449. For a late reassessment of that influence, see Jordan, R. F., ‘Dudok’, Architectural Review, CXV (1954), 237-42.
450. It is probable that Mendelsohn’s early projects and also the tower had some influence on the later development of ‘streamlining’ in industrial design. See Banham, R., ‘Machine-aesthetic’, Architectural Review, CXVII (1955), 224-8.
451. This sort of enclosure has come of late to be called a ‘curtain-wall’. Some of the skyscrapers of the nineties in Chicago, most notably Beman’s Studebaker Building of 1895 and Holabird & Roche’s McClurg Building of 1899, approached it very closely, yet in them the actual supporting piers remained in the façade plane as at the Fagus Factory and thus the ‘curtain’ was interrupted, not continuous horizontally. The first true example of the curtain-wall applied to a large urban structure followed within a few years after the Fagus Factory, and certainly with no influence from it; this is the Hallidie Building in San Francisco, completed by Willis Polk (1867-1924) in 1918 immediately after the First World War. But see p. 238 and Note 9 to Chapter 14 for Oriel Chambers of 1864-5.
453. See Popp, J., Bruno Paul, Munich.
454. To those historians of modern architecture who find its relevant prehistory largely in the technical developments of the previous century and a half, the Fagus Factory is the more important; to those who accept that the architecture of the mid twentieth century had aesthetic as well as technical roots, the special ‘classicism’ of Mies’s project, like Wright’s contact with the American ‘Academic Tradition’ of the nineties, seems perhaps at least as important. The thesis of the late Emil Kaufmann, adumbrated in a series of books from his Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier of 1931 to his posthumous Architecture in the Age of Reason of 1955, stresses—indeed overstresses—the relevance of the theories and projects of the revolutionary architects of the late eighteenth century to the new architecture of the twentieth century. If it ever becomes possible to subsume historically under a single rubric the ‘traditional’ and the ‘advanced’ architecture of the first quarter of the twentieth century, the ‘classicism’ and ‘academicism’ of Wright, Wagner, Mies, and Le Corbusier as well as of Perret and Behrens will prove as significant as the technical feats of those architects who erected the last great railway stations in these years and the tallest skyscrapers. Lest the issue seem a simple dichotomy, Mies’s respect for Berlage’s structuralism should also be remembered at this point; as also the Expressionism which influenced both Gropius and Mies after the First World War, not to speak of Wright’s ‘Baroque’ phase of 1914-24.
455. Le Corbusier’s first publication was an Étude sur le mouvement d’art décoratif en Allemagne, La Chaux de Fond, 1912, giving evidence of his closer rapport with Central European than with Parisian currents at this point in his life.
456. For the early work of Le Corbusier, hitherto almost entirely unpublished, see Perspecta, 6 (1961), 28-33.
457. Le Corbusier’s relations with Loos were very close for a year or two after Loos settled in Paris in 1923. But he undoubtedly knew of Loos’s work well before the First World War, having been for a short stay in Vienna in 1908, at which time he had already begun to react against the dominant decorative emphasis in the work of Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte.
458. As has been noted, Garnier’s book on the ‘Cité Industrielle’ did not appear until 1918, but his projects had long been generally known in Paris. His work attracted more attention in the early twenties, thanks to his own publication Les Grands Travaux de la ville de Lyon, Paris, 1919, and an article by Jean Badovici, ‘L’Œuvre de Tony Gamier’, in L’Architecture vivante, Autumn-Winter 1924.
461. Several years earlier, possibly even before he actually joined De Stijl, Rietveld had designed and executed a remarkable ‘Red-Blue’ chair in which many aspects of the three-dimensional aesthetic of the group were already realized.
462. The first number is not dated and may have appeared in 1919.
463. See Bayer, H., and others, Bauhaus 1919-28, New York, 1938.
464. The mixed character of Bauhaus theory and production in the early years is well illustrated in Gropius, W., Staatliches Bauhaus, 1919-1923, Munich [1923].
465. The effect of van Doesburg’s visit to Germany remains controversial. Although Gropius denies, or at any rate minimizes, its importance to the Bauhaus group—and, indeed, personally disliked van Doesburg—critics and historians mostly believe the influence of Neoplasticism to have been at least as significant at this point as that of the Russian Constructivists. See Zevi, B., ‘L’Insegnamento critico di Theo van Doesburg’, Metron, VII (1951), 21-37.
It is not without significance that Gropius included in 1926 Oud’s Holländische Architektur in the series of Bauhausbücher which he edited. That certainly proves a special respect for the De Stijl-nurtured modern architecture of Holland at the time.
466. Like Le Corbusier’s window-walls, these horizontal strip-windows, usually called ‘ribbon-windows’ in English, can be traced back at least as far as Shaw’s work of the sixties, though all the intervening links are not yet clearly identified. Their analogy with ‘Chicago windows’ is closest and, indeed, Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott façades, with their wide windows crisply cut in the smooth terracotta wall-plane, are amazingly premonitory of the characteristic new window-banded façades of the twenties. Before this time window-strips were always subdivided by relatively heavy mullions in the plane of the wall, as in Voysey’s houses, or set behind ranges of colonnettes or other supports, as they were still in the clerestory of Wright’s Unity Church.
467. This special vision of America is well illustrated in books of the twenties by European architectural visitors; see Mendelsohn, E., Amerika. Bilderbuch eines Architekten, Berlin, 1926, and Neutra, R., Wie baut Amerika? Stuttgart, 1927.
468. The preoccupation with the shapes of things that move—which architecture does not—reflects doubtless the motion-aesthetic of the Futurists. How well Le Corbusier knew the pre-war projects of the brilliant Italian Antonio Sant’Elia is not clear. But his own aesthetic is less related to the particular forms found in Sant’Elia’s designs for buildings than to generalized Futurist dreams of speed and technical modernity. See also Note [495] to Chapter 23.
469. However, Le Corbusier’s sketch books make evident that he had used his eyes to advantage on a very wide range of buildings in the Mediterranean world on his early travels, from peasant huts to the Parthenon, the Campidoglio, and Versailles. His attitude towards the past was very different, evidently, from that of the Futurists, of which a somewhat closer reflection is to be found in the doctrines of Gropius.
470. Throughout this period, and indeed down to 1943, Le Corbusier practised in partnership with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (b. 1896); technically most of his work should therefore be attributed to ‘Le Corbusier & Jeanneret’. No attempt has yet been made by critics or historians to determine to what extent Jeanneret deserves credit for the work of the firm, nor to evaluate the work he has since done independently.
471. See Roth, A., Zwei Wohnhäuser von Le Corbusier und Pierre Jeanneret, Stuttgart, 1927.
472. The open plan of the Vaucresson house was more significant than the treatment of the exterior; that was ‘scraped’ of all features in a Loos-like way, yet still quite symmetrical, at least on the garden side.
The studio-house for Ozenfant, built on a very restricted corner site, was too special in its vertical organization to be very influential. Although today in good general condition, the very ‘industrial’ saw-toothed skylights on the roof have been removed and the terrace surrounded with a crude railing.
473. Confused by Le Corbusier’s description of his houses as machines à habiter and the general ‘machinolatry’ of much of his early writing, many have mistakenly supposed that his was a machine-aesthetic. Just how to define his aesthetic other than by begging the question and merely calling it ‘Corbusian’ is, however, far from clear. For an analysis stressing Le Corbusier’s ‘formalism’, but not in the pejorative sense of Stalinist criticism, see Rowe, C., ‘Mannerism and Modern Architecture’, Architectural Review, CVII (1950), 289-300.
474. Le Corbusier’s personal system of proportion, first used for the 1916 house, gradually crystallized into a very detailed mathematical scheme which has been made generally available in his books Le Modular, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1950; English ed., London, 1954; and Modular II, London, 1958.
475. See Moussinac, L., Robert Mallet-Stevens, Paris, 1931.
476. See André Lurçat, projets et réalisations, Paris, 1929.
477. In this connexion Schumacher’s school-building programme for Hamburg, initiated considerably earlier, is also significant.
478. See Le Corbusier, Une maison—un palais, Paris, 1928.
479. As building activity increased in Russia in the late twenties there was considerable experimentation, mostly along Constructivist lines, and a growing acceptance of the new architecture of the western world. This continued into the early thirties. But the competition for the Palace of the Soviets of 1931, to which Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as Poelzig and Mendelsohn were among the over two hundred architects who contributed projects, represented a major turning point. This was won by the Soviet architect B. M. Iofan (b. 1891) with a very monumental scheme designed in a variant of that megalomaniac mode of scraped classicism which had been popular for large-scale architecture in Germany under the Second Reich and which returned to favour in 1933 under the Third Reich, just after Iofan’s scheme triumphed. By 1937 this relatively severe project had been elaborated by Iofan and his collaborators W. G. Helfreich and V. A. Schouko until it rose—and to the same tremendous height as the Empire State Building in New York—like a telescopic wedding-cake, terminating in a statue of Stalin a third as tall as the whole structure below.
Henceforth the ‘scraping’ of Classical forms ceased and Stalinist architecture in general aimed at an elaboration that was at once Baroque and Victorian in its coarse exuberance and in its illiterate use of academic clichés all but forgotten in the western world. During the later Stalinist period official Soviet criticism decried the modern architecture of the western world as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois formalism’.
Since the end of that period the denunciation of its characteristic architecture by Soviet leaders implies some return towards the contact with advanced western ideas which was evident in the twenties and early thirties. For the production of the Stalinist period, which would rate anywhere else as very low-grade ‘traditional’ architecture, see Dreissig Jahre sowjetische Architektur in der RSFSR, Leipzig, 1950.
480. More than rivalling Gropius’s housing in its extent was that carried out by Ernst May (b. 1887) for the city of Frankfort at this same time.
481. Gropius and Meyer first used a smooth rendered surfacing on a theatre at Jena that they remodelled in 1922; this was not otherwise very significant, except that no trace of Expressionist influence, still strong in work of the year before, remained. As will appear shortly, Mies van der Rohe proposed to use brick in a design for a country house in 1922; and all the private houses he built in the twenties are of that material, though his housing blocks at Berlin and Stuttgart were rendered.
482. Although Mies is not, as his second name van der Rohe might suggest, Dutch, he has always been an admirer of Berlage, and his very high standards for brickwork derive from his knowledge of Dutch building, both old and new, acquired during the year spent in The Hague designing the Kröller house.
483. Much of Le Corbusier’s prolific writing of the twenties has already been mentioned in the text and earlier notes; for Gropius’s, see Cook, R. V., A Bibliography: Walter Gropius, 1919-1950, Chicago [1951].
484. For example, the German translation of Vers une architecture appeared in 1926; the English translation in 1927 in both English and American editions. Of Urbanisme, the American edition is of 1927, the English of 1929, and the German of 1929 also. Mies wrote, in effect, nothing at all.
485. As has been noted, Oud, at the invitation of Gropius, wrote Holländische Architektur (No. 10 in the series of Bauhausbücher) and also published many articles in Dutch, German, English, and French magazines.
CHAPTER 23 - Notes
488. A hospital built in 1926-8 by Adolf Schneck and Richard Döcker (b. 1894) in Stuttgart is actually earlier but hardly comparable in quality.
489. For Howe’s earlier ‘traditional’ work see Monograph of the Work of Mellor, Meigs and Howe, New York, 1923; for an assessment of his later career, see also Zevi, B., ‘George Howe’, Journal of the American Institute of Architects, XXIV (1955), 176-9. For the PFSF see Jordy, W., and Stern, R., Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XXII (1962), entire June issue.
490. The same description applies roughly to Aalto’s work down to the buildings mentioned above, it may be noted.
491. See Jordan, R. F., ‘Lubetkin’, Architectural Review, CXVIII (1955), 36-44.
492. Technically the architects were J. Alan Slater and Arthur Hamilton Moberly (1885-1952) with Crabtree as designing associate. Professor Sir Charles Herbert Reilly (1874-1948), head of the School of Architecture at Liverpool, which he made one of the most advanced schools in the world in these years, was consultant. It is curious to recall that he had earlier been a consultant on Devonshire House in Piccadilly in London, built in 1924-6 by Carrère & Hastings (John M., 1858-1911; and Thomas, 1860-1929), when the influence of American ‘traditional’ architecture was strong in London (see Chapter 24).
494. For the late twenties and early thirties, when the newer architecture first penetrated England, see Pevsner, N., ‘Nine Swallows—No Summer’, Architectural Review, XCI (1942), 109-12, and Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘England and the Outside World’, Architectural Association Journal, LXXII (1956), 96-7 (this is a special number of the Journal devoted to the work of Connell, Ward & Lucas, 1927-39). See also Richards, J. M., ‘Wells Coates’, Architectural Review, CXXIV (1958), 357-60.
495. If Expressionism in architecture is an episode difficult to assess despite the real achievement of several of the architects involved with it (see Chapters 20 and 22), Futurism is impossible to evaluate at all since it was only a ‘might have been’. Italian modern architecture since the thirties does not derive from the projects of Sant’Elia, many of which are only now being studied for the first time. Sant’Elia and the other architects associated with Futurism wished to cut all links with the past, Terragni re-linked the ‘International Style’—usually called architettura razionale under the Fascist regime—with Italian tradition, a line which several Italian modern architects have followed since. See Sartoris, A., Sant’Eliae l’architettura futurista, Rome, 1943; Tentori, F., ‘Le Origini Liberty di Antonio Sant’Elia’, L’Architettura, 1(1955), 206-8; Banham, R., ‘Futurism and Modern Architecture’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, LXIV (1957), 129-38, and ‘Futurist Manifesto’, Architectural Review, CXXVI (1959), 77-80. The greater part of Sant’Elia’s drawings are now available for study at the Villa Olmo, Como.
496. See Le Corbusier, UN Headquarters, New York, 1947.
497. See Rudolph, P., ‘Walter Gropius et son école’, L’Architecture d’ aujourd’hui, XX (1950), 1-116.
498. Credit for initiating the reform at Harvard must be given to the Dean of the school there, Joseph Hudnut (b. 1886), who invited Gropius to join his faculty.
499. Louis Skidmore (1897-1962), Nathaniel Owings (b. 1903), John O. Merrill (b. 1896).
500. Ralph Rapson is Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, it is relevant to note at this point.
501. See Le Corbusier, The Marseilles Block, London, 1953.
502. See Le Corbusier, Œuvre complète, [VI, 1957], 50-107.
503. See Stirling, J., ‘Ronchamp’, Architectural Review, CXIX (1956), 155-61. The best coverage is in Le Corbusier, Œuvre complète, [VI, 1957], 16-43, however. See also Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp, New York, 1957.
504. In collaboration with the French architect B.-H. Zehrfuss and the Italian engineer Pierluigi Nervi.
506. Curiously enough Philip Johnson’s glass house in New Canaan, Conn., which obviously derives in several ways from the Farnsworth house, was actually erected first, in 1949; but of course Mies’s plan and model of the Farnsworth house had already been published by Johnson in his book Mies van der Rohe in 1947.
507. Although their design follows closely that of the two blocks built in 1949-51, the construction is actually of ferro-concrete, not steel.
508. Thanks to the continuance in the early post-war years of the reaction of the thirties, the buildings at the south end of the Coolsingel appear to present a curious inversion of chronology. While Dudok’s Bijenkorf Department Store of 1929-30, now demolished to open the view to the harbour, was characteristic of the ambiguity of much of his work, this ‘baby skyscraper’ of 1939-40 and also the contiguous Exchange by J. F. Staal (1879-1940), designed in 1929 and built in the thirties, appear much more ‘modern’ to mid-century eyes than the first big banks and so forth rebuilt after the war—these look as if they had been designed at least a generation ago. But the wave of reaction soon ran its course; the Lijnbaan of 1953-4, a complete shopping street by van den Broek & Bakema running parallel to the Coolsingel, if not the new Bijenkorf by Breuer of 1955-7, was among the most advanced projects carried out anywhere in the mid fifties.
509. Oud’s prominent Resistance Monument on the Dam in Amsterdam opposite the Royal Palace, completed in 1956, is hardly a work of architecture but rather an enlarged pedestal and frame for sculpture. Such a commission and the honorary doctorate he received in 1955 from the University of Leiden none the less indicate the high respect he was receiving in Holland by that time.
CHAPTER 24 - Notes
511. ‘Historicism’ is a clumsy term matched by no viable adjective. It does, however, express more accurately than ‘traditionalism’, ‘revivalism’, or ‘eclecticism’ a certain aspect of architecture which was common throughout the last five hundred years, and not unknown in early ages. Quite simply, it means the re-use of forms borrowed from the architectural styles of the past, usually in more or less new combinations. It is late in this book to introduce a definition; but historicism is always so much taken for granted in discussing the architecture of the nineteenth century that it is only after the appearance as an alternative of exclusive modernism, rejecting all borrowed forms, that the older attitude needs to be isolated in order to discuss its continuance in this century. Characteristically, the architecture of two-thirds of the period covered by this book balanced a moderate sort of modernism with more or less of historicism. This is as true of most of the novel projects of Ledoux in the 1780s as it is of a considerable part of the work of the first generation of modern architects. However, only the traditional architects remained firmly attached to the concept of historicism in the twentieth century; men like Behrens and Perret were, through much of their careers at least, in highly significant revolt against it, quite as Ledoux had been in his day.
512. See Östberg, R., The Stockholm Town Hall, Stockholm, 1929.
513. The decline is perhaps to be related at its start to the death of their associate Joseph M. Wells in 1890. Never a member of the firm, he had nevertheless been personally responsible for the design of the Villard houses (Plate 109B) that had opened the academic phase of the firm’s career. Later, the death of White and the retirement of McKim in the early years of the new century removed the two controlling personalities from the firm. Henceforth the office was a ‘plan-factory’, with high professional standards undoubtedly, but without direction other than that already established in the late eighties and nineties by the founders. In 1961 the firm finally came to an end with the death of J. K. Smith, the only surviving partner who had known the founders.
514. J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920), a pupil of Gilbert who had worked with Garnier on the Opéra and succeeded Labrouste at the Bibliothèque Nationale, had at least as high a reputation, and was the teacher of several prominent English and American architects. His severe academic style, emulated later by his Anglo-Saxon pupils, was well established by the time he designed the Faculty of Medicine at Bordeaux in the early nineties. Nénot was one of Pascal’s French pupils.
515. William Adams Delano (b. 1874) was a pupil of Laloux; Chester Holmes Aldrich (b. 1878) was also trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. For an attempt to reassess the ‘traditional’ houses of this period, see Lane, J., ‘The Period House in the Nineteen-Twenties’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 185-90.
516. The controversy as to which firm should receive credit for the design of the Grand Central Station once waxed hot. The organization of the tremendous complex was probably the work of Charles A. Reed (?-1911) and Allen H. Stem (1856-1931), who had already built other big stations in Troy, N.Y., in 1901-4 and in Tacoma in 1909-11—as, moreover, their successors, Felheimer & Wagner, have done also: Buffalo and North Station, Boston, both begun in 1927, and Cincinnati in 1929-33. Whitney Warren (1864-1943) and Charles D. Wetmore (1866-1941), who also worked with Reed & Stem on the Detroit station completed in 1913, were doubtless more responsible for the dignified and well-scaled detailing. See Marshall, D., Grand Central, New York, 1946.
517. Books of the period, such as American Architecture of 1928 by the distinguished architectural historian Fiske Kimball, or American Architecture of Today, also of 1928, by the then Dean of the Harvard University School of Architecture, G. H. Edgell, offer the later writer very little assistance. Kimball in the twenties was too ready to consider the continuance of the academic tradition assured—his chapter on Sullivan and Wright was entitled ‘The Lost Cause’—while Edgell offers such a miscellany of buildings that no clear picture emerges. Several attempts within the period to select its major monuments fixed on much the same lot as are given prominence here; but such selections hardly help to organize the work of the day in historical terms.
518. See Weisman, W., ‘Towards a New Environment: the Way of the Price Mechanism; the Rockefeller Centre’, Architectural Review, CVIII (1950), 399-405; ‘Who Designed Rockefeller Center?’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, X (1951), 11-17; and ‘The First “Mature” Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVIII (1959), 54-9.
519. This firm were the successors of Richardson, and Henry Richardson Shepley, now its head, is Richardson’s grandson. See Forbes, J. D., ‘Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, Architects—An Introduction’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVII (1958), 19-31.
520. ‘Compositionalism’ has been suggested by Colin Rowe as a name for the style-phase with which this section deals. Composition was then conceived by many architects and theorists as an absolute to which the re-use of any sort of stylistic forms could be accommodated. It is at least open to suspicion, for example, that Rogers’s Pierson College at Yale was designed originally with Gothic forms and then re-cast as Neo-Georgian. Later eyes than our own will doubtless find it possible to identify the period characteristics of traditional work of the twenties in the way many critics already feel able to do with the nineteenth-century revivals. The period-designation ‘President Harding’ may some day perhaps be as meaningful as ‘General Grant’, if hardly comparable to ‘Victorian’!
521. Harvey Wiley Corbett (b. 1873), a pupil of Pascal at the École des Beaux-Arts, was probably the designer.
522. Carrère was dead by this time, but the firm name remained unchanged; as has been mentioned earlier, Professor Sir Charles Reilly was consultant, and he probably made some real contribution to the design.
523. C.-F. Mewès (1858-1947) and Arthur Joseph Davis (1878-1951), both pupils of Pascal, like Corbett.
524. Gropius is very insistent on the desirability of anonymous team-work in architecture. His TAC, the one-time Tecton group in London, and other firms with similar names are examples of this ideal which aims, of course, at something rather different from the anonymity of the large commercial firms. Theirs is fact rather than ideal.
525. See Weisman, W., ‘Group Practice’, Architectural Review, CXIV (1953), 145-51.
526. Sir John J. Burnet (1857-1938), another pupil of Pascal at the École; Thomas S. Tait (1882-1954).
527. See Pevsner, N., ‘Building with Wit; the Architecture of Sir E. Lutyens’, Architectural Review, CX (1951), 217-25.