No better name than ‘modern’ has yet been found for what has come to be the characteristic architecture of the twentieth century throughout the western world, well beyond its confines also in Japan, India, and Africa, and increasingly in most of the Communist countries. Alternative adjectives such as ‘rational’, ‘functional’, ‘international’, or ‘organic’ all have the disadvantage of being either vaguer or more tendentious. Whether the Art Nouveau or such things as Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Voysey’s houses all truly belong, in their rather sharply differing ways, to a first stage of modern architecture or are transitional and prefatory may still be debated; but from the earliest years of this century several continuous lines of development can certainly be traced. These lines were in the main convergent through the twenties, if increasingly divergent in the middle decades of the century. By stressing generic changes rather than specific achievements the development can be presented almost anonymously, somewhat as the nineteenth-century development of commercial architecture was outlined earlier in this book (see Chapter 14). But it is more humanistic, and at least as true to the detailed facts, to consider modern architecture as deriving from the individual activities of a few leaders rather than from some Hegelian historic necessity. Of those leaders one group, born in the late 1860s, constitutes the first generation; a group born some twenty years later forms a second generation; since the 1930s still another generation has come to the fore.

A somewhat similar succession of three generations could be distinguished in the case of Romantic Classicism, the last universal style in architecture. What sets the twentieth-century situation apart from that of the earlier period has been the marked prolongation of the activity of the first generation, two of whose leading members, Wright and Perret, lived on and remained active well beyond 1950. Wright continued in vigorous production down to his death in 1959. The leaders of the second generation, who first moved towards the centre of the stage in the early twenties, are mostly still alive; two of them at least, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, have been rather more productive since 1946 than they were earlier in their careers (see Chapter 21).

While some influence from their juniors can be noted in the later work of the modern architects of the first generation, a real difference between their approach to architecture and that of the second generation has continued. Those who have come forward since the mid thirties owe much to the first generation as well as to the second, yet they have also manifested some significant characteristics that are their own. The modern architecture of the last sixty years may well be presented historically in terms of the work of two generations of leaders (see Chapters 18-23), and then of the production of the decade following the Second World War (see Chapter 25). But modern architecture, even very broadly interpreted, includes only a small fraction of all building production down to the war; the work of those supporters of the ‘tradition’ in the twentieth century bulked much larger in quantity, even if it very rarely rivalled the modern work in interest or quality (see Chapter 24). An Epilogue will touch on the current scene in the early sixties.

The leaders of the first generation of modern architects remained great individualists to the last. It is therefore not easy to draw any general stylistic picture from their production, even for the years before the twenties when they were the only modern architects. The leaders of the second generation drew their inspiration, in most cases, not from one but from several of the older men; yet their work was so convergent that by the mid twenties a body of doctrine had come to exist deriving partly from their theories and partly from their few executed buildings and their many projects. With the increasingly wide acceptance of this body of doctrine critics were soon ready to recognize the existence of a new style as coherent, as consistent, and almost as universally employed by younger architects everywhere as the Romantic Classical style had been at the opening of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 22).

Towards the constitution of this new style each of the great architects of the first generation had made notable contributions; yet their executed work, and even more their theories, remained independent of it. To appreciate that work only in the light of what they had in common with their juniors is to miss much of the richness and all of the idiosyncrasy of their achievement. In considering the work of these older architects for its own sake, what sets it apart from the Art Nouveau, whose protagonists were in many cases their exact contemporaries, must first be indicated and evaluated. For example, their rejection of ornament, at most but relative, provides only a minor and negative point of differentiation. In their positive preoccupation with structure and its direct architectonic expression, and also their reform and revitalization of planning concepts, however, they went much further than most of the Art Nouveau designers of 1900. It is true that such architects as Horta and Jourdain, when working with metal and glass, were concerned with the expression of structure, but that expression was usually more decorative than architectonic (Plates 132B and 133). Traditional materials, such as stone and brick, in the hands of Art Nouveau architects and their spiritual brothers often lost all their natural character, being treated like so much clay. The sense of materials, both new and old, and the determination of their proper use preoccupied all the leading architects of the first generation, something for which only the English and the Americans prepared the way in the nineteenth century.

The new importance of structure and its expression, the preoccupation with a particular building material, is nowhere more evident than in the work of Auguste Perret (1874-1954), the only great French architect of this generation. Associated as he was with the family contracting firm of A. & G. Perret, which specialized early in the use of reinforced concrete, he saw as his principal task the development of formulas of design for concrete as valid as those so long established in France for building with stone. The other architects of his generation came more gradually and less whole-heartedly to the exploitation of new materials—it is paradoxical, for example, that the characteristic Art Nouveau interest in exposed metal construction came generally to an end about 1905—and their work as a result is more various and less doctrinaire. Because of Perret’s clear definition of his goal and his single-minded advance along a predetermined line, his somewhat limited architectural achievement may well be considered before the protean many-sidedness of Wright’s in America and the ambiguity of Peter Behrens’s in Germany, not to speak of the important contributions of Wagner and Loos in Austria, and of Berlage and de Klerk in Holland (see Chapters 19, 20, and 21).

Auguste Perret came of Burgundian stock, but by the accident of his father’s exile from France after the Commune he was born in Brussels. His education was entirely French. He left the École des Beaux-Arts to enter the family’s building firm without waiting to receive the Government’s diploma, somewhat as Wright went out into the practical world with but two years of engineering school behind him. His career began almost at once, for he built his first house at Berneval in 1890. Several blocks of flats and an office building in Paris followed in the next eight years; the Municipal Casino at St-Malo, built in 1899, was the first work of any real consequence. There he and his brother Gustave (1876-?) used reinforced concrete for an unsupported slab floor of 54-foot span. Executed otherwise in local granite and wood, this building has a certain bold simplicity as remote from ‘Beaux-Arts’ as from Art Nouveau work of the period.

Reinforced concrete,^[395] that is concrete strengthened by internal reinforcing rods of metal, seems to have been invented by a French gardener named Joseph Monnier in 1849, but he used it only for flower pots and outdoor furniture. In 1847 François Coignet (1814-88) built some houses of poured concrete without reinforcement; in 1852 for a house at 72 Rue Charles Michel in St-Denis, Seine, Coignet first employed his own system of béton armé, to use his term. That term has since remained current in French—the German term is Eisenbeton, the Italian cimento armato. During the next four decades ferro-concrete, to give it its simplest English name, was developed very gradually by Coignet and by François Hennebique (1842-1921) with no very notable architectural results. Detailed research is gradually revealing many instances of its early use by various men in different countries; but neither in the scale of its employment nor in the achievement of new and characteristic modes of expression does its history in these decades rival that of iron in the first half of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 7).

In 1894, just as the Art Nouveau was reaching France, ferro-concrete was used for the first time in a structure of some modest architectural pretension by J.-E.-A. de Baudot^[396] (1836-1915) for a school in the Rue de Sévigné in Paris. This is overshadowed in interest, however, by the church he began to build in 1897. Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre at 2 Place des Abbesses in Paris has very little connexion with the Art Nouveau except for its drastic novelty. On the contrary, de Baudot employed for his structural skeleton very much simplified Gothic forms. Actually, it is incorrect to call the material used here béton armé; it is more properly ciment armé since there is no coarse aggregate as in concrete. Like his master Viollet-le-Duc’s projects, Saint-Jean is curious rather than impressive and not at all to be compared in intrinsic interest with Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. Worth noting, however, is the use of faience mosaic to decorate the concrete structural members, something de Baudot had already tried out on his earlier school. The authorities were dubious of the strength of de Baudot’s structure, as well they might have been considering the iron-like delicacy of the membering, and a hiatus of several years held up the construction after 1899, the church being completed only in 1902-4. As has been mentioned already, the contractor was Contamin working with Soubaux, his partner of the period.

Before Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre was finally finished in 1904, Perret had already demonstrated the architectural possibilities of the new material rather more effectively in the block of flats that he built in 1902-3 at 25 bis Rue Franklin in Paris. Despite the echo of the Art Nouveau already noted in the foliage patterns of faience mosaic filling the wall-panels on the exterior, most of the interest of the building resides in its structure and its planning. Like that of Anatole de Baudot’s church, the structure is visibly a discrete framework, but made up entirely of vertical and horizontal elements with no curved members of either Gothic or Art Nouveau inspiration. However, the concrete is nowhere exposed but always covered with glazed tile sheathing. Within the wall-panels the windows are crisply outlined by plain projecting bands of tile; this provides an early instance of that encadrement, or framing, on which Perret came to insist in all his work after the mid twenties.

The skeletal structure of 25 bis Rue Franklin allowed great freedom in planning (Figure 36). Around a small court, sunk into the front of the building, the principal living areas of each flat all open into one another, somewhat as in Wright’s Hickox house of 1900 but with less spatial unification (Figure 31); the result is closer to Horta’s treatment of the main floor of his Aubecq house of 1900 in Brussels (Figure 34).

The next year Perret built another block of flats at 83 Avenue Niel in Paris with an internal skeleton not of concrete but of metal, and façades of stone treated somewhat like those of his Art Nouveau flats of the previous year in the Avenue Wagram (see Chapter 17). He returned, however, at once to the use of ferro-concrete and rarely deserted it again.

The Garage Ponthieu, which was built in 1905-6 in the Rue de Ponthieu in Paris, is a much more striking example of the possibilities of the new material than the earlier blocks of flats; moreover, the concrete is here exposed (Plate 139A). Inside, galleries carried along both sides of the L-shaped space provide a second level for parking motor cars and the whole interior is almost as light and open as if it were built of metal, thus recalling a little de Baudot’s church. The façade, likewise, is as skeletal as if executed with a metal frame. But Perret’s determination, somewhat comparable to Sullivan’s in the Wainwright Building in St Louis of fifteen years before, to organize the expression of a new type of construction along basically Classical lines is as evident as the maximal fenestration. The thin slab which projects at the top provides a sort of cornice and the range of small windows underneath it a sort of frieze, while the arrangement of the elements of the façade below is very formal indeed. The rose-window-like glazing of the big central panel is somewhat rudimentary and rather less Classical in feeling than the rest, but the essentials of Perret’s concrete aesthetic are all adumbrated here as they were not in the more tentative block of flats in the Rue Franklin.

In the solid, marble-sheathed façade of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Perret’s largest and most conspicuous early work, his classicizing intentions are even more evident, but the expression of concrete-skeleton structure is much less complete; these intentions are underlined, moreover, by the large stylized reliefs by Antoine Bourdelle that provide the only external decoration. Originally, in late 1910, the commission for this theatre was given to Van de Velde. He at once proposed that it should be built of ferro-concrete with the Perret firm as contractors. During the course of the following year Perret proposed various changes in the plan to make more practical its construction with a concrete skeleton. When he later offered an alternative design for the façade this was preferred by Van de Velde because it seemed then so expressive of the underlying structure, as it hardly does to posterity. By September Van de Velde made a final report as consulting architect and withdrew completely. Needless to say, there has been controversy ever since as to the degree of Perret’s responsibility for this major monument of twentieth-century Paris; as built, however, there can be little question that it is very largely of his design. How different a theatre by Van de Velde would have been is at least suggested by the one that he erected in 1914 for the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (see Chapter 20).

The foyer of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées expresses the possibilities of ferro-concrete in a more architectural way than do the interiors of the earlier block of flats and the garage. The actual structural members of the skeleton are visible in the free-standing columns, as are also the beams that they support; the walls are very evidently only thin panels between the piers. A few simple mouldings are used to assimilate the new expression to the conventions of academic design—too few to satisfy contemporaries, though too many for later taste.

There is less clarity of expression in the great auditorium because of the profusion of murals contributed by various Symbolists and Neo-Impressionists—Maurice Denis and K.-X. Roussel most notably—and by the over-all gilding of the principal structural members, which are also elaborated by semi-Classical detailing. Even so, the fact that the dome is carried on the four pairs of tall slender columns is very evident, and the swinging curves of the successive balconies give early evidence of the ease with which ferro-concrete lends itself to bold cantilevering.

The presumed necessity of achieving monumentality undoubtedly compromised the purity of Perret’s expression of structure throughout the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. During the War, which followed so soon after the inauguration of the theatre in 1913, an important industrial commission of Perret’s produced what would be for the next generation of architects a more exemplary work. The warehouses built at Casablanca in North Africa in 1915-16—there are also others there of 1919—required no representational display; they are almost ‘pure’ engineering in concrete. But the lightness of their walls, pierced with abstract patterns formed by ventilating holes, and the elegance of their thin shell vaults of segmental section displayed the potentialities of a quite new structural aesthetic, at once delicate and precise, with no echoes at all of the massive masonry buildings of the past.

The interior of the Esders Clothing Factory at 78 Avenue Philippe-Auguste in Paris, erected just after the War in 1919, and several smaller industrial buildings for the metal-working firm of Wallut & Grange at Montataire, Oise, of 1919-21 were more readily studied by younger architects and, in the case of the Esders factory, much grander in scale than the North African warehouses. Even more elegant than the warehouses, and equally ‘pure’, was the atelier of the decorator Durand built in Paris in the Rue Olivier-Métra in 1922. This has a shell vault rising from the floor broken, along one side only, by a long skylight over widely spaced ribs that continue the curve of the vault.

By this time, of course, ferro-concrete was in general use for industrial building throughout most of the western world. In France the vast parabolic-vaulted aircraft hangar at Orly, Seine, designed by the engineer Eugène Freyssinet (1879-1962) in 1916, overshadowed in size and boldness anything built by Perret. This very exceptional utilitarian construction, magnificent in form yet quite without architectural pretension, was destroyed during the Second World War. To Tony Garnier’s work in Lyons we shall turn later.

In America Frank Lloyd Wright used ferro-concrete for his modest E.Z. Polish Factory in Chicago in 1905, just as Ernest L. Ransome was completing the first mature example of a large plant of ferro-concrete frame construction, the United Shoe Machinery Plant in Beverly, Mass., begun in 1903.^[397] All over the Middle West, moreover, grain elevators^[398] were rising in the form of gigantic linked cylinders. In Switzerland the great engineer Robert Maillart (1872-1940) in his factories and bridges was using concrete in several new ways as different from the elevators as from the usual timber-like frames of the French and the Americans or the shell vaults of Perret and Freyssinet. Everywhere the importance of ferro-concrete as the prime building material of the twentieth century was receiving increasing recognition; for it was a material more universally available than structural steel and also so elastic in its potentialities that these have hardly even yet been adequately explored.^[399] In the early twenties, when a younger generation of architects all over Europe turned their major attention to ferro-concrete as the most modern of building materials, Perret was the architect who had the most to offer them—how limited had been Wright’s exploitation of concrete up to this time we shall shortly see (see Chapter 19). When Perret erected the church of Notre-Dame at Le Raincy, S.-et-O., near Paris in 1922-3 concrete came of age as a building material in somewhat the same way that cast iron had done in a series of major English and French edifices of the 1840s (see Chapter 7).

The Le Raincy church is not revolutionary in plan, being a basilica with aisles and an apse; unlike de Baudot’s church, however, it has no specific elements of Gothic reminiscence in the interior (Plate 141). Instead it provides what the medieval builders of Saint-Urbain at Troyes or King’s College Chapel in Cambridge had obviously sought to achieve, a complete cage of glass supported by a minimal skeleton of solid elements. The broad segmental shell vault of the nave, with smaller vaults running crosswise over the aisle bays in the Cistercian way, is carried on no walls at all but only on the slightest of free-standing columns reeded vertically by the forms in which they were cast (Figure 37). Quite separate from this supporting skeleton is the continuous enclosing screen of pre-cast concrete units, pierced and filled with coloured glass designed by Maurice Denis. This is carried round the entire rectangle of interior space and bowed out at the east end in a segmental curve to form a shallow apse behind the altar. Only at the front is the clarity of the conception compromised by the awkward impingement of the clusters of columns that shoot up to form the tower.

Deserting the dilute Classicism that was his natural bent, Perret allowed the clustered piers of his tower to rise into the sky, supporting nothing at the top, in order to approximate the outline of a Gothic spire. Even more than in the interior, where one is aware only of the lowest stage, the verticalism and the medieval suggestion of this feature, so over-ingeniously composed of standard ferro-concrete elements, seems quite at odds with the severe concrete-and-glass box that provides the body of the church. Few other ferro-concrete churches^[400] of the twenties, least of all Perret’s own Sainte-Thérèse at Montmagny, S.-et-O., of 1925-6 and other French ones by his imitators, rival Notre-Dame at Le Raincy. The largest and boldest, Sankt Antonius at Basel in Switzerland, built by Karl Moser (1860-1936) in 1926-7, seems somewhat heavy and factory-like. Its plain rectangular tower, however, rising free at one corner of the church, is much simpler and more original than Perret’s spire and has been frequently and successfully emulated by other architects. Of quite a different order are the Expressionist churches of the German Dominikus Böhm, which have, in the long run, had at least as wide an influence (see Chapters 20 and 25).

Two remodelled Paris banks, one of 1922 for the Société Marseillaise de Crédit in the Rue Auber and another of 1925 for the Crédit National Hôtelier, gave evidence of Perret’s capacity to extend the implications of ferro-concrete design to more conventional problems. These interiors are almost wholly devoid of ornament, and they largely depend for their effectiveness, like the foyer of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, upon the careful proportioning of the exposed elements of the skeleton construction. In 1924 the Palais de Bois, a temporary exhibition building at the Porte Maillot in Paris, showed how this sense of direct structural expression could be exploited in a building all of timber. This was much more successful than the theatre that Perret built in 1924-5 for the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. Of a quite different order was the Tour d’Orientation at Grenoble, also of 1924-5. Here Perret was far happier in achieving something comparable to the richness of medieval spires with standard structural elements and pre-cast panels than in the tower of his church at Le Raincy, for this is much more structurally conceived and quite devoid of Gothic reminiscence in the outline.

The mid twenties also brought to Perret, by this time widely recognized in advanced circles as the leading French architect, several commissions for houses, chiefly for artists, in France and even as far afield as Egypt. Characteristically French in his preoccupation with large, not to say monumental, problems, house-design was not Perret’s forte in the way it was that of his American and Austrian contemporaries Wright and Loos. Moreover by this date certain younger architects, particularly Le Corbusier and two or three others in Paris, had set under way a revolution in domestic architecture as drastic as Wright’s of twenty-five years earlier (see Chapter 22).

Perret’s best houses, such as the Mouron house at Versailles of 1926 or the Nubar house in the Rue du 19 Janvier at Garches of 1930, have an almost eighteenth-century dignity and serenity. The ‘stripped-Classical’ apparatus of terminal cornices, encadrements around the openings, and occasional free-standing columns is doubtless logical as an expression of the construction, but it is also very conservative in effect. Yet the ferro-concrete construction encouraged Perret to introduce very wide openings leading out on to surrounding terraces and to open up the main living areas even more than he had done in the flats of 1902-3 in the Rue Franklin. Such treatments were still rather advanced for Europe, however common they may have been in America for a quarter of a century and more. The characteristic quality of Perret’s domestic work is seen at its best in a small block of flats at 9 Place de la Porte de Passy in Paris facing the Bois de Boulogne that he built in 1930 (Plate 139B). This has a façade towards the park so superbly proportioned that it might almost be by Schinkel and a flow of space inside the individual flats that is worthy of Wright, although much more formal in organization.

Now Perret began to receive the official commissions that are generally given in France only to men well on in years. The building designed in 1929 that he erected for the technical services of the Ministry of Marine in the Boulevard Victor in Paris is one of the largest and most typical of his later works (Plate 140B). The complex rhythms and subtle three-dimensional play of this façade are entirely produced by the actual structural elements. The skeleton divides the long façades into a series of horizontal panels within which are set the vertical frames of the windows separated by pre-cast slabs; in one storey the windows even extend the full width of the bays.

To a considerable extent Perret had succeeded in achieving what he had long consciously sought, that is, a vocabulary of design in concrete as direct, as expressive, and as ordered as the masonry vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a style Louis XX, so to say—still very French in a quite traditional way, yet unmistakably of this century. In the Garde Meuble or National Furniture Storehouse in the Rue Croulebarbe in Paris, begun the next year, the vocabulary is—from principle—all but identical; yet fewer windows and more solid panels were necessary here so that the general effect is flatter and blanker. The curved colonnade across the open side of the court is almost archaeologically reminiscent of the eighteenth century, despite the breadth of its spans and the ingenuity of its detailing. The small concert hall of 1929 in the Rue Cardinet for the École Normale de Musique is less pretentious but also less impressive.

Concrete to Perret, after all these years of employing it, was not a crude or a substitute material. By the use of coloured aggregates which he found various means of exposing he was able to vary the texture and colour of his poured and pre-cast elements with considerable subtlety and elegance. In the later buildings the workmanship is usually of the highest quality—it was by no means so in the early twenties—with arrises brought to a sharp edge in pure cement and such classicizing details as the flute-like facets on piers and the capital-like treatment of their tops carried to a finish comparable to that of chisel-cut freestone.

Thus Perret was eventually able to avoid the industrial brutality of much work in concrete where the material is left as it comes from rough timber forms with crumbling arrises and pockmarked surfaces. Such lack of finish is acceptable in large-scale engineering work but certainly awkward when seen close to as in Notre-Dame at Le Raincy. On the other hand, Perret kept well away also from that slickness of surface—especially popular with younger architects in the twenties—that is produced when concrete is covered with a smooth stucco rendering and painted.^[401] Such slickness is, of course, generally very soon lost as the original surface grows cracked and stained; only too rarely is it properly maintained by frequent patching and repainting. Concrete was to Perret a worthy material, like stone, and therefore deserved the effort and the cost required to give it an expressive finish requiring little or no maintenance.

The reticulated wall system of the big government buildings was also used for a block of flats at 51-55 Rue Raynouard, built in 1932, where Perret himself lived and also maintained his atelier. The necessary adaptation of his formalized open planning to a trapezoidal site produced suites of interior space of considerable complexity yet perfect orderliness. Though Perret was still without a governmental diploma, the atelier^[402] he ran here was associated with the École des Beaux-Arts. It almost seemed now as if he wished to demonstrate how much truer a representative he was of real French tradition than those who were its official, though unworthy, custodians. Thus the older he grew the farther his work drew away from that of the more revolutionary modern architects of the second generation. By 1930 it had definitely begun to date; yet it was only in the last twenty-five years of his life that there came to him the greatest opportunities of realizing his ambitions for French twentieth-century architecture.

In comparison with Perret’s own pioneering of 1902-22 his late work seems to lack vitality. For all the thought that went into its finish, for all the virtuosity of certain features—such as the self-supporting curve of the broad stair that spirals down into his atelier in the Rue Raynouard—his very ambition to create a new French tradition gave his later buildings something of the banality of those designed by the more conventionally ‘traditional’ architects of his generation. This applies in particular to his principal work of the thirties in Paris, the still unfinished Musée des Travaux-Publics in the Avenue du Président-Wilson which he began in 1937. Here the ingeniously pseudo-Classical—yet also truly structural—apparatus of external engaged columns and the intricate plan spreading out from a circular auditorium at the apex of the site are quite in the Beaux-Arts manner. But the grandeur of scale in the interiors and the exciting upward sweep of the boldly curving stairs lend value, and even novelty, to a scheme that is in many ways extremely conservative.

After the Second World War Perret was asked to provide plans for the rebuilding of several bombed cities: Le Havre in 1945; Amiens in 1947; and the Vieux-Port district of Marseilles in 1951. For Amiens he designed a skyscraper, long physically complete but still unoccupied, that derives more from his decorative Tour d’Orientation at Grenoble than from the skyscrapers of the New World. This is one of his few complete failures, if for no other reason than the competition its tall and awkward silhouette offers to the cathedral, whose towers had so long dominated the city’s skyline. The executed Marseilles buildings are not of his design any more than are most of those at Amiens.

At Le Havre, however, his control of the rebuilding was more complete. The Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, or at least the three sides completed between 1948 and 1950 by his associates, outweighs by a great deal the failure of the Amiens skyscraper (Plate 140A). Ranges of four-storey buildings, all carried out in the reticulated vocabulary of his Government buildings of the early thirties in Paris, surround a large sunken plaza; the Hôtel de Ville in the near-Beaux-Arts manner of his Musée des Travaux Publics occupies the fourth side. Shops open towards the square under a continuous colonnade. Behind, rising out of small courts, are taller towers occupied by flats; these lend great three-dimensional interest to the formal and absolutely symmetrical layout of this section of the rebuilt quarter. Since his death similar ranges of buildings have been carried out along the quais to the south. On the whole the extensive work of the team^[403] is superior to the public monuments by their captain, the Hôtel de Ville and the church of St Joseph, both designed in 1950 and completed before Perret’s death in 1954.

Impressive as is Perret’s Le Havre in the international roster of post-war urban rebuilding, it seems curiously out of date today, a mere realization in the 1940s and 1950s, one might almost say, of the aspirations of the early decades of the century. Since that period had few such opportunities as was Perret’s here to realize urbanism on this scale, however, what he accomplished there is a welcome addition to the city-building achievements of this century.

Until the second generation appeared on the scene in the twenties France produced little modern architecture of much interest besides Perret’s work. The department stores of the early years of the century, still strongly under the influence of the Art Nouveau, have already been mentioned (see Chapter 17). After Perret the most important architect was Tony Garnier (1867-1948), and he is of more significance for a vast project that he prepared in his youth than for the executed work of his maturity. In the later decades of the eighteenth century, when the Romantic Classical revolution in architecture was getting under way, projects were often of more interest than executed buildings for their premonitions of what was to come, and this was particularly true in France. It was true again in the early decades of the twentieth century, down at least to Le Corbusier’s project for the Palace of the League of Nations of 1927-8.

Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’ summarized his own aspirations and also provided a wealth of ideas from which later generations of Romantic Classical architects could draw inspiration. So, at the opening of the twentieth century, Garnier’s very complete scheme for a ‘Cité Industrielle’^[404] contained a wealth of ideas on which architects drew well into the 1920s. Like that of the ‘Ville Idéale’, the interest of the ‘Cité Industrielle’ is threefold: sociological, urbanistic, and architectural. Henceforth the industrial city would be more and more accepted as normal and not exceptional. Its needs both general and specific—so notably recognized by Garnier, all the way from the provision of adequate workers’ housing to various sorts of industrial plants—would become more and more important preoccupations of most modern architects. In coping generally with the manifold needs of an industrial community Garnier also faced in detail many very different individual architectural problems with considerable ingenuity.

Garnier’s solutions in the main were very simple and direct, but they often had a merely negative character, as of buildings of academic design scraped of all surface paraphernalia, rather than displaying any fresh and creative approach. But an important part of the main architectural development for some twenty years was to be such a purging of inherited excess. Garnier reduced architecture to basic, if not particularly unfamiliar, terms; on his foundations the next generation began, in the twenties, to build something much more positive; thus his influence was parallel to that of Loos (see Chapters 20 and 21). His contribution to the twentieth century’s repertory of forms was less than Ledoux’s had been to that of the nineteenth a hundred years earlier; notably inferior in quality to Ledoux’s was his own actual production, moreover.

Garnier’s appointment as Architect of the City of Lyons in 1905, a position which he retained until 1919, might seem to have provided the perfect opportunity to realize his dreams as, but for the Revolution, should Ledoux’s appointment by Louis XV to build the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans. But neither the Municipal Slaughterhouse of Lyons at La Mouche, executed in 1909-13, the Herriot Hospital at Grange-Blanche, designed in 1911 and begun in 1915, nor the Olympic Stadium of 1913-16 at Lyons realize much more than the obvious practical implications of the detailed projects for various buildings in his ‘Cité Industrielle’.^[405] The slaughterhouse is bold structurally but clumsily industrial in its handling, with none of the refinement of Perret’s factories; the more highly finished stadium has irrelevant Classical touches in the detailing, simple though it is, of the concrete elements.

Garnier’s work after the First World War began with the hospital, which was completed only in 1930, and included a large low-cost housing project in the États-Unis quarter of Lyons designed as early as 1920 but executed only in 1928-30. Both are quite overshadowed by the comparable work of the next generation in these years—that in other countries at least, if not that in France. The Moncey Telephone Office at Lyons of 1927, the Textile School at La Croix-Rousse of 1930, and the Hôtel de Ville of the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt of 1931-4, on which another architect, J.-H.-E. Debat-Ponsan (b. 1882), a pupil of Victor Laloux, collaborated, differ very little from the scraped academicism of most French public architecture of this period. The houses Garnier built in 1909 at St-Rambert and in 1910 at St-Cyr (Mont d’Or) are among his best executed works; all the same, except for their early date, they are hardly very notable.

Two blocks of flats built by Henri Sauvage (1873-1932) in 1925 in the Rue des Amiraux and in the Rue Vavin in Paris, faced with glazed white brick and stepped back in section to provide terraces for the upper floors, are well above the level of quality of Garnier’s later work without approaching that of Perret’s. That in the Rue des Amiraux, being for working-class occupancy, is more significant of the international aspirations of the period. Although less drastically novel than the low-cost housing of the twenties in Holland and Germany, this has survived very well because of its permanent grime-proof surfacing. It has been rather unjustly forgotten, largely because it lies off the main line of international development (see Chapter 21).

Most French production in the twenties remained completely subject to academic discipline although it was often tricked out with the sort of modish decoration that flourished particularly at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925. Yet at the same time Paris, as the world capital of modern art, was one of the three great foci of architectural advance. The linkage between advanced painting and the Art Nouveau in the nineties was discussed earlier (see Chapter 16). Perret employed Symbolist and Neo-Impressionist painters as collaborators, beginning with the Théâtre des Champs Élysées before the First World War. But there is no real parallel between his architecture and that of Garnier or Sauvage on the one hand and the art of the great twentieth-century masters of the École de Paris on the other. Picasso, Gris, Braque, Matisse, and Derain had no effective influence on architecture. Characteristically Perret employed Bourdelle, not Maillol, when he needed sculpture. With the next generation the situation entirely changed; but the new architects of the twenties, not only in France but everywhere, for all their greater sophistication and their close association with advanced painters and sculptors, still owed at least as much to Perret and to Garnier if not to Sauvage.

To the most creative new architects who appeared around 1920 Garnier’s project for the ‘Cité Industrielle’ offered both a challenge and an inspiration, but Perret was by far the more important influence. Somewhat later, towards 1930, that influence became almost ubiquitous in France, and its effect grew increasingly banal as the ferro-concrete Classicism of Perret’s later work gradually replaced the official and inherited tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts, by that time nearly obsolete even in France.^[406] As has so often happened in France before, a youthful rebel, after being accepted late in life by the academic authorities, was only too ready to support a new discipline that had itself already become academic. Thus is cultural continuity maintained in France at the expense of variety and recurrent new growth. The situation was rather different in America, as we shall soon see.