opaque, and also by screens of highly polished marble standing apart from the metal supports. The disposition of these screens is asymmetrical but exquisitely ordered; yet it has none of that Neoplasticist complexity evident in the placing of the partitioning elements in the project of 1922. As a result, the articulated space of the pavilion has a classic serenity quite unlike the more dynamically flowing interiors of Wright’s houses. At the Berlin Building Exhibition in 1931 Mies repeated the Barcelona Pavilion in less sumptuous materials, making only slight changes in the plan so that it might provide a model for a house.

More than a little of the special quality of space-distribution in this exhibit Mies had been able to achieve already in the Tugendhat house of 1930 at Brno in Czechoslovakia. There also the screens that subdivide the unified living-space are quite separate from the delicate cruciform metal supports (Figure 50). One of them, made of macassar ebony, partially encloses the dining-area and is semicircular in plan, thus notably enriching the general spatial effect. Externally this house is less remarkable. At the upper, or entrance, level towards the street it is quite closed in and even rather forbidding; but at the rear towards the garden there is a continuous, room-high glass wall framed by stucco bands above and below. At one end an open terrace is included within the rectangle of the plan, and from this a broad flight of stone stairs descends to the ground. The contrast with the somewhat similar rear of Le Corbusier’s Les Terrasses expresses well the considerable range of different effects possible within the tight limits of the new architecture even in this, its most rigidly doctrinaire period of the late twenties.

Within the twenties, both in France and in Germany, the new architecture received its full formulation, first in projects and shortly afterwards in executed work. At the same time Le Corbusier and Gropius provided in articles and in books the arguments in its defence.[483] Both are extremely articulate men, the one with the emotional intensity of a poet or a preacher, the other with the cool logic of a scientist or a professor. They soon found excited readers and later devoted followers all over the western world as their writings were exported, translated,[484] and paraphrased; but the significant activity of this period was by no means only French and German. Despite the continuing vitality of the Amsterdam School through the mid twenties, the new Dutch school associated with Rotterdam rose rapidly in national and international significance. Oud,[485] indeed, brought the new architecture to maturity in Holland in precisely the same years as Le Corbusier and their German contemporaries; Rietveld and several others made signal contributions also, in Rietveld’s case perhaps equal in importance to Oud’s.

The Oud Mathenesse housing estate at Rotterdam, which Oud undertook in 1922, is rather different from Spangen and Tuschendijken. At first sight it may appear more conservative, since it consists of small terrace houses with visible tiled roofs rather than tall blocks of flats. But rendered and painted walls replaced the brick of the earlier Rotterdam work, recalling the Loos-like treatment of his seaside villas as also the rather Wrightian projects he had designed in the intervening years. Moreover, the shapes and subdivisions of the windows were very carefully considered, so that the general effect is quite similar to the most advanced projects of Le Corbusier and of Mies designed in this same year. The influence of the De Stijl artists may not be very apparent in the façades of the houses and shops; but in the temporary building superintendent’s office that Oud built here in 1923 cubical wooden elements painted in primary colours produced a composition quite like a Neoplasticist painting developed in three dimensions. It should be noted, however, that this was not, like Dudok’s work of the period, at all related to the very complex Neoplasticist sculpture of Vantongerloo. Oud’s façade of 1925 for the Café de Unie in Rotterdam, being two-dimensional, was even more like a Mondrian painting raised to architectural scale.

It has already been mentioned that in 1923 van Doesburg was engaged in collaboration with van Eesteren on some remarkable studies, half abstract paintings, half architectural isometrics. Rietveld, in the Schroeder house of 1924 in Utrecht (Plate 164B), boldly carried such a hypothetical Neoplasticist architecture of discrete planes and structural lines into the world of reality even more completely than in his earlier shop in Amsterdam.

But by this time, Oud felt he had learned what Neoplasticism had to offer him. He was in any case now personally closer to Mondrian than to van Doesburg, and Mondrian had left Holland for Paris. In Oud’s first really mature work, which remains also his masterpiece, two terraces with shops at their ends built at the Hook of Holland in 1926-7 but designed a year or two earlier, all overt emulation of contemporary painting disappeared, except for the restriction of colour to white-painted rendering with only small touches of the primaries on some of the minor elements of wood and metal (Plate 163B). The serenity of these smooth façades with their long regular ranges of horizontal windows, the extreme refinement of the detailing of the fences and the doorways, and, above all, the lyricism of the rounded shops, their walls all of glass under a cantilevered slab bent down at the ends, were unequalled by anything Le Corbusier or Gropius or Mies had yet built. Reputedly it was the influence of Van de Velde that led Oud to introduce curves here, much to the disgust of the Neoplasticists.

Oud’s terrace-houses in the 1927 exhibition at Stuttgart were equally exemplary in their perfection of finish but slightly less interesting in their over-all design. Those by a still younger Dutch architect, Mart Stam (b. 1899), were perhaps superior. Then there followed Oud’s very large Kiefhoek housing project at Rotterdam which was built in 1928-30. Here the windows of the upper storey of each terrace became a continuous band, but something of the earlier refinement was lost just as in Gropius’s Siemensstadt blocks of the same period.

At Kiefhoek Oud was called on to provide a church as well as housing. Its vices as well as its virtues epitomize very well the state of the new architecture at the end of the decade (Plate 164A). Considered as elements in an abstract composition, the handling of the subordinate features of the Kiefhoek church is masterly, refining and—as it were—domesticating various adjuncts of an almost industrial order such as had earlier provided a good part of the varied visual interest of Gropius’s Fagus Factory. But the main auditorium block is so box-like that it holds its place among the rows of houses only by its size, offering no expression whatsoever of its special purpose—it could as easily be a garage. A far more notable exemplar of the new architecture, still about the finest twentieth-century building in Holland, is the van Nelle Factory outside Rotterdam built in 1927-8 by the firm of J. A. Brinkman (1902-49) and L. C. van der Vlugt (b. 1894) but probably designed by Stam (Plate 163A). The Dutch firm of B. Bijvoet (b. 1889) and Johannes Duiker (1890-1935) should also be mentioned for their admirable work of the twenties, starting with several Wrightian houses of 1924 at Kijkduin, but soon quite as advanced as Oud’s or Rietveld’s.

The conditions of the twenties—or more precisely the particular conditions under which the new architects had to work and, to a large extent, even seemed satisfied to work—restricted their scope rather considerably. In France the usual clients, often American rather than French, sought houses that were avant-garde and related ideologically to the painting of the Cubists and Post-Cubists. Towards the utilitarian field of low-cost housing the new architects everywhere felt a special responsibility; in Germany and Holland they readily found major opportunities for official employment at such work. Their intense concern with the aesthetic potentialities of engineering gave them a special sympathy for industrial building, but major opportunities such as the van Nelle Factory were very rare. Gropius’s Bauhaus, a large and complex structure serving a cultural purpose, and the Barcelona Pavilion, an edifice with almost no other purpose than to be beautiful, were important exceptions in a range of production characterized by a surprising international consistency of type as well as of character.

Yet the hands of the various individual architects are, in fact, never difficult to distinguish and, from this time onwards, the paths of the four early leaders began definitely to diverge. It was chiefly the work of late-comers, of whom there were in the twenties large numbers only in Germany, that tended towards monotony and anonymity. Not since the early years of the nineteenth century, when Romantic Classicism at the hands of a second generation reached a comparable clarity of stylistic definition, had there been such a rigid and humbly accepted architectural discipline. However, certain men, such as Mendelsohn and Dudok, retained in their practice of the new architecture strong traces of earlier idiosyncrasies. Much of their work lacks therefore the purity and the assured mastery of the four initiators. But Mendelsohn’s Schocken Department Stores, built in several German cities in the late twenties—at Nuremberg and Stuttgart in 1926-7, at Chemnitz in 1928—and his Petersdorf Store at Breslau in 1927 are certainly superior in interest and in vitality to the new city houses and suburban villas in France; not to speak of the housing estates in Germany that were being produced in such considerable quantity by the end of the decade by architects who were literalistic adherents of the new architecture. The work of such designers showed all the naive enthusiasm, the subjection to discipline, and the doctrinaire characteristics of the activity of new converts in any field.

But when, in his Columbus Haus of 1929-31 in Berlin, Mendelsohn finally accepted a comparable discipline he was able to retain most of his earlier vitality. Here he produced a really paradigmatic commercial building—almost a small skyscraper—such as none of the four leaders ever had the opportunity of carrying to execution in the twenties. Much the same can be said for a considerably later ‘baby skyscraper’, Dudok’s Erasmus Huis of 1939-40 in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam. This is still, after the van Nelle Factory, one of the best buildings in Rotterdam, despite all the post-war reconstruction there (see Chapter 25).

As the new architecture spread to other countries around 1930 it was naturally the lowest common denominator of its potentialities that became most widely evident. However, at just this point an international depression supervened; the building boom, with which the rise of the new architecture had been at best but coincidentally associated, soon ground to a standstill. In Germany in the early thirties, moreover, as also in Russia and considerably later and less rigidly in Italy, an authoritarian regime proscribed the new architecture. Leaders like Gropius, Mies, and Mendelsohn left the country and the new architecture was in abeyance there until after Hitler’s fall.

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23. LATER WORK OF THE LEADERS OF THE SECOND GENERATION

HISTORIANS, whether of politics or the arts, should ideally stand at some distance from their subjects thanks to remoteness in time; in lieu of that, remoteness in space sometimes serves the same purpose. However, this historian has now reached the point at which he entered the scene; he must write, as statesmen who write history are often forced to do, of events concerning which he has first-hand knowledge—and hence, alas, first-hand prejudices. Architects, the real actors in architectural history, often write as well as build; since Vitruvius there have been many whose fame depends as much on their books as on their buildings, not least several of the men with whom Part Three of this book has dealt. But those who write about architecture as historians and critics without being active builders, who merely explain, select, and illustrate the significant work of their own day or even of the past—particularly the immediate past—are to some extent minor actors on the scene also. They cannot, therefore, be merely neutral observers, reporting without parti pris the ideas and the achievements of others, however hard they may try to maintain their objectivity.

To have written the only monograph on Wright to appear in French, to have provided the first account in English of the new architecture, to have published a book on the work of Oud in the late twenties, modest as these contributions were, are all actions indicating an early commitment on the part of this author. The preparation in 1931 with Philip Johnson of the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, in which Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, and Mies were signalized as the leaders of the new architecture, and the publication—also with Philip Johnson—of the book called The International Style[486] at that time were even more definite and controversial acts of participation in the dialectic of architectural development in this century.

If it seems necessary to mention these publications here and not merely to refer to them in the Notes or list them in the Bibliography, it is in no spirit of boastfulness but rather of apology. From this point on the ideal objectivity of the historian, attempting disinterestedly to piece the past together from a study of its extant monuments and from relevant contemporary documents, is inevitably coloured, if not cancelled out, by the subjectivity of the critic writing of events he knew at first hand. Concerning them, of course, his present opinions have no more real historical validity than those he held and published nearer the time when the events occurred. With this proviso the canvas may now be somewhat broadened.

By the early thirties the new architecture was by no means restricted to France, Germany, and Holland, the countries where it had originated. Yet, with the possible exception of Alvar Aalto (b. 1898) in Finland, no other leader of the calibre of the early four had appeared up to that time. The building of 1928-9 at Turku for the newspaper Turun Sanomat was Aalto’s first mature work to be completed. In this the plastic handling of the concrete piers[487] in the interior introduced a new and personal note of architectural expression in a frankly industrial setting. His Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Paimio of 1929-33 rivalled the Bauhaus in size, if not perhaps in complexity, and was almost the first[488] major demonstration of the special applicability of the new architecture to hospitals. The City Library at Viipuri, designed as early as 1927 but not finished until 1935, was a more original example of the new architecture. In particular, the lecture hall there, with its acoustic ceiling of irregularly wavy section made up of strips of wood, was strikingly novel.

In the United States the Lovell house in Los Angeles opened in 1929 the American career of Richard J. Neutra (b. 1892), an Austrian who had worked briefly with Wright. In this house, with its cantilevers, its broad areas of glass, and its volumetric composition, Neutra showed the completeness with which he had already rejected the broad Wrightian road and accepted the more restricted aspirations of the newer architecture of Europe. Never, perhaps, have Wright’s ideals and those of the next generation appeared so sharply opposed as at just this time, moreover. But Neutra’s mature work began only considerably later than this.

In 1930-2 the tallest of all skyscrapers, the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, was rising in New York; this was a shaped tower in the local tradition although devoid of reminiscent stylistic detail. In these same years, however, a well-established ‘traditional’ architect, George Howe (1886-1954),[489] in association with a Swiss, William E. Lescaze (b. 1896), who had been a pupil of Karl Moser, returned to the Sullivanian slab in designing the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (Plate #169:pl169). Moreover, they treated their slab along the lines that the leading European exponents of the new architecture had adumbrated in the previous ten years. It would be a score of years before other skyscrapers of such significant and distinguished design were built in American cities (see Chapter 25).

In Sweden E. G. Asplund (1885-1940), whose architecture had hitherto been of a ‘Neo-Neo-Classic’ order, extremely crisp and refined but definitely reminiscent,[490] turned to the new architecture of Le Corbusier and Gropius just before he completed the Central Library of Stockholm (Plate 176A), a building first projected in 1921 but not opened until 1928 (see Chapter 24). For the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, of which he had entire charge, Asplund was soon designing an extensive and elegantly varied range of pavilions that exploited to the full the possibilities of the new architecture. In Denmark Kay Fisker (b. 1893) underwent a somewhat less drastic conversion at much the same time.

These years also saw the beginning of the English career of Berthold Lubetkin[491] (b. 1901), a Russian who had settled in England in 1930 after working for some time in France. His early Gorilla House at the Regent’s Park Zoo in London was soon outshone by the smaller, but much more remarkable, Penguin Pool there of 1933-5, which is almost a piece of Constructivist sculpture (Plate 172B). In 1933-5 also, the tall block of middle-class flats, Highpoint I at Highgate outside London, was erected by the Tecton group, of which Lubetkin was the leading spirit. With its fine hill-top site overlooking Hampstead Heath, this cruciform tower rivalled Le Corbusier’s Clarté block in Geneva of 1930-2 in interest and in quality. Almost equally impressive, and like Highpoint hardly rivalled by comparable work in London since, is the Peter Jones Department Store in Sloane Square, designed in 1935 by William Crabtree.[492] Already in 1933 Mendelsohn had settled in England, practising there for a few years in partnership with Serge Chermayeff (b. 1900) before moving on to Israel in 1936. From 1934 to 1937 Gropius was in England working with E. Maxwell Fry (b. 1899); Marcel Breuer (b. 1902), a Hungarian pupil of Gropius from the Bauhaus, was also in England working with F. R. S. Yorke (1906-62). By the mid thirties Connell, Ward & Lucas,[493] Wells Coates (1895-1958), and Frederick Gibberd (b. 1908) were also well started on their careers.[494]

In Italy, where the projects of an architect associated with Futurism,[495] Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916), before his death in the First World War had offered a remarkable premonition of the new architecture of the twenties, a fresh talent at least comparable in interest and individuality to Lubetkin’s appeared on the scene in these years. The Casa del Fascio at Como of 1932-6 by Giuseppe Terragni (1904-43) is almost as original as Aalto’s Viipuri Library but very different (Plate 172A). In its use of fine marbles and in its innate classicism it recalls Mies, yet it is as Mediterranean in spirit as his work is Northern. Unfortunately, like Sant’Elia before him, Terragni was killed in the Second World War that followed within a few years after the start of his career. However, the firm of Luigi Figini (b. 1903) and Gino Pollini (b. 1903), who continue to be leaders of Italian modern architecture, also made their first mark at this time with the ‘Artist’s House’ that they showed at the Fifth Triennale in Milan in 1933. This was similarly calm and Latin in its handling of the ‘international’ vocabulary of form.

The Florence railway station, built in 1934-6 by Giovanni Michelucci (b. 1891) and five associated architects, also deserves mention. Michelucci is not to be compared with Terragni or Figini & Pollini, but his station was stylistically the most advanced in the world when it was built. Moreover, like the Casa del Fascio in Como, it offers notable evidence of the support the Fascist regime was still giving to architettura razionale at a time when both in Germany and in Russia other authoritarian regimes were denouncing the International Style. The Termini Station in Rome (Plate 183B) was begun even earlier from the designs of Angiolo Mazzoni. It owes its distinguished reputation as the finest station of the twentieth century, however, to the new project of Eugenio Montuori (b. 1907) and his associates, prepared in 1947 and finally carried to effective completion in 1951 (see Chapter 25).

Yet for all the increasingly wide spread of the new architecture by the mid thirties, Le Corbusier and two Germans retained their international position of leadership despite economic depression in France and Hitlerian exile from Germany. If the amount of their executed work was much reduced—in the case of Mies for several years to nil—the geographical range of their activities was now much extended. Today, for example, Le Corbusier’s work is to be found from La Plata in Argentina to Chandigarh in India; he was also a consultant on two of the largest and most striking buildings in the New World built just before and just after the Second World War, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio (Plate 171) and the United Nations Secretariat[496] in New York.

Gropius and Mies, settling in America in the late thirties, became figures of crucial importance in the reform of American architectural education[497] as well as being increasingly productive as architects since the war. At Harvard University[498] and at the Illinois Institute of Technology, respectively, they set a pace for several American architects who later became leading educators, such as Howe at Yale and W. W. Wurster (b. 1895) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California. Mendelsohn, still very much of an individualist, but with a notable international reputation based on what he had built in England and in Israel as well as on his earlier work of the twenties in Germany, practised in America from after the war down to his death.

This extension of the field of activity and the direct influence of the European leaders further emphasized the universal character of the new architecture. Today American architects, such as the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,[499] working as far from home as Turkey, or Edward D. Stone (b. 1902), building on three continents, provide almost the most characteristic later examples of what—and in their cases most critics would agree—is not improperly called the International Style. The American Embassies in Copenhagen and in Stockholm, and the flats for embassy personnel at Neuilly and at Boulogne outside Paris, all by Rapson[500] & Van de Gracht, are perhaps the most distinguished examples of American work abroad of the 1950s.

But there would have been no El Panamá Hotel in Panama (1950) by Stone, no Istanbul Hilton Hotel (1954) by the Skidmore firm, and no such foreign building programme by the United States Government as was responsible for the executed embassies by Rapson & Van de Gracht of the early fifties and the ones since built by Eero Saarinen in London and Oslo, by Gropius and TAC in Athens, by Stone in New Delhi, and by Breuer in The Hague but for the pioneering of the Europeans, nor did that pioneering cease in the thirties. Only in Oud’s case, because of a serious indisposition that removed him from practice for many years after 1930, was the œuvre effectively complete with the twenties; and even he is now quite active again. In the case of both Le Corbusier and Mies, if not of Gropius, their largest commissions came only after the Second World War. Their influence in the 1950s was still as great as around 1930, in Mies’s case considerably greater. The mid twentieth century had come to accept stylistic continuity in a way that the nineteenth century, was never able to do once the tradition of Romantic Classicism finally wore out. The often adventurous late work of these men, now become elder statesmen of modern architecture, fortunately counter-balanced to some extent those more rigid interpretations of the discipline they founded, interpretations that recurrently threatened after the late twenties to become academic and frozen in one country or another.

Many of the more characteristic demands of Le Corbusier’s aesthetic canon, as it had been announced in his projects of the early twenties and adumbrated in the succession of houses that led up to the Savoye house of 1929-30—including restrictions docilely accepted almost everywhere by advanced architects in the late twenties—were already ignored in the buildings he himself designed in the early thirties. The house that he built for Hélène de Mandrot at Le Pradet in Provence in 193O-1 is raised on no pilotis but sits firmly on a terrace; and its walls, where solid, are of rough, uncoursed rubble. Quiet and rectangular, with no lyrically curved elements and little painted colour, this house accepts the surrounding landscape as Wright’s had always done. Le Corbusier seemed here almost to be avowing a respect for local materials and humble village craftsmanship such as is associated with Voysey and his English contemporaries of a generation earlier that would certainly have been anathema to him in the twenties. On the other hand, the penthouse that he built in 1931 for Carlos de Beistegui on top of a block of flats on the Champs Élysées in Paris was all of plate glass and white marble. This had something of the glittering elegance of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion of two years earlier, where the polished marbles, once so brilliantly exploited by Loos, were first brought back after a decade of restriction to ascetic and impermanent surfaces of painted stucco.

The Salvation Army Building which Le Corbusier erected in 1931-2 in the Rue Cantagrel in Paris is more in line with the canon of the twenties. Unfortunately the original curtain-wall is now cut up by projecting sun-breaks added in a post-war refurbishing by Le Corbusier’s former partner Pierre Jeanneret. The Maison Clarté block of flats of 1930-2 in Geneva is almost as completely glass-walled.

It was most notably the Swiss Hostel at the Cité Universitaire in Paris, designed in 1930 and built in 1931-2, which introduced various quite new elements of plan and design that Le Corbusier would develop much further after the Second World War (Plate 165B). The pilotis he used in the twenties were thin and round, rather like Perret’s columns, though without their facets and capitals; but here a double row of heavy piers of a complex moulded section carries a dormitory block that is boldly cantilevered out from them both front and back. The rubble masonry of the Mandrot house was used here once more for a tall unbroken wall of irregularly curved plan at the rear of the building; the textured and tonal surface of this wall and its effect of solidity contrasts both with the exposed concrete of the structural elements and with the smooth areas of thin stone plaquage on the upper walls. Curves in Le Corbusier’s earlier work were almost always confined within a bounding rectangle and never made of massive materials; yet they lost none of their elegance in being handled in this bolder and more organic way. This is closely related to his later paintings, of which the mural in the common room here provides a major example.

The international depression closed in even more completely on France in the early thirties than it did elsewhere, and there was no subsequent revival of building activity such as other countries experienced in the years preceding the Second World War. Le Corbusier’s activities were therefore more and more confined to projects, most of them for commissions outside France. However, a small block of flats, very similar to the Maison Clarté in Geneva, was built at 24 Avenue Nungesser et Coli on the western edge of Paris in 1933. The most interesting portion of this is the architect’s own penthouse on top; there, like another Soane, he experimented at small scale with a variety of vault-topped spaces.

In a modest house at 49 Avenue du Chesnay in Vaucresson of 1935 there are no more curves in plan than in the Mandrot house, but segmental concrete vaults cover the rectangular bays of which the plan is made up. Moreover, as if to underline Le Corbusier’s return towards nature after his earlier devotion to the abstract and the mechanistic, grass grows over their crowns to provide insulation. The exposed frame of the concrete structure, where not filled with glass brick, has panels of coursed rubble.

Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties often included new ideas that others exploited even before he was able to do so himself in executed work. For example, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio de Janeiro, on which he was a consultant only, designed in 1937 and completed in 1942 by Lúcio Costa (b. 1902), Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1907), and a group of others, the great building which opened so brilliantly the story of the new architecture in Brazil (Plate 171), included on the west front the projecting sun-breaks he had first proposed in 1933 for certain tall buildings intended to be erected in Algiers. Such sun-breaks soon became characteristic of mid-century architecture in all countries where the sun’s heat and glare offered a major problem—in Asia and Africa as much as in South America. By this device the all-glass wall, favourite large-scale theme of the new architecture since Mies’s early skyscraper projects, received a much-needed functional correction. As often before, a real (or supposed) practical need encouraged the satisfaction of overt or covert aesthetic aspirations; for sun-breaks very much enhance the three-dimensional interest of large façades, substituting for the slick planar effects characteristic of the twenties a more articulated sort of surface treatment related to, but independent of, the expression of skeleton structure. Sun-breaks even came to be used where they are hardly needed, quite as has been the case with various other clichés of modern architecture.

Since the war three major works of Le Corbusier, in the estimation of many critics his masterpieces, have carried much further the sculptural tendencies of his architecture of the thirties. One of these, the block of flats called the Unité d’Habitation,[501] far out the Boulevard Michelet in Marseilles, which was first projected in 1946 and finally completed in 1952, has various other points of interest, however. The Unité realizes on a large scale Le Corbusier’s ideas for the mass-dwelling, providing a single tall slab large enough to house a complete community and including, half-way up, a storey intended to be entirely occupied by shops, as well as other communal facilities on the roof (Plate #166:pl166). An ingenious section allows two-storey living-rooms for all the flats and also permits the use of a skip-stop lift system (Figure 51). The framework in front of the walls provides sun protection for the tall living-room windows and also shallow balconies for each flat both front and back.

Like the Swiss Hostel, the Unité is carried on central supports arranged in a double row. These are much more massively sculptural than the earlier ones in Paris, and almost anthropomorphically expressive of weight-bearing. All the poured concrete surfaces are left rough as they came from the forms, and the prefabricated members of the outer sun-break system have an exposed pebble aggregate. Everything is bold and masculine, even coarse, indicating a complete turnabout in Le Corbusier’s understanding of the essential ‘nature’—itself a rather Wrightian concept—of concrete. On the roof an abstract landscape of sculptural forms plays counterpoint to the superb backdrop of mountains. One cannot help remembering the roof of Gaudí’s Casa Milá in Barcelona (Plate 137A); there are even some glazed tiles set in the concrete to provide notes of ‘permanent polychrome’. Yet the window in the entrance-hall at the base of the slab is quite Neoplasticist in the pattern of its subdivisions and the use of coloured glass; while painted colour of the boldest sort, by no means restricted to the primaries, is used on the sides of the sun-breaks, though not on any of the outer surfaces. Thus has Le Corbusier’s later architecture been enriched by a sort of eclecticism quite remote from his Purist aesthetic of the twenties.

At Chandigarh in India, where Le Corbusier had the general responsibility for planning the entire new capital of the State of Punjab and of building the principal public monuments, only one or two were by the mid fifties finished; the rest of the city was the work of other architects, principally Pierre Jeanneret and the English firm of Maxwell Fry and his wife Jane Drew. The High Courts of Justice,[502] built by Le Corbusier in 1952-6, are even more sculptural than the Unité at Marseilles. A continuous umbrella-like shell-vault of concrete rises high above the roofs of the court-rooms to allow the free passage of air. Supporting this are great rounded piers that merge into the concave surfaces over them, almost like the structural elements of the Casa Milá, but here of monumental scale. On the west side deep box-crates, with brilliant painted colours on their soffits like those on the sun-breaks of the Unité, keep the sun off the glazed walls of the court-rooms and provide that three-dimensional play first exploited on the Ministry in Rio.

The long slab of the Secretariat at Chandigarh, also of 1952-6, with its very varied pattern of sun-breaks, is less novel than the High Courts; but other work of the mid fifties at Ahmedabad should not be ignored (see Chapter 25). However, Le Corbusier’s most extraordinary late building is in France, not India, and therefore considerably more accessible. Architects and laymen alike have been consistently impressed by the intense emotionalism of his church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, Hte-Saône,[503] built in 1950-5. Whether this church will ever have as much influence as the Unité has already had remains debatable because of its very special character. But it certainly made even more evident than the High Courts the fact that Le Corbusier in the fifties was moving in almost the opposite direction from that in which he led in the twenties.

In an exaggerated phrase Le Corbusier described his early houses as machines à habiter; but Notre-Dame-du-Haut is more like an enormous piece of sculpture than a ‘machine for praying-in’ (Plate 167). He who once drove architecture towards the mechanistic, the precise, and the volumetric, now provides the exemplar of a new mode so plastic as almost to be naturalistic in the way of Gaudí’s blocks of flats of fifty years earlier. The walls and roof are rough, indeed almost brutal, in finish, and so massive and solid that the interior of the church at certain times of the day seems positively ill-lit by the tiny deep-sunk windows that irregularly penetrate the side walls. In place of an aesthetic expression emulating the impersonal results of engineers’ calculations, there is here a freehand quality comparable to the spontaneity of the sculptor. Moreover, where the overtones of his characteristic buildings of the twenties were wholly of the present, this arouses deep prehistoric atavisms—and quite intentionally. Whether the High Courts at Chandigarh and the church at Ronchamp evidence a deep split in modern architecture or represent rather a major turning point is still far from clear. Only a few have yet succeeded in following with any distinction the line of development they appear to open (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue).

The later work of the German leaders arouses no such difficult critical problems as does Le Corbusier’s; yet it has also ranged sometimes in directions not altogether to be expected from their best-known work of the twenties. Their careers, moreover, suffered a harsher break because of the political tribulations of their homeland than Le Corbusier suffered from the economic tribulations of France. In 1930 Mies became Director of the Bauhaus, remaining until it was closed by Hitler in 1933. Although he won a competition for the Reichsbank in Berlin as late as that year, he was allowed to do no work under the Nazis, and so he settled in the United States in 1938 after a preliminary visit the previous year.

As has been noted, Mendelsohn and Gropius, on leaving Germany in 1933, settled first in England, and both did significant work there—if not especially significant for their own careers, certainly so for the early stage of modern architecture in England. With his English partner Maxwell Fry, Gropius was responsible in 1935-7 for the Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire; this set a new pace for school design in England in the post-war years, perhaps the best in the world. Mendelsohn, with Chermayeff, built in 1934-5 the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on the Sussex coast. In the main this is a rather conventional example of the new architecture; but it has a semicircular glazed stair-tower that recalls the more lyrical quality of his best earlier work such as the Schocken department stores.

From England Mendelsohn moved on to Israel, where a large Government Hospital by him at Haifa and the Medical Centre of the Hadassah University in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus, both of 1936-8, show a most skilful adaptation of the international European canons to a hotter climate and a different cultural tradition, somewhat as is the case with the Ministry at Rio. Only with the onset of the war in 1941 did Mendelsohn settle in America. There his Maimonides Hospital in San Francisco of 1946-50 and synagogues and Jewish community centres in Cleveland (1946-52), St Louis (1946-50), Grand Rapids (1948-52), and St Paul (1950-4) continued to illustrate his very personal command of the commonly accepted elements of the new architecture, with the inclusion here and there of anomalous features that seem to belong to a much earlier period of his career.

Gropius proceeded directly from England to America in 1937, having been called by Dean Joseph Hudnut of the Graduate School of Design to be Professor of Architecture at Harvard University. He became Chairman of the Architecture Department the following year, which position he retained until 1953. As has already been said, his major contribution to architecture in America has been as an educator. However, he built, in partnership with Breuer, whom he had brought to Harvard, several houses, including his own at Lincoln, Mass., and also a housing development at New Kensington, Penna., in the years 1938-41. These are, on the whole, no more successful than much of his work of the late twenties in Germany, despite an intelligent effort to adapt a European mode to American building methods, particularly as regards the use of wood, both structurally and for sheathing. This turning away, on Gropius’s part, from ferro-concrete and rendered surfaces is parallel to Le Corbusier’s somewhat earlier reversion to the use of local and traditional materials. The houses that Breuer designed after he parted from Gropius have considerably more intrinsic interest; as is perhaps natural in the work of a younger man, they show a more integral adjustment to the characteristic living habits and building methods of the New World. Two large-scale commissions, for the Unesco Building[504] in Paris (now nearly finished) and for the Bijenkorf Store in Rotterdam (1955-7), not to speak of the U.S. Embassy at The Hague, have brought him back to the European scene, but as an American rather than a Hungarian or German architect.

Gropius’s principal American work was all done after the war. It included by the mid fifties two schools at Attleborough, Mass., one of 1948 and one of 1954, and the Graduate Centre of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., of 1949-50. These were all three designed—as also the already-mentioned Athens Embassy, which is not yet completed—in association with the firm known as TAC (The Architects’ Collaborative), consisting of a group of younger architects, all but one educated at Yale University, formed in 1946. In the double quadrangle of buildings at Harvard, forming in itself almost a complete small college, the architecture of the twenties lived on with little change. Light-coloured brick replaced stucco for the walls, however, and there is a certain rather inhibited use of curves in plan and of angular relationships in detail reflecting ideas that had entered the new architecture only in the thirties. The Attleborough schools are less pretentious and altogether more successful, improving upon Gropius and Fry’s Impington College of the thirties in England in various ways. After his retirement as professor, Gropius and TAC became increasingly active, and he continued to present his well-known architectural doctrines in lectures, articles, and books.[505]

Coming to the United States a year later than Gropius, Mies also found his greatest opportunity there, and almost at once. In 1939 he was commissioned to design the entire new group of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was moving to the south side of Chicago. In this scheme, which is of urbanistic scale and extent, a classic, indeed an almost academic, order prevails throughout (Figure 52). The buildings that he was able to execute, two during the war in 1942-4, many more after 1945, have a comparably classic serenity. But they also express with relentless logic the character of their predominantly steel-skeleton construction. In them Mies almost revived architectural detail by the precision and the elaboration of his handling of the elements of metal structure. As at Gropius’s Graduate Centre, light-coloured brick replaces stucco for the solid wall panels. The severe patterns of the black-painted metalwork are organized with something of the purity of Mondrian’s canvases of the twenties yet with a dominating symmetry. This is true also of the interior planning of the individual buildings. However, the latest, Crown Hall, housing the architectural school, completed in 1956, is unsubdivided on the principal floor, and thus represents the most extreme statement of his later ideals, both structurally and in its planning.

Mies also built houses and several tall blocks of flats in and near Chicago and, with Philip Johnson (b. 1906), a New York skyscraper at 375 Park Avenue for the Seagram Company in 1956-8 (Plate 192). His completely glazed Farnsworth house near Plano, Ill., designed in 1946 and built in 1950,[506] is a cage of white-painted welded steel raised above the river valley in which it is set and walled partly with great sheets of plate glass, partly with metal screening. The floor is a continuous plane of travertine from which broad travertine steps descend to an open travertine terrace. Planned about a central core in which are placed the fireplace, the bathrooms, and the heater, the interior space is completely unified, the different functional areas being separated only by cupboards that do not rise to the ceiling (Figure 53). Even more than Crown Hall, this house represents the purest and most extreme statement of aesthetic purpose in one particular direction that the new architecture has yet produced—a direction which is, of course, in total opposition to the increasingly complex plastic effects sought in these same years by Le Corbusier. It is, nevertheless, quite as remote from the stucco boxes characteristic of the twenties and even more remote from Mies’s own brick houses of that period.

A similarly ascetic luxury is also evident in Mies’s blocks of flats at 845-860 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago of 1949-51 (Plate 170). There he seemed to have arrived, not imitatively but by force of parallel logic, at something very close to the skyscrapers that Sullivan designed in the nineties (Plate 119). Mies’s structural piers, carried down to the ground as free-standing elements just as they are below the Farnsworth house, give the dominant bay rhythm, their structural steelwork being sheathed here first in protective concrete and then in black-painted metal. Between the piers continuous I-shaped beams along the mullion lines stiffen the wall screens which are otherwise entirely of glass held in bright aluminium frames; they also provide a subsidiary rhythm, quite as Sullivan’s mullions sometimes did in the eighties and nineties.

Identical in shape, rectangular slabs both, the two blocks were set close together and at right angles to one another. This placing gave a minimum of overlap as regards the lake view and a minimum of overlook as regards the privacy of the apartments. The relationship also creates from these very simple shapes a notable variety of effects in perspective. The visual interest is enhanced especially by the fact that the projecting I-beams, when seen at a sharp angle, give the illusion that one wall of each block is solid; the other wall, being seen head on or nearly so, appears completely open between the structural piers and the mullions. Four more nearly identical apartment blocks[507] have risen in Chicago from Mies’s designs since, the Esplanade Apartments beside the first two towers, and two farther to the north, not to speak of those in Detroit and Newark.

After his arrival in America Mies was not merely for fifteen years the architect of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s buildings, he soon became head of its Department of Architecture also, a post he retained until he retired in 1955. Less articulate than Gropius and occupying a less important academic post, Mies’s influence specifically as an educator has been considerably less. On the other hand, the general influence of his work in America in the late forties and fifties has been far greater. The ‘Miesian’ became almost a sub-school of the new architecture not only in the United States but in several other countries: to Mies not only younger men but also many established practitioners owed the specific direction of much of their post-war work (see Chapter 25).

Just before the Second World War broke out Oud, in 1938, recovered his health sufficiently to undertake a large commission, the Shell Building in The Hague, completed in the course of the next four years. In Holland there had been in the thirties a strong reaction against the new architecture led by M. J. Granpré-Molière (b. 1883) and the graduates of his school at Delft. Granpré-Molière urged a return, if not to the outright ‘traditional’, at least to a semi-traditionalism that was not without some similarity to what Hitler was sponsoring in Germany. In response to this challenge Oud set out to show how the new architecture, still considered by many in Holland to be too stark and mechanistic, could be humanized. To return from stucco to brick, in this case a thin glazed white brick such as Dudok was using at this same time with great success on his quite conventionally ‘International Style’ Erasmus Huis office building in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam,[508] was merely to emulate the rejection of stucco in this decade by the French and German leaders in favour of more permanent, if also more traditional, walling materials, such as marble, rubble, brick, and even wood. But Oud’s attempt to revive ornament and the elaborate symmetry and near-academic complications of his over-all design of the Shell Building had little appeal outside Holland. In the small Esveha office building of 1952 near the railway station in Rotterdam and the much larger Vrijzinnige Christelijk Lyceum at 131 Goudsbloemlaan in The Hague of 1953-6 Oud returned to something much closer to the norms of the new architecture elsewhere. But the day of his great international influence has long been over despite the belated prestige which is still his in Holland.[509]

Like several of the preceding chapters dealing with the architects of the first modern generation, this has brought some aspects of our story down nearly to the present. In so doing, the specifically modern architecture of the twentieth century has been largely accounted for; the picture will be rounded out later by offering a synoptic view of the international scene at the mid century (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue). But first it is necessary to discuss the architecture that was not modern which was produced in the first four decades of this century. Historicism,[510] that is reminiscence of past styles, endemic throughout the nineteenth century, lived on. It is considered polite to call such architecture ‘traditional’, over-favourably weighted rather than accurate though the term may be. Clearly a traditional architecture that produced a ‘Gothic’ skyscraper like Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (Plate 178) or vast ‘Classical’ railway stations like the two in New York (Plate 177B) was not unduly restricted by revivalistic canons. Clearly also this sort of architecture cannot be ignored historically, since it produced some of the largest, most prominent, and most carefully studied buildings and groups of buildings of the first third of this century. Moreover, in many countries traditionalism gave way to modern design only after the Second World War; while the authoritarian regimes of Europe in varying degree returned to its sanctions in the thirties, just as it was generally losing ground elsewhere in the western world.

There were few if any great leaders among twentieth-century traditional architects; certainly hardly more than one or two approached the calibre or the individual significance of the men whose work Part Three of this book has largely dealt with up to this point. But a conspectus can be provided, with typical examples of the best work in several countries, and some indication offered of the character of the production in other countries where the individual architects were less colourful, the monuments less notable, and the general level of quality less high.

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24. ARCHITECTURE CALLED TRADITIONAL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THROUGH at least the first three decades of the twentieth century most architects of the western world would have scorned the appellation ‘modern’ or, if they accepted it, would have defined the term very differently from the way it has been understood in the immediately preceding chapters. For twentieth-century architecture that continued the historicism[511] of the nineteenth century the usual name in English is ‘traditional’. This term reflects a fond presumption that such architecture derives its sanctions from the traditions of the further past, although in fact its only real tradition is that of the preceding hundred years. Whatever one calls it, this traditional architecture includes the majority of buildings designed before 1930 in most countries of the western world and a considerable, if very rapidly decreasing, proportion of those erected since.

Statements of this sort are not very relevant when they concern the arts. In the case of every revolutionary change in architecture the same situation has obtained while the old slowly gave way to the new. Since the modern revolution may well be of the scale of the Renaissance, the student of architectural history should recall that from the early crystallization of the new Italian mode—and at first it was no more than a minor regional mode—in Florence around 1420 to the general acceptance of a new international style throughout Europe some two hundred years passed. The Baroque, in succeeding the Renaissance, came to international dominion only by gradual stages and eventually died out, not all at once around 1750, but gradually over the next half century.

Despite prolific production and the quite remarkable things that were occasionally achieved when historicism came to uneasy terms with new technical means—as had already happened not infrequently in the nineteenth century—the traditional architecture of the twentieth century is primarily an instance of survival; and cultural survivals are among the most difficult problems with which history has to deal. Their sluggish life, sunk in inertia and conservatism, is very different from the vitality of new developments. Yet survivals are tough and resilient, tending always to maintain themselves by their very uneventfulness. Static, not to say smug, assurance is their greatest strength; their greatest danger is that boredom resulting from excessive familiarity which they eventually induce.

Survivals do not generally rouse the interest of posterity. The Gothic of fifteenth-century Italy or that of seventeenth-century England has not received from historians the attention of the rising forces in the architecture of those periods. Somewhat unfairly, late and anachronistic achievements, if admired at all, are likely to be credited to the previous age. In America, for example, Grecian plantation houses built as late as the 1850s are frequently called ‘Southern Colonial’. We are too well aware today, however, that the work of the traditional architects of the last fifty or sixty years is of this century, and not of the previous one, to permit that kind of confusion. The historian must attempt to give some sort of account of things like the Stockholm City Hall (Plate 174A and B) and the Woolworth Building (Plate 178). But the story is not an easy one to tell because it seemed—still at least in the mid twentieth century—to lack plot. The rise of modern architecture, on the other hand, offers material for a dramatic narrative, for it follows the pattern of the ‘success-story’, just as does that of the Gothic in twelfth-century France or the beginnings of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy.

In some areas of the world a meaningful succession of stages can be discerned in the late period of historicism. Because of the differential lags in various parts of the western world, however, it is difficult to find a scheme of organization that is at all generally applicable. All the same, those lags usually mean that certain countries were going through phases of architectural development in the early twentieth century that more advanced areas had left behind before 1900. Since those phases have been discussed in Part Two, it is unnecessary to detail here the peripheral and anachronistic ‘repeats’ of familiar late nineteenth-century episodes in the present century.

Without attempting to round out the picture with the citation of multiple examples, one may at this point suggest some of the aspects, parallel and successive, of twentieth-century historicism. There was, for example, a characteristic continuation of that reaction against the boldness and coarseness of the architecture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century which is recognizable in most countries, and particularly perhaps in America and England from the eighties; hence the general critical emphasis of the period on ‘restraint’ and on the ‘tasteful’. Academically designed buildings of the 1920s were often still intended to realize aspirations that had been novel some forty years earlier; rarely, however, did they do so with a vitality comparable to that of later nineteenth-century work. So also Gothic of the early twentieth century produced by such American architects as Ralph Adams Cram or James Gamble Rogers hardly differs in its standards from what the English Bodley initiated around 1870.

We have already seen in much of the work of Perret and Behrens a special kind of continuation of the Classical tradition in the twentieth century. This shades down through various degrees and kinds of simplification as represented in the personal modes of such architects as Asplund in Sweden or Marcello Piacentini in Italy to the maintenance of a Classical revivalism as absolute as that of 1800 in white marble temples like Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial in Washington (Plate 180).

The medievalizing currents of the nineteenth century link up with many aspects of the advanced architecture of the early twentieth century. This aftermath, often vital and creative in the fields of theory and of craftsmanship with architects as different as the English Voysey and the Spanish Gaudí, likewise shades down through various levels of decreasing stylization to a literal revivalism that is still in the Victorian tradition, but more in line with that tradition’s early or Puginian phase or its latest Bodleian phase than with the Butterfieldian phase of the 1850s and 1860s.

Both on the Classical and on the Gothic side of the fence, however, there have been a few twentieth-century traditional architects whose personal stylization of borrowed forms was almost as extreme as that of the High Victorians. In their work, intense individualism and limited respect for the canons of ‘taste’ and ‘restraint’ offer real points of contact with the brashness of such modern architects of the first generation as Wright and de Klerk. This is in contrast to the other line of traditionalist integrity in the handling of materials that was solidly based on Gothic Revival standards of revived hand-craftsmanship, one of the truly positive values contributed to the next generation by such architects as Richardson in America and Webb in England. The two lines could also in some milieus combine to produce, particularly in Scandinavia, some of the most impressive works of the early twentieth century. Such an outline, blurred and overlapping in its rubrics, can do little more than suggest some of the principal later channels of the architectural currents which were carried over from the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century.

There is still hardly a country in the world where buildings of traditional design are not being erected; but whatever vitality twentieth-century traditional architecture retained as late as the second and even the third decade of the century had departed by the fourth. Post-mortems on traditional architecture have been many—and often premature. The causes of death are still disputable, but the fact of dissolution is by now generally accepted. Yet the last years of traditional architecture were not completely senile. However much the youthful vitality of the newer architecture attracts sympathy and attention, as late as 1930 its impact on building production was in most countries a very limited one. It is fortunate, therefore, that not all the traditional architecture of the years 1900-30 need be dismissed with scorn, even if the standards by which it must be judged remain those of the nineteenth rather than of the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century ended, as we have seen earlier, with a surge of innovation (see Chapters 14, 15, and 16). Looking forward from the late nineties, a prophet might well have assumed that a new architecture would surely arise just beyond the turn of the century; yet within a few years a general reaction set in which took somewhat different forms in various parts of the western world. As has already been noted, there were almost everywhere strong links with the earlier Academic Reaction of the eighties against the bold and brash ‘high styles’ of the mid century; indeed, it may be said that the traditional architecture of the new century was in general both a continuance and a resurgence of that reaction. In most European countries, although not in England and America, the academic architecture of the late nineteenth century had represented little more than a resurgence or a continuance of certain aspects of decadent Romantic Classicism. Seeking a loftier pedigree, however, conservative architects often claimed that they were returning to traditions that had existed down to less than a century before their own day, quite as various reformers from Pugin to Voysey claimed they were renewing a link with one or another earlier period.

Relatively valid as this might still have been for certain aspects of the Queen Anne in England and the Colonial Revival in America, or for the parallel return to eighteenth-century modes in various Continental countries towards the end of the century, this theory had already run into serious difficulties long before 1900. A church might hope to be plausibly Gothic, but a railway station could only be Victorian Gothic; a skyscraper could not even be as Gothic as that. Moreover, the tide of eclecticism that had been rising since the mid eighteenth century was not turned back; for both the reaction of the 1880s and the later reaction of the early 1900s represented chiefly a rejection of earlier nineteenth-century innovations, especially of novel sorts of detail, rather than positive programmes of exclusive revival.

It is possible, at least for individual countries, to make statements concerning what occurred in the field of traditional design between the 1890s and the 1930s that are not wholly without significance. Of Holland it may be said, negatively, that no reaction of consequence towards the traditional occurred before the mid thirties. In Germany the boundary line between what was traditional and what was modern was always fairly vague; yet evidence of a return to stylistic reminiscence after the earliest years of the century is to be found even in the work of leaders of the first generation of modern architects such as Olbrich and Behrens (see Chapter 20). Farther to the North in Denmark and Sweden, the Copenhagen Town Hall of 1892-1902 (Plate 173A) by Martin Nyrop (1849-1923) and the contemporary post offices and fire stations in Stockholm and Malmö by Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1940) resemble Berlage’s Exchange in Amsterdam in their haunting parallelism to the Richardsonian of the eighties in America and even, to some extent, to the Shavian of the seventies in England. It is true that Absalons Gaard, built in 1901-2 by Vilhelm Fischer (1868-1914) in the square in front of Nyrop’s Town Hall, and even more notably the nearby Palace Hotel of 1907-10 by Anton Rosen (1859-1928), developed the freer implications of Nyrop’s manner with an almost Dutch verve. But more characteristically there followed in Scandinavia from about 1900, as elsewhere rather earlier, a programme of tasteful emulation of local versions of the Baroque and then, from shortly after 1910 in Denmark and a decade later in Sweden, an even more programmatic revival of Romantic Classicism.

In the Scandinavian development from 1890 to 1930 there is therefore a sort of ‘plot’ or recognizable sequence of phases despite their overlappings. What has been called ‘National Romanticism’, rooted in the cultural climate of the eighties, had a briefer span in Denmark than in Sweden. Nyrop’s Town Hall, begun in 1892, although in fact hardly more traditional than Berlage’s Amsterdam Exchange, introduced the mode, and the Stockholm Town Hall (Plate 174A and B) by Ragnar Östberg (1866-1945), completed thirty years later, brought it to a close. But its dominion in Denmark was never exclusive. Although the Custom House of 1897 at Aarhus by Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) with its picturesque high roofs and corner towers belongs to the mode, his Aarhus Theatre of 1898-1900 and his City Library there of 1898-1902 do not. Externally, the theatre is in the main of Early Renaissance design, although with considerable eclecticism in the detail; on the other hand, the library is even less traditional than Nyrop’s Town Hall. Both, moreover, have extremely rich plaster decoration inside that may not improperly be called Art Nouveau.

Wahlman’s Engelbrekt Church of 1904-14 in Stockholm, mentioned earlier as an exception to the general dominance of tradition in Scandinavia in these decades, and the Grundvig Church in Copenhagen (Plate 175B) by P. W. Jensen Klint (1853-1930), originally designed in 1913 and completed finally in 1926, are both closely related to the earlier National Romanticism of the eighties and nineties. By the time the latter was designed, however, this phase had for some years been superseded by a sort of Neo-Baroque still also very nationalistic in its choice of precedents and very romantic in their handling. Sometimes, however, this mode approached eighteenth-century revivalism of the sort that flourished in England and America. For example, the Marselisberg Slot, built by Kampmann for the Danish Crown Prince at Aarhus in 1899-1902, is the precise Danish equivalent of the best Neo-Georgian houses of the period in England and America.

Monuments such as the Masthugg Church (Plate 175A) of 1910-14 in Göteborg by Sigfrid Ericson (b. 1874) or the Högalid Church of 1916-23 in Stockholm by Ivar Tengbom (b. 1878) are hardly recognizable as Neo-Baroque to non-Swedish eyes, for they are composed with a sense of visual drama quite equal to Wahlman’s and very stylized in all their detailing. Ericson’s, in particular, has much in common with the American Shingle Style, although that was rarely used for churches and never for big ones of stone or brick construction.

In much secular Swedish work in the Neo-Baroque mode, such as the very typical ASEA Building of 1916-19 in Västeros by Erik Hahr (1869-1944), bold asymmetrical massing and onion-domed towers reflect the romanticism of the churches and also recall early stages of the revived Queen Anne in England in the seventies. Danish taste in the second decade of the century was much more severe than Swedish, as in fact it had always been, and the characteristic low-cost housing blocks in Copenhagen of this period, such as those of 1914 in the Amagertorv by Hansen & Hygom, are, so to say, only Neo-Baroque round the edges.

For the 1920s, however, the most significant phase was the third, that is the return to Romantic Classicism. This was initiated in Denmark by Carl Petersen (1874-1923) in his Faaborg Museum designed in 1912, and reached its climax immediately after the First World War. In Sweden the parallel phase began a bit later. By the time such men as Fisker in Denmark, Asplund in Sweden, and Aalto in Finland became ‘converts’ to the International Style in the late twenties, Scandinavian traditionalism had become almost as purged of stylistic detail as the architecture of Tony Garnier, or even that of Adolf Loos, had been for a generation.

On the whole the Danes and the Swedes produced the most lively and distinguished traditional architecture of the early decades of the century. Medievalizing churches in Scandinavia, such as the just-mentioned Grundvig Church in Copenhagen, where Jensen Klint followed Baltic modes that seemed strange and even Expressionist to foreign eyes, or Tengbom’s Högalid Church in Stockholm, superbly sited and actually much more Baroque than Gothic in its detail, make the respectable Neo-Perpendicular and Neo-Georgian exercises of contemporary Anglo-Saxon architects look timid and unimaginative. In both cases it is the stylization of proportion—the tremendous verticality—that makes them striking and full of a sort of vitality, at once nervous and lusty, which is comparable to that of the best High Victorian Gothic churches.

The finest medievalizing work is undoubtedly Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall of 1909-23.[512] This is an exceedingly eclectic combination of elements adapted from various periods both of the Swedish and the general European past. Superbly set at the water’s edge, it is sumptuously decorated inside and out with products of craftsmanship that are of a very high order of competence (Plate 174A and B). Despite his eclecticism, Östberg succeeded in imposing on all his disparate elements a high degree of personal stylization at the same time that he exploited the situation with marvellous dramatic effect. There is also a witty allusiveness suggesting the art of the theatre and the exotic fantasies of the late eighteenth century. The Stockholm Town Hall provides a sort of pageant-setting for the ceremonial life of the city, recalling the splendours of town-hall architecture of many epochs of the past, even though it lacks the straightforwardness and the integrity of Nyrop’s earlier Town Hall in Copenhagen.

The outside world had hardly had time to apprehend such new Scandinavian building in the years following the First World War before it became evident that architecture in these countries, hitherto on the whole in stylistic retard of developments elsewhere by almost a generation, had taken a surprisingly sharp turn. Petersen’s museum at Faaborg followed the local Romantic Classical models of C. F. Hansen far more literally than any of the contemporary admirers of Schinkel in Germany were doing. Brought to completion in 1916 during the First World War, it attracted very little foreign attention at the time it was built. But the Police Headquarters in Copenhagen by Kampmann, erected after the war in 1918-22, with its great colonnaded circular court, and the Øregaard School (Plate 176B) at 32 Gersonsvej in the Gentofte Kommune north of Copenhagen by Edward Thomsen (b. 1884) and G. B. Hagen (1873-1941) that followed in 1922-4 were at once noticed abroad. Both indeed are notable for their grandeur and for their simplicity, the latter realizing old Romantic Classical ideals with extraordinary success, the former coming closer to the academic work of McKim, Mead & White in America.

Still simpler, and not without a similar sort of understated grandeur surprising in such work, were the Danish low-cost housing blocks erected in the early twenties in succession to those of Hansen & Hygom. Those by Povl Baumann (b. 1878) in the Hans Tavsengade or the enormous Hornsbaekhus of 1923 by Kay Fisker (b. 1893), all in Copenhagen, are especially fine. The extreme precision, the elegant craftsmanship in brick, and the ascetic detailing of these blocks of flats, rivalling the contemporary ones by de Klerk and by Kramer in Amsterdam in quality but subscribing to a quite opposed aesthetic, are found also in many Danish private houses of the twenties built by Gotfred Tvede (1863-1947) and other architects both in the city and in the country.

Although Carl Westmann (1866-1936) in the Röhss Museum of Handicraft at Göteborg and Erik Lallerstedt (1864-1955) in the University of Architecture and Engineering at Stockholm approached the simplicity and fine craftsmanship in brick of the Danes, Swedish work of this period was in general richer and more robust, still reflecting the very eclectic sources of inspiration of Östberg’s Town Hall. However, in 1923 Neo-Classicism of a more attenuated and whimsical order than Petersen’s made a striking appearance in the buildings for the Göteborg Jubilee Exhibition. Of these the Congress Hall by Arvid Bjerke (b. 1880), with its serried clerestories carried on arched principals, was the boldest and least reminiscent. These Göteborg pavilions were very influential abroad in the mid and late twenties; detailing of Swedish inspiration then seemed to offer to traditional designers elsewhere a sort of Nordic spice with which to enliven the dead-level of the local eighteenth-century revivals.

Tengbom, deserting the romantic eclecticism and the emotional drama of his earlier Högalid Church, used a highly stylized, almost exposition-like, Neo-Classic mode for his Stockholm Concert Hall of 1920-6. However, the climax in Sweden—if not, indeed, the climax as regards all Scandinavia—came with Asplund’s Central Library in Stockholm, begun in 1921 and much simplified and refined as construction proceeded through the mid twenties. Rejecting the frivolous decorative detail of his Skandia Cinema of 1922-3, Asplund rivalled the Danes in reducing architecture to geometrical simplicity (Plate 176A). Thus he might almost seem to have passed beyond C. F. Hansen and Schinkel, the Scandinavian idols of the day, to draw the inspiration for his plain cylinder rising out of a cube directly from Ledoux or Boullée (Plate 2A); while at the base he ran a continuous band of windows derived from the newest architecture of these years in France, Germany, and Holland. This juxtaposition in the same edifice of Ledoux and Le Corbusier, so to put it, is rather awkward; but it is highly symptomatic of the very slight step that the Scandinavians had still to take in the late twenties when they gave up revived Romantic Classicism—already pared down to basic geometry in this library and in much Danish housing—to become outright converts to the International Style.

Although Sweden and Denmark produced no modern architect of the first generation of such individual distinction as the Finnish Saarinen, and must in any case be considered to have started out around 1900 from a position somewhat in retard of the French and the Germans, their early twentieth-century architecture largely avoided the stasis of traditionalism elsewhere, moving through overlapping but discrete phases to an early and sympathetic acceptance of the new international architecture of the twenties even before that decade was over. So clear a picture is hard to discern in most other countries.

In the United States the pattern of development between the 1890s and the 1930s, in so far as one can make out any pattern at all, was quite different; nor was there in America, in the way of England in the twenties, any Swedish influence of consequence. Movements roughly equivalent to the Scandinavian National Romanticism of 1900, the Richardsonian Romanesque and the Shingle Style, had flourished in the eighties and come to an end by 1900. The Academic Reaction that early succeeded them swept on, however, for some forty years. Despite the ruling eclecticism of taste that permitted an archaeological sort of revived Gothic still to thrive as a mode for churches and educational institutions, the more widely favoured Classical, Renaissance, and Georgian stylisms had all been initiated by McKim, Mead & White in the eighties and early nineties. The quality of their work began to decline[513] almost as soon as their professional primacy became assured; yet their best buildings of the first decade of the new century undoubtedly remain among the most competent, if unexciting, examples of traditional architecture then produced anywhere. Americans, not Frenchmen, were in these decades the worthiest products of the École des Beaux-Arts, and thus heirs of the strongest academic tradition in the world.

Whether McKim, Mead & White’s models be Renaissance, as in the University Club in New York (Plate 179) completed in 1900, the series of Branch Public Libraries there that were built over the next dozen years, and the Tiffany Building finished in 1906; or Classical, as in the Knickerbocker Trust in New York and the Bank of Montreal in Montreal, both completed in 1904, the very similar Girard Trust in Philadelphia of 1908, and the vast Pennsylvania Station in New York of 1906-10, this New York firm was clearly one of the truest successors to the nineteenth-century academic heritage that so many of the French were frittering away at the opening of the new century in a half-hearted flirtation with the Art Nouveau.

The Gare d’Orsay in Paris of 1898-1900 (Plate 183A) by V.-A.-F. Laloux (1856-1937) is no more to be compared with the Americans’ station than his Hôtel de Ville at Tours of 1904-5 with their clubs and banks—his best work, closer to the tradition of Duquesney and Hittorff, was an earlier station, that at Tours of 1895-8. Yet Laloux was often considered the most accomplished French traditional architect of the period.[514] Moreover, the McKim, Mead & White repertory of stylistic modes was wide: much wider than that of the French, although Laloux did produce in Saint-Martin at Tours, completed in 1904, a domed basilica still in the line of the earlier French Romanesquoid churches, though not at all of the quality of Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge of the sixties.

McKim, Mead & White exploited a vernacular Colonial Revival, as in the E. D. Morgan house of 1900 at Wheatley Hills, Long Island, as well as a more formal Neo-Georgian, at which several others, such as Delano & Aldrich[515] and Charles A. Platt (1861-1933), were quite as competent as they. But they could also shade their Classicism towards the Byzantine, as in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York completed in 1906, or adapt it to industrial uses, as in the I.R.T. Power Station in New York of 1903. They could even extend it upward into skyscrapers, as in the New York Municipal Building completed in 1908, concentrating all their attention on the ground floor and the crowning feature while ignoring the many-storeyed shank between; or spread it thin over large apartment houses such as that they built in 1918 at 998 Fifth Avenue, one of the best examples of the apparently solid blocks that walled one side of that thoroughfare above 57th Street facing Central Park and soon turned Park Avenue from 46th to 96th Street into a man-made canyon. The one thing they and their contemporaries seemed to be unable to do was to make their architecture live, even with the derivative vitality of the Scandinavians. Frozen ideals of stylistic ‘correctness’ stifled such expression of individual personality as gives real character to the work of a Tengbom or a Kampmann even when it comes closest to theirs.

In popular estimation certain buildings that made use of Gothic rather than Classical, Renaissance, or Georgian forms had a higher reputation. Cass Gilbert’s already-mentioned Woolworth Building finished in 1913 (Plate 178) initiated a considerable range of Gothic skyscrapers, including Howells & Hood’s Chicago Tribune Tower of 1923-5, but it remains in the judgement of posterity the most notable example of this sort of applied medieval design. Despite the considerable acclaim it received when new, such an equally characteristic Romanesquoid example as the Shelton Hotel of 1929 by Arthur Loomis Harmon (b. 1901) rivals Gilbert’s no more in interest than in height. The New York Telephone Company Building, completed in 1926 by Ralph Walker (b. 1889) at the beginning of his career with the firm of McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin, is more original. Its fortress-like masses, somewhat frivolously relieved by ornamental touches borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925, and its isolated location at the Hudson River’s edge, ensure that its bold silhouette will long vie, for the visitor arriving from abroad, with the so much taller and richer silhouette of the Woolworth Building. Most of the other individual big buildings of the twenties in New York and other large American cities are no more than incidental elements in the man-made mountain ranges of their skylines.

Curiously enough the ‘correct’ Gothic churches of this period do not receive today as favourable a response as the large-scale medievalizing secular work that is necessarily so very unlike real work of the Middle Ages. Those of Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), then the most esteemed Gothic practitioner, are lifeless and even crude beside Bodley’s and Pearson’s in England from which they largely derive. His first church, All Saints’, Ashmont, outside Boston which was built in 1892 is by its early date the least anachronistic. Cram’s former partner Goodhue’s St. Vincent Ferrer in New York completed in 1916, a competent and well-scaled example of Late Gothic that is more Continental than English in character, is rather more successful than any of their joint work or that which Cram did later with his other partner Ferguson. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924), responsible also, as has been noted, for the Spanish Colonial revival in California, moved on in the early twenties just before his death to an eclectic sort of semi-modernism best represented by his Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln. This is vaguely Byzantinesque, yet towered instead of being domed in what had been the tradition for state capitals ever since Bulfinch’s in Boston. His contemporary Los Angeles Public Library is starker and more like a project by Tony Garnier.

There were other architects to match McKim, Mead & White directly at their own academic exercises: most notably John Russell Pope (1874-1937), with his Temple of Scottish Rite in Washington completed in 1916, a grandiose reconstruction of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus; and Henry Bacon (1866-1924), with his Lincoln Memorial completed the following year (Plate 180). The latter is a peripteral Greek Doric temple of white marble with a high attic that might almost have been designed in Paris in the 1780s—no mean compliment. Equally French in spirit, but with no such evident prototypes, is the Grand Central Station in New York, built in 1903-13 by Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore.[516] More efficiently organized than the Pennsylvania Station, its concourse is one of the grandest spaces the early twentieth century ever enclosed (Plate 177B).

Compared to most work of these decades by French architects, all trained like the American leaders at the École des Beaux-Arts, the greater ‘correctness’ of the detailing of these buildings is notable. The boast of ‘good taste’ was not altogether a hollow one, although it is at best a negative rather than a positive criterion for architecture.

So extensive was American building production during the twenties that it is difficult to know how to epitomize it.[517] On the one hand, there are the later skyscrapers, essaying new stylistic garments as the older ones lost their piquancy. Even before the Romanesquoid of Harmon’s Shelton Hotel had come the massive simplicity of Walker’s Telephone Building. But for all the playing around with superficially novel decoration borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925 in the succeeding years, there was no basic renewal of form before next decade opened. Just after the crash of 1929 terminated the boom, the second skyscraper age came to a belated close with the erection in the early thirties of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s Empire State Building and the initiation of the Rockefeller Center project.[518] There a more urbanistic grouping, extending over a considerable area, replaced the earlier ideal of building single structures of ever greater height that had just reached its climax with the Empire State Building. This change in approach, recognized ever since as a turning point, was for a long time hardly at all followed up. However, the spaced skyscrapers of Pittsburgh’s rebuilt Golden Triangle and, since then, various projects of urban renewal for big and middle-sized cities from coast to coast are shifting the emphasis from individual structures to the wholesale reorganization of very large areas (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue).

In the terms of this chapter neither the Empire State Building nor Rockefeller Center are examples of traditional architecture, even if it is hardly proper to consider them ‘modern’ in the sense of the European architecture of their day. Although likewise no example of the new architecture as then understood in Europe like Howe & Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of 1932 (Plate 169), such a clean-cut skyscraper as Hood’s vertically striped Daily News Building in New York marked with more distinction than its outsize rivals the end of traditional design in this field.

Almost as remarkable as the skyscrapers of the twenties in size and elaboration were the groups of new buildings in which so many academic institutions, both new and old, variously housed themselves. The mode is Classical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built by Welles Bosworth (b. 1869) in 1912-15 on the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.; ‘Georgian-Colonial’ in the range of ‘Houses’ that Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott[519] built in the twenties for Harvard, also along the Charles River in Cambridge; it is Gothic at Cram & Ferguson’s Graduate College at Princeton, N.J. (Plate 177A) completed in 1913, in the Harkness Quadrangle, designed in 1917, and other later buildings for Yale at New Haven, Conn., by James Gamble Rogers (1867-1947), and at the Men’s Campus by Horace Trumbauer (1869-1938) at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; it is even, by exception, Byzantinoid at Cram’s Rice Institute at Houston, Texas, opened in 1912. The usual modes for such work were what was known as ‘Collegiate’ Gothic, based rather loosely on work at Oxford and Cambridge that was quite as likely to be nineteenth-century as medieval in date, and Neo-Georgian in an Anglo-American version, usually too grand to be plausibly Colonial yet too casually composed to be properly Anglo-Palladian. Curiously enough, the Gothic Cram’s Neo-Georgian Sweet Briar College in Virginia of 1901-6 is more successful than much of his own medievalizing work or than comparable work by those who specialized in eighteenth-century design.

The technical competence of American architects in this period was very great, the sums of money available almost unlimited, and the avowed standards of design only the vague ones of ‘taste’ and ‘correctness’, by this time little more than a schoolmasterish respect for precedent in detail, though rarely in over-all composition.[520] Far less than in Scandinavia is it possible to define the particular ways in which the period expressed itself, for express itself America in these decades undoubtedly did. Yet, when Americans of this period worked abroad, what they produced is readily distinguishable from the work of local traditionalists. The American Academy on the Gianicolo in Rome, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1913, has a certain chaste precision in its High Renaissance detailing no Italian could then have achieved even if he had wanted to. In London Helmle & Corbett’s[521] Bush House, rising between the Strand and Aldwych, has a clarity of form and a sense of urbanistic responsibility that few comparable buildings of its period designed by leading British architects display; up to a point, the same is true of Carrère & Hastings’s[522] Devonshire House in Piccadilly of 1924-6. The Ritz Hotel of 1906 across the street by the Anglo-French firm of Mewès & Davis,[523] both of them trained at the École des Beaux-Arts as was Thomas Hastings, is bolder in scale, less priggish, but it also lacks the suavity and finish of its neighbour. Bolder also, indeed too monumental for its size, is Barclays Bank of 1926 by W. Curtis Green (b. 1875), near by in Piccadilly across Arlington Street. Of more nearly comparable quality is Green’s earlier Westminster Bank of 1922-3 on the north side of Piccadilly.

Somewhere between the extreme professional competence of the traditional architects of America, a competence almost wholly anonymous in its results, and the intensely personal expression of the Scandinavians lies the pattern that the best traditional architecture, such as Green’s, followed in England in the early twentieth century. But before turning to that a good deal more should first be said concerning both the competence and the anonymity of American production, since that competence and even that anonymity came to be accepted throughout the western world as desirable[524] characteristics of modern architecture by a great many architects, at least in the mid century.

Partnerships were not unknown in the nineteenth century, although professional alliances between strong personalities rarely lasted for long. When the partner was not an equal the historian is often justified in writing, say, of G. G. Scott and forgetting Moffatt or, with rather less justification, only of Sullivan while ignoring Adler. But architectural firms that include three or more named partners, with still other members listed only on the letter-head; others such as D. H. Burnham and Company and Albert Kahn Incorporated, or ‘partnerships’, such as McKim, Mead & White or Cram & Ferguson, which continued to function under the same name for decades after the death of the original partners like so many firms of lawyers: these are more or less peculiar to the twentieth century and first became common in the United States. Today, moreover, an architect of European background like Mies van der Rohe does not undertake large-scale operations in America, such as the group of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology or a fortiori his tall blocks of flats in Chicago and the Seagram skyscraper in New York, without associating himself with such large local firms. Wright and Gropius solved the problem somewhat differently; but the Taliesin Fellowship and TAC provided them respectively with the relatively modest and idiosyncratic equivalents of the organization of the big Harrison & Abramowitz firm in New York or of one of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon.

The development of the characteristic large-scale American architectural office seems to have begun in Chicago. Burnham, on the death of his designing partner Root in 1891, just after they had undertaken the primary responsibility for the general planning and building of the World’s Fair of 1893, had to set up an organization of which he was no more than the executive head. But the office of McKim, his closest associate in carrying out the Fair, was certainly already far advanced along a parallel road. There is a definite connexion here also with the rise of the skyscraper, for those very large commercial buildings already required a vast amount of uninspired draughting that could be efficiently undertaken only by a large force of assistants working in what came later to be derisively called ‘plan-factories’.

The same is even more true of industrial work. Here Albert Kahn took the lead around 1905 in developing a type of subdivision and flow of work in his office in Detroit comparable to the new methods of mass-production that his motor-car factories were specifically designed to facilitate. Such patterns are found at their extreme in the group[525] of firms that together produced Rockefeller Center, in the Harrison & Abramowitz office which is in effect their heir, and in the largely post-war expansion of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Abroad, more characteristically, such organizations have been built up in offices under a public authority such as those of the London and the Hertfordshire County Councils, the City Architects’ Offices in various German cities, or the Banco Obrero housing agency in Venezuela.

‘Plan-factories’ are undoubtedly conducive to speed and to a certain sort of competence in the execution of large projects, but it must be evident that the architecture they produce will necessarily be anonymous. In defining the character of their competence, moreover, one must be careful not to imply too much. Only such team-work, perhaps, can organize the logistics of building production in such a way that extensive and ramified ventures are carried rapidly to completion, a desideratum of the first order in a boom period for skyscrapers that must be finished quickly in order to begin repaying their enormous cost. Efficiency is of a different sort of consequence where large-scale building schemes of a more public and social nature are being undertaken, but none the less extremely important. Le Corbusier’s Unité at Marseilles, produced without an elaborate office organization, took some six years to build; as a result it was no longer ‘low-cost housing’ when it was finally completed.

Yet competence in the sections of a big office that deal with the plumbing, say, or the electrical system is no assurance that the quite different sort of competence required in the design department will be available. Moreover, a brilliant initial design may or may not survive intact the various modifications that other departments bring to it as the preparatory paper-work for the building moves through successive stages to ultimate execution. At best, even when a particular designer’s name is associated with a particular building, as is that of Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Lever House (Plate 189), his responsibility is of a very different order from Wright’s for the Price Tower-although not perhaps so different from Mies’s for the Seagram skyscraper.

The situation in England in the first third of the century was rather different from that in America despite a nineteenth-century inheritance which was in many aspects common to both countries. One architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, had a personal capacity for invention along traditional lines superior to that of any American of his generation. This was not, however, of the order of individualistic intensity of an Östberg or a Jensen Klint, nor was he able, in the way of an Asplund or even a Hood, to accept around 1930 the discipline of the newer architecture of the day. Lutyens built no skyscrapers, nor did he develop the sort of office organization that made them possible in America. This was, however, occurring to some extent by the twenties and thirties in other big English offices, such as those of Sir John Burnet & Tait[526] and of Curtis Green.

All the same, it fell to Lutyens’s lot to build some of the biggest business structures erected anywhere outside America in these years, and his career culminated in the design and construction of an imperial capital such as came the way of no American. His competence was of a more nineteenth-century order than that of the Americans, and there was certainly nothing anonymous about his work. He was, moreover, still an inspiriting figure in an England where architecture, under the difficult economic conditions since the last war, tended to become anonymous without becoming especially competent, except for public housing and for schools (see Chapter 25).

Lutyens’s beginnings were very remote from the world of business and governmental buildings with which his career wound up (see Chapter 15). Very early houses, such as Ruckmans of 1894 at Oakwood Park or Sullingstead of 1896 at Hascombe, both in Surrey, followed directly in the line of Shaw’s Surrey manor-houses with their tile-hung walls, free and easy composition, and simple domesticity of tone. They are, indeed, superior to most of Shaw’s—the first of which, Glen Andred, was built almost thirty years earlier and the last about this time—because of Lutyens’s respect for Webb and the resultant superiority of his craftsmanship. In his finest early houses, such as Deanery Gardens at Sonning of 1901 (Plate 182B), he rivalled Voysey. He was already inclined, however, like Webb in many of his later houses, to use considerable stylistic detail, usually Neo-Georgian, in his interiors, and here and there on exteriors as well.

Perhaps the revolution—or counter-revolution—in his development represented by his Heathcote of 1906 at Ilkley in Yorkshire has been somewhat exaggerated. Yet the design of this, completely symmetrical and quite elaborately Palladian in detail, did represent as great a shift in approach, taken in one jump, as that from Shaw’s Glen Andred of the late sixties to his Chesters of the early nineties. It was, however, practically the same shift. Eclectic like almost all the traditional architects of his generation, Lutyens still occasionally remodelled medieval houses, but the main line of his development henceforth was certainly Neo-Georgian. Yet it was usually Neo-Georgian with an important difference from what had become by this time in England as in America a rather drearily codified mode. Nashdom at Taplow in Buckinghamshire, built in 1909, is a vast white-painted house, plain, regular, massive, and hardly at all archaeological. Yet this is so handsomely proportioned and so well built that one could well believe it to be the result of some generations-long process of accretion in the eighteenth century. Great Maytham in Kent of 1910 is Queen Anne, but not the Queen Anne of the 1870s. Here a great mansion of the early eighteenth century was re-created with such a plausibility of craftsmanship that after only half a century it was hard to believe it was not two hundred and fifty years old. A somewhat smaller house, the Salutation at Sandwich of 1912, is similar and perhaps even more remarkable as an example of what is almost ‘productive archaeology’ on the part of a man who was not, in fact, at all archaeologically minded. Such houses are the twentieth-century equivalents of Devey’s in the nineteenth century, but they often have a witty originality in the handling of traditional detail that has aptly been called ‘naughty’ and is peculiarly personal to Lutyens.[527]

If the Georgian had to be revived in the way of the Greek and the Gothic, it could hardly have been done with more competence and more animation; certainly the Americans of Lutyens’s generation rarely excelled so notably in this particular field, although many of the once highly esteemed firms mentioned earlier positively specialized in it. Beside these houses of Lutyens, the Neo-Georgian of the Shepley firm’s Harvard Houses or Cram’s Sweet Briar College is merely routine. Yet in such work Lutyens was still only a country-house architect.

Before discussing Lutyens’s work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, with which his association began in 1908, something should be said concerning the ‘Garden City’ movement[528] in general. In 1892 Ebenezer Howard[529] (1850-1928) published Tomorrow. A Peaceful Path to Reform, better known by the title of the edition of 1902 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Howard’s opportunity to realize his aspirations for a new sort of town began with the acquisition of land at Letchworth in 1903, but the construction of the Letchworth Garden City on the plans of Sir Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) and his partner Richard Barry Parker actually post-dates their work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb. They had, however, already laid out a ‘model village’ for a chocolate manufacturer at New Earswick near York in 1904.

In 1907 Dame Henrietta Barnett set out to realize some aspects of the Garden City ideal on the outskirts of London. The next year land was acquired near Golders Green on the far side of Hampstead Heath and the suburb planned as a whole by Parker & Unwin.[530] Lutyens was invited to plan and design the group of public buildings in the centre and their immediate setting (Figure 54). This town centre was eventually largely completed, most of it from Lutyens’s design, and the two churches, with the contiguous squares, provide some of his finest work. His work here certainly set a pace of coherence and urbanity that was unfortunately not maintained in later Garden Cities such as Welwyn, begun in 1919, that followed the rather more diffuse plan of Letchworth.

Welwyn, however, is of importance in the history of town-planning because it was not merely a residential development but included from the first an industrial estate as well. Thus it was a more complete entity and the prototype of the English ‘New Towns’ initiated after the Second World War. The Barnett project was originally, and has remained, an upper-middle-class suburb; yet it is unique for the orderliness and the distinction of the public buildings that Lutyens provided at the centre and the terrace-framed squares that flank them.

St Jude’s, the Anglican church, begun in 1910 and not finally completed at the west end until 1933, is Lutyens’s principal ecclesiastical work, his Catholic cathedral in Liverpool having been barely begun before his death. Lacking the emotional drama of the Scandinavian churches of its period, St Jude’s has nevertheless a certain real boldness of silhouette, produced by rather eclectic means, and an elegance of craftsmanship in the brickwork that is in the finest tradition of the Gothic Revival. Yet, being by Lutyens, it is hardly at all medieval. The tall crossing tower may have slight suggestions of the Norman in its detailing and a cathedral-like scale, but in general the exterior is in a vaguely seventeenth-century vernacular descending from the later work of Shaw and Webb.

The interior, rather surprisingly, proves to be almost High Renaissance in character; there is even a barrel vault over the nave. On the other hand, the timberwork of the roofs of the aisles, which descend so low on either side, is of a structural peculiarity recalling Webb at his crankiest if not, indeed, Butterfield. Except for the highly exceptional London church of the Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, built by J. D. Sedding (1837-91) in 1887-8, so truly Palladian—rather than Anglo-Palladian—internally as almost to persuade one that it is Italian, no non-Gothic church of this quality had been built in England for two generations. Lutyens’s more modest Free Church is rather similar, both inside and out, but considerably less effective.

To surround two sides of both North Square and South Square beside the churches Lutyens revived the Early Georgian terrace, varying the composition ingeniously and handling the beautifully laid bricks in two colours, reddish and greyish, with a fascinating subtlety. Unfortunately such truly urban housing stood no chance with the clientèle drawn to this and other Garden Cities as against the appeal of free-standing or semi-detached houses. No general revival of the terrace occurred. But Parker & Unwin and their emulators achieved in individual houses a standard of semi-traditional suavity that represents one of the principal English achievements of the period, and something frequently imitated abroad.

Lutyens’s call to lay out New Delhi as the capital of India followed in 1911, and the first plans were made before 1914. It was a commission better suited to his leaping imagination than the modest domesticity of an English Garden City. Construction of the buildings, notably the enormous Viceroy’s House, began only in 1920.[531] Not since L’Enfant laid out Washington had a fiat city of such amplitude and grandeur been conceived, much less even partly executed. The Viceroy’s House, finally finished in 1931, is official residence, centre of administration, and focus of the whole scheme—a tour de force for which, from the Queen Anne, the Neo-Georgian, and the Palladian, Lutyens lifted his sights to a Roman scale (Plate 181). The result is grand and broad, adapted to the climate, and even reminiscent of the Indian architectural past in some of its forms and features. Towards the designing of such a major monument generations of Frenchmen and others who studied at the Beaux-Arts had been prepared; there is a certain irony that this opportunity came to an Englishman, trained in the most private and individualistic English way.

Nashdom and Great Maytham represent a side of Lutyens’s mature talent that follows rather directly from Webb’s Smeaton Manor of the seventies (Plate 102A). The work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and above all that at Delhi, represents another side. On the one side he had a few worthy rivals: Leonard A. S. Stokes (1858-1925)[532] was a more adventurous architect than he around 1900, with some leaning towards the Art Nouveau; Shaw’s pupil Newton was almost as competent at Neo-Georgian work. Those who tried to rival him on the other side, however, Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942), a pupil of Norman Shaw, and Sir Herbert Baker (1862-1946), a pupil of Ernest George, hardly deserve mention, even though their work bulks very large on the London scene.

Blomfield’s watered-down version of Shaw’s quadrant façade of the Piccadilly Hotel, carried out in the twenties, has been mentioned. Better examples of what may be called in W. S. Gilbert’s terms his ‘not too French, French’ academicism face Piccadilly Circus. But his pretensions to cosmopolitanism, although based on a very considerable knowledge of French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture, did not serve him as well as Lutyens’s purely English background in continuing along the ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ line of Shaw’s late work.

Baker’s outrageous rape of Soane’s masterpiece, the Bank of England, carried out over the years 1921-37, has also been mentioned; it was literally a fate worse than death. Despite a half-hearted decision to preserve a good deal of the relatively unimportant exterior, the Tivoli Corner was pointlessly stripped of its idiosyncratic crown, presumably in the name of Baker’s superior ‘taste’. His South Africa House of 1935, moreover, all but ruins Trafalgar Square.

Lutyens’s Midland Bank of 1924, near the Bank of England in Poultry, like Baker’s bank almost a skyscraper in size if not in height, at least required the destruction of no earlier work of distinction and is undoubtedly more consistently and personally designed. Yet the cliff-like massiveness of its walls, with even less evidence of the underlying structural skeleton than in office buildings of this period by American architects, is almost as anti-urbanistic as Baker’s Bank of England. Because of the very narrow streets of the area, the filling up of the City of London with such structures, very few of them even of this degree of intrinsic interest, was a tragedy of the twenties that even bombing did not put right. The superiority of Corbett’s Bush House, not in the rather flat detailing but in the exploitation of the fine site at the foot of Kingsway, and even in the politeness of the plain foil it offers to the Baroque elaboration of Gibbs’s St Mary-le-Strand, is very notable.

Lutyens’s other big Midland Bank buildings, one of 1928 in Leadenhall Street in the City and one of 1929 in King Street in Manchester, are not much of an improvement over that in Poultry. However, his elegant little Midland Bank of 1922 in Piccadilly in front of Wren’s St James’s is a rich and inventive exercise in the vein of Wren built of brick and stone. Anachronistic as such a design must be considered, the verve of the pastiche nevertheless has a distinct appeal, like a plausibly realistic setting on the stage.

Lutyens’s most successful big business building is doubtless Britannic House of 1924-7. This profits from its site between Finsbury Circus and Moorgate Street, the curve of the Circus giving to the eastern front a certain major Baroque drama that is echoed in the versatile play with seventeenth-eighteenth-century motifs in the detailing. But one may well prefer the massively mock-Egyptian effect of Adelaide House by London Bridge, built by Sir John Burnet & Tait in 1924-5. This, at least, makes some approach to the new ideals of the Continent in these years. Burnet, moreover, had been for decades one of the most competent British practitioners in a local version of the international Beaux-Arts mode, as his King Edward VII wing of the British Museum of 1904 notably illustrates. Three years later Tait was the first English-born architect[533] to attempt to build in the International Style, as has been mentioned earlier. The closest Lutyens came to the Continental modes of the twenties was in his public housing.

Public housing in England between the wars was generally rather routine in design despite the statistical importance of its social achievement, lacking either the drama of the Dutch or the restraint of the Scandinavians. On the one occasion when Lutyens turned his attention to this field, on the Grosvenor Estate in Westminster in 1928, he succeeded beyond all expectation. The bold device of chequering all the façades of his blocks of flats in alternate oblongs of brickwork, plain stucco panels, and windows is somewhat inhuman in scale but notably effective. The contrast is striking to the work of the twenties by the London County Council Architect’s Office. In that a type of design not unsuited to semi-detached houses in middle-class suburbs was spread thin over vast many-storeyed masses.

Lutyens, one feels, in a different time and place—a generation earlier in England, say, or a generation later—might have been a greater architect. But even as his career actually worked out, he is not unworthy to occupy the place given him here as the ‘last traditionalist’. Since his death there has not been, either in England or elsewhere, any traditional or even semi-traditional building of consequence, unless one wishes to consider Perret’s work at Le Havre in the latter category.

The traditional architecture of the first third of the twentieth century in Italy and France, headquarters in so many ways of the major architectural traditions of the western world, is disappointing beside that of the countries discussed so far. In the case of France, the situation is confused by the modulation of Perret’s style towards a semi-traditional Classicism which, by the thirties, official and academic taste was ready to meet half-way. In Italy Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960), the son of the architect of the Academy of Fine Arts in the Via Nazionale in Rome, always had more vitality than the French of his generation other than Perret. From the new città bassa of Bergamo, for which he won the competition in 1907 and which was executed in 1922-4, through his general responsibility for the Terza Roma, Mussolini’s vast project for a new capital between old Rome and Ostia which was to have opened with an exhibition in 1942, there is a certain assurance and amplitude of scale lacking in most contemporary work in France. Mussolini, in the middle years of Fascism, was not averse to modern architecture, as we have seen. When, under German influence, he began to turn against the International Style the choice of Piacentini to set a neo-imperial pace was as natural as Hitler’s return to the modes of twenty years earlier in Germany. Moreover, from the public buildings of Bergamo through the ‘New Towns’ below Rome—Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, etc., mostly destroyed during the Second World War—to the arcaded cube of La Padulla’s Palace of Italian Civilization at the Terza Roma, nicknamed by Italians the ‘Square Colosseum’, fine materials, clean if familiar proportions, and excellent craftsmanship provide certain lasting qualities not unworthy of Italian national traditions. Where Fascist work is interpolated in an earlier urbanistic scheme, as along the Via Roma in Turin between the Piazza San Carlo and the Piazza Carlo Felice, the new buildings of 1938—here by Piacentini—fit as well with the seventeenth-century buildings of the one as with the nineteenth-century ones of the other. For all their obviousness, moreover, the colonnades of the Via Roma, all of polished granite monoliths, have a truly Roman scale and dignity. Even the Square Colosseum has a Chirico-like obsessive force, like something out of a dream; while the big unfinished structures around it, only now being completed, are not altogether without virtues to balance the mid century conventionality of those that have lately risen beside them.

To pursue the subject of traditional architecture further would be merely to explore what can now be seen to have been not so much a cul-de-sac as a road without a goal. The standards of traditionalism—standards of ‘taste’, of ‘literacy’, of ingenious adaptation—were still on the whole nineteenth-century ones. Yet down into the thirties, traditional buildings were the big trees in the forest of twentieth-century architecture; with the rise of a new range of giants in the forest, the seedlings from which they grew seem now to have been more significant: Asplund’s Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and his Crematorium there of 1935-40 tend to obscure our vision of his earlier Library, although that is perhaps finer considered absolutely. So also the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society skyscraper of 1932, so clearly the immediate ancestor of those built in the last decade, draws attention away from the Woolworth Building. In England continuity has been so completely broken that it is hard to realize how much the ‘Mannerist’ façade-treatment of Drake & Lasdun’s tall housing slabs of 1946-56 on the Paddington Estate has in common with Lutyens’s chequered Grosvenor Estate blocks of thirty years ago. However the future may evaluate the achievements of the traditional architects of the early twentieth century, the chapter is now closed.

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