There was considerable variety in mid-century house-design in Latin America, ranging all the way from such Mexican houses as those of Francisco Artigas (b. 1916) or Sordo Madaleno that present a blank wall to the street and yet open up completely to a patio or a garden, to Niemeyer’s open pavilion at Gávea. In North America there was perhaps even wider diversity. Despite the equalization of climate by then readily provided by heating and cooling facilities, there were still great differences between one region and another in the forces of nature that must be controlled or protected against, from the insects and hurricanes of Florida to the blizzards of Minnesota, than between the various countries of Latin America. Johnson’s Davis house at Wayzata in Minnesota was enclosed, however, not because of the climate, but in order to provide hanging space for an art collection, while it opens within on to a patio that can be roofed in winter (Figure 57). Neither screening nor anchorage against high winds is conspicuous in the design of most of the Florida houses of Paul Rudolph (b. 1918). On the West Coast the aberrant casualness of the Bay Region manner of the thirties and forties now became increasingly disciplined. Wooden construction, pitched roofs, and a certain discursiveness of planning still contrasted, however, with more rigidly Miesian design; yet the finest houses of Joseph Esherick in and around San Francisco or of John Yeon in Portland, Ore., to mention only two West Coast architects, sometimes rivalled in distinction those of Johnson and Rudolph.

Whether the building of individual houses in other countries will ever again have the significance it still retains in the New World depends on many extra-architectural factors. The last thing a historian should pretend with regard to this or to any other aspect of the near-present is that he is capable of prophecy. The history of architecture in the second half of this century can only be written in the future. The glimpses—for they are no more than that—of post-war production given here represent a critic’s and not an historian’s selection, and a selection that has inevitably been much influenced by what that critic knows best at first hand.

Despite the obligation to provide in the Introduction some sort of eighteenth-century foundation, this book had a real historical turning-point for its actual beginning; it had, in the mid 1950s, no such point at which to end. From Wright, near ninety, to men two generations younger, some of whom have been mentioned in this chapter, the work of the architects of the western world showed then no convincing evidence of a major and general turn, however surprising in the light of his work of the twenties Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp might seem. We stopped in mid-stream and even the Epilogue which follows can provide no true peroration. Fortunately the contemporary history of architecture is being recorded more promptly and completely than ever before in the professional press. It does not seem necessary to footnote this chapter or the Epilogue with references to periodicals when every issue of the principal journals inevitably includes material illustrative of current production throughout the world. Yet when one leaves the world of history for the world of ‘current events’, the time has come to turn from books to periodicals. In the Bibliography there are naturally few ‘monographs’—i.e. books or summary articles—devoted to the men first mentioned in this chapter, since many of them were still at the outset of their careers.^[545]

From Papworth’s ‘Cottage Orné’ (Plate 122A) to the slabs of Loughborough Road (Plate 186B)—’model’ dwellings both; from the Bank of England to Thyssen Haus (Plate 191), both housing business as it was never housed before the period with which this book deals; from Baltimore Cathedral (Plate 5) to Notre-Dame-du-Haut (Plate 167), the range of notable achievement recorded in this book is not readily outranked in variety by any other hundred-and-fifty-year period in the history of the western world. As to the absolute quality of that achievement, as distinguished from what may be called the ‘plot’-interest of various relatively coherent developments continuing over the last century and a half, it requires a very catholic taste indeed even to pretend to pronounce. The ‘revivals’ of the nineteenth century and the ‘traditionalism’ of the twentieth century accepted the dangerous challenge of meeting the earlier past on its own ground, and this in itself is enough to reduce the absolute value of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century production. Yet there were renaissances long before there were revivals; and at almost any given moment of the past most production has been the equivalent in stylistic retardation of the traditional architecture of the twentieth century. If one must have originality, these hundred and fifty years have not lacked it, from Ledoux and Soane to Gaudí and Wright. Of the hundreds of names mentioned in these twenty-five chapters there are few doubtless equal to Bramante or to Bernini, but how many were there in the preceding hundred and fifty years? while the variety of approach represented, from a Schinkel to a Le Corbusier, from a Butterfield to a Mies, is hardly to be equalled in any comparable period of history. Above all, this is the stage of architectural history that lies between the unhallowed present and the hallowed past, between the cultural certainties—if they were so certain—of the eighteenth century and the cultural anxieties of the present. What we are we can only hope to understand by exploring the immediate ancestry of our own present. Only revivalists could afford to denigrate and ignore all that lay between them and some ‘golden age’ they sought to emulate. The future must build upon the foundations—so very various, so often nearly contradictory—of the architecture of the last hundred and fifty years.