More than a little of the special quality of space-distribution in this exhibit Mies had been able to achieve already in the Tugendhat house of 1930 at Brno in Czechoslovakia. There also the screens that subdivide the unified living-space are quite separate from the delicate cruciform metal supports (Figure 50). One of them, made of macassar ebony, partially encloses the dining-area and is semicircular in plan, thus notably enriching the general spatial effect. Externally this house is less remarkable. At the upper, or entrance, level towards the street it is quite closed in and even rather forbidding; but at the rear towards the garden there is a continuous, room-high glass wall framed by stucco bands above and below. At one end an open terrace is included within the rectangle of the plan, and from this a broad flight of stone stairs descends to the ground. The contrast with the somewhat similar rear of Le Corbusier’s Les Terrasses expresses well the considerable range of different effects possible within the tight limits of the new architecture even in this, its most rigidly doctrinaire period of the late twenties.

Within the twenties, both in France and in Germany, the new architecture received its full formulation, first in projects and shortly afterwards in executed work. At the same time Le Corbusier and Gropius provided in articles and in books the arguments in its defence.^[483] Both are extremely articulate men, the one with the emotional intensity of a poet or a preacher, the other with the cool logic of a scientist or a professor. They soon found excited readers and later devoted followers all over the western world as their writings were exported, translated,^[484] and paraphrased; but the significant activity of this period was by no means only French and German. Despite the continuing vitality of the Amsterdam School through the mid twenties, the new Dutch school associated with Rotterdam rose rapidly in national and international significance. Oud,^[485] indeed, brought the new architecture to maturity in Holland in precisely the same years as Le Corbusier and their German contemporaries; Rietveld and several others made signal contributions also, in Rietveld’s case perhaps equal in importance to Oud’s.

The Oud Mathenesse housing estate at Rotterdam, which Oud undertook in 1922, is rather different from Spangen and Tuschendijken. At first sight it may appear more conservative, since it consists of small terrace houses with visible tiled roofs rather than tall blocks of flats. But rendered and painted walls replaced the brick of the earlier Rotterdam work, recalling the Loos-like treatment of his seaside villas as also the rather Wrightian projects he had designed in the intervening years. Moreover, the shapes and subdivisions of the windows were very carefully considered, so that the general effect is quite similar to the most advanced projects of Le Corbusier and of Mies designed in this same year. The influence of the De Stijl artists may not be very apparent in the façades of the houses and shops; but in the temporary building superintendent’s office that Oud built here in 1923 cubical wooden elements painted in primary colours produced a composition quite like a Neoplasticist painting developed in three dimensions. It should be noted, however, that this was not, like Dudok’s work of the period, at all related to the very complex Neoplasticist sculpture of Vantongerloo. Oud’s façade of 1925 for the Café de Unie in Rotterdam, being two-dimensional, was even more like a Mondrian painting raised to architectural scale.

It has already been mentioned that in 1923 van Doesburg was engaged in collaboration with van Eesteren on some remarkable studies, half abstract paintings, half architectural isometrics. Rietveld, in the Schroeder house of 1924 in Utrecht (Plate 164B), boldly carried such a hypothetical Neoplasticist architecture of discrete planes and structural lines into the world of reality even more completely than in his earlier shop in Amsterdam.

But by this time, Oud felt he had learned what Neoplasticism had to offer him. He was in any case now personally closer to Mondrian than to van Doesburg, and Mondrian had left Holland for Paris. In Oud’s first really mature work, which remains also his masterpiece, two terraces with shops at their ends built at the Hook of Holland in 1926-7 but designed a year or two earlier, all overt emulation of contemporary painting disappeared, except for the restriction of colour to white-painted rendering with only small touches of the primaries on some of the minor elements of wood and metal (Plate 163B). The serenity of these smooth façades with their long regular ranges of horizontal windows, the extreme refinement of the detailing of the fences and the doorways, and, above all, the lyricism of the rounded shops, their walls all of glass under a cantilevered slab bent down at the ends, were unequalled by anything Le Corbusier or Gropius or Mies had yet built. Reputedly it was the influence of Van de Velde that led Oud to introduce curves here, much to the disgust of the Neoplasticists.

Oud’s terrace-houses in the 1927 exhibition at Stuttgart were equally exemplary in their perfection of finish but slightly less interesting in their over-all design. Those by a still younger Dutch architect, Mart Stam (b. 1899), were perhaps superior. Then there followed Oud’s very large Kiefhoek housing project at Rotterdam which was built in 1928-30. Here the windows of the upper storey of each terrace became a continuous band, but something of the earlier refinement was lost just as in Gropius’s Siemensstadt blocks of the same period.

At Kiefhoek Oud was called on to provide a church as well as housing. Its vices as well as its virtues epitomize very well the state of the new architecture at the end of the decade (Plate 164A). Considered as elements in an abstract composition, the handling of the subordinate features of the Kiefhoek church is masterly, refining and—as it were—domesticating various adjuncts of an almost industrial order such as had earlier provided a good part of the varied visual interest of Gropius’s Fagus Factory. But the main auditorium block is so box-like that it holds its place among the rows of houses only by its size, offering no expression whatsoever of its special purpose—it could as easily be a garage. A far more notable exemplar of the new architecture, still about the finest twentieth-century building in Holland, is the van Nelle Factory outside Rotterdam built in 1927-8 by the firm of J. A. Brinkman (1902-49) and L. C. van der Vlugt (b. 1894) but probably designed by Stam (Plate 163A). The Dutch firm of B. Bijvoet (b. 1889) and Johannes Duiker (1890-1935) should also be mentioned for their admirable work of the twenties, starting with several Wrightian houses of 1924 at Kijkduin, but soon quite as advanced as Oud’s or Rietveld’s.

The conditions of the twenties—or more precisely the particular conditions under which the new architects had to work and, to a large extent, even seemed satisfied to work—restricted their scope rather considerably. In France the usual clients, often American rather than French, sought houses that were avant-garde and related ideologically to the painting of the Cubists and Post-Cubists. Towards the utilitarian field of low-cost housing the new architects everywhere felt a special responsibility; in Germany and Holland they readily found major opportunities for official employment at such work. Their intense concern with the aesthetic potentialities of engineering gave them a special sympathy for industrial building, but major opportunities such as the van Nelle Factory were very rare. Gropius’s Bauhaus, a large and complex structure serving a cultural purpose, and the Barcelona Pavilion, an edifice with almost no other purpose than to be beautiful, were important exceptions in a range of production characterized by a surprising international consistency of type as well as of character.

Yet the hands of the various individual architects are, in fact, never difficult to distinguish and, from this time onwards, the paths of the four early leaders began definitely to diverge. It was chiefly the work of late-comers, of whom there were in the twenties large numbers only in Germany, that tended towards monotony and anonymity. Not since the early years of the nineteenth century, when Romantic Classicism at the hands of a second generation reached a comparable clarity of stylistic definition, had there been such a rigid and humbly accepted architectural discipline. However, certain men, such as Mendelsohn and Dudok, retained in their practice of the new architecture strong traces of earlier idiosyncrasies. Much of their work lacks therefore the purity and the assured mastery of the four initiators. But Mendelsohn’s Schocken Department Stores, built in several German cities in the late twenties—at Nuremberg and Stuttgart in 1926-7, at Chemnitz in 1928—and his Petersdorf Store at Breslau in 1927 are certainly superior in interest and in vitality to the new city houses and suburban villas in France; not to speak of the housing estates in Germany that were being produced in such considerable quantity by the end of the decade by architects who were literalistic adherents of the new architecture. The work of such designers showed all the naive enthusiasm, the subjection to discipline, and the doctrinaire characteristics of the activity of new converts in any field.

But when, in his Columbus Haus of 1929-31 in Berlin, Mendelsohn finally accepted a comparable discipline he was able to retain most of his earlier vitality. Here he produced a really paradigmatic commercial building—almost a small skyscraper—such as none of the four leaders ever had the opportunity of carrying to execution in the twenties. Much the same can be said for a considerably later ‘baby skyscraper’, Dudok’s Erasmus Huis of 1939-40 in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam. This is still, after the van Nelle Factory, one of the best buildings in Rotterdam, despite all the post-war reconstruction there (see Chapter 25).

As the new architecture spread to other countries around 1930 it was naturally the lowest common denominator of its potentialities that became most widely evident. However, at just this point an international depression supervened; the building boom, with which the rise of the new architecture had been at best but coincidentally associated, soon ground to a standstill. In Germany in the early thirties, moreover, as also in Russia and considerably later and less rigidly in Italy, an authoritarian regime proscribed the new architecture. Leaders like Gropius, Mies, and Mendelsohn left the country and the new architecture was in abeyance there until after Hitler’s fall.