Historians, whether of politics or the arts, should ideally stand at some distance from their subjects thanks to remoteness in time; in lieu of that, remoteness in space sometimes serves the same purpose. However, this historian has now reached the point at which he entered the scene; he must write, as statesmen who write history are often forced to do, of events concerning which he has first-hand knowledge—and hence, alas, first-hand prejudices. Architects, the real actors in architectural history, often write as well as build; since Vitruvius there have been many whose fame depends as much on their books as on their buildings, not least several of the men with whom Part Three of this book has dealt. But those who write about architecture as historians and critics without being active builders, who merely explain, select, and illustrate the significant work of their own day or even of the past—particularly the immediate past—are to some extent minor actors on the scene also. They cannot, therefore, be merely neutral observers, reporting without parti pris the ideas and the achievements of others, however hard they may try to maintain their objectivity.

To have written the only monograph on Wright to appear in French, to have provided the first account in English of the new architecture, to have published a book on the work of Oud in the late twenties, modest as these contributions were, are all actions indicating an early commitment on the part of this author. The preparation in 1931 with Philip Johnson of the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, in which Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, and Mies were signalized as the leaders of the new architecture, and the publication—also with Philip Johnson—of the book called The International Style^[486] at that time were even more definite and controversial acts of participation in the dialectic of architectural development in this century.

If it seems necessary to mention these publications here and not merely to refer to them in the Notes or list them in the Bibliography, it is in no spirit of boastfulness but rather of apology. From this point on the ideal objectivity of the historian, attempting disinterestedly to piece the past together from a study of its extant monuments and from relevant contemporary documents, is inevitably coloured, if not cancelled out, by the subjectivity of the critic writing of events he knew at first hand. Concerning them, of course, his present opinions have no more real historical validity than those he held and published nearer the time when the events occurred. With this proviso the canvas may now be somewhat broadened.

By the early thirties the new architecture was by no means restricted to France, Germany, and Holland, the countries where it had originated. Yet, with the possible exception of Alvar Aalto (b. 1898) in Finland, no other leader of the calibre of the early four had appeared up to that time. The building of 1928-9 at Turku for the newspaper Turun Sanomat was Aalto’s first mature work to be completed. In this the plastic handling of the concrete piers^[487] in the interior introduced a new and personal note of architectural expression in a frankly industrial setting. His Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Paimio of 1929-33 rivalled the Bauhaus in size, if not perhaps in complexity, and was almost the first^[488] major demonstration of the special applicability of the new architecture to hospitals. The City Library at Viipuri, designed as early as 1927 but not finished until 1935, was a more original example of the new architecture. In particular, the lecture hall there, with its acoustic ceiling of irregularly wavy section made up of strips of wood, was strikingly novel.

In the United States the Lovell house in Los Angeles opened in 1929 the American career of Richard J. Neutra (b. 1892), an Austrian who had worked briefly with Wright. In this house, with its cantilevers, its broad areas of glass, and its volumetric composition, Neutra showed the completeness with which he had already rejected the broad Wrightian road and accepted the more restricted aspirations of the newer architecture of Europe. Never, perhaps, have Wright’s ideals and those of the next generation appeared so sharply opposed as at just this time, moreover. But Neutra’s mature work began only considerably later than this.

In 1930-2 the tallest of all skyscrapers, the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, was rising in New York; this was a shaped tower in the local tradition although devoid of reminiscent stylistic detail. In these same years, however, a well-established ‘traditional’ architect, George Howe (1886-1954),^[489] in association with a Swiss, William E. Lescaze (b. 1896), who had been a pupil of Karl Moser, returned to the Sullivanian slab in designing the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (Plate #169:pl169). Moreover, they treated their slab along the lines that the leading European exponents of the new architecture had adumbrated in the previous ten years. It would be a score of years before other skyscrapers of such significant and distinguished design were built in American cities (see Chapter 25).

In Sweden E. G. Asplund (1885-1940), whose architecture had hitherto been of a ‘Neo-Neo-Classic’ order, extremely crisp and refined but definitely reminiscent,^[490] turned to the new architecture of Le Corbusier and Gropius just before he completed the Central Library of Stockholm (Plate 176A), a building first projected in 1921 but not opened until 1928 (see Chapter 24). For the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, of which he had entire charge, Asplund was soon designing an extensive and elegantly varied range of pavilions that exploited to the full the possibilities of the new architecture. In Denmark Kay Fisker (b. 1893) underwent a somewhat less drastic conversion at much the same time.

These years also saw the beginning of the English career of Berthold Lubetkin^[491] (b. 1901), a Russian who had settled in England in 1930 after working for some time in France. His early Gorilla House at the Regent’s Park Zoo in London was soon outshone by the smaller, but much more remarkable, Penguin Pool there of 1933-5, which is almost a piece of Constructivist sculpture (Plate 172B). In 1933-5 also, the tall block of middle-class flats, Highpoint I at Highgate outside London, was erected by the Tecton group, of which Lubetkin was the leading spirit. With its fine hill-top site overlooking Hampstead Heath, this cruciform tower rivalled Le Corbusier’s Clarté block in Geneva of 1930-2 in interest and in quality. Almost equally impressive, and like Highpoint hardly rivalled by comparable work in London since, is the Peter Jones Department Store in Sloane Square, designed in 1935 by William Crabtree.^[492] Already in 1933 Mendelsohn had settled in England, practising there for a few years in partnership with Serge Chermayeff (b. 1900) before moving on to Israel in 1936. From 1934 to 1937 Gropius was in England working with E. Maxwell Fry (b. 1899); Marcel Breuer (b. 1902), a Hungarian pupil of Gropius from the Bauhaus, was also in England working with F. R. S. Yorke (1906-62). By the mid thirties Connell, Ward & Lucas,^[493] Wells Coates (1895-1958), and Frederick Gibberd (b. 1908) were also well started on their careers.^[494]

In Italy, where the projects of an architect associated with Futurism,^[495] Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916), before his death in the First World War had offered a remarkable premonition of the new architecture of the twenties, a fresh talent at least comparable in interest and individuality to Lubetkin’s appeared on the scene in these years. The Casa del Fascio at Como of 1932-6 by Giuseppe Terragni (1904-43) is almost as original as Aalto’s Viipuri Library but very different (Plate 172A). In its use of fine marbles and in its innate classicism it recalls Mies, yet it is as Mediterranean in spirit as his work is Northern. Unfortunately, like Sant’Elia before him, Terragni was killed in the Second World War that followed within a few years after the start of his career. However, the firm of Luigi Figini (b. 1903) and Gino Pollini (b. 1903), who continue to be leaders of Italian modern architecture, also made their first mark at this time with the ‘Artist’s House’ that they showed at the Fifth Triennale in Milan in 1933. This was similarly calm and Latin in its handling of the ‘international’ vocabulary of form.

The Florence railway station, built in 1934-6 by Giovanni Michelucci (b. 1891) and five associated architects, also deserves mention. Michelucci is not to be compared with Terragni or Figini & Pollini, but his station was stylistically the most advanced in the world when it was built. Moreover, like the Casa del Fascio in Como, it offers notable evidence of the support the Fascist regime was still giving to architettura razionale at a time when both in Germany and in Russia other authoritarian regimes were denouncing the International Style. The Termini Station in Rome (Plate 183B) was begun even earlier from the designs of Angiolo Mazzoni. It owes its distinguished reputation as the finest station of the twentieth century, however, to the new project of Eugenio Montuori (b. 1907) and his associates, prepared in 1947 and finally carried to effective completion in 1951 (see Chapter 25).

Yet for all the increasingly wide spread of the new architecture by the mid thirties, Le Corbusier and two Germans retained their international position of leadership despite economic depression in France and Hitlerian exile from Germany. If the amount of their executed work was much reduced—in the case of Mies for several years to nil—the geographical range of their activities was now much extended. Today, for example, Le Corbusier’s work is to be found from La Plata in Argentina to Chandigarh in India; he was also a consultant on two of the largest and most striking buildings in the New World built just before and just after the Second World War, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio (Plate 171) and the United Nations Secretariat^[496] in New York.

Gropius and Mies, settling in America in the late thirties, became figures of crucial importance in the reform of American architectural education^[497] as well as being increasingly productive as architects since the war. At Harvard University^[498] and at the Illinois Institute of Technology, respectively, they set a pace for several American architects who later became leading educators, such as Howe at Yale and W. W. Wurster (b. 1895) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California. Mendelsohn, still very much of an individualist, but with a notable international reputation based on what he had built in England and in Israel as well as on his earlier work of the twenties in Germany, practised in America from after the war down to his death.

This extension of the field of activity and the direct influence of the European leaders further emphasized the universal character of the new architecture. Today American architects, such as the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,^[499] working as far from home as Turkey, or Edward D. Stone (b. 1902), building on three continents, provide almost the most characteristic later examples of what—and in their cases most critics would agree—is not improperly called the International Style. The American Embassies in Copenhagen and in Stockholm, and the flats for embassy personnel at Neuilly and at Boulogne outside Paris, all by Rapson^[500] & Van de Gracht, are perhaps the most distinguished examples of American work abroad of the 1950s.

But there would have been no El Panamá Hotel in Panama (1950) by Stone, no Istanbul Hilton Hotel (1954) by the Skidmore firm, and no such foreign building programme by the United States Government as was responsible for the executed embassies by Rapson & Van de Gracht of the early fifties and the ones since built by Eero Saarinen in London and Oslo, by Gropius and TAC in Athens, by Stone in New Delhi, and by Breuer in The Hague but for the pioneering of the Europeans, nor did that pioneering cease in the thirties. Only in Oud’s case, because of a serious indisposition that removed him from practice for many years after 1930, was the œuvre effectively complete with the twenties; and even he is now quite active again. In the case of both Le Corbusier and Mies, if not of Gropius, their largest commissions came only after the Second World War. Their influence in the 1950s was still as great as around 1930, in Mies’s case considerably greater. The mid twentieth century had come to accept stylistic continuity in a way that the nineteenth century, was never able to do once the tradition of Romantic Classicism finally wore out. The often adventurous late work of these men, now become elder statesmen of modern architecture, fortunately counter-balanced to some extent those more rigid interpretations of the discipline they founded, interpretations that recurrently threatened after the late twenties to become academic and frozen in one country or another.

Many of the more characteristic demands of Le Corbusier’s aesthetic canon, as it had been announced in his projects of the early twenties and adumbrated in the succession of houses that led up to the Savoye house of 1929-30—including restrictions docilely accepted almost everywhere by advanced architects in the late twenties—were already ignored in the buildings he himself designed in the early thirties. The house that he built for Hélène de Mandrot at Le Pradet in Provence in 193O-1 is raised on no pilotis but sits firmly on a terrace; and its walls, where solid, are of rough, uncoursed rubble. Quiet and rectangular, with no lyrically curved elements and little painted colour, this house accepts the surrounding landscape as Wright’s had always done. Le Corbusier seemed here almost to be avowing a respect for local materials and humble village craftsmanship such as is associated with Voysey and his English contemporaries of a generation earlier that would certainly have been anathema to him in the twenties. On the other hand, the penthouse that he built in 1931 for Carlos de Beistegui on top of a block of flats on the Champs Élysées in Paris was all of plate glass and white marble. This had something of the glittering elegance of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion of two years earlier, where the polished marbles, once so brilliantly exploited by Loos, were first brought back after a decade of restriction to ascetic and impermanent surfaces of painted stucco.

The Salvation Army Building which Le Corbusier erected in 1931-2 in the Rue Cantagrel in Paris is more in line with the canon of the twenties. Unfortunately the original curtain-wall is now cut up by projecting sun-breaks added in a post-war refurbishing by Le Corbusier’s former partner Pierre Jeanneret. The Maison Clarté block of flats of 1930-2 in Geneva is almost as completely glass-walled.

It was most notably the Swiss Hostel at the Cité Universitaire in Paris, designed in 1930 and built in 1931-2, which introduced various quite new elements of plan and design that Le Corbusier would develop much further after the Second World War (Plate 165B). The pilotis he used in the twenties were thin and round, rather like Perret’s columns, though without their facets and capitals; but here a double row of heavy piers of a complex moulded section carries a dormitory block that is boldly cantilevered out from them both front and back. The rubble masonry of the Mandrot house was used here once more for a tall unbroken wall of irregularly curved plan at the rear of the building; the textured and tonal surface of this wall and its effect of solidity contrasts both with the exposed concrete of the structural elements and with the smooth areas of thin stone plaquage on the upper walls. Curves in Le Corbusier’s earlier work were almost always confined within a bounding rectangle and never made of massive materials; yet they lost none of their elegance in being handled in this bolder and more organic way. This is closely related to his later paintings, of which the mural in the common room here provides a major example.

The international depression closed in even more completely on France in the early thirties than it did elsewhere, and there was no subsequent revival of building activity such as other countries experienced in the years preceding the Second World War. Le Corbusier’s activities were therefore more and more confined to projects, most of them for commissions outside France. However, a small block of flats, very similar to the Maison Clarté in Geneva, was built at 24 Avenue Nungesser et Coli on the western edge of Paris in 1933. The most interesting portion of this is the architect’s own penthouse on top; there, like another Soane, he experimented at small scale with a variety of vault-topped spaces.

In a modest house at 49 Avenue du Chesnay in Vaucresson of 1935 there are no more curves in plan than in the Mandrot house, but segmental concrete vaults cover the rectangular bays of which the plan is made up. Moreover, as if to underline Le Corbusier’s return towards nature after his earlier devotion to the abstract and the mechanistic, grass grows over their crowns to provide insulation. The exposed frame of the concrete structure, where not filled with glass brick, has panels of coursed rubble.

Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties often included new ideas that others exploited even before he was able to do so himself in executed work. For example, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio de Janeiro, on which he was a consultant only, designed in 1937 and completed in 1942 by Lúcio Costa (b. 1902), Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1907), and a group of others, the great building which opened so brilliantly the story of the new architecture in Brazil (Plate 171), included on the west front the projecting sun-breaks he had first proposed in 1933 for certain tall buildings intended to be erected in Algiers. Such sun-breaks soon became characteristic of mid-century architecture in all countries where the sun’s heat and glare offered a major problem—in Asia and Africa as much as in South America. By this device the all-glass wall, favourite large-scale theme of the new architecture since Mies’s early skyscraper projects, received a much-needed functional correction. As often before, a real (or supposed) practical need encouraged the satisfaction of overt or covert aesthetic aspirations; for sun-breaks very much enhance the three-dimensional interest of large façades, substituting for the slick planar effects characteristic of the twenties a more articulated sort of surface treatment related to, but independent of, the expression of skeleton structure. Sun-breaks even came to be used where they are hardly needed, quite as has been the case with various other clichés of modern architecture.

Since the war three major works of Le Corbusier, in the estimation of many critics his masterpieces, have carried much further the sculptural tendencies of his architecture of the thirties. One of these, the block of flats called the Unité d’Habitation,^[501] far out the Boulevard Michelet in Marseilles, which was first projected in 1946 and finally completed in 1952, has various other points of interest, however. The Unité realizes on a large scale Le Corbusier’s ideas for the mass-dwelling, providing a single tall slab large enough to house a complete community and including, half-way up, a storey intended to be entirely occupied by shops, as well as other communal facilities on the roof (Plate #166:pl166). An ingenious section allows two-storey living-rooms for all the flats and also permits the use of a skip-stop lift system (Figure 51). The framework in front of the walls provides sun protection for the tall living-room windows and also shallow balconies for each flat both front and back.

Like the Swiss Hostel, the Unité is carried on central supports arranged in a double row. These are much more massively sculptural than the earlier ones in Paris, and almost anthropomorphically expressive of weight-bearing. All the poured concrete surfaces are left rough as they came from the forms, and the prefabricated members of the outer sun-break system have an exposed pebble aggregate. Everything is bold and masculine, even coarse, indicating a complete turnabout in Le Corbusier’s understanding of the essential ‘nature’—itself a rather Wrightian concept—of concrete. On the roof an abstract landscape of sculptural forms plays counterpoint to the superb backdrop of mountains. One cannot help remembering the roof of Gaudí’s Casa Milá in Barcelona (Plate 137A); there are even some glazed tiles set in the concrete to provide notes of ‘permanent polychrome’. Yet the window in the entrance-hall at the base of the slab is quite Neoplasticist in the pattern of its subdivisions and the use of coloured glass; while painted colour of the boldest sort, by no means restricted to the primaries, is used on the sides of the sun-breaks, though not on any of the outer surfaces. Thus has Le Corbusier’s later architecture been enriched by a sort of eclecticism quite remote from his Purist aesthetic of the twenties.

At Chandigarh in India, where Le Corbusier had the general responsibility for planning the entire new capital of the State of Punjab and of building the principal public monuments, only one or two were by the mid fifties finished; the rest of the city was the work of other architects, principally Pierre Jeanneret and the English firm of Maxwell Fry and his wife Jane Drew. The High Courts of Justice,^[502] built by Le Corbusier in 1952-6, are even more sculptural than the Unité at Marseilles. A continuous umbrella-like shell-vault of concrete rises high above the roofs of the court-rooms to allow the free passage of air. Supporting this are great rounded piers that merge into the concave surfaces over them, almost like the structural elements of the Casa Milá, but here of monumental scale. On the west side deep box-crates, with brilliant painted colours on their soffits like those on the sun-breaks of the Unité, keep the sun off the glazed walls of the court-rooms and provide that three-dimensional play first exploited on the Ministry in Rio.

The long slab of the Secretariat at Chandigarh, also of 1952-6, with its very varied pattern of sun-breaks, is less novel than the High Courts; but other work of the mid fifties at Ahmedabad should not be ignored (see Chapter 25). However, Le Corbusier’s most extraordinary late building is in France, not India, and therefore considerably more accessible. Architects and laymen alike have been consistently impressed by the intense emotionalism of his church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, Hte-Saône,^[503] built in 1950-5. Whether this church will ever have as much influence as the Unité has already had remains debatable because of its very special character. But it certainly made even more evident than the High Courts the fact that Le Corbusier in the fifties was moving in almost the opposite direction from that in which he led in the twenties.

In an exaggerated phrase Le Corbusier described his early houses as machines à habiter; but Notre-Dame-du-Haut is more like an enormous piece of sculpture than a ‘machine for praying-in’ (Plate 167). He who once drove architecture towards the mechanistic, the precise, and the volumetric, now provides the exemplar of a new mode so plastic as almost to be naturalistic in the way of Gaudí’s blocks of flats of fifty years earlier. The walls and roof are rough, indeed almost brutal, in finish, and so massive and solid that the interior of the church at certain times of the day seems positively ill-lit by the tiny deep-sunk windows that irregularly penetrate the side walls. In place of an aesthetic expression emulating the impersonal results of engineers’ calculations, there is here a freehand quality comparable to the spontaneity of the sculptor. Moreover, where the overtones of his characteristic buildings of the twenties were wholly of the present, this arouses deep prehistoric atavisms—and quite intentionally. Whether the High Courts at Chandigarh and the church at Ronchamp evidence a deep split in modern architecture or represent rather a major turning point is still far from clear. Only a few have yet succeeded in following with any distinction the line of development they appear to open (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue).

The later work of the German leaders arouses no such difficult critical problems as does Le Corbusier’s; yet it has also ranged sometimes in directions not altogether to be expected from their best-known work of the twenties. Their careers, moreover, suffered a harsher break because of the political tribulations of their homeland than Le Corbusier suffered from the economic tribulations of France. In 1930 Mies became Director of the Bauhaus, remaining until it was closed by Hitler in 1933. Although he won a competition for the Reichsbank in Berlin as late as that year, he was allowed to do no work under the Nazis, and so he settled in the United States in 1938 after a preliminary visit the previous year.

As has been noted, Mendelsohn and Gropius, on leaving Germany in 1933, settled first in England, and both did significant work there—if not especially significant for their own careers, certainly so for the early stage of modern architecture in England. With his English partner Maxwell Fry, Gropius was responsible in 1935-7 for the Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire; this set a new pace for school design in England in the post-war years, perhaps the best in the world. Mendelsohn, with Chermayeff, built in 1934-5 the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on the Sussex coast. In the main this is a rather conventional example of the new architecture; but it has a semicircular glazed stair-tower that recalls the more lyrical quality of his best earlier work such as the Schocken department stores.

From England Mendelsohn moved on to Israel, where a large Government Hospital by him at Haifa and the Medical Centre of the Hadassah University in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus, both of 1936-8, show a most skilful adaptation of the international European canons to a hotter climate and a different cultural tradition, somewhat as is the case with the Ministry at Rio. Only with the onset of the war in 1941 did Mendelsohn settle in America. There his Maimonides Hospital in San Francisco of 1946-50 and synagogues and Jewish community centres in Cleveland (1946-52), St Louis (1946-50), Grand Rapids (1948-52), and St Paul (1950-4) continued to illustrate his very personal command of the commonly accepted elements of the new architecture, with the inclusion here and there of anomalous features that seem to belong to a much earlier period of his career.

Gropius proceeded directly from England to America in 1937, having been called by Dean Joseph Hudnut of the Graduate School of Design to be Professor of Architecture at Harvard University. He became Chairman of the Architecture Department the following year, which position he retained until 1953. As has already been said, his major contribution to architecture in America has been as an educator. However, he built, in partnership with Breuer, whom he had brought to Harvard, several houses, including his own at Lincoln, Mass., and also a housing development at New Kensington, Penna., in the years 1938-41. These are, on the whole, no more successful than much of his work of the late twenties in Germany, despite an intelligent effort to adapt a European mode to American building methods, particularly as regards the use of wood, both structurally and for sheathing. This turning away, on Gropius’s part, from ferro-concrete and rendered surfaces is parallel to Le Corbusier’s somewhat earlier reversion to the use of local and traditional materials. The houses that Breuer designed after he parted from Gropius have considerably more intrinsic interest; as is perhaps natural in the work of a younger man, they show a more integral adjustment to the characteristic living habits and building methods of the New World. Two large-scale commissions, for the Unesco Building^[504] in Paris (now nearly finished) and for the Bijenkorf Store in Rotterdam (1955-7), not to speak of the U.S. Embassy at The Hague, have brought him back to the European scene, but as an American rather than a Hungarian or German architect.

Gropius’s principal American work was all done after the war. It included by the mid fifties two schools at Attleborough, Mass., one of 1948 and one of 1954, and the Graduate Centre of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., of 1949-50. These were all three designed—as also the already-mentioned Athens Embassy, which is not yet completed—in association with the firm known as TAC (The Architects’ Collaborative), consisting of a group of younger architects, all but one educated at Yale University, formed in 1946. In the double quadrangle of buildings at Harvard, forming in itself almost a complete small college, the architecture of the twenties lived on with little change. Light-coloured brick replaced stucco for the walls, however, and there is a certain rather inhibited use of curves in plan and of angular relationships in detail reflecting ideas that had entered the new architecture only in the thirties. The Attleborough schools are less pretentious and altogether more successful, improving upon Gropius and Fry’s Impington College of the thirties in England in various ways. After his retirement as professor, Gropius and TAC became increasingly active, and he continued to present his well-known architectural doctrines in lectures, articles, and books.^[505]

Coming to the United States a year later than Gropius, Mies also found his greatest opportunity there, and almost at once. In 1939 he was commissioned to design the entire new group of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was moving to the south side of Chicago. In this scheme, which is of urbanistic scale and extent, a classic, indeed an almost academic, order prevails throughout (Figure 52). The buildings that he was able to execute, two during the war in 1942-4, many more after 1945, have a comparably classic serenity. But they also express with relentless logic the character of their predominantly steel-skeleton construction. In them Mies almost revived architectural detail by the precision and the elaboration of his handling of the elements of metal structure. As at Gropius’s Graduate Centre, light-coloured brick replaces stucco for the solid wall panels. The severe patterns of the black-painted metalwork are organized with something of the purity of Mondrian’s canvases of the twenties yet with a dominating symmetry. This is true also of the interior planning of the individual buildings. However, the latest, Crown Hall, housing the architectural school, completed in 1956, is unsubdivided on the principal floor, and thus represents the most extreme statement of his later ideals, both structurally and in its planning.

Mies also built houses and several tall blocks of flats in and near Chicago and, with Philip Johnson (b. 1906), a New York skyscraper at 375 Park Avenue for the Seagram Company in 1956-8 (Plate 192). His completely glazed Farnsworth house near Plano, Ill., designed in 1946 and built in 1950,^[506] is a cage of white-painted welded steel raised above the river valley in which it is set and walled partly with great sheets of plate glass, partly with metal screening. The floor is a continuous plane of travertine from which broad travertine steps descend to an open travertine terrace. Planned about a central core in which are placed the fireplace, the bathrooms, and the heater, the interior space is completely unified, the different functional areas being separated only by cupboards that do not rise to the ceiling (Figure 53). Even more than Crown Hall, this house represents the purest and most extreme statement of aesthetic purpose in one particular direction that the new architecture has yet produced—a direction which is, of course, in total opposition to the increasingly complex plastic effects sought in these same years by Le Corbusier. It is, nevertheless, quite as remote from the stucco boxes characteristic of the twenties and even more remote from Mies’s own brick houses of that period.

A similarly ascetic luxury is also evident in Mies’s blocks of flats at 845-860 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago of 1949-51 (Plate 170). There he seemed to have arrived, not imitatively but by force of parallel logic, at something very close to the skyscrapers that Sullivan designed in the nineties (Plate 119). Mies’s structural piers, carried down to the ground as free-standing elements just as they are below the Farnsworth house, give the dominant bay rhythm, their structural steelwork being sheathed here first in protective concrete and then in black-painted metal. Between the piers continuous I-shaped beams along the mullion lines stiffen the wall screens which are otherwise entirely of glass held in bright aluminium frames; they also provide a subsidiary rhythm, quite as Sullivan’s mullions sometimes did in the eighties and nineties.

Identical in shape, rectangular slabs both, the two blocks were set close together and at right angles to one another. This placing gave a minimum of overlap as regards the lake view and a minimum of overlook as regards the privacy of the apartments. The relationship also creates from these very simple shapes a notable variety of effects in perspective. The visual interest is enhanced especially by the fact that the projecting I-beams, when seen at a sharp angle, give the illusion that one wall of each block is solid; the other wall, being seen head on or nearly so, appears completely open between the structural piers and the mullions. Four more nearly identical apartment blocks^[507] have risen in Chicago from Mies’s designs since, the Esplanade Apartments beside the first two towers, and two farther to the north, not to speak of those in Detroit and Newark.

After his arrival in America Mies was not merely for fifteen years the architect of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s buildings, he soon became head of its Department of Architecture also, a post he retained until he retired in 1955. Less articulate than Gropius and occupying a less important academic post, Mies’s influence specifically as an educator has been considerably less. On the other hand, the general influence of his work in America in the late forties and fifties has been far greater. The ‘Miesian’ became almost a sub-school of the new architecture not only in the United States but in several other countries: to Mies not only younger men but also many established practitioners owed the specific direction of much of their post-war work (see Chapter 25).

Just before the Second World War broke out Oud, in 1938, recovered his health sufficiently to undertake a large commission, the Shell Building in The Hague, completed in the course of the next four years. In Holland there had been in the thirties a strong reaction against the new architecture led by M. J. Granpré-Molière (b. 1883) and the graduates of his school at Delft. Granpré-Molière urged a return, if not to the outright ‘traditional’, at least to a semi-traditionalism that was not without some similarity to what Hitler was sponsoring in Germany. In response to this challenge Oud set out to show how the new architecture, still considered by many in Holland to be too stark and mechanistic, could be humanized. To return from stucco to brick, in this case a thin glazed white brick such as Dudok was using at this same time with great success on his quite conventionally ‘International Style’ Erasmus Huis office building in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam,^[508] was merely to emulate the rejection of stucco in this decade by the French and German leaders in favour of more permanent, if also more traditional, walling materials, such as marble, rubble, brick, and even wood. But Oud’s attempt to revive ornament and the elaborate symmetry and near-academic complications of his over-all design of the Shell Building had little appeal outside Holland. In the small Esveha office building of 1952 near the railway station in Rotterdam and the much larger Vrijzinnige Christelijk Lyceum at 131 Goudsbloemlaan in The Hague of 1953-6 Oud returned to something much closer to the norms of the new architecture elsewhere. But the day of his great international influence has long been over despite the belated prestige which is still his in Holland.^[509]

Like several of the preceding chapters dealing with the architects of the first modern generation, this has brought some aspects of our story down nearly to the present. In so doing, the specifically modern architecture of the twentieth century has been largely accounted for; the picture will be rounded out later by offering a synoptic view of the international scene at the mid century (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue). But first it is necessary to discuss the architecture that was not modern which was produced in the first four decades of this century. Historicism,^[510] that is reminiscence of past styles, endemic throughout the nineteenth century, lived on. It is considered polite to call such architecture ‘traditional’, over-favourably weighted rather than accurate though the term may be. Clearly a traditional architecture that produced a ‘Gothic’ skyscraper like Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (Plate 178) or vast ‘Classical’ railway stations like the two in New York (Plate 177B) was not unduly restricted by revivalistic canons. Clearly also this sort of architecture cannot be ignored historically, since it produced some of the largest, most prominent, and most carefully studied buildings and groups of buildings of the first third of this century. Moreover, in many countries traditionalism gave way to modern design only after the Second World War; while the authoritarian regimes of Europe in varying degree returned to its sanctions in the thirties, just as it was generally losing ground elsewhere in the western world.

There were few if any great leaders among twentieth-century traditional architects; certainly hardly more than one or two approached the calibre or the individual significance of the men whose work Part Three of this book has largely dealt with up to this point. But a conspectus can be provided, with typical examples of the best work in several countries, and some indication offered of the character of the production in other countries where the individual architects were less colourful, the monuments less notable, and the general level of quality less high.