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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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