The pattern of architectural development in Germany in the early decades of this century was rather different from that in either France or the United States. No academy, native or foreign, no influences from the École des Beaux-Arts discouraged innovation; yet there was an early and general reaction against the whimsicality and the decorative excesses of the Art Nouveau at which most of the younger men had tried their hands before 1900. After the First World War, however, the example of Expressionism in painting and sculpture led many architects to excesses of another sort. Expressionism in architecture,[421] or something very close to it, is not restricted to Germany. The most extreme example of any consequence, and probably the earliest, is Dutch, the Scheepvaarthuis in Amsterdam of 1912-13 by van der Meij (see Chapter 21). In Germany around 1920 various architects who had earlier been predominantly ‘traditional’ in their approach were influenced by Expressionism, as well as others who were already programmatically modern; nor was that influence restricted to the modern architects of the first generation (see Chapter 22).
The boundary line between what, in retrospect, still seems definitely modern and what now seems very similar to the ‘traditional’ work of these decades in other countries is much less sharp than in America. And no German architect of their own generation had the continuously creative achievement of a Perret or a Wright to his credit. Nevertheless Peter Behrens stands out among his contemporaries because of the vigorous boldness of his industrial buildings. Moreover, the influence of his factories of around 1910 was crucial on the next generation, and several of the later leaders actually worked in his office at that relevant period. Yet all but Behrens’s finest work can be matched in the production of other German architects; while his own vitality as an innovator was rather strictly limited to a few years and to what he did for one corporate client. That client was the A.E.G. (German General Electric Company), which had already employed Messel down to his death in 1909.
Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann (1851-1932) dominated the architectural scene in Berlin, where the latter was appointed City Architect in 1896 on the strength of his vast academic Imperial Law Courts of 1886-95 in Leipzig. In the early years of the century they both developed a formal mode that was more ‘traditional’ than modern. Despite Messel’s and Hoffmann’s usual preference for conventional sixteenth- or eighteenth-century models, Behrens was certainly not uninfluenced by their mode of design, even though his more positive sources of inspiration were of a less conservative order. Yet, in so far as one can sort out the different architectural camps in Germany in these years, Behrens must be considered well to the artistic ‘left’ of Messel and Hoffmann.
Germany was certainly very receptive to new ideas in decoration when Behrens’s architectural career began at the turn of the century—receptive rather than creative. There were other Germans who handled the Art Nouveau with considerable originality besides August Endell, notably Bernard Pankok (b. 1872) and Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957); but two foreigners, neither of them very prolific builders, seem to have been the most influential figures on the German architectural scene at the opening of the new century. The Belgian Van de Velde had moved from Paris to Berlin in 1899; the Austrian Olbrich was called to Darmstadt by the Grand Duke in the same year. Olbrich stayed at Darmstadt until his early death in 1908; Van de Velde, however, left Berlin in 1902 when he was invited to Weimar to head the School of Arts and Crafts there which later became the Bauhaus. Van de Velde’s finest Art Nouveau furniture dates from his Berlin years around 1900. As late as 1906,[422] the Central Hall which he designed in the Dresden Exhibition showed him still a competent if rather heavy-handed decorator in the Art Nouveau tradition.
Van de Velde’s remodelling of the Folkwang Museum at Hagen of 1900-2, quite Art Nouveau in its details, his Esche house at Chemnitz of 1903, and his Leuring house at Scheveningen in Holland of the next year, both very massive and heavily mansarded though unornamented externally like his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle, hardly require particular mention. However, for the school that he headed in Weimar he completed in 1906 a building even more devoid of Art Nouveau elements and notably straightforward in character. The plain white stucco walls below his usual heavy mansards were very frankly fenestrated with ranges of wide studio windows, perhaps in emulation of Mackintosh’s Glasgow Art School. Indeed, the general effect is even simpler and more rectilinear than that of its possible Scottish prototype. The problem of his responsibility or lack of responsibility for the design of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in Paris of 1911-13 has already been discussed (see Chapter 17).
Van de Velde continued to build occasionally throughout all his long life—some portions of his Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo in Holland were only completed in 1953—but his last pre-war work was the theatre that he designed and executed in 1913-14 for the Werkbund Exhibition at Cologne. Some trace of the massively plastic quality of his Dresden hall of 1906—so different from the delicacy and grace of the Art Nouveau in its best period—remained in the curved walls and roof of this edifice, but the whole effect was lighter and plainer, more abstract one might almost say.
The resemblance of Olbrich’s Ernst Ludwig Haus of 1901 at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony to Mackintosh’s Art School has already been noted (see Chapter 17). At Darmstadt he also continued to build houses for some years, and his work there culminated in the Exhibition Gallery and the Wedding Tower on the Matildenhöhe, erected in 1907. The former was blocky and somewhat classicizing in character, at once very plain and very formal. The latter, of brick, had a more Hanseatic flavour because of its arched and panelled gable; but it also included a novel motif, bands of windows that seem to carry round a corner, that was destined to be very influential everywhere in the twenties.
In the next and last year of Olbrich’s life—he died, it will be recalled, at the early age of forty-one—two important commissions came to him away from Darmstadt. The Feinhals house at Marienburg near Cologne repeats the blocky symmetrical composition of the Exhibition Building, the walls being articulated only with flat oblong panels. The loggia between, however, has a range of Greek Doric columns, clear evidence of the influence of Romantic Classicism that was growing stronger in Germany all through this decade. But Olbrich had little real appreciation of the subtle elegance of the work of Schinkel and his contemporaries, or so it would appear from this house.
The buildings of the East Cemetery in Munich, designed by Hans Grässel (1860-?) in 1894 and completed in 1900, are perhaps the first examples of this sort of ‘Neo-Neo-Classicism’. Yet beside the contemporary Neo-Baroque of the Munich Palace of Justice built in 1897 by Grässel’s master, Friedrich von Thiersch (1852-1921), nearly as over-scaled and aggressive as Wallot’s Reichstag in Berlin, the rather Schinkelesque work at the cemetery appears, in its crispness and its relative simplicity, almost as ‘modern’ as anything by Olbrich. As has been noted earlier, Schinkel remained a major inspiration to such a leader of the second generation of modern architects as Mies van der Rohe, so this influence has a continuing significance.
A much larger building by Olbrich than the house at Marienburg, also completed in the year of his death, the Tietz (now Kaufhof) Department Store in Düsseldorf, repeats the reiterative verticalism of those portions of Messel’s Wertheim store in Berlin that were built in 1900-4, though Olbrich’s detailing is not medievalizing like Messel’s but rather semi-Classical. Neither of these later things maintains the promise of his Ernst Ludwig Haus; they rather illustrate that general recession from bold innovation which characterized the architecture of this decade in Germany, a recession corresponding more or less closely to the general resurgence of ‘traditionalism’ in England and America that came a few years later (see Chapter 24).
Peter Behrens (1868-1940), only a year younger than Olbrich, began his career as an architect at Darmstadt. From 1896 on, before being called there, he had only done decorative work of a markedly Art Nouveau sort. In his own house in the Artists’ Colony of 1900-1—the only one not built by Olbrich—the interiors are still quite Art Nouveau, but the clumsy exterior has little interest except as a document of revolt. Yet the plan is quite like that of Wright’s own house of 1889 in Oak Park, allowing a real flow of space through wide openings between entrance hall, living-room, and dining-room. By 1902 the ‘Hessian’ interior that he contributed to the Turin Exhibition was wholly rectilinear, presumably under the influence of Olbrich and Mackintosh. A similar severity characterized the work that he did, much of it merely open pergolas, for the Düsseldorf Garden and Art Exhibition of 1904.
By this time Behrens’s personal style was maturing, although his debt to Olbrich remained very evident. The Art Pavilion for the North-West German Art Exhibition held in Oldenburg in 1904 was a symmetrical composition of cubical masses, the flatness of their surfaces even more emphasized by linear panelling than in Olbrich’s work. The Obenauer house of 1905-6 at Sankt Johann near Saarbrücken is rather more loosely composed; indeed, its white stucco walls, slated roofs, and grouped windows distinctly recall Voysey’s houses, which were by this time very well known in Germany thanks to the Studio and Muthesius’s book. The garden front, however, is symmetrical and the plan not as open as that of his own house of four years earlier.
In Behrens’s next two buildings, the small Concert Hall in the Flora Garden at Cologne of 1906 and the large Crematorium at Delstern near Hagen completed the following year, the geometrical panelling in black and white, used both inside and out, recalls a little San Miniato in Florence. But the blocky geometry of the Oldenburg pavilion and its smooth flat surfaces were also repeated, so that both these buildings have a curiously model-like look as if they were made of sheets of cardboard.
Behrens’s two finest works up to this time, the Schröder house of 1908-9—no longer extant—and the Cuno house of 1909-10 in the Hassleyerstrasse at Eppenhausen near Hagen, have a much more solid appearance, with quarry-faced masonry below and roughcast walls above (Plate 148B). The symmetrical façades, which correspond to completely symmetrical plans, are at once more tightly and more subtly composed. Here English influence seems to have been superseded by an attempt, rather more successful than Olbrich’s at Marienburg, to emulate Schinkel. A third early house by Behrens, the Goedecke house at Oppenhausen of 1911-12, is equally formal but not symmetrical, recalling thus a little Schinkel’s Schloss Glienecke near Potsdam.
Somewhat similar to Behrens’s work of this period in its evident derivation from German Romantic Classicism, but more delicate in scale, was the work of Heinrich Tessenow (1876-1950), notably his Festival Theatre of 1910-13 and the other buildings he designed and erected for the Art Colony at Hellerau near Dresden. But such German work, of which a great deal was produced in the decade before the First World War, corresponds rather closely, despite the frequent stylization of detail and the serious concern with geometrical clarity in composition, to the Neo-Georgian of England and America in the early twentieth century, and also to much parallel work in the Scandinavian countries that is usually of rather higher quality (see Chapter 24).
Moreover, those Frenchmen who castigated the Théâtre des Champs Élysées as ‘Boche’ during the First World War because of the presumption that it was designed by Van de Velde, born a Belgian but head of a German art school, were not altogether wrong. In its scraped Classicism and rigidly geometrical ordonnance Perret’s façade was not at all remote from one of the most characteristic German modes of the years just before 1914. Perret’s industrial work was, of course, much more significant for the future.
So also with Behrens it was the challenge that his position as architect of the A.E.G. brought of working in the industrial field that made him briefly a rival of Wright, and even more particularly of Perret, as a major architectural innovator. Behrens’s first work for the A.E.G., the Turbine Factory at the corner of the Hussitenstrasse and the Berlichingenstrasse in Moabit, an industrial suburb of Berlin, was erected in 1909 immediately upon his appointment as successor to Messel. This broke new ground in several ways. It was built partly of poured concrete, partly of exposed steel, with both materials very directly expressed (Plate 149A). The side wall of glass and steel more than rivals in its openness those of the department stores designed by Art Nouveau architects (Plates 131B and 133). But Behrens’s façade, in contradistinction to theirs, has no applied ornament whatsoever. Moreover, he ordered the whole composition as carefully as Schinkel might have done if either large factories or metal-and-glass construction had come within his purview.
The end façade of the Turbine Factory is slightly less frank in design. The concrete corners on either side of the central window-wall of metal and glass are battered and striated horizontally as if to suggest rusticated masonry. The gable of the multi-faceted roof is brought forward to shelter the window-wall; this projects slightly in front of the concrete corners, almost like a Shavian bay-window raised to industrial scale. The treatment of the window-bands of the lower concrete block to the left resembles that of Schinkel’s articulated walls on the Berlin Schauspielhaus, but with all the Greek mouldings omitted. Thus the functional elements of a factory executed throughout in new materials were here for the first time in Germany architectonically ordered with no dependence on decoration of any sort. Wright had done much the same four years earlier in his little-known E.-Z. Polish Factory in Chicago, but the scale of that is modest and its walls are not extensively fenestrated. Perret had come closer to it in his Garage Ponthieu in Paris, also built in 1905. There can be little question, however, that Behrens’s is the finest building of the three.
In two more factories built in 1910 for the A.E.G., both much larger but neither of them quite so striking, Behrens broadened his range as an industrial architect. The High Tension Factory in the Humboldthain is of brick, not concrete or steel. Except for a few minor elements somewhat suggesting pedimented temple-fronts translated into an industrial vocabulary, he handled the vast façades here with the same directness as the side elevation of metal and glass at the Turbine Factory. The Small Motors Factory in the Voltastrasse is similar but much finer (Plate 148A). There the brick piers have rounded corners and rise unbroken almost the full height of the building. The effect is somewhat like that portion of Messel’s Wertheim Store which was built in the late nineties, but the scale is larger, and there is none of Messel’s rich, half-traditional, half-Art-Nouveau detailing. Instead, the careful proportioning and the suave but extremely straightforward treatment of the structural elements again suggests Schinkel’s sort of ‘rationalism’ yet succeeds in doing so, as at the earlier Turbine Factory, with almost no reminiscence of actual Romantic Classical forms.
Thanks to the widening range of responsibility that German industry was now ready to give architects, Behrens not only built these big factories for the A.E.G. and also redecorated their retail shops all over Berlin, but he was soon asked in addition to provide some blocks of flats for the company’s workmen at Hennigsdorf outside Berlin. This was a social challenge which neither Wright nor Perret had to meet. (In fact, however, Wright did in 1904 design terrace-houses that were never executed for Larkin Company workers in Buffalo; while in France low-cost housing had a very important place in Garnier’s projects for a ‘Cité Industrielle’.) Henceforth, such housing would be a major preoccupation of most modern architects. This is true not only in Germany but all over the western world, and especially in Holland and Scandinavia. The origins of low-cost housing go back to the 1840s in England when Henry Roberts, whose Fishmongers’ Hall in London has been mentioned, became the first architect to specialize in this field. But the early history of housing[423] is of more sociological than architectural interest. Moreover, what the nineteenth century esteemed to be ‘model’ low-cost dwellings have too often had to be demolished as ‘sub-standard’ in the twentieth. Even the interest and activities of present-day architects may not spare the twentieth century the shame of building again as a public service what posterity will consider slums.
Various small A.E.G. factories for making porcelain, lacquer, and other specialized products were also erected by Behrens in 1910 and 1911, none of particular interest. In 1911-12, however, there followed the Large Machine Assembly Hall at the corner of the Voltastrasse and the Hussitenstrasse near the Small Motors Factory. This rivals in quality the Turbine Factory of 1909. Once more a great rectangular volume is covered with a multi-faceted steel-framed roof, the structure below being in this instance also of steel with no use of concrete. The metal frame is largely filled with glass, but brick was introduced at the base and on the ends. The scale of this unit is less monumental than that of the Turbine Factory, though the size is much greater. The general effect, particularly that of the interior with its travelling cranes, is at once light and dramatic. A big A.E.G. plant was also built by Behrens at Riga in Russia in 1913.
Three large non-industrial commissions of 1911-12 show how this work for the A.E.G. affected Behrens’s approach to design. Although it is built of stone not brick, the German Embassy (Plate 27A) opposite Monferran’s St Isaac’s Cathedral in Petersburg is, at first sight, deceptively like the Small Motors Factory. Actually, the façade has a range of engaged Doric columns, but by their tall slim proportions and their lack of entasis these were, so to say, ‘industrially’ stylized. The great scale, the absolute regularity, and a certain coldness surely derived in part from the factories of the previous two years; but these also recall Romantic Classical monuments of Alexander I’s time in Petersburg.
Behrens’s enormous office building for the Mannesmann Steel Works on the Rhine at Düsseldorf was less successful, as was also that for the Continental Rubber Company in Hanover. The latter was designed in 1911 and begun in 1913, but not completed until after the First World War, in 1920; it was destroyed in the Second World War. The heavily reiterative sort of scraped Classicism Behrens used for these overpowering masonry blocks lacked the subtlety of composition of the Hagen houses yet retained something of the directness of expression of the A.E.G. factories. They were not untypical, however, of much large-scale German building of the second and third decades of the century. This mode developed fairly directly out of the Berlin work of Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann, although it was usually much less specifically ‘traditional’ in its detailing and even more aggressive in scale; a not dissimilar mode returned to official favour under Hitler in the mid thirties, usually with very coarse detailing.
With these big office buildings by Behrens and others one may compare the work of this period by various other German architects who preferred less classicizing modes. Early buildings by Fritz Schumacher (1869-1947), such as his crematorium in Dresden of 1908, also illustrate the megalomaniac tendencies of the period that seem so expressive of the expansive ambitions of William II’s Second Reich. The many schools that Schumacher built in Hamburg just before the First World War are simpler, although still rather heavily scaled, and more comparable in quality to Behrens’s work. One in particular, built in 1914 in the Ahrensburgerstrasse, almost echoes the elongated colonnade of Behrens’s Petersburg Embassy, but the ‘columns’ are plain piers executed in dark red brick[424] and strung along a front that is concave not flat. The bath-house at Eppenhausen, also of 1914, is very like the schools; while in the Kunstgewerbe Haus of the previous year on the Holstenwall in Hamburg a similar mode was employed for what is, in effect, a large office building. This seems to have initiated a local tradition of design for commercial buildings which was maintained in the twenties with little change, not only by Schumacher but by several other Hamburg architects. Schumacher’s cemetery chapel, built as late as 1923, follows much the same line.
In Stuttgart the railway station by Paul Bonatz (1877-1951) and F. E. Scholer (b. 1874) is the finest though not the largest of several built in Germany in these years. Designed in 1911, it was started only in 1914, just as the enormous and much less interesting one at Leipzig with its six parallel sheds, begun by Wilhelm Lossow (1852-1914) and M. H. Kühne in 1907, was reaching completion. That at Stuttgart was not finished until 1927 because of the interruption caused by the First World War. This structure has a rather Richardsonian flavour in its extensive unbroken wall surfaces of rock-faced ashlar and its plain round arches (Plate 152). But the influence here came rather from the Munich architect Theodor Fischer (1862-1938). Fischer’s Romanesquoid churches, such as that of the Redeemer in Munich of 1899-1901 and the Garrison Church of 1908-11 in Ulm, were among the largest and most strikingly novel built in the opening years of the century in Germany; in the latter he even used ferro-concrete principals to carry the roof of the nave. Fischer’s Art Gallery of 1911 in Stuttgart was both more delicate in scale and rather more archaeological in its detailing; Bonatz’s Stuttgart work is bolder, simpler, and quite as admirably expressive of the traditional materials used.
With the Stuttgart Station may be contrasted the rather earlier one at Hamburg that Heinrich Reinhardt (1868-?) and Georg Süssenguth (1862-?) built in 1903-6. There the major sections—shed, concourse, etc.—designed by the engineer Medling resemble rather closely Contamin and Dutert’s Galerie des Machines at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. These great constructions of iron and glass fortunately quite overshadow the low ranges of accessory elements in masonry, with ornament still in the Meistersinger mode of the eighties, contributed by the architects. The differences between these two notable stations well illustrate that reaction towards masonry construction and a more or less traditional approach to design that was developing strength in the decade preceding the First World War. In the history of the railroad station as a type the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof represents, not a new beginning, but the end of a line descending from the great shed-dominated stations of the mid nineteenth century.
Intermediate in date between the Hamburg and Stuttgart stations was that at Karlsruhe built by August Stürzenacker in 1908-13. Although masonry construction and masonry forms dominate here as at Stuttgart, the simplification of mass and space composition throughout, and above all the elegant detailing, give evidence of the continuing leadership of Olbrich at the time of his death. Olbrich never built a station himself, but he won third place in the 1903 competition for that at Basel and second place in the 1907 competition for Darmstadt.
In other specialized fields of building a forward line of development is more evident. Two big circular halls, one in Frankfort built by Thiersch in 1907-8, the other in Breslau built by Max Berg (b. 1870) in 1910-12 (Plate 149B), are more notable than the contemporary railway stations at Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. Like Behrens’s industrial work for the A.E.G., these structures illustrate the vital stimulus that German architects were obtaining in these generally somewhat reactionary years from the use of engineering solutions and materials other than masonry—steel at Frankfort, ferro-concrete at Breslau—to cover and enclose space. In the case of Thiersch this is the more remarkable when one remembers the ponderous traditionalism of his Neo-Baroque Palace of Justice in Munich built ten years before. While Berg on the exterior of his vast hall approaches the attenuated Classicism of Perret’s work of the next decade, the superb interior reminds one at once of Piranesi and of the much later structures of Nervi.
German architects of this generation were rarely able to carry over into the designing of more conventional structures the boldness and freshness of approach of their large-scale work. They seem to have felt no such call to regenerate architecture as Wright had imbibed from Sullivan; nor did they, like Perret, attempt to use the new materials and the new structural methods consistently for all sorts of buildings whatever their particular purpose. German production before and after the First World War, as represented in the œuvre of such then highly esteemed figures[425] as Oskar Kaufmann (b. 1873), German Bestelmeyer (1874-1942), and Wilhelm Kreis (b. 1873), to mention but three of the best known, shades over almost imperceptibly from industrial and semi-industrial buildings of bold and original character to a range of structures in various tasteful modes that are, in retrospect, hardly distinguishable from the traditional work of this period in other countries. This has already been noted as regards Tessenow. Characteristic examples of these men’s work were Bestelmeyer’s extensions of the University and the Technical High School in Munich, of 1906-10 and 1922 respectively, both in the local tradition of Theodor Fischer’s work. The Museum of Prehistory in Halle that Kreis built in 1916 with K. A. Jüngst was more traditional even than Bestelmeyer’s work, although Provincial-Roman rather than Romanesque in inspiration.
As in England in the late nineteenth century, individual idiosyncrasies were much cultivated, and architects tended to specialize in particular types of buildings. Kaufmann, for example, had a very personal Neo-Rococo manner, delicate and frivolous, that he employed with real appropriateness in various Berlin theatres, notably the remodelling of the Kroll Oper and the Komödie, both carried out in 1924. But Behrens remains on the whole the most interesting and accomplished architect of this generation, whose opportunities for building were often to be even greater under the Weimar Republic in the early twenties than they had been under the Kaiser.
No very great change is observable in Behrens’s work after the First World War. The terrace-houses that he built in 1918 for A.E.G. workers at Hennigsdorf, and the semi-detached dwellings of a low-cost housing estate for which he was responsible at Othmarschen near Altona in 1920 are simple and solid in construction, quite like those of before the war but more conservative in design. However, at this point comes a characteristic, though brief, change of phase that illustrates his ready response to influences from the new painting and sculpture of the day. In the big complex erected for the I. G. Farben Company in 1920-4 at Höchst Behrens gave up the direct expression of new industrial building methods characteristic of his A.E.G. factories of 1909-11. The exterior was massive and almost medievalizing, even though the ranges of arches were of the unconventional parabolic form that seems to have appealed especially to Expressionist taste. In the tall glass-roofed court inside the angular forms of Expressionism were most strikingly evident; but he also introduced wholly abstract wall paintings and a few rather Constructivist lighting fixtures elsewhere in the reception rooms and offices. The result was, to say the least, ambiguous and incoherent, although the exterior was not unimpressive in its general effect.
Expressionist influence had first appeared a little earlier than this in the work of other German architects, but it reached a peak in these years of the early twenties. In his pre-war industrial work Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) was not yet Expressionist. The chemical works that he built at Luban near Posen in 1911-12 rivalled in size and even in directness of expression—though not in distinction—Behrens’s factories for the A.E.G. After the war, however, Poelzig became a principal exponent of Expressionism in architecture. One of the earliest and most striking examples of Expressionist design on a large scale was his remodelling of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1919. Here the cavernous, stalactite-ceilinged interior round the central circular stage was itself like an Expressionist stage-set and the planning implied a major revolution in dramatic presentation that never, in fact, quite came off. Yet his industrial work of the early twenties soon became much more straightforward again, and he later reverted to something very comparable to the stripped monumentality of Behrens’s Düsseldorf and Hanover office buildings. The most prominent extant example of this is the enormous I.G. Farben Company headquarters that he built in 1930 in Frankfort.
One can hardly leave the subject of Expressionism in German architecture, largely confined though its more extreme manifestations were to a very short post-war period of three or four years, without mentioning two more names, those of Fritz Höger (1877-1949) and Dominikus Böhm (1880-1955).
The twenties saw a few skyscrapers erected in Germany, none of them of the great height then current in America, but sometimes as conspicuous above the existing skyline as the first skyscrapers in New York had been in the seventies. The largest, though not the tallest, and certainly the most impressive was the Chilehaus, built by Höger in Hamburg in 1923, with its Schumacher-like piers of patterned brickwork and its upper three storeys receding behind narrow terraces (Plate 153A). A large and irregular site encouraged the employment of a long double curve on the right-hand side of the hollow block, and the sharp angle at that end produced automatically a silhouette of the shrillest Expressionist order. Actually, however, Höger like other German architects was already returning by this time from earlier and wilder Expressionist adventures. To what extent he was aware of the skyscrapers of Sullivan is uncertain. The emphatically vertical scheme of design he used here, with arches linking the brick piers together below slab cornices, certainly suggests some knowledge of them, even though they were by this time all but forgotten in America.
Considerably taller than the Chilehaus, but not otherwise very distinguished, were two other German skyscrapers of the twenties. Kreis’s Wilhelm Marx Haus of 1924 in Düsseldorf, a thirteen-storey tower crowned with curious openwork tracery of inter-laced brick, is still a conspicuous feature of the local skyline; but the Planetarium and associated buildings that he erected at the Gesolei there two years later are better examples of the fairly restrained mode that he and others usually employed in these years. The plainer and better proportioned seventeen-storey Hochhaus am Hansaring in Cologne was built in 1925 by Jacob Koerfer (b. 1875).
Although only a few skyscrapers actually rose in European cities in the twenties, the theme nevertheless fascinated the younger architects. Many bold designs for them were projected, some of them of real significance for later developments in both the Old World and the New (see Chapter 22). The international competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower held in 1922, which many Europeans entered and the Finn Eliel Saarinen all but won, signally focused attention on a type of building hitherto considered unsuitable for the Old World, and generally accepted in Europe only in the 1950s (see Chapters 21 and 25).
The churches of Böhm, all of them Catholic, have a suavity that Höger’s work lacks, but at least equal forcefulness. The Suabian War Memorial Church of 1923 at Neu-Ulm is like an imaginative film-set of the period, being a sort of free fantasia on Gothic themes with little feeling of structural reality. But the boldest of Böhm’s churches, that he built at Bischofsheim in 1926, seems almost to take off from the engineer Freyssinet’s hangars at Orly. The paraboloid forms are here very frankly used; yet the concrete ‘barrel’ vault of the nave, intersected by lower cross-vaults over the bays of the aisles, creates a strong emotional effect that is both Gothic and Expressionist in tone. The finest of his churches, however, may be Sankt Engelbert at Cologne-Riehl of 1931-3. This is circular in plan and very ingeniously roofed, not with a dome,[426] but with lobes of paraboloid barrel-vaulting.
However, in a church built in 1929, Sankt Josef at Hindenburg in Upper Silesia, Böhm had already turned away from the emotionalism of his earlier work towards simple rectangular forms.[427] This simplicity he has maintained in his post-war churches, with the result that his last work, Maria Königin,[428] built at Marienburg outside Cologne in 1954, with its squarish plan, very slender metal supports, and side wall of glass, has very little churchly flavour left. Yet some of Böhm’s very late projects indicated that many of his ambitions of thirty years ago still remained with him to the end; they may well some day find effective expression at the hands of his son or of Rudolf Schwarz now that a more emotional approach to church-design has been revived internationally.
Compared to such a French church of the twenties as Perret’s Notre-Dame at Le Raincy or such a Swiss church as Moser’s Sankt Antonius in Basel, both using concrete in the rectangular and skeletal mode usually preferred at that time, Böhm’s churches of the twenties once seemed semi-traditional rather than modern. One can now see, however, that there is a different and more emotive line of development in modern church architecture to which, for example, Gaudí’s unfinished churches at San Coloma and Barcelona belong, as do also such later Latin American examples in ferro-concrete as the Purísima at Monterrey in Mexico by Enrique de la Mora (b. 1907) of 1939-47, São Francisco at Pampulha in Brazil, built by Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1901) in 1943, Nuestra Señora de los Milagros in Mexico City by Felix Candela (b. 1910), completed in 1955, and several completed in the mid fifties by Juvenal Moya at Bogotá in Colombia[429] (see Chapters 23 and 25). Expressionism may have been less of a cul de sac than its brief impingement on Behrens might lead one to suppose. Certainly it was a potent force for a few years after the First World War, and played then a significant role in breaking down the rule of ‘tasteful’ traditionalism inherited from the preceding decade.[430]
As the twenties progressed, however, and extreme Expressionist influence generally receded, Behrens gave evidence of his awareness of the quite different direction that modern architecture had just taken in the hands of certain younger men, several of whom had actually been his own pupils or at least his employees. In 1925-6 he built New Ways, a house in Northampton, England, for S. J. Bassett-Lowke, earlier a client of Mackintosh’s. With its smooth white stucco walls, horizontally grouped windows, and flat roof, this is of considerable historical interest, although of very little intrinsic merit.[431] No such advanced work had yet been done in England by local architects, and at this time only a very few houses of a comparably advanced character had been executed anywhere (see Chapter 22).
Despite his unusual openness of mind, which led Behrens in his fifties to attempt to rival juniors barely started on their careers—or, quite as probably, because of the lack of strong personal conviction of which this gives evidence—Behrens did not, like Perret and Wright in later life, continue to be very creative beyond this date. In Vienna, where he was called in the mid twenties to be professor of architecture at the Akademie, he settled into a sort of compromise mode. The low-cost housing blocks that he built in Vienna in 1924-5 on the Margaretengürtel, in the Stromstrasse, and in the Konstanziastrasse illustrate his characteristic uncertainty of direction in these years. If considerably sounder, they are also much less adventurous than the Bassett-Lowke house designed at almost the same time. This can be seen still more clearly at the Weissenhof in Stuttgart where many of the buildings of the German Werkbund’s housing exhibition held in 1927 remain in use today. There Behrens’s block of flats stands very near one designed by the director of this exhibition, his former assistant Mies van der Rohe (Plate 162B), and not far from houses by such other leaders of the new generation as Gropius, Le Corbusier—who had both worked in his office also—and Oud (see Chapter 22). The contrast between his massive block and their light and open structures is the more striking because Behrens here so evidently set out to meet his juniors more than half-way.
Behrens’s very latest work, the factory for the Austrian Tobacco Administration at Linz built in 1930 in association with Alexander Popp (b. 1891), was rather less conservative because of the nature of the commission. It is less mechanistic than the industrial work done so much earlier for the A.E.G., yet nonetheless impressive for its consistency of treatment and also for its human scale. The Linz factory provides a not unworthy concluding note to Behrens’s ambiguous career.
The vast productivity of the German architects of Behrens’s generation, both before and after the First World War, building in a boom which only came to a close around 1930 with the world-wide depression, makes it difficult to choose specific examples worth the emphasis of even brief mention. The situation is made no easier by the considerable versatility of most of the leading figures. Those few buildings that have been specifically mentioned—even most of Behrens’s own work except for his A.E.G. factories—should be considered typical of the upper level of German achievement in these decades rather than monuments of unique distinction like the best things done by Perret and by Wright in the same decades. Yet, it is worth noting, for a long time neither Wright nor Perret had much effect on the general scene in their own countries, for all the seminal effect of their influence on younger architects everywhere; while the Germans achieved a tremendous volume of what can be called ‘half-modern’ work that notably changed the whole character of several large cities. Thus the way was prepared for a very early and widespread acceptance of the next stage of modern architecture, an acceptance so premature that it induced in the thirties a sharp reaction.
In 1933 a regime rose to power in Germany with doctrinaire objections to the latest phase of modern architecture, ironically castigated as Kultur-Bolschevismus immediately after the Bolsheviks had rejected it as unacceptably bourgeois! As a result, the leaders of the younger generation almost all emigrated (see Chapter 23); while with few exceptions those German architects who remained at home turned backwards in their tracks, though not very far backwards. Most German production in the Nazi period is all but indistinguishable, indeed, from what was considered most advanced before the First World War and even for some years thereafter. Very little of it deserves specific mention. As was the case around 1910, the more nearly the structures were of an engineering order—as for instance Bonatz’s bridges for the Autobahn built over the years 1935-41—the less they were likely to be stylized along the heavy near-Classical or semi-medieval lines the later Imperial period had established as conventional a generation before. Even the housing that Bonatz built after the War in 1945-6 at Ankara in Turkey and his Opera House there of 1947-8 are hardly as advanced as his Zeppelinbau office building of 1929-31 opposite the station in Stuttgart. Like Behrens at the same time, he had attempted there—with a certain amount of real success—to follow the ascetic principles of the younger generation that had just been so well illustrated at Stuttgart in the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 on the Weissenhof (see Chapter 22).
Immediately after the Second World War there was for several years some continuing use of the modes of 1910, so to call them. This was natural because of the prolonged absence of most of the leaders of the intervening generation from the country—Gropius, Mies, and Mendelsohn never returned—and the renewed activity of so many of the older generation who had made their reputation in the period 1905-25 with which this chapter has chiefly dealt. Today it is as if Germany had lived through the stylistic developments of the twenties a second time, and now the newer sort of architecture is once again as ubiquitous there as it was in 1930.
These tidal waves of changing taste in Germany, each representing a sharp reaction against its predecessor, make difficult such a focusing of attention on a few creative and insurgent figures as gives dramatic pungency to the history of these decades in America and France. Jugendstil, Expressionismus, Neue Sachlichkeit,[432] these general movements, more than even so distinguished an individual as Behrens, are the real protagonists of the German story from 1900 to 1933; but in the international frame of reference they must be subordinated to the broader currents that dominated the architecture of the western world in the period. In that frame of reference the contribution of a few Austrians more than equalled that of the more prolific Germans, down at least to the First World War.