Architecture

To describe the state of architecture in the late forties and early fifties, before and after the mid-point of this century, is far more difficult than to sketch its condition a hundred and fifty years earlier, as the first chapter of this book attempted. The western world was enormously larger in geographical extent, vastly more populous, and as a result very much more productive of buildings of all types and at all levels of quality. Many of the types most important in the twentieth century—big business buildings, low-cost public housing, facilities for transportation such as bus stations and airports—did not exist in 1800. These difficulties are objective and merely imply that the sampling of executed work must be relatively much more limited. But the very limited selection provided here is inevitably influenced by subjective criteria. The activity of two generations of historians writing on the architecture of the early nineteenth century has produced something approaching a consensus of opinion as to what is and what is not important or characteristic in that period. There remains, of course, much to be discovered concerning building in the decades around 1800, particularly as interest rises in the technical aspects of the story; yet the engineers^[534] are unlikely ever to force the Soanes and the Schinkels out of the centre of the picture: moreover, men like Latrobe and Mills were themselves as much engineers as architects.

Already, in carrying the story of the production of the leading architects of the first and second generations of modern architecture down to the mid fifties, a certain emphasis has been given to their work in the production of the last decades. The decisions as to what to include in rounding out the picture are critical ones hardly comparable to the relatively objective historical process of selection that controls in the First and Second Parts of this book. The very extent in time of what should be considered ‘the present’ is a subjective matter. I have known American architectural students whose present was so limited that they had never heard of Perret! To anyone under thirty the effective present will hardly extend backward more than five or ten years. To keep this chapter still more or less historical I have saved consideration of the years since the later fifties for an Epilogue.

In most countries of the western world the Second World War occasioned a hiatus in construction that lasted nearly a full decade from the slowing down that came with Munich in the late thirties to the general revival of building activity in the late forties. There is therefore a real lack of continuity between pre-war and post-war building except in those countries that remained neutral. But just as the break in the continuity of building production around 1800 resulting from the Napoleonic Wars was a limited, not an absolute, phenomenon, since the truly revolutionary developments in architecture preceded rather than followed its onset, so there was in the last post-war period very little to be recognized at first that had not had its beginnings well before 1939.

The perspective of the war seemed somehow to flatten out some of the architectural episodes deemed to be significant in the mid thirties, not alone the Nazi and late Fascist reaction but such minor symptoms of dissatisfaction with the general line that architectural development had taken internationally since the early twenties as the rise of the Bay Region School^[535] in America and of the New Empiricism in Europe. Historians are still rather uncertain how much weight to give to these matters. Once they lost the topicality of current events they seemed no more and no less significant than the rather similar critical flurries that came later concerning the ‘New Brutalism’ and ‘Neo-Liberty’.^[536] Such flurries cannot be entirely ignored;^[537] yet the general emendation of the rigid doctrines of the ‘International Style’ was more strikingly illustrated by the continued high esteem of Wright’s latest productions and, a fortiori, by the warm critical reception of Le Corbusier’s remarkable church at Ronchamp than by any of the buildings that illustrated the schismatic reactions of the decade of the thirties. The accepted definitions of modern architecture had undoubtedly become very much looser than they were a generation earlier, partly as a result of various abortive attempts at more thoroughgoing revolt. But the greatest individualists were, paradoxically, not young men^[538] in their thirties, but older masters in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties.

The greatest change in the post-war architectural scene, a change that began gradually during the pre-war years, was the shift in the geographical pattern. No longer did France, Germany, and Holland occupy the centre of the stage. The rise of the United States to great prominence, continuing a development already begun in the 1870s, was not surprising. Far more surprising was the rise in the importance of Italy and Japan, not only because of their actual achievements, especially in concrete construction in both cases, but as major influences. This was presaged in Italy by the work of Terragni and of Figini & Pollini in the mid thirties and was hardly inhibited there by the ambiguities of the later Fascist attitude towards architecture just before the Second World War. The post-war British achievement was more canalized; yet it was of an autochthonous character which a long-term consideration of English architectural abilities and disabilities makes more intelligible than that flurry of new ideas, so largely of foreign origin, characterizing the mid thirties in England.

The Scandinavian countries retained their position of prominence but not pre-eminence in the international architectural scene. In contrast to their long-recognized virtues, some rather less relevant today than they once were, must be set the very different contribution of the Latin American countries, whose entry on the international scene all but post-dates the war. Production there was hardly worth mentioning a hundred and fifty years ago; by the late forties Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela were making a contribution on a par, in quantity and even in quality, with older and richer countries. Moreover, while the West was more and more losing political control of Africa and Asia, its cultural influence on those continents did not necessarily decline, indeed as regards architecture it probably increased. Modern architecture, originally developed to utilize to the full the most advanced technologies, was found to serve especially well also in areas where technology was least advanced. Indeed, the most characteristic building material of modern architecture, ferro-concrete, is often exploited most ingeniously in countries where materials are dear and labour cheap.

Not only did many outlying parts of the world import architects along with other technicians from the West; Asia, which lay almost entirely outside the field of western culture a century and a half ago, produced a great modern school in Japan. Various Dominions and dependencies—South Africa, Australia, Puerto Rico, for example—likewise began to have active groups of local practitioners operating in close consort of principle with those of Europe and North America.

With so wide a range of lively activity, no continent-by-continent, much less country-by-country, survey of modern architecture is possible in a single short chapter. Even allowing for all the enormous climatic and cultural differences that still affect architectural production, there was still sufficient identity of principle in architecture throughout most of the world to justify an international consideration of post-war achievement in terms of various building types, moving from the macrocosm down to the microcosm—from the whole city as a planned product of architectural design to the individual dwelling-house.

Despite its vast productive capacity, the old western world in the mid twentieth century created rather fewer urban entities of distinction than did the nineteenth. Partly, this was because the building of cities necessarily remains a slower process than the building of individual structures, even in an age when there are many fiat towns and also much concerted rebuilding of older cities partially cleared by bombing in the Second World War. Even more, perhaps, it is because it takes far longer for the ‘planning’ ideals of architects in any period to achieve a degree of public acceptance sufficient to ensure over decades proper control of layout and construction—or reconstruction—of whole cities than to find clients, even governmental clients, for single buildings or for extensive, but piecemeal, social projects.

Perret’s Le Havre (Plate 140A) has earlier been characterized as the realization—notable even if belated—of ideals that date back before the First World War. None of the post-war ‘New Towns’ of England were complete enough by the mid fifties to be apprehensible as urban entities; for the most part they were still only large-scale housing developments—suburbs in search of a city, so to say—realizing at a considerably lower economic level the ideals of the Garden Cities of fifty years before. Better than the English examples and indicative of the widespread acceptance of Garden-City ideals was Vållingby in Sweden.

More complete urban entities of the mid century could be seen in such heavily bombed and largely rebuilt cities as Coventry in England or Hanover in Germany; yet in neither case was the architectural achievement of the highest contemporary order. They should be compared for quality with Napoleon III’s Paris or Francis Joseph’s Vienna rather than with Alexander I’s Petersburg or Ludwig I’s Munich, and even that comparison is not always very favourable to them.

In the extensive and almost explosive expansion and reconstruction of various Latin American cities it was only in Caracas that the planner Maurice Rotival was able to keep a bit ahead of the builders. But even Caracas still had only samples of the characteristic new urbanism of the mid twentieth century: two or three isolated skyscrapers and a housing development, the Cerro Piloto, differing from those in other parts of the world chiefly by its very great extent and its superb mountain-backed site. The North American cities that were growing fastest, Houston or Los Angeles or Miami Beach or Toronto in Canada, were at least as chaotic as the Latin American ones, and neither the quantity nor the quality of the individual buildings was as high. Against the eruptive growth of a city like São Paulo in Brazil might be better balanced such a North American programme of large-scale rebuilding as that which had already cleared the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh, replacing typical nineteenth-century urban congestion with an open park and spaced cruciform skyscrapers. The new capital of Brazil, Brasilia, was not planned by Lúcio Costa even on paper until 1957.

The mid twentieth century had no full-scale cities that properly exemplified the highest ideals of modern architects. It would be necessary to wait, with fingers crossed, even to see the results of such piecemeal projects of reconstruction as that proposed by Sir William Holford for the bombed district around St Paul’s Cathedral in London,^[539] and still longer for such complete cities as Brasilia and Chandigarh where, however, the public buildings by Le Corbusier were in the mid fifties rapidly rising. But there were also in existence already certain special entities of almost urban scale planned since the Second World War that deserve attention. Notable are the ‘university cities’, complete educational plants located on new terrain, planned as a whole and designed as regards their individual buildings either by a single team of architects or by several teams whose work was closely co-ordinated from start to finish. The most remarkable of these is that of the University of Mexico, but even here the difference in quality between such highly original structures as the Olympic Stadium of Augusto Perez Palacios (b. 1909), Raúl Salinas Moro, and Jorge Bravo Jiménez of 1951-2, with its fine relief mosaic by Diego Rivera, or the Central Library of Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra, and Juan Martinez de Velasco of 1951-3, with its stack tower entirely covered with mosaics designed by O’Gorman, and certain of the other equally large and prominent buildings is very notable (Plate 184). The university city of Rio de Janeiro, for which Le Corbusier was originally called to Brazil to provide a plan in 1936, was by no means so far advanced; but the control of the design of all the principal buildings by one architect, Jorge Moreira (b. 1904), who is one of the three or four ablest in Brazil, seemed to promise a homogeneity of character and a distinction of finish unique in this field. Among several other Latin American examples begun and partly built by the mid fifties, that at Caracas by Carlos Raúl Villanueva (b. 1900) rivals in its principal building, the Aula Magna of 1952-3 with its extraordinary acoustic ceiling by the technician Robert Newman and the sculptor Sandy Calder, the achievement of the Mexicans.

Of a very different character indeed, and initiated much earlier, is the University of Aarhus^[540] in Denmark for which Kay Fisker, C. F. Møller (b. 1898), and Povl Stegmann (1888-1944) won the competition in 1931. Some of its many buildings date from before the Second World War: professors’ houses of 1933, student residences of 1934, museum of natural history of 1937-8; while most of the classroom buildings were actually erected in the war years 1942-6. The work continues in the hands of Møller, and the layout of the beautiful sloping site was by C. Th. Sørenson (b. 1893). Built of buff brick with tile roofs of medium pitch, the general effect is much quieter than that of the Latin American university cities with their tall ferro-concrete buildings, crisply shaped and distinguished both by a bold use of colour and the conspicuous incorporation of work by distinguished painters and sculptors. At first sight—and to the prejudiced—the University of Aarhus may appear more conservative; but the range of the new architecture is recognized today as being wider than it was thirty years ago, and Møller’s aula in its very different way is quite as advanced as Villanueva’s; or even, for that matter, as the shell-domed auditorium of 1952-5 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., by Eero Saarinen (1910-61).

One of the earliest individual building types to find wholly untraditional expression was the large block of offices. The skyscraper reached maturity early in the hands of Sullivan in Chicago; the later vagaries of the form in New York did not recommend it to European emulation, although skyscraper projects by Mies, by Gropius, and by Le Corbusier were among the most notable early evidences of the birth—on paper—of a new architecture in the years 1919-22. Howe & Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of a decade later was the first large-scale example of the acceptance in America of the new architecture of Europe; but during the thirties skyscraper-building languished, and many critics thought that their day was already over. In many parts of the world that day had yet to dawn, and Europe still had very few notable examples to offer, but in the New World the fifties saw the start of a new wave of skyscraper building by no means confined to the United States. For the first time since the nineties a rather considerable number of really distinguished examples were being built in both North and South American cities. Wright’s Price Tower at Bartlesville, Okla., a relatively modest one, and Mies and Johnson’s Seagram Building in New York have both been mentioned already. Diagonally across Park Avenue in New York from the site of the Seagram tower stands the first epoch-making post-war skyscraper in New York, Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft (b. 1909) of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill firm and built in 1950-2 (Plate 189). The almost completely glazed curtain-walls of the east and west sides of the United Nations Secretariat in New York—built in 1947-50 by Wallace K. Harrison (b. 1895) and his partner Max Abramowitz (b. 1908) but incorporating ideas provided by an international panel of which Le Corbusier and Niemeyer were members—are carried round three sides of Bunshaft’s slab. More significant, however, is the fact that this slab, rising like the isolated United Nations building with no setbacks, covers only a portion of the available site. Thus it stands in its own envelope of space carved, as it were, out of the solid canyon of Park Avenue, just as Mies and Johnson would later set their building back 100 feet from the avenue and well in from both the side streets also. Their ‘plaza’ is unconfined; Bunshaft’s open space is defined by a mezzanine on pilotis carried round an unroofed court.

Reacting against the almost totally glazed curtain-wall of his U.N. Secretariat, a type of sheathing for large urban structures then spreading very rapidly to other countries, Harrison on the Alcoa Building of 1952 in Pittsburgh used storey-high panels of aluminium cut by relatively small windows. This alternative type of sheathing has been less exploited since, however, than the more completely glazed sort. There was a curious revival of Expressionist feeling in the complex angular design of the glazed lobby of the Alcoa Building that contrasted sharply with the paradigmatic expression of the ‘International Style’ seen in the Equitable Building in Portland, Ore., of 1948 by Pietro Belluschi (b. 1899), the earliest of the interesting post-war skyscrapers. A later Western skyscraper, the Mile-High Center in Denver, Col., completed by I. M. Pei (b. 1907) in 1955, followed almost more closely the formula of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago than he did himself in the design of the Seagram Building.

It is invidious to mention only these few North American examples, but production of similar skyscrapers was already so nation-wide in the United States and in Canada that one can still hardly hope to see the individual trees for the forest. There are good reasons why those selected for illustration or mention are likely to remain conspicuous and not become lost in the crowd. But skyscrapers are no longer a prerogative of North America; some of the finest were rising in Latin America, and these would before long be rivalled by European examples already projected or even under construction by 1955.

It is a mistake to assume that North Americans housed business only in skyscrapers. More and more large corporations were moving their headquarters to the open country. Quite as significant as Lever House in the production of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the mid fifties was the 700-foot-square but only four-storeyed office plant of the Connecticut General Insurance Company of 1955-7, set in a park of eighteenth-century size and amenity at Bloomfield, Conn., some ten miles outside Hartford, the insurance capital. Luxury of materials, white marble and granite as well as aluminium, makes up somewhat for the rigid asceticism of the standardized walls, while four interior court gardens by Noguchi and three pink granite figures by him on the slope beyond the ‘artificial water’ in which swans swim about below the all-glass cafeteria further balance the expression of crisp efficiency with something warmer and more humane.

In most Latin American cities all-glass walls are impractical because of the heat and the glare of the sun. As a result, architects have developed various versions of the sun-break system introduced twenty years ago on the first tall modern building to be erected in that part of the world, the Ministry of Education in Rio; glazed curtain-walls were by no means unknown, however. The egg-crate sun-breaks of the Edificio C.B.I. of 1948-51 in São Paulo by Lucjan Korngold (b. 1897) and the horizontally patterned grid of the Retiro Odontológico of 1953-4 in Havana by Antonio Quintana Simonetti and Manuel A. Rubio give these buildings a very different look from such examples of more North American character as the building in the Calle de Niza at the corner of the Calle de Londres in Mexico City of 1952-3 by Juan Sordo Madaleno (b. 1916), or that of the Suramericana de Seguros in the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada in Bogotá of 1954 by Cuéllar, Serrano, Gomez & Co.

The most ingenious and best designed Latin American skyscraper of the fifties, however, is the completely isolated Edificio Polar of 1953-4 at the Plaza Venezuela in Caracas. This was built by Martin Vegas Pacheco (b. 1926), a pupil of Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and his partner José Miguel Galia, a pupil of the one distinguished South American architect of the first modern generation, Julio Vilamajó, at the University of Montevideo. Here the structure was reduced to four ferro-concrete piers from which the curtain-walls were cantilevered out 11 feet on all four sides. The curtain-walls have a varied infilling, part solid sandwiches of plywood and aluminium sheeting, part louvres that transmit air but not light, and part glass. These are combined in different proportions on each side according to the orientation in order to control the glare and the heat of the sun while providing direct ventilation. Since this tower was isolated, it needed no envelope of space; in fact, however, the wider mezzanine extending under the base of the tower does provide this. The two open storeys, one at ground level and one above the mezzanine, give a lightness of effect and a frank view of the essential structure that is even more striking than at Lever House, where the relation of the towering slab to the mezzanine is less boldly handled.

European skyscrapers^[541] as yet rarely rivalled North American ones in height, and few large urban office buildings reached even the median level of quality of those in Latin America. In rebuilding bombed cities, however, there were opportunities that could readily be exploited for carrying certain buildings very high over a portion only of their sites, as was first done in North America at Lever House, but using the ampler spaces provided by the replanning of the cities to extend lower blocks from the main slab. One of the best examples of this treatment is the Continental Rubber Building of 1952-3 in Hanover by Werner Dierschke and Ernst Zinsser, which replaces Behrens’s ponderous block of thirty years earlier that was destroyed in the war. The surfacing materials, mostly various stones, are serviceable and the general composition well studied, but the proportions lack the elegant lightness of the Edificio Polar. Yet the whole achieved a ‘reality’ of effect lacking in the C.B.I. in São Paulo, which looks, despite its great size, rather like a cardboard model; or Lever House, which too much resembles a slick cellophane-wrapped package. Some German commercial work at smaller scale was more refined, as, for example, the Haus der Glas-Industrie of 1951 at Düsseldorf by Bernhard Pfau and Pempelfort Haus there of 1954 by Hentrich & Petschnigg, or the Burda-Moden Building of the same date in Offenburg by Egon Eiermann. Hentrich & Petschnigg are also responsible for the striking BASF skyscraper at Ludwigshafen, the tallest built in the Old World up to the mid fifties.

Post-war Italian commercial work was more varied and imaginative than in other countries, but the tallest examples were not the best. Very often it was the fine marble or mosaic surfacing—echoed in the BASF—and the high quality of the craftsmanship that seemed to give them interest and an effect of luxury rarely yet found in other countries, rather than real distinction of design. Interestingly enough, since post-war Latin America has tended to follow Italian models, one of the best Italian buildings of this decade, the Olivetti offices in Milan of 1954-5 by G. A. Bernasconi, Annibale Fiocchi (b. 1915), and M. Nizzoli, has a very Latin American air because of its prominent sun-breaks. This was one of the few buildings premiated by the international jury at the São Paulo Biennal in 1957, and the only non-Brazilian one.

Industrial construction has not even yet been as fully accepted into the realm of architecture as has commercial building for the last hundred years. Ever since the factories of Behrens and the warehouses of Perret, however, industrial commissions have played an increasingly important part in modern architectural production. Probably the largest acreage of good factory-building just after the war, as earlier in the century, was in North America. With rising standards of amenity, moreover, and the substitution of road haulage for rail transportation, factories came out from behind the railway tracks and took their proper place visually as well as functionally, with well-maintained grounds as important features, in regional planning. It is hard to single out particular factories for mention, if only because their design, whether it is by engineers or by specialist architectural firms like Albert Kahn, Inc., had arrived at a largely anonymous standardization—the fate, incidentally, towards which some critics see all twentieth-century architecture as inevitably moving.

The General Motors Technical Institute at Warren, Mich., completed by Eero Saarinen in 1955 after a decade of planning and construction, is almost more comparable in scale and complexity to a university city than to a factory; yet this group of twenty-five buildings organized round a large rectangular artificial lake is also in its use and in its character a major example of American industrial building raised at the behest of a corporate client into the realm of distinguished architecture (Plate 168B; Figure 55). Little or no link remained between this and even the latest buildings designed by Eliel Saarinen on which his son collaborated, although the former was involved in this commission down to his death in 1950. Instead, the influence of Mies was very strong, since in the younger Saarinen’s estimation the Miesian discipline was specially suitable for giving order to such a project, in terms both of over-all planning and of the characteristic structural vocabulary of curtain-walling. Yet the necessary variety of size and shape of the buildings, determined in part by the very different activities that they house, from power-houses and engine-test cells to the Styling Centre for new motor-car models, made impossible the imposition of so classic a pattern as Mies had aimed to produce at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Figure 52). In conscious avoidance of the monotony of the motor-car factories around Detroit, which run on without modification for thousands of feet, and in pursuit of ideals which most modern planners have realized only on paper, Eero Saarinen accented his long lake-front with a water-tower all of stainless steel rising out of the water and provided a special domed unit at the south end to house the display of new models beside the one section of the complex to which the outside world has some access. Moreover, he varied the characteristic metal-and-glass vocabulary of the façades—the metal in general black oxidized aluminium, the glass greenish in tone to reduce glare in the interiors—with solid walls of glazed brick in various brilliant colours, almost rivalling the Mexicans in the intensity of the reds, blues, yellows, and greens that he chose. As with the later Connecticut General plant, sculpture of distinction, here by Antoine Pevsner, provides a note of humane interest amid all the expression of mechanistic efficiency.

In Europe the Olivetti Company were more consistent patrons of distinguished design in architecture than General Motors. The main plant at Ivrea, designed by Figini & Pollini, is small by American standards, and has been in existence for some time—since 1942. It is chiefly notable because it is the heart, as it is the raison d’être, of an architectural programme of almost urbanistic scope at Ivrea that is still in process of

realization by Figini & Pollini and by the resident architect Fiocchi, whose small foundry of 1954-5 is an exemplary industrial unit of almost Miesian elegance. Characteristic now of most Latin countries are the sun-breaks on the south-west side of the large Ivrea factory; while the north-east façade rises four storeys in sheer glass like a vast extension of Gropius’s studio block at the Bauhaus. Of the present period of the fifties, and better sited, more articulated, and more self-complete, is the later Olivetti factory at Pozzuoli near Naples by Luigi Cosenza. Structurally, however, the industrial work of the engineer Nervi is more original.

Factories are still more likely to be designed by engineers than by architects; but the contribution of engineers to their design is by no means always standardized and monotonous. Particularly in those countries where the lack of steel encourages the use of ferro-concrete, engineers were devising notably imaginative solutions to the problems of space-coverage and lighting. The Spanish-born engineer Candela in Mexico worked with ferro-concrete vaults in industrial construction with the casual ease and ad hoc ingenuity of a twelfth-century Frenchman building in stone; yet his church of Nuestra Señora de los Milagros of 1953-5 gave the impression of being a reversion to Expressionism, despite the unassailable mathematical and structural logic of the hyperbolic paraboloid forms of its ‘ruled surfaces’. The Italian-born José Delpini, in such factories as his S.I.T. Spinning Shed of 1949-50 at Pilar in Argentina, easily rivalled the work of the leading modern architects of Argentina in the distinction as in the scale of his buildings. The Danish-born Ore Arup in England, working with the Architects Co-Partnership on the artificial rubber factory at Bryn Mawr in Wales, provided one of the most notable large-scale buildings in post-war Great Britain, and deserves much of the credit for it. To return to the work of architects, it should be noted that in England, where most post-war industrial building was rather modest in size, the power-stations of Farmer & Dark, culminating in that of 1955-7 at Marchwood, have a grandeur of scale and a logic of partially open design that ordinary factories can almost never rival.

Industrial building, still at the frontier of architecture despite the great contribution it has made to more general developments since the English mills of the 1790s, was notably international in its twentieth-century standards and its achievements. The leading industrial firms, such as Albert Kahn, Inc., and that of Frankland Dark were asked to build in many parts of the world, for the traditions of the old-established technologies are of especial value in such work. The continued existence of cultural empires, so to call them, is still made manifest when English firms build power-houses and factories in the Middle and Far East. James Cubitt & Partners^[542] completed in Rangoon in 1955, for example, a pharmaceutical plant that was probably the largest post-war factory of architectural interest to be built by an English firm, just as their Technical College at Kumasi in Ghana built at the same time was a more considerable example of a mid-twentieth-century university city than England had yet seen.

The provision of housing by organs of the State had come to be recognized almost everywhere as an essential social service, quite as modern architects always insisted that it should be. Le Corbusier’s Unité at Marseilles is doubtless the most striking single example of the tall structures, slabs or ‘point-blocks’, which were increasingly the characteristic form of such housing, but the most notable general programmes of production were still found in England, in certain Latin American countries, and in Denmark and Sweden. The pressure of population-growth and the need for rebuilding after war-time destruction motivated such programmes almost everywhere, but in several countries notable otherwise for the high standard of their current architecture—the United States and Italy, for example—the results were disappointing indeed. A strong social tradition of public housing, moreover, as in Holland, even with the precedent there of the notably fine work of thirty and forty years ago, seemed then to be no guarantee of continued excellence in this field. Although the rising popularity of housing in tall structures is still balanced in England by a strong attachment to small houses built in pairs or in terraces, such as comprise the greater part of the New Towns, English achievement in this field on the whole exceeded that of most other countries in the ten years after the war, both in quantity and in quality. The post-war pace was set by the Churchill Gardens of A. J. Philip Powell (b. 1921) and his partner Hidalgo Moya in Pimlico, London, for which the Westminster Borough Council was the client. For over a decade the planning and building of this vast urban project went forward towards completion with rising standards of design and finish. Perhaps the finest single block is De Quincey House, with its ingenious section of duplexes approached by access galleries. But the Architect’s Department of the London County Council, under the successive leadership of Robert Matthew (b. 1906) and of Sir Leslie Martin (b. 1908), in the last seven years equalled and perhaps exceeded in quality, as many times over in quantity, the achievement of Powell & Moya. Whether on urban sites, such as that at Loughborough Road in South London (Plate 186B), or on more open sites, as at the Ackroydon estate in Putney or at Roehampton, by the combination of tall blocks, some square in plan, some slab-like, with ranges of lower blocks of maisonettes and terraces of houses the L.C.C. has provided—piecemeal at least—examples of mid-twentieth-century urbanism more impressive than anything the New Towns yet offered. A provincial English example of comparable excellence is the Tile Hill Estate outside Coventry by the Borough Architect’s Office.

The forty-eight slabs of the Cerro Piloto development of 1955 built by the Banco Obrero, the Venezuelan public housing corporation, and designed by Guido Bermudez (b. 1925), rising against the mountains outside Caracas more than rival in extent and in scale the English examples. And in the Cerro Grande blocks of flats there, built in 1953-5, Bermudez rivalled the ingenuity of Powell & Moya and the L.C.C. in the use of duplexes. Interesting for the mixture of types—tall slabs, lower blocks of flats, and houses—is the Centro Urbano Presidente Juarez in Mexico City by Mario Pani (b. 1901); the handsome colours used here were chosen by the painter Carlos Mérida. But the most exemplary of the Latin American estates is Pedregulho outside Rio de Janeiro begun in 1948 by Affonso Eduardo Reidy (b. 1909). Here the tall serpentine block at the rear is entered at middle level from the hill slope, a scheme suggested by certain of Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties for North Africa, and various community buildings provide something of New Town character in the development, as does a range of low blocks with shops at their base in the Tile Hill Estate at Coventry. Most notable is Reidy’s school at Pedregulho with its murals of azulejos—glazed tiles—by Cándido Portinari and its characteristic repertory of the architectural forms of the Cariocan School. Of that Reidy, a member of the original group who designed and built the Ministry of Education, was as much one of the founders as Oscar Niemeyer.

In the mid twentieth century, however, it is England that leads in school design and construction even more definitely than in the design of tall housing blocks. In particular, the Hertfordshire County Architect’s Office under C. H. Aslin (1893-1959) developed a system of construction using a light-metal skeleton and prefabricated concrete slabs of very great technical interest. Not all the Hertfordshire schools are designed in the County Architect’s Office, however, and some of the best were by private architects, such as the Architects’ Co-partnership and James Cubitt & Partners (Plate 186A). The new architecture has been more widely and successfully used for schools than for most other types of buildings. Outside England those of Donald Barthelmé in Texas, such as his Elementary School at West Columbia of 1952, and by Ernest J. Kump (b. 1911) in California may be especially noted, although they represent no such concerted programme of design and construction as has spread in England from Hertfordshire to other parts of the country. Outright ‘traditional’ schools are rare anywhere today.

In church architecture the post-war situation was rather different. Although Perret and Wright, Moser and Böhm, among the older generation of modern architects, all built notable churches, until Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp the international leaders of the next generation were rarely called on to design them; and from Oud’s church of the late twenties at Oud Mathenesse through Mies’s Chapel of 1950 at the Illinois Institute of Technology it seemed that the extreme rationalism of these men made it difficult if not impossible for them to provide ecclesiastical edifices which differed in any expressive way from meeting-halls. Something was said earlier of the more emotional concrete-vaulted church architecture of Böhm and the line of related advance in the last two decades from the semi-traditional, somewhat Gothic or Baroque, effects of the twenties to work of completely original character. Niemeyer’s São Francisco at Pampulha (Plate 190C), completed in 1943, was one of the buildings that early established his reputation as one of the most imaginative architects of his generation anywhere in the world. Soon Latin American churches as different as Candela’s Nuestra Señora de los Milagros in Mexico City and the unvaulted Beato Martín Porres at Cataño outside San Juan in Puerto Rico by Henry Klumb (b. 1905), a pupil of Wright, were illustrating a wider range of possibilities; while Juvenal Moya’s Nuestra Señora de Fatimá and his chapel at the Ginnásio Moderno in Bogotá, the one of 1953-4, the other of 1954-5, followed—with considerable vulgarization—the more lyrical line of Niemeyer’s São Francisco.

Less operatic, but doubtless better adapted to Protestant use, are the churches in the American Northwest by Belluschi, notably the First Presbyterian of 1951 at Cottage Grove in Oregon. Various Swiss churches, some Catholic but more of them Protestant, followed also in this line, to which such earlier-mentioned churches as Moser’s Sankt Antonius in Basel of 1927 and the elder Saarinen’s Christ Lutheran, Minneapolis, of 1948 belong (Plate 157B). The younger Saarinen’s silo-like circular chapel of red brick at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of 1954-5, however, reverted to something much more emotional. There is great ingenuity in the handling of the lighting, which streams down from above over a screen by Harry Bertoia and also penetrates more subtly round the edges of the low-arched base through the water of a surrounding moat.

Johnson’s synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., of 1955-6, while severe in its general character, uses coloured glass in slots between the vertical slabs with which the visible steel frame is filled and also a curved awning-like ceiling of plaster to warm and enrich the basically Miesian paradigm. Accessories by the sculptor Ibrahim Lassaw also play an important part in the interior; while the oval domed entrance vestibule is an element of almost Baroque formal interest despite its ascetic simplicity of execution. Thus, two Mies disciples have offered in their ecclesiastical work correctives to the classroom-like coldness of his own chapel in Chicago.

Such large-scale constructions as factories and tall housing blocks, together with skyscrapers, represent the new architecture’s preoccupation with building problems that the nineteenth century had already essayed, but of which the development was not carried to its logical extremes, either technically or architecturally, before the present period. Curiously enough, in the provision of new edifices to serve the needs of transportation, the nineteenth century in its middle decades was rather more successful in bringing the railway station to quite early maturity than was the twentieth century with the airport. One of the largest and finest post-war buildings of Italy is the Rome railway station (Plate 183B), and within a few years the active campaign of modernizing and rebuilding stations in Italy was notably reflected in other European countries. But airports had still to find so satisfactory an expression, partly because the expansion of traffic everywhere made them inadequate almost before they were completed. Too often the necessity for continual extension has destroyed such integrity of conception as the architects were able to give them in the first place. Some of the world’s busiest, such as Idlewild near New York and Midway near Chicago, were through the nineteen fifties near-shambles beside which century-old railway stations appeared as masterpieces of up-to-date organization! Here, as in many other fields of contemporary building, there seem to be two main lines of approach, but not properly to be distinguished as ‘rational’ versus ‘emotional’, since both are almost entirely dependent on the structural solutions chosen. Of the first sort a relatively early example (which now carries only local traffic and has therefore not had to be expanded), the Santos Dumont Airport by the Roberto brothers begun in 1938 and largely completed after 1944 at the bay’s edge in downtown Rio de Janeiro, remains one of the best; for it is compactly planned, clear and direct in design, and elegant in the choice of materials and the use of colour. The San Juan Airport completed in 1955 by Torro, Ferrer & Torregrossa^[543] in Puerto Rico is larger and somewhat less refined in detail, but an excellent example of planning in terms of circulation. The vast London Airport by Gibberd was still incomplete.

Two other airports of much the same date, the very large one at St Louis by Minoru Yamasaki (b. 1912) and Joseph W. Leinweber, and the small one by Pani and his partner Enrique del Moral at Acapulco, used concrete shell vaults with very dramatic effect. It would seem that the ‘classic’ stage of airport design, reached in railway stations between 1845 and 1855, was only beginning in the late fifties, and its climax may well lie many years ahead.

From the airport to the individual dwelling, from the newest sort of structure to what is presumably the oldest, represents a considerable jump. Yet it is at least debatable whether the best houses of the mid twentieth century, continuing a line of development that has earlier been traced forward from 1800 (see Chapter 15), were not more satisfactory solutions of the problems their designing and building poses, both practically and aesthetically, than any of the airports mentioned. To a considerable extent they were as novel.^[544] The dwelling may not, in the years after 1925, have developed primarily as a ‘machine for living in’, according to Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, but it certainly became more and more a ‘box for housing machinery in’. As the relative proportion of the total cost spent for mechanical equipment went up, the shell had to shrink. As the shell shrank, planning was increasingly simplified. Only rarely was the ultimate in unification of space reached, as in Mies’s Farnsworth house or Philip Johnson’s own house in New Canaan, Conn., where only the bathroom is enclosed and the other subdivisions of the interior are but ranges of cupboards not reaching to the ceiling. Equally rare is the exclusively glass walling of these two houses, clearly the extreme point of a crescendo that goes back at least to the window-walls of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But if they represented the end-point of several developments, from which there has since been a return even on the part of their own architects (Plate 190A), the extremes that they illustrate were in many respects those towards which houses in general were then tending.

The house as a detached, individually-designed edifice was still for most people the ideal dwelling. But at no time since 1800 had such a dwelling been more of a luxury. Convenience and economy drove rich and poor alike towards more communal forms of habitation, whether they were the cabañas of the millionaires’ motels at Palm Springs or the low-cost flats in suburban ‘point-blocks’. In between these poles were all the varieties of terrace-housing, ‘semi-detachery’, and builders’ standardized products, ranging from conservative parodies of the individually designed houses of a generation ago through various vulgarizations of more modern houses to the prefabricated package-dwelling which seemed to be no nearer to receiving that general acceptance which would make it economical than it was a hundred years ago. Mass housing, no matter what form it took, whether the forty-eight tall slabs of the Cerro Piloto or the forty-eight hundred, more or less, semi-detached two-storey dwellings of an English housing estate, belongs increasingly to the world of bureaucratized architecture. The house, on the other hand, conceived as an individualized entity, remained almost as much a specialized and exceptional product as the church; yet the changes first made in individual houses gradually affected all housing standards. Particularly in North and South America they still provided architectural opportunities of the greatest interest and variety. Most Latin American houses, for example, retained the semi-oriental ideals of seclusion of the Iberian tradition; yet behind the walls surrounding their plots to cut out the world, they were often opener than houses in the United States, since a warm climate makes of the patio or garden the principal living area. Niemeyer’s own house of 1954 at Gávea outside Rio de Janeiro is almost as much a glass box as Mies’s or Johnson’s, although its glass walls are set under a slab whose outline is a continuous free curve. The house of Osvaldo Arthur Bratke (b. 1907) at 3008 Avenida Morumbí outside São Paulo is also closer in plan and conception to houses in the United States, protection of various sorts being provided by grilles and movable shutters (Figure 56).