The project that Gropius and Meyer offered in the competition of 1922 for the Chicago Tribune Tower, unlike Saarinen’s, attracted very little contemporary attention in America (Plate 158A). Such a stripped expression of skeleton construction had, up to that time in America, been seen only in factories and warehouses. Even in Chicago, moreover, the New York ideal of the shaped tower had quite replaced the Sullivanian slab as the favourite form for pretentious skyscrapers. Ten years later, however, when the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture was held at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York it was evident that the kind of architecture represented by Gropius’s project had become widely accepted in several European countries. By that date it was even possible to deduce from the executed work of Gropius and his chief European contemporaries, most of which was shown in the exhibition, the existence of a new style christened ‘international’^[443] by Alfred Barr, the Museum’s director. Whether the new architecture that came into being in the twenties in Europe and has since spread throughout the western world should in fact be considered a style, or even a style-phase, remains a matter of controversy; but for forty years now it has been readily distinguishable from what the older generation of modern architects produced.

In 1922 this new architecture hardly existed except in the form of projects. Some of the most strikingly novel buildings built in the early twenties were by Willem Marinus Dudok (b. 1884) in Holland and by Erich Mendelsohn^[444] (1887-1953) in Germany. These no longer belonged to the realm of the earlier, pre-war modern architecture. Yet the work of neither was as indicative of the direction the newer architecture was taking in these formative years as is the Gropius Chicago Tribune project. Very shortly, however, both Dudok and Mendelsohn drew closer to the main current of development of this decade, although they continued to be, in varying degree, individualists rather than whole-hearted converts to the dominant architectural mode of their generation.

Dudok’s work as City Architect of Hilversum, beginning with the Public Baths and the Dr H. Bavinck School in 1921, is remarkably simple and direct (Plate 157A). The abstract crispness and clarity of his compositions are very different from the whimsically curved surfaces of de Klerk’s and Kramer’s housing blocks (Plate 156A and B). This rigidly geometrical organization of the forms reflects his earlier contact with the group of Dutch abstract artists known as De Stijl,^[445] notably the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg and the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo. But Dudok’s continued emphasis on the fine quality of his brickwork, the massiveness of his characteristically interlocking blocks, and a certain basically decorative intention still link his buildings of the twenties at Hilversum with the ideals of the older generation. Dudok’s work of this period was certainly novel—and even modern in a very advanced way for the date—but it remained quite Dutch in its idiosyncrasies, not ‘international’.

The plasticity of Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, designed in 1919 and completed in 1921, at Neubabelsberg near Berlin (Plate 153B) seems at first sight not unrelated to that of Gaudí’s hewn-stone Casa Milá in Barcelona of 1905-10 (Plate 137A). But it was originally intended to be executed in poured concrete—for technical reasons it is in fact mostly of brick rendered with cement—and what one might call the ‘overtones’ of the forms are more mechanistic than organic. Like Dudok, Mendelsohn had been influenced by a local school of painting. But the images he distorted according to the tenets of Expressionism came from the world of machines not, like Gaudí’s, from the world of plants and animals. Mendelsohn’s earlier war-time sketches^[446] make this origin even more evident. The extreme point of this sort of abstract sculptural Expressionism^[447] in the twenties is found in the work of no architect but in the mountainous cult edifice called the Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland, designed by the creator of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner^[448] and begun in 1923.

Mendelsohn himself rejected this excessively plastic approach to architecture—an approach to which a reversion can be noted on the part of Le Corbusier in the last decade, incidentally (Plate 167)—even before the Einstein Tower was completed. The hat factory that he built at Luckenwalde in 1920-3 was in the direct line of descent from the industrial work Behrens and Poelzig had done before the First World War. This was rightly recognized as one of the signal productions of those crucial years of the early twenties when the concepts of the new architecture were first being tentatively realized in France and in Holland, and very shortly, of course in Germany. Dudok’s buildings at Hilversum of the early twenties had a very considerable international influence;^[449] Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower did not, at least not on architecture.^[450] However, other work of his done in the next few years was much admired and also widely emulated, both in Germany and abroad, by the younger architects.

In spite of the importance in these years of the executed work of Dudok and of Mendelsohn, several other architects certainly had far more to do with determining the direction that architecture took from 1922 on. One was a Swiss then working in Paris, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier. At this time more painter than architect, Le Corbusier had earlier been an assistant of Perret’s and had also worked briefly for Behrens and even for Josef Hoffmann. Two others were Dutchmen. J.J.P. Oud had practised in association with Dudok at Leiden in 1912-13, and from 1917 and 1918 he and G.T. Rietveld were in much closer contact with the artists of De Stijl than Dudok ever was, being actual members of that small cohesive group. Two more were Germans, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both of whom had been Behrens’s assistants, respectively for two and for three years.

Gropius, born in 1883, is the eldest of the five and older than Mendelsohn also; Le Corbusier, Rietveld, and Mies were born in 1888; Oud in 1890. Gropius’s career began as early as 1906, when he erected some plain brick workmen’s houses in Pomerania even before he had finished his professional training at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. A leading professor in this school was Theodor Fischer, Bonatz’s master, in whose office Oud later spent a few months in 1911. After a year of travel in Spain, Italy, and Holland Gropius entered Behrens’s office in 1908, remaining there till 1910. On leaving Behrens he designed in 1911, with Adolf Meyer, the Fagus Factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine. He worked again in partnership with Meyer from after the First World War until the latter’s death in 1925.

Directly as this Alfeld factory—it made shoe-lasts—follows from Behrens’s work for the A.E.G., notably the front of the Turbine Factory of 1909, its architectural expression is much more advanced (Plate 158B). There the great window remained, for all its size, but a window; here, in the main three-storey block, the slightly projecting metal chassis rise unbroken over very wide areas bounded by narrow brick piers, and the storey levels are barely indicated by solid panels identical in treatment with the glazed sash above and below them. This arrangement of transparent and opaque elements identically handled may almost—but not quite—be considered to constitute a ‘curtain-wall’.^[451] The omission of piers at the corners, a structural novelty here, enormously enhances the effect of transparent volume as opposed to that of solid mass. In the organization of the various industrial elements of the complete plant that are associated with the glazed block there is neither symmetry, such as Behrens was only beginning to relinquish, nor yet asymmetry of the more casual and picturesque sort; instead a modular regularity controls the whole composition. This factory has long been recognized historically as one of the most important^[452] buildings of the twentieth century.

Gropius’s next building, the Hall of Machinery at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1914 in Cologne, was in some ways less advanced. The main façades of this were quite symmetrical; and in the articulation of the brick piers of the ground storey, in the heavily framed central entrance and, above all, in the projecting slab roofs of the raised corners there appears to have been some direct influence from the work of Wright, notably from his hotel of 1909 in Mason City, Iowa. (This was published in the Wasmuth book of 1910, where Gropius would almost certainly have seen it.) The glazed front of the principal storey, however, and especially the rounded glass stair-towers at the ends were not at all Wrightian; they carried still further the expression of architecture as transparent volume already evident in the Fagus Factory and approached very closely indeed the mature curtain-wall concept, although at a modest scale.

Mies remained with Behrens a year longer than Gropius, after having spent three earlier years with Bruno Paul^[453] (1874-1954), a more conservative architect whose best work was done as a furniture designer. His independent career began in a much less spectacular fashion than that of Gropius. The Perls house of 1911 at Zehlendorf outside Berlin was as formally symmetrical as Behrens’s houses at Hagen of 1908-9 and rather more Schinkelesque. The Urbig house of 1914 at Neubabelsberg was very correctly late-eighteenth-century in its detailing. His most important work of these years, however, was the project for the H. E. L. J. Kröller house in The Hague of 1912, intended to contain the large and famous Kröller-Müller Collection of modern paintings now at Otterlo. Of this a full-scale wood and canvas model was erected on the actual site, but it was never built. The formal though asymmetrical organization of the severe horizontal blocks, the incorporation of voids in the composition by means of loggias and pilastrades, and the cold austerity of the refined detailing of the masonry all approach very closely such things by Schinkel as the Zivilcasino at Potsdam and Schloss Glienecke, even if the characteristic belvedere tower of the latter is significantly omitted. In many ways this project was as premonitory of later modern architecture as the Fagus Factory, although the latter, as an executed building, has properly received much more notice.^[454] Both Gropius and Mies were involved in the First World War from 1914 to 1918, so that the next stage in their careers opened only in 1919.

Le Corbusier, Oud, and Rietveld were neutral nationals, but their production of these early years, although less interrupted by the war, is mostly not of much intrinsic interest. After two years with Perret in Paris Le Corbusier had spent six months in Behrens’s office in 1910.^[455] His first house,^[456] built for his parents at La Chaux de Fond in Switzerland in 1913, is more closely related to Behrens’s early houses in its plain white stucco walls and fairly restricted fenestration than it is to the work of Perret or to Behrens’s A.E.G. factories of 1909-11. The plan is the most interesting feature: this provides a central living area out of which other more specialized rooms open to left and right through wide glazed doors, a scheme that seems to derive from Perret’s planning, or perhaps that of Loos,^[457] rather than from Wright’s.

Le Corbusier’s next significant work was a war-time project of 1914-15 for low-cost houses called Dom-Ino. These seem to derive not from anything of Perret’s or Behrens’s but rather directly from the ones that Tony Garnier had proposed for his ‘Cité Industrielle’ as early as 1901-4,^[458] but they are still plainer, probably because of the concurrent influence of Loos. However, Le Corbusier’s only important executed building of the War years, the Villa Schwoff of 1916 at La Chaux de Fond, is closer to Perret in its elaborate formality,^[459] its much simplified academic detail, and its concrete-and-brick construction. The plan represents an advance over that of his parents’ house, however, for the main living area here is carried up two storeys and lighted by a tall window-wall towards the garden. Of special significance also is the arrangement of all the flat roofs as usable terraces.

The next year, 1917, De Stijl was founded, and soon Oud and Rietveld as members of the group began to collaborate with the Dutch abstract painters and sculptors generally known as Neoplasticists.^[460] In this year Oud built two villas by the seashore: Allegonda at Katwijk, designed in association with the architect M. Kamerlingh Onnes; and De Vonk at Noordwijkerhout, with interiors decorated by the De Stijl painter and critic Theo van Doesburg. The Dutch had no direct contact with Behrens, unlike the other three, but Oud was briefly with Fischer in Munich in 1911, as has been said. However, Oud’s work down to this time had been essentially Berlagian: moreover, it was Berlage who evoked his interest in the work of Wright. Nevertheless, there is nothing Wrightian about these villas, but rather a Loos-like reduction of architecture to white stucco cubes. The interest of De Vonk is largely confined to the floors of bold geometric pattern executed in coloured tile by van Doesburg; Allegonda was much modified by Oud in 1927. Rietveld was still primarily a furniture designer until 1921.

In 1918 Oud became City Architect of Rotterdam, where his brother occupied a prominent political position, and began work at once on the Spangen Housing Estate, Blocks I and II being of that year, Blocks VIII and IX of the next. The Tuschendijken Estate followed in 1920. These housing blocks, even more than the seaside villas, are notable for their negative rather than their positive qualities. All the elaboration of form and detail of the Amsterdam School was put aside in favour of an ascetic regularity. But various projects of these years illustrate how boldly Oud was attempting, partly under the influence of his painter and sculptor friends, partly under that of Wright, to arrive at new formal concepts. But Oud was not alone in these years in attempting to translate the ideals of De Stijl into architecture. Gerrit Rietveld, in a jewellery shop in Amsterdam built in 1921, was probably the first fully to realize Neoplasticist concepts in three dimensions and at architectural scale.^[461]

In Paris in the first post-war years Le Corbusier was also closely involved with painters; indeed, he himself was then as much, or more, a painter as an architect, and he has never ceased painting since. With the French painter Amédée Ozenfant he had written a book on art, Après le cubisme, published in Paris in 1918; together they developed a post-Cubist sort of abstract painting, partly inspired by their friend Fernand Léger and partly by their interest in the simple shapes of everyday objects. This they called ‘Purisme’. In support of their ideas about all the arts they began in 1920^[462] to publish a review, L’Esprit nouveau, which continued to appear until 1925, the nursery years of the new architecture.

In succession to his Dom-Ino system of multiple housing of 1914-15, Le Corbusier was developing at this time the Troyes system, using poured concrete, and also the Monol system with a reinforced-concrete skeleton deriving technically from the innovations of Perret. But the definitive formulation of his new ideals for architecture, focused as they were at this time on the sociological problem of the low-cost dwelling, lay a year or two ahead. Having no official position, he did not need, like Oud, to produce executed work in quantity before his own concepts matured. Gropius’s earliest work, back in 1906, had been a low-cost housing scheme, as has been noted, and in 1911 he built another housing estate, at Wittenberg-an-der-Elbe. Economical housing was increasingly recognized as a social service for which architects ought to exploit to the utmost their technical abilities; from the first it offered a common challenge to the Dutchman, the Swiss-Parisian, and the German.

Like the Dutch and Le Corbusier, Gropius was involved with painters in the early post-war years. Appointed in 1919 head of the Art School in Weimar and also of the Arts and Crafts School there which Van de Velde had run before the War, he combined them and named the new school the Bauhaus.^[463] Here teachers of painting and sculpture and architecture worked in closest association with teachers of the crafts in continuation and extension of the English Arts and Crafts ideals of the eighties and nineties. Soon this rather Viennese approach, brought to the Bauhaus by Adolf Itten, with its emphasis on handicraft, was revised by Gropius so that it might better fit an increasingly industrialized society.^[464] To his faculty Gropius brought such advanced painters as the German-American Lyonel Feininger in 1919 and in 1922 the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee. Yet it was not their refined art but rather Expressionist painting and sculpture which still influenced the jagged War Monument that he erected in Weimar in 1921. His architectural ideals in the early post-war years before 1922, moreover, seem to have been rather closer to Poelzig’s or Mendelsohn’s than to those of Le Corbusier, Oud, or Rietveld.

As has been several times stated already, certain remarkable projects best displayed the direction in which several of the architects of the younger generation were moving, along nearly parallel lines, in these years preceding the general revival of building production in the mid twenties. Gropius’s Chicago Tribune project of 1922, in which the line of his development shifted away from Expressionism, has already been discussed out of sequence (Plate 158A). But the most significant projects, earlier than this by several years, were by Mies and by Le Corbusier. Mies’s early work had not been very adventurous up to the time when he proposed, in 1919 and in 1920-1, two revolutionary glazed skyscrapers to be built in Berlin. In both, the floors were to be cantilevered out from central supporting cores and the curtain-walls enclosing them merely light metal chassis holding great panes of glass. However, their plans, respectively jagged and curvilinear, reflected the strong influence of Expressionism, an influence that disappeared from Mies’s as from Gropius’s work the very next year, after the Germans became aware of the architectural implications of Dutch Neoplasticism and also of Russian Constructivism. Van Doesburg,^[465] it should be noted, visited the Bauhaus in 1922, and for a short but crucial period both Gropius and Mies seem to have drawn from Dutch sources as much inspiration as the young Dutch architects. In addition to the obvious debts of Dudok, Oud, and Rietveld to Neoplasticism, Cornelis van Eesteren (b. 1897), today City Architect of Amsterdam, was actually collaborating with van Doesburg in these years on various house projects.

Less striking than Mies’s skyscrapers, but more buildable, were Le Corbusier’s successive Citrohan projects for houses of 1919-22 (Plate 160A; Figures 44 and 45). Brought to public attention first in L’Esprit nouveau and later in his extremely influential book Vers une architecture, published in Paris in 1923 and shortly translated into English and German, these adumbrated a new aesthetic of architecture more completely than anything that he or any other architect had yet proposed on paper, much less built. Modest in size, each Citrohan house was to consist largely of a two-storey living-room fronted like that of the La Chaux de Fond house of 1916 with a tall window-wall. This would occupy most of the façade, and it was here set within a very plain frame of rendered concrete. The dining area was to be at the rear under a balcony from which the bedroom would open. Thus the section is similar to Wright’s Millard house of 1923.

The earlier version of the house was intended to stand on the ground (Figure 44); in the later scheme the whole cube of the house was to be lifted up on pilotis, that is, free-standing piers of reinforced concrete constituting, Perret-like, essential parts of the structural skeleton (Plate 160A; Figure 45). Like Sullivan’s piers at the base of the Guaranty Building of 1894-5 (Plate #119:pl119) the effect of these pilotis, allowing circumambient space to pass under the enclosed building above, was to enhance very strongly the look of volume as opposed to mass. This treatment, possible only with skeleton construction in ferro-concrete, steel, or wood, soon became one of the most significant formal devices differentiating the new architecture of the twenties from what preceded it. The later Citrohan project was thus the first of the ‘boxes on stilts’ against which Wright continually protested, even though his own buildings themselves tended more and more frequently to be lifted off the ground by one means or another.

If the structural methods employed here by Le Corbusier came from Perret, the external expression of his lifted box seems rather to derive from Garnier or Loos, although the rendered surfaces were evidently intended to be smoother and flatter than those of Loos’s executed houses (Plate 155A) and the pattern of the windows much more regularly organized in the wall-plane. With the roof terrace on top surrounded by parapets continuous with the wall-planes below, even the earlier type is apprehended as volume rather than mass, especially as there were no deep window reveals to suggest thickness in the walls such as appear in Garnier’s projects and Loos’s executed work. By keeping the openings absolutely in the wall-plane, as Hoffmann had done on the Stoclet house, the very exact geometrical discipline of the design of the façades could be maintained even when seen in perspective. As a result, however, the underlying structure was expressed only in the pilotis of the later project. Yet the wide expanse of the window-wall at the front and the characteristic shape of the other windows, oblongs extended horizontally,^[466] would obviously not have been practical but for the long spans made possible by the ferro-concrete skeleton.

There was in the Citrohan projects no very close similarity to Le Corbusier’s Purist pictures of these years other than the crisply geometrical ordering of the very flat façades and the untextured smoothness of their surfaces. However, the extreme mechanical precision and the more-than-Loosian rejection of the inessential clearly reflected an aesthetic parallel to that adumbrated in his paintings. Certainly the effect was—as Wright and others recurrently complained—likely to prove more pictorial than architectonic when such things were executed. There was no ornament such as Oud had, in some sense, obtained at Katwijk from his painter-collaborator van Doesburg; indeed, there was hardly any detail at all, at least as architectural detail was understood by Perret and Behrens. In this respect also Le Corbusier’s new architecture was closest to the personal style of Loos.

Articles in L’Esprit nouveau and later the illustrations in Vers une architecture revealed the sources of Le Corbusier’s extra-architectural inspiration and made such inspiration available to others who cared to look about them with his particular vision and his clearly defined ideals for the modern world. Works of engineering, American grain-elevators and the like;^[467] the forms of things that move—ocean liners, motor cars and aeroplanes:^[468] such things provided some of the visual prototypes for Le Corbusier’s new aesthetic of architecture.^[469] But there was also the social motive of developing a method of building houses to satisfy the needs of all classes. Moreover, Le Corbusier was already—to use a term introduced later—as much a ‘planner’ as an architect. In 1922 he prepared a project for a city of three million inhabitants. This proposed at the core a geometrically ordered group of widely spaced cruciform skyscrapers and, round the core, ranges of blocks of flats of moderate height, not arranged along narrow streets, but broadly distributed over a park-like terrain.

Le Corbusier had many years to wait before the world caught up with his ideas as a planner as these were promulgated in his book Urbanisme, published in Paris in 1925. But as an architect^[470] he was shortly building in and near Paris a series of houses, most of them of considerably greater size than his Citrohan project. Moreover, in 1927, at the Werkbund Exhibition in Stuttgart, he finally brought that to execution also, although some minor modifications were incorporated.^[471] Le Corbusier’s very first post-war houses—one at Vaucresson, S.-et-O., near Paris, which has been remodelled quite beyond recognition, and the house for Ozenfant at 53 Avenue Reille in the Montrouge district of Paris, both designed in 1922 and built in 1923—were naturally not very adequate expressions of his ideals^[472] (Figure 46). But, beginning with the contiguous La Roche and Jeanneret houses, designed originally in 1922 also and executed with many modifications and improvements in 1924 in the Square du Dr Blanche in the Auteuil district of Paris, and culminating in the Savoye house at Poissy, S.-et-O., of 1929-30 (Plate 159), the new aesthetic^[473] of the Citrohan project was exploited with increasing virtuosity. Le Corbusier developed much further the spatial unity of his plans, usually keeping inside a defining rectangle but articulating that in various ways: at the Savoye house, for example, the main terrace is within the same raised box as the enclosed rooms (Figure 47). The treatment of the exteriors likewise grew simpler and more open. Horizontal windows were grouped and extended to form continuous ribbons all the way across façades, and roofs at various levels, being completely flat, served as outdoor living-spaces. This is best seen at Les Terrasses (Plate 160B), the house built in 1927 for Michael Stein at 17 Rue du Professeur Pauchet in Garches, S.-et-O.

Different colours were often used on different walls to emphasize them as individual planes, particularly in interiors. Curved elements, such as were introduced earlier in the plan of the Vaucresson house (Figure 46), appeared at the Savoye house in screens that rose around the upper roof-terrace (Plate 159). Moreover, the geometrical discipline of his tracés régulateurs based on the Golden Section was used with ever-increasing consistency.^[474] At the same time the use of different colours and of curves produced, particularly at the Savoye house, a lyricism closely related to that of Purist paintings of the early twenties. This is curious, since in his paintings dating from the late twenties Le Corbusier was moving away from Purism, under the influence of Fernand Léger (and perhaps even of Surrealism), towards a looser and more connotative mode.

Le Corbusier was not the only architect of the new generation building houses in Paris in these years. Beside his, those by the Belgian Robert Mallet-Stevens (b. 1886)^[475] are at once cruder and more superficial in their design. In the Rue Mallet-Stevens near Le Corbusier’s La Roche and Jeanneret houses, where he built several houses close together in 1926-7, he provided a somewhat depressing glimpse of the future, a glimpse which has often proved, alas, to be only too accurate a generation later. The Cité Seurat, on the other side of Paris near Le Corbusier’s Ozenfant house, offered an even larger group of new houses of the same period, several of them of much higher quality. The Chana Orloff house there is by Perret; but most of the others are by André Lurçat^[476] (b. 1892), an architect of much more integrity than Mallet-Stevens, if without Le Corbusier’s genius. The best of Lurçat’s houses, where they have been adequately maintained, possess certain common-sense virtues that Le Corbusier’s lack; in the late twenties and early thirties they provided paradigms at least as popular as Le Corbusier’s. His school of 1931 in Villejuif, Seine, has a special importance also, as it was in the field of school-building^[477] that the new architecture first became widely accepted later in the thirties in several countries. Le Corbusier’s activity was much greater than Lurçat’s, however, and in one major project at least he extended the scope of the new architecture far beyond the realm of the modest private dwellings that he and Lurçat were so largely restricted to building in the twenties.

In 1925, in the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, Le Corbusier had shown a dwelling unit of the Citrohan type arranged as a flat with a large terrace at one side, following an unexecuted project of 1922. The actual housing estate that he built at Pessac outside Bordeaux in 1925-6 was less successful, although by this time many young architects concerned with housing in other countries were finding inspiration in his work and perhaps even more in his ideas. But it was in an entirely different realm that Le Corbusier had, like Saarinen in the Chicago Tribune competition, a failure which was nonetheless a tremendous succès d’estime. Le Corbusier’s project for the Palace of the League of Nations^[478] came very close to winning the competition of 1927. Moreover, the totally undistinguished scheme jointly produced by the elderly Frenchman P.-H. Nénot (1853-1934), who had built the new Sorbonne in Paris in 1884-9, and various other architects from several different countries eventually executed in Geneva never received the attention or the flattery of world-wide emulation and imitation which Le Corbusier’s project did. This led, for example, to his selection to design the Centrosoyus in Moscow in 1928. Begun the following year, this was finally finished in 1936, but with most inadequate supervision. However, the Communist ‘party line’^[479] turned sharply against modern architecture in the early thirties, and no more projects by Western European architects were invited after the Palace of the Soviets competition held in 1931.

If Le Corbusier in the twenties was, by force of circumstances, almost more completely restricted to house-building than Wright had been in the preceding decades, Gropius’s career in Germany developed very differently. In 1925 he was invited by the city of Dessau to come there from Weimar and re-establish the Bauhaus; in that year and the next he had a chance to build a very large and complex structure to house the school as well as his own and several other professors’ houses. The houses were not notable additions to the new canon, although they were soon as much imitated as Le Corbusier’s and Lurçat’s. However, the Bauhaus building itself was the first major example of the new architecture to be executed, illustrating on a large scale most of its possibilities and principal themes, none of them by this date altogether novel.

The most striking element of the Bauhaus is the studio block, a four-storeyed glass box (Plate 161A). This carried to its logical limit the implications of the near-curtain-wall of the Fagus Factory, quite as Mies had already proposed for his two glass skyscraper projects, but without their Expressionist planning. The bridge to the left of this block exploits the possibilities of great spans in ferro-concrete construction. Throughout that section and the block on the left ribbon-windows longer than Le Corbusier’s at Les Terrasses open up the walls just as Mies had already proposed to do in a notable project of 1922 for a ferro-concrete office building. A lower refectory wing links the glazed block with an apartment tower at the rear; in that the grouping of the horizontal windows with the many little projecting balconies clearly expresses the fact that this portion of the building is made up of small repeated dwelling units.

The organization of this very complex structure is asymmetrical but carefully studied (Figure 48). Where Le Corbusier had thus far composed most of his houses inside a single ‘box’, Gropius here combined four or more. In each he emphasized visually the fact that the surface was but a thin shell enclosing an internal volume, but he varied the treatment according to the internal use of each portion of the building. At the same time regularity of rhythm, and often identity of measure in the parts, ordered the whole without recourse to symmetry or to the imposition of any such special system of proportion as Le Corbusier was enthusiastically developing.

Gropius did not again, until late in life in America, have such another architectural opportunity. In the following years, down to his departure from Germany with the rise of Hitler, his production was almost entirely in the field of low-cost housing. There he had the large-scale responsibilities largely denied to Le Corbusier until after the Second World War, but common enough by then in Germany.^[480] First, in 1926-8, came the Törten Estate at Dessau consisting of terrace houses of concrete with smoothly rendered walls and horizontal windows. These were sound and economical but somewhat dull in design, the very reverse of Le Corbusier’s at Pessac. At the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927, moreover, Gropius’s free-standing houses did not rival Le Corbusier’s in quality of design, despite their considerable technical importance as early examples of something approaching total prefabrication.

Gropius’s most finished works of the twenties were all at Dessau. Besides the Bauhaus itself, there is a small block of flats rising at the end of a row of one-storey shops to form the centre of the Törten Estate of 1928. But even more notable is the Dessau City Employment Office, begun the year before. Here Gropius rejected stucco rendering,^[481] hitherto almost as much the sign manual of the new architecture in Germany as in France, and surfaced his walls with brick (Plate 161B). The horizontal strips of window in the office wing, carefully related to the narrow bands of wall between and elegantly subdivided by light metal sash, are balanced with bold assurance against the tall vertical light of the stair tower at one end. Whether Gropius had learned from the Neoplasticists or the Constructivists, by this time he had become a master of abstract architectural composition in his own right.

Leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, Gropius next undertook a large housing estate, Dammerstock, at Karlsruhe. Here he combined terrace houses, somewhat ampler in size and less mechanically designed than those at Törten, with ranges of six-storey blocks of flats in the form of long, rigidly orientated slabs. Following this came the Siemensstadt Estate of 1930 outside Berlin (Plate 162A). This is the classic example of housing in tall, thin slabs, prototype of innumerable similar estates to be built throughout the western world before and after the Second World War. In Germany, however, where the form was first adumbrated, their production ceased in 1933 with the onset of the Hitler regime—it has since been revived very actively, particularly by Ernst May at Hamburg and by architects of several countries in the Interbau exhibition of 1957 in Berlin.

Mies in the twenties was not nearly so prolific as Gropius, nor was he so widely influential. His Wolf house of 1926 at Guben and the Lange and Esters houses at Krefeld of 1926 and 1928, side by side in the Wilhelmshofallee, despite their fine dark brickwork^[482] and the careful placing of the large horizontal windows, did not redeem the promise of an earlier project which he had made in 1922 for a country house; that was comparable in significance to his skyscraper schemes of the preceding years. Its plan seemed to represent the extension upward of a complex, but very rigid, geometrical pattern like those seen in Mondriaan’s and van Doesburg’s paintings of this period (Figure 49). This sort of planning allowed a continuous flow of space in and around internal partitioning elements and out through wall-high glass areas to the surrounding terraces, themselves defined by the extension of the solid brick walls of the house. This openness more than rivalled, and was probably influenced by, the spatial flow in the Prairie Houses of Wright. Neoplasticist influence continued strong in Mies’s work as late as his Liebknecht-Luxemburg Monument in Berlin of 1926. This was an abstract rectangular block, ingeniously composed of various brick surfaces arranged in different planes. (It was, of course, destroyed under Hitler.)

The flats that Mies built in the Afrikanische Strasse in Berlin in 1924-5 were more in line with Gropius’s and Le Corbusier’s contemporary work than his private houses. Moreover, his block of flats (Plate 162B) at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 on the Weissenhof at Stuttgart, of which he was the general director, with its lines of broad window-bands broken occasionally by vertical stair-windows, had an elasticity of planning and a clarity and subtlety of expression much superior to Gropius’s taller and longer slabs at Dammerstock and Siemensstadt.

In 1929 came Mies’s masterpiece, one of the few buildings by which the twentieth century might wish to be measured against the great ages of the past (Plate 165A). The German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition, although built of permanent materials—steel, glass, marble, and travertine—was, like most exhibition buildings, only temporary. But few structures have come to be so widely known after their demolition, or so intensely admired through reproductions, except perhaps Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Set on a raised travertine base almost like a Greek stylobate, in which lies an oblong reflecting pool, the space within the pavilion was defined by no bounding walls at all but solely by the rectangle of its thin roof-slab. This was supported, almost immaterially, on a few regularly spaced metal members of delicate cruciform section sheathed in chromium. The covered area was subdivided, rather in the manner of the project of 1922 for a brick country house, by tall plate-glass panels carried in light metal chassis, some transparent, some opaque, and also by screens of highly polished marble standing apart from the metal supports. The disposition of these screens is asymmetrical but exquisitely ordered; yet it has none of that Neoplasticist complexity evident in the placing of the partitioning elements in the project of 1922. As a result, the articulated space of the pavilion has a classic serenity quite unlike the more dynamically flowing interiors of Wright’s houses. At the Berlin Building Exhibition in 1931 Mies repeated the Barcelona Pavilion in less sumptuous materials, making only slight changes in the plan so that it might provide a model for a house.