Cohen, Jean-Louis_The Future of Architecture. Since 1889_2012 [Parte]

The Future of Architecture. Since1889.

-

Jean-Louis eohen

I

~ , 1

Introduction

f

Architecture's expanded field 010 - Two thresholds 013 - The carousel 014 - The continuity 015 - Historians

in time 01 hegemonies 01 type

versus architects,

or the problem

S eds to rails: e dominion of steel

01 inclusion

02

03

The search for modern form

Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

018 - The lamp 01 style

028 - Toward a "new art" from Paris to Berlin

042 - The central

place 01 Great Britain

019 - The eminence

031 - Great Britain alter the Arts and Crafts

043 - Residential

re/orm

043 - Uni/ying

01 the Beaux-Arts

023 - Proqrarns

01 modernization

034 - Art Nouveau and the Paris-Nancy

023 - Networks

01 internationalization

036 - From Italian "Floreale"

axis

to Russian "Modern"

the urban landscape

046 - The advent 01 rein/orced

concrete

036 - The Catalan renaissance

053 - Concrete

07

08

09

In search of a language: from classicism to Cubism

The Great War and its side effects

Expressionism in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

090 - Anglo-American

102 - A triple mobilization

classicisms

092 - German nostalgia 093 - Loos and the lure 01 "Western 097 - Berlage and the question

culture"

01 proportions

100 - Cubism and cubistics

nationalisms

103 - The spread 01 Taylorism

110 - The Arbeitsrat

103 - Commemoration

111 - Dynamism

in architecture

106 - Postwar recomposition

117 - Hanseatic

Expressionism

108 - New architects

118 - De Klerk and the Amsterdam

science

and reconstruction

between

lür Kunst

13

14

15

Architecture and revolution in Russia

The architecture of social reform

Internationalization, its networks and spectacles

162 - The shock 01 revolution

176 - Modernizing

165 - A pro/ession

renewed

180 - Red Vienna

190 - The journal

166 - The "social

condensers"

181 - The new Frank/urt

191 - Model cities and open-air

171 - Polemics

and rivalries

171 - The Palace 01 the Soviets competition

School

and propaganda

cities

185 - Taut's housing

developments

186 - French suburbs 186 - Echoes overseas 189 - Equipping

the suburbs

in Berlin

194 - Modern

as printed stage

architecture

195 - The International

Congresses

01 Modern Architecture 198 - Networks

exhibitions

enters the museums

01 in/luence

(CIAM) and historical

narratives

04

05

06

American rediscovered, tall and wide

The challenge of the metropolis

New production, new aesthetic

056 - Chicago

070 - An explosion

082 - The AEG model in Berlin

057 - Sullivan's

in white and black inventions

without

071 -_The planners'

precedent

toolbox

083 - Factory as inspiration

060 - Wright and prarie architecture

071 - Town, square, and monument

085 - The Deutscher

063 - Wright and Europe

076 - The idyll 01 the garden

088 - Futurist mechanization

067 - The skyscraper

migrates

to New York

city

077 - Zoning tor the colonies lor Europe's

Werkbund

and

metropoles

10

11

12

Return to order in Paris

Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness to elementarism

Architectural education in turmoil

138 - The Dada blast

153 - The Weimar Bauhaus

124 - Purist lorms and urban compositions 127 - Le Corbusier

and the modern

house

128 - Grand vessels in Paris and Geneva 128 - Perret and the "sovereign

shelter"

129 - Paris Art Deco 132 - Mallet-Stevens,

or elegant

modernism

136 - The extent 01 French modernism

152 - The Beaux-Arts

138 - The new lorms 01 De Stijl

156 - The Bauhaus

143 - Van Doesburg

156 - The Vkhutemas

builds

143 - Oud and Rietveld, Irom lurniture

161 - Innovative

to house design

148 - Mies van der Rohe's theoretical

and the alternatives

in Dessau and Berlin in Moscow

schools

in the

new and old worlds projects

16

17

18

Futurism and Rationalism in Fascist Italy

The spectrum of classicisms and traditionalisms

North American modernities

200 - A second

Futurism

224 - Wright, the return

200 - Muzio and the Novecento

212 - Literal classicism

231 - Los Angeles

204 - The regime and Rationalism

215 - Modern

232 - The skyscraper

207 - Terragni's

216 - Traditionalism

geometries

208 - An ambiguous 209 - New territories

"Mediterraneanism"

classicism

217 - Opportunism

and selt-crttlcal without

217 - Islands 01 coexistence

borders

modernism

236 - Industrial between

- lertile ground reloaded

products: lactory

and market

238 - The New Deal's housing and the European

relorm

immigration

19

20

21

Functionalism and machine aesthetics

Modern languages conquer the world

Colonial experiences and new nationalisms

250 - British reticence

272 - From Arabizing

240 - Taylorism

and architecture

241 - From ergonomics standard

to

national

243 - Dynamic

lunctionalism

in

France and the United States

modernisms

to modernizing

in North Alrica

as Czechoslovakia's

275 - Near Eastern and Alrican

brand

260 - The moderns

and Nelson

deleated

European

258 - The modern

dimensions

242 - Poetic lunctionalism: Chareau

255 - Northern

in Hungary

and Poland

01 Turkey and Iran

277 - The modernization

261 - Balkan ligures

279 - Chinese

pluralism

262 - Iberian modernization

283 - Modern

hegemony

264 - Japanese

endeavors

275 - Italian cities around the Mediterranean

in Palestine

experiments

265 - Brazilian

curves

25

26

27

Le Corbusier reinvented and reinterpreted

The shape of American hegemony

Repression and diffusion of modernism

322 - The Unité d'Habitation

338 - The second

358 - Seven Sisters

322 - 01 palaces

342 - Mies the American

359 - Socialist

345 - Wright's

359 - Khrushchev's

and houses

01 Ronchamp

324 - The surprise

325 - Indian adventures

346 - Research

326 - Invention

349 - Gropius

326 - Corbusian

and introspection

Brutalism

334 - The saga 01 Brasilia

age

last return out west

366 - Japan's

01 the Bauhaus

351 - Saarinen's

Iyricism

352 - The solitude

in Moscow

realism exported critique

360 - Aalto's eminent

and Breuer: the

assimilation

mannerisms

330 - Anglo-American

skyscraper

position

new energy

367 - Latin Americanisms

and Johnson's

anxiety

01 invention

372 - Archipelagoes

01 Kahn

353 - From experimentation

to commerce

31

32

33

lhe postmodern season

From regionalism to critical internationalism

The neo-Futurist optimism of high tech

--

424 - Scarpa,

- From nostalgia

to play

- The "end 01 prohibitions" .: - - Retrieving - America .:~

-

urbanity's

ligures

turns postmodern

e uncertain

Iront 01 postmodernism

e city - composition

or the rediscovery

01 craft

or collage?

427 - Collective

endeavor

438 - Beaubourg

establishes

439 - Composition

426 - Siza's poetic rigor in the Ticino

according

439 - Experimentation

431 - Moneo and Iberia

441 - Structure

432 - Europe as a lield 01 experience

445 - Architects

433 - Research

446 - New geometries

in South Asia

434 - Latin American 434 - A critical

personalities

internationalism

a canon to Rogers

according

according

to Piano

to Foster

and engineers

22

23

24

Architecture of a total war

Tabula rasa to horror vacui: reconstruction

286 - Front lines and home Ironts

and renaissance

The fatal crisis of the Modern Movement, and the alternatives

287 - Extreme scales 298 - An American

288 - Air raid protection 291 - Constructive 291 - Mobility

and destructive

292 - Imagining

01 military occupation the postwar

294 - Converting

age

310 - The Festival 01 Britain

299 - Literal reconstruction

or radical

modernization?

and Ilexibility

292 - Architecture

294 - Memory

techniques

world

to peace

and memorials

312 - Italian Neorealism 314 - Planet Brazil

301 - The "neighborhood 302 - The traditionalists

unit" as model at work

318 - Housing

and innovation

in North Alrica

302 - In search 01 a British model

319 - CIAM in turmoil

303 - German debates

320 - The end 01 CIAM

309 - A modernist

triumph?

28

29

30

Toward new utopias

Between elitism and populism: alternative architecture

After 1968: architecture forthe city

378 - Italy: critical

continuity

381 - Independent

together

385 - Technology:

ethos or icon?

394 - Research

cities 01 indeterminacy

395 - Venturi's

386 - Hovering

388 - Metabolism

in Japan

388 - Megastructures 389 - Technology

404 - 1968, annus mirabilis and technocracy critique

and its double

401 - From lunctionalism advocacy

408 - The input 01 the user

planning

35

Architecture's outer boundaries

Vanishing points 469 - Strategic

- Gehry, or the seduction

-

- Koolhaas,

or lantastic

-- - Nouvel, or mystery

471 - Reinvented

materials

realism

471 - Sustainable

buildings

- Herzog and de Meuron, or the principie

01 the collection

.:; - Deconstructivists - Fragmentation

geographies

01 art

recovered

and rationalists

and poetry in Japan

472 - The city reborn yet threatened 473 - Landscape

as horizon

473 - Hypermodern 474 - Persistent

city

to

34 -

the extended

405 - The shape 01 the city

396 - Grays and Whites

and global agitation

405 - Observing

media

social expectations

476 - Notes 494 - Bibliography 506 - Index 526 - Acknowledgments

and credits

Architecture's expanded field

William Morris's News from Nawhere and H. G. Wells's When

consumption.

the Sleeper Wakes, published

types and classes of users. Architecture

in 1890 and 1899 respectively,

The field al so expanded

with the rise of new ceased to be a dis-

depict a future society - a socialist utopia in the former case,

cipline exclusively in the service of the wealthy and began to

a capitalist dystopia in the latter - encountered

address broader constituencies,

protagonists

by the novels'

after a long period of sleep. If the contemporary

including municipalities,

coop-

eratives, and a wide range of institutions and social groups ..•

2

inhabitants of the planet had awakened in the early twenty-first

It also responded to the breaking down of classical codes, the

century, they would have been at a loss to recognize not just

rejection of historical imitation, and the introduction

the cities constellating

materials. Its new relations to technology, the arts, and the city

the world's surface, but also the build-

of new

ings making them up. Both cities and buildings have under-

were affected by external conditions as well as by internal anes.

gone fundamentaltransformations,

At times it had recourse to sources outside the discipline,

more so than at any time

in the past. Likewise, the quantity of building stock produced

adopting metaphors based on biological organisms, machines,

since 1900 has surpassed the sum total of that which existed

or language; at other times it found inspiration within its own

in all previous human history.

disciplinary

Not only did the population of urban areas exceed that of the

it has been impossible to limit architecture's

countryside

book to realized constructions.

for the first time shortly after the year 2000, but

traditions ..•

3

In view of all these transformations,

also the very forms of human presence on the face of the earth

books, journals, and public manifestations

reflected tharoughgoing

ture of architecture

changes. In the nineteenth century, the

train station and department

store joined the ha use, palace,

and temple in the existing inventory of building types. In the

definition in this

Unbuilt designs, as well as embodying

the cul-

in its broadest sense, have also been taken

into account. Indeed, realized buildings are always informed by ideas, narratives, and repressed memories of past projects.

twentieth century, office and apartment towers, large housing developments,

vast hangars enclosing factories and shopping

centers, and a wide variety of infrastructures dams to airports followed. Contradicting

ranging from

Two thresholds in time

the British historian

Nikolaus Pevsner, who famously wrote that "a bicycle shed is

The very delimitation

a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture,"

Rejecting a strictly chronological

the most prosaic programs came to be considered worthy of aesthetic altention. This unprecedented struction was meager compensation

.• 1

objects

begins with the period from 1880 to 1914. It finds its temporal brackets between the "short century" that the British historian

for a previously unim-

treasures, the effects ot industrialization,

urbanization, and war.

mutations were not limited to the invention of

programs responding to the new demands of production

Introduction

I

Architecture's

expanded field

definition, the present narrative

surge in con-

aginable level of destructian ot natural resources and cultural . Architecture's

"twentieth century" is open to debate.

and

Eric Hobsbawm condensed

into the years from 1914 to 1991 .• 4

and a longer span that places the twentieth century's origins within a continuum that goes as far back as the Enlightenment. This initial mament is characterized industrialization

and urbanization,

by the convergence

of

the rise of social democracy

throughout disciplinary

Europe, the emergence specializations,

of the social sciences as

and the dissemination

thought of important philosophers

of the

from Friedrich Nietzsche to

Henri Bergson. It also coincides with the rise of revolutionary art movements such as Symbolism

in poetry and the arfs, and

second millennium appeared to signal the next radical break in the culture of architecture.

It is this moment that provides the

closing bracket for this book. The automation sional labor as well as the relationship

dio and the building site. The Guggenheim

a war for world domination

Spain, completed

the triumph of

in

between the design stu-

Cubism in painting. While the European powers were fighting and orchestrating

of processes

a digital age had the effect of modifying the division of profesMuseum in Bilbao,

by Frank Gehry in 1997, was a highly visible

imperialism, designers, and the images of their work, also

exemplar of these new practices while also a demonstration

began to make inroads around the globe, thanks to the unprec-

the potential importance

edented acceleration of modes of transport and new networks of

public policy; together with dozens of other surprising

printed information, which disseminated the cultural norms of the

ings, Gehry's museum called into question the traditional defini-

leading-nations.

tion of the architectural

A pair of almost contemporaneous

events were crucial to this

of architecture

object. With architecture

and cultural organizations

of

in urban planning and build-

firms, clients,

enjoying unprecedented

mobility,

beginning: the Universal Exposition in Paris of 1889 and the

the rise of a generation of designers hyped by the international

World's Columbian

media, but initially engaged in theoretical and critical activ-

Exposition in Chicago of 1893. The Paris

fair coincided with the climactic moment of European colonial-

ity and open to utopian discourse, coincided with a crisis in the

ism, while the Chicaco fair signaled the emergence

social policies that had developed over the course of the twen-

of the New

World on the international scene. Both everits called the very

tieth century. Coming on the heels of several generations

definition of architecture

architects who had nurtured high aspirations to social trans-

addressees

into question, in its purpose - as its

became much broader social groups - as well as

formation, designers at the end of the twentieth century often

its forms. Mass production, of which Fordism became the most

relinquished

significant system of organization,

have used to achieve substantive reforms.

wide market and encouraged

led to the creation of a world-

the most radical architects to

to developers

and politicians tools that they might

The span from 1889 to 2000 does not divide easily into tidy,

search for new forms consonant with the machine aesthetic. At

self-contained

the same time, traditionalists,

account multiple, overlapping

who were often no less engaged

socially and no less hostile to eclecticism, the more comforting

sought to perpetuate

archetypes of the past by adjusting them

segments. Rather, it is necessary to take into

which culmi-

nated with Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990, and

temporalities

throughout the

century, as suggested by the historian Fernand Braudel in his historical interpretation used the architectural

o new demands. Almost one century later - after decolonization,

of

of the Mediterranean

world.

metaphor of multidimensional

to describe these multiple temporalities.

->

5

Braudel

"planes"

In twentieth-century

architecture they include state policies and their highly volatile

e end of the Cold War, which was marked by the West's

configurations;

iumph over the Soviet bloc in 1989 - the winding down of the

well as cities and regions, which undergo slow processes of

life cycles of institutions and organizations

as

010

I

011

Introduction

I

Architecture's

expanded field

3

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the

Illinois Institute 01 Technology,

c. 1945

growth and decline; and, most simply, the construction

of major

manifestoes, which have sometimes exerted their influence at

buildings and the lives of architects, critics, clients, and histori-

a distance of several decades. An attempt has been made

ans. More fleeting temporalities,

throughout the book to identify the visual documents

in which concepts and ideals

allowing

appear and disappear only to resurface a few decades later,

the clearest understanding

also play their par!. The problem of writing a history of twentieth-

tions. Together with images of completed

century architecture

within their urban contexts, pages of magazines, book covers,

is precisely that of relating these differential

rates of temporal change to specific designs and built objects.

and architects'

Given this framework, I have resisted the temptation to write a

continuously

of these resonances and reverberabuildings, sometimes

portraits help to reconstruct the complexity

changing

of

networks of signs and forms.

history of what has been known as the "Modern Movement" ever since Nikolaus Pevsner made a rather partisan identification of its "pioneers"

in 1936, celebrating Walter Gropius

as its major figurehead.

-> 6

ing the rubric of the "International New York,

-> 7

The carousel of hegemonies

I have also avoided perpetuatStyle," formulated

in 1932 in

preferring instead to shape a broader definition

In the following

pages, the different national "scenes" of archi-

tecture have been treated as porous to international strategies

of modernity that cannot be reduced to the fetish of novitas,

and debates - as contexts in which the latter were subjected to

of the new for newness's sake. From this point of view, it was

discussion,

essential not to disreqard architectural

ries with impermeable

nity based on conservative

interpretations

or traditionalist

of moder-

concepts, even if

modification,

and adaption - rather than as territo-

borders. The history of twentieth-century

architecture could be written by following the thread - or, rather,

they were frequently rejected or ridiculed by militant critics act-

untangling the knot - of consecutive

ing, as is often the case, on behalf of the leading architects.

imposed on national and regional cultures.

Resurgences of classicism and the occasional subversive erup-

consideration

tion of the vernacular are part of this bigger picture. Indeed, far

economic

from being a rigid category, and even less a sterile one, tradi-

including their military consequences.

tion - though sometimes wholly fabricated - has consistently

mendous impact on culture. In 1941 the media tycoon Henry

served as an intellectual stimulan!.

Luce declared that the twentieth century was destined to be

-> 8

An exploration of the shifting boundaries

between architecture

was characterized

United States exercised considerable

cal architects

The elevated ideals with which radi-

have often identified themselves

machine aesthetic or organicism

- such as the

- needed to be taken into

account, along with the effects of the apparently most abstract

These conflicts had tre-

the "American Century," following centuries implicitly perceived as "French" and then "English."

methods of form-giving.

The period under

and political conflicts between dominant states,

al so proved indispensable

the changing

-> 9

in crucial ways by recurrent

and the related fields of art, urban planning, and technology for understanding

systems of hegemony

-> 10

There is no doubt that the influence on architecture

- as on many other fields of culture - even before the massive increase in its power following victory over the Axis forces in 1945 and a second triumphal moment at the end of the Cold War.

-> 11

The vocabulary

of architecture

faithfully reflected

012

I

013

these shifts. After 1945 American terminology

supplemented

been perfected by the British. The architecture

of the Moroccan

the Italian language of architecture that had emerged during

city of Casablanca

the Renaissance and then was supplemented

al so to Berlin and Los Angeles, while Buenos Aires contained

by French and

British terms in the eiqhteenth and nineteenth centuries and by German terms in the early twentieth century.

was defined in relation not just to Paris but

echoes of Madrid, Budapest, Milan, New York, and Paris.

-> 12

But the hegemony of this relatively new civilization was not the only thing to have an impact on global architeclure. Considering

The continuity of type

each national scene as a porous rather than

closed real m reveals systems of domination

of varying types,

On each national scene, the groups competing

for dominance

intensity, and duration, from industrial modes of production

in architecture at times indulged in exaggerated

polemics in

lo patlerns of leisure. National scenes have remained open

order to consolidate

despite recurrent attempts by authoritarian

Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the termo ->

or xenophobic

their own "symbolic capital," in sociologist 14

It was therefore impos-

regimes to shore up their borders. Far from giving way to a

sible to limit a history of the relationships

homogenizing

century architecture to a list of aesthetic "influences"

internationalism,

national systems have con-

structuring twentieth- a term

stantly redefined themselves, shaped by the interplay of inter-

I have consciously avoided. Instead, following Hans Robert Jauss,

nal and external forces. Long before the advent of air travel and

I found it essential to analyze the reception

new information technologies,

the global circulation

of ideas

and images by way of the steamship, the telegraph, and the mechanical

reproduction

met by works and

ideas, as this often redefined the professional tects, even those working at a considerable

identity of archi-

distance from the

buildings they were interpreting and sometimes emulating.

of pictures - all nineteenth-century

inventions - shaped every local scene.

This book proposes to map the relationships

These patterns may also be detected within colonial empires,

among theoretical systems, seminal concepts, urban plans,

->

which both reached their apogee and underwent their final

paper projects, and completed

collapse in the twentieth century, then were partially perpetu-

along with individual architects, remains the central focus,

ated under postcolonial

although, once again, with their local and international recep-

conditions

after 1945. But the relation-

buildings. This last, however,

ship of the colonizer to the colonized was never unidirectional,

tion taken into account. The connection

and the hybridization that characterized

spaces and built ones was particularly strong in the twentieth

architecture

urban planning and

into constructions

plan of Chandigarh,

nations.

-> 13

Corbusier - was rooted in town-planning

I

Architecture's

expanded field

principies that had

in a kind of leap from the shelf of the "ideal project

library," as identified by Bruno Fortier,

The general

capital of the Punjab - initially entrusted

to the American architect Albert Mayer, then to Paris-based

Introduction

developed

built by the dominant power,

also operated between colonizing

between imagined

century, given that the principal types of structures were often

in many colonies, where local themes were

assimilated

15

established

construction Le

-> 16

to the reality of the

site.

The glass towers imagined by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1921, for example, were built only in the 1950s. They then

became a tiresome cliché - an easy target for critics advocat-

within an optimistic picture of the encounter between formal

ing "postmodernism"

and technological

- before being reborn at the end of the

century thanks to new technological immeuble-villa

conceived

advances. Likewise, the

by Le Corbusier in 1922, a collec-

invention and social advances ...• 22 Twenty

years later, but in a similar vein, Kenneth Frampton proposed a "critical history" of the Modern Movement, seeking to pro-

tive dwelling with individual living spaces, has contínued'to

long its "incomplete

inspire projects in the third millennium. The machine-build-

took into account the global expansion of modern architecture,

project." ..•23 Soon after, William Curtis

ing that Antonio Sant'Elia envisioned just before World War I

a perspective

would appear in a modified form in the Centre Pompidou in

America ...• 24 In 2002, Alan Colquhoun

Paris, while the contorted, biomorphic

vey no less committed to the celebration of modernism than Frampton's ...• 25

by the Expressionists

structures dreamed of

have finally become feasible today in an

rooted in his own experiences in Asia and Latin published a concise sur-

age when digital modeling has made it possible to break down

Reyner Banham, who as early as 1960 saw roots of modern

complex shapes into components

architectural

that can be calculated and

strategies in both Italian Futurism and French

Classicism, was among those to propose a more subversive

industrially produced.

reading ...• 26 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Iyzed the relationship century architecture,

Historians versus architects, or the problem of inclusion

Dal Co also ana-

of aesthetics and politics in twentiethunderlining

the ideological

shaped the field, ..•27 which Tafuri had addressed his enigmatic but magisterial Architecture

forces that previously in

and Utopía (1973).

Until the 1970s the histories told by Sigfried Giedion, Bruno

Several generations of biographical

Zevi, Henry-Russell

pedias have allowed readings parallel to those offered by these

Hitchcock, and Leonardo Benevolo per-

dictionaries

and encyclo-

petuated a view of modern architecture that gave priority to the

historical narratives. Recently Adrian Forty attempted,

radical character of its innovations. Each narrative carried its

and Buíldíngs, to define the semantic field of modern archi-

own particular biases ...• 17 As early as 1929 Giedion was inter-

tecture by identifying some of its key terms, whereas Anthony

ested in observing

Vidler unveiled the strategies determining

"national constants." ..•18 By 1941 he spoke

in Words

many of these found-

of the creation of a "new tradition," a notion Hitchcock had

ing histories ...• 28 Yet few of these works have attempted to

proposed in 1929 ...• 19 In 1951 Zevi responded to Giedion by

reveal the continuities that characterize

highlighting

- an often broken thread, but one that runs throughout the

the historical relationship of architectural

culture

modern architecture

to politics and surveying a vast array of buildings ...• 20 In 1958

episodes discussed

Hitchcock described the "reintegration"

From Giedion to Tafuri to Frampton, these discourses

of the arts of the engi-

in this book. of archi-

neer and the architect; he also preferred to write about build-

tectural history have revealed the fact that the supposed

ings that he had actually had the opportunity

omy or objectivity of the author is a quasi-fiction.

Benevolo, he placed the development

to visit. ..•21 As for

of modern architecture

books originated from a commission

auton-

Many of these

by a particular architect

014

I

015

- in Giedion's case, by Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius - or

appears all the more obsolete thirty years after the eruption

reflected an intellectual

of the last of several short-lived

position developed

in close contact

postmodernisms.

with architects - in Tafuri's case, with Aldo Rossi and Vittorio

going so far as to extend the definition

Gregotti. Through such relationships, architects have undeni-

tion to the vast configurations

ably shaped historians' thinking and writing and at times biased

explored by, tor example, Bruno Latour,

Without

of the modern condi-

of scientific and political thought -> 30

I have ventured

their interpretations.

beyond the limits of the movements

The following pages try to place less emphasis on the creativity

own modernity to consider changes brought about by the con-

of incontestable

vergence 01 the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and

and Mies

-> 29

"masters" like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier,

than on the sometimes

unfairly neglected work of

ing codes to the lunctional

ered through the publication

objective

ing the last two decades. The importance modern architecture

dur-

of the "masters" of

needs to be assessed as much through a

careful reconsideration

of their ascendancy

ination as through a celebration

and period of dom-

of their work. From this point

their

the rise of the nation-state. The adjustment of conservative build-

architects who had less heroic careers but have been rediscovof a plethora of monographs

literally proclaiming

requirements

01 modernization

process of the material transformation

- the

of society -

belongs to this chronicle as much as do innovations in building typology and torrn, even if the former respond more to the mandates of state power and capital than to ideal s of social relorm. It is difficult and perhaps impossible to communicate

in a single

01 view - and unlike many 01 the volumes named above - this

narrative a spectrum of experiences

book attempts to be as inclusive as possible, within the limits 01

graphs, exhibition catalogs, doctoral theses, and thematic stud-

its format and at the risk 01 occasionally

ies have not yet exhausted. Yet by alternating wide brushstrokes

plex trajectories.

I have frequently

the experimental

beginnings

oversimplilying

corn-

devoted more attention to

01 architects' careers than to their

that thousands of mono-

with specific details, I have endeavored to evoke a landscape of recurrent themes and at times to reveal different ways of think-

late periods, when their work often regressed or was simply fro-

ing about the past. Among these recurrent themes is the

zen in place by success and repetition.

passionate search by modern architects for an architecture

In order to avoid reproducing

the kind 01 epic narrative with

which many previous histories have interpreteo the theories and

considered

to be "rational" - a term that has enjoyed much

success over many decades - or in any case to be justified

designs of the most innovative architects 01 the nineteenth cen-

by a ratio related to construction, function, or economy. This

tury - reducing their immediate predecessors

search led in extreme cases to a reduction of the conception

to the dubious

status 01 "pioneers"

- I have taken a broad view 01 the untold-

ing of architectural

modernity. The continuity between the ide-

of "rational" building to little more than the implementation

als and reform strategies lorged during the first decades of the

ment guaranteeing

Industrial Revolution and those 01 the "mature" modernism

theme in twentieth-century

of

maximum

sunlight. Another recurrent

architecture

has been the relation-

the 1920s cannot be denied. Indeed, a definition 01 modernity

ship of architectural

limited to the aesthetic and design precepts of high modernism

classes - a subject taken into consideration

Introduction

I

Architecture's

expanded field

of

principies like the provision of optimal ventilation or an align-

programs to the needs of exploited social by professional

architects Throughout

for the first time in history during this periodo the twentieth century, diverse populist movements

constantly addressed this subject, whether structurally - for example, in terms of social housing - or aesthetically, by drawing on vernacular

rather than "pedigreed"

forms.

I have aspired to trace projects, alongside the dazzling accomplishments of the "rnasters" and their trailblazing

experiments

that claimed to free architecture from the weight of history, that are more reflective of the slow, cumulative, and irresistible process of modernization.

During the golden age of Hollywood

cinema, the major studios and leading producers eir movies as "A," "B," or

"e" according

categorized

to their budget. This

narrative, though most often focused on A buildings, was initially written with the intention not to neglect the relationship between the "major" architecture • orks and the "minor" architecture

of the most spectacular

of mass production, which

constituted the urban backdrop for the monumental

projects.

The physical limitations of a single volume have constrained this arnbítíon, But if the pages that follow cannot unravel all the myszsries of twentieth-century

architecture, they aim first and fore-

-nost to be an invitation to discovery and to suggest a framework in which to understand its most characteristic features.

016

I

017

Sheds to rails: the dominion of steel

The historical cycle referred to by the Scottish urban planner

The lamp of style

Patrick Geddes and his American disciple Lewis Mumford as the "paleotechnic

age" was symbolized by the invention of the

steam engine, the diffusion of the telegraph, and the expansion of the railroads ..•

1

As it unfolded, the crisis of rapidly growing

cities and the erosion of historicist architectural voked a late-nineteenth-century

languages pro-

revision of ideals that had been

At a time when national identity was developing in parallel with a passion for history, Semper and his French contemporary Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-Ie-Duc shared the beliefs that architecture must free itself from the multiple styles inherited from the past and that the logic embedded in the history of architecture, when released

formulated in response to the Industrial Revolution. Most of the

from the baggage of historical styles, would give rise to the one

theoretical

true style of the contemporary age. Semper declared, "Style is the

positions and slogans of the following decades

sprang from these precocious visions of a new culture based

accord of an art object wilh its genesis and with all the precondi-

on induslry. The effects of scientific discoveries combined

tions and circumstances of its becoming." .• 4 Viollet-Ie-Duc added

wilh Romanlicism

and belated echoes of the Enlighlenmenl

lo

in his Lectures on Architecture

5

that style was no longer merely

broaden Ihe ambilions of new nation-states thal rapidly came lo

the result of the will to create a form, but rather the logical outcome

both support and depend upon imperialism

of a given set of conditions: "As long as we are used to proceeding

and colonial expan-

sion. National and inlernalional economic growth heighlened

by reasoning, as long as we have a principie, any compositional

the demand for public policies that would satisfy the expecla-

task is possible, if not easy, and follows an orderly, methodical

tions of increasingly well-organized

workers.

path, the results of which, though they may not be masterpieces,

In 1889 an international

opened in Paris to com-

are at the very least fine, acceptable pieces of work that can have

exposition

memorale the hundredlh

anniversary

With Iheir Galerie des Machines,

11

of the fall of the Baslille. Ferdinand Dulert and

style." .• 5 Thus a locomotive or a sleamboat could be stylish in the sense meant by Viollet-Ie-Duc so long as it did not imitate a stage-

Victor Conlamin soughl lo ouldo Joseph Paxlon's Crystal

coach or a sailboat but embraced its own lechnical requirements.

Palace al Ihe London world exposition, which in 1851 had

The bold gestures represented

revealed Ihe vast gap between the mechanical

in which three-hinged

arches spanned 110 meters (360 feet),

and by the 300-meter

(986-foot) tower that would soon take

prefabricated

elegance of its

glass envelope and the eclectic ornamentation

of the industrial

objects it housed ..•

products featuring mass-produced

2

The sight of these new

decoration

had spurred

the name of Gustave Eiffel,

13

by the Galerie des Machines,

the man responsible for its

design and erection, were made possible by the use of iron,

John Ruskin to pen diatribes against the machines that were

the preeminenl

stripping workers of their rale in handcrafting

clearly visible in both these emblematic

"Caribbean

objects. But the

hut" also on view at the 1851 fair inspired the ideas

that would fuel Gottfried Semper's treatise Oer Stil in den technischen und tektonischen

Künsten (Style in the Technical and

Tectonic Arts; 1860-3) ..• 3 4

Chapter 01

I

Sheds to rails: the dominion

fully disguised

material of nineteenth-century

industry. Though

edifices, iron was care-

in other contexts, including most of the buildings

erected in Europe and North America in the middle of the century. Architectural

theorists therefore took particular interest in

the question of how to sheathe metallic structures ..•

01 steel

6

6 ~

,-

Firth 01 Forth Bridge, Benjamin

Baker and John Fowler, Edinburgh, Inchgarvie and File, United Kingdom,

1880-90

,It===~=

I el g Caribbean zecnniscnen

Hut, Irom Der Stil in den und tektonischen

5

Künsten

Slyle in the Technical and Tectonic Arts), 30ttlried

11

Vaulting 01 Large Spaces, Irom Entretiens

sur I'architecture Eugene Emmanuel

(Lectures on Architecture), Viollet-Ie-Duc,

1872

Semper, 1860-3

his 1849 volume The Seven Lamps of Architecture,

Ruskin had

the dominant status 01the methods inculcated at the École

eñounced "structural deceit" as inimical to architectural "truth."

des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which was uncontested as the lead-

e wrote, "The architect is not bound [italics in original] to exhibit

ing school in Europe and much 01the world. Among its stu-

structure; nor are we to complain 01 him ter concealing it, any ore than we should regret that the outer surlaces 01the human - ame conceal much 01 its anatomy; nevertheless, that building "11 generally be the noblest, which to an intelligent eye discovers

- e great secrets 01 its structure, as an animal lorm does, although • om a careless observer they may be concealed."

-> 7

In a similar

dent body were young Americans and Central and Eastern Europeans, whose adherence to its principies would vary widely alter they returned home. The Beaux-Arts approach lavored axial composition, symmetry, and hierarchy - above all in the context 01the competitions

in which its students engaged - and

it neglected the relationship 01 buildings to the urban labric in

.~in, Semper - borrowing the notion 01 "tectonics," or the exterior

favor 01 an abstract vision that generally imposed them on empty

axpression 01 interior structure, lrom the historian Karl Bbtlicher

sites.

- proposed to differentiate the Kernform (corelorm) lrom the

Ernest Flagg underlined in a lively article written upon his return

«unsttorm

Irom France, such an approach provided ballast against the

(artform) in buildings.

-> 8

Filty years later Walter

->

10

But as the New York architect and Beaux-Arts alumnus

3enjamin no longer resorted to these kinds 01 organic images to

hazards 01 prolessional practice.

characterize nineteenth-century

The École was hardly characterized by complete unanimity, how-

Parisian architecture but rather

oorrowed a ligure lrom psychoanalysis.

In a clarilication 01 a

ever; contradictory

-> 11

positions were olten embraced even by those

staternent by Giedio'n, he noted that the engineering structure 01

who adhered to its central principies. In contrast to the carica-

e ildings played "the role 01 bodily processes - around which

tures drawn by modernist critics, many exponents 01 eclecticism

ertistic' architectures gather, like dreams around the Iramework 01

used the past not as a supermarket ter historical ornaments but

~ ysiological processes."

rather as a source lor evaluating the "true" and "correct" language

->

9

He thus updated Semper's distinc-

zon between Kernform and Kunstform using a concept proposed Sigmund Freud tor the interpretation 01dreams.

suited to each project; in this respect they differed Irom both the champions 01 a rigorous classicism and the hard-line rationalists. The Beaux-Arts "eclectics" olten proclaimed their allegiance

The eminence of the Beaux-Arts

to Viollet-Ie-Duc, tor whom a building's plan was a lunction 01 its

~~e relationship 01the outer skin to the internal structure rern-

and critic Frantz Jourdain expressed this position by praising the

purpose and its lacade deduced Irom its plan. The Paris architect z:

ed a kind 01 mystery in the great Parisian buildings 01the late

architects 01the 1889 exposition lor having "put aside senile and

- ,eteenth century, such as Charles Garnier's Opéra (1860-75)

dangerous formulas and understood that ... social requirements

=..1

lifts our limbs." He added that the modern line had to transcribe 6

lhe movemenls 01 lile "whether we are devoling ourselves to

In Vienna a group 01 young architects trorn all over Central

practical daily chores or we are in a state 01 ecstasy, drunk or

Europe gathered around Otto Wagner and saw their first works

drawn into that divine dance, to which, as Zarathustra com-

go up in the Austrian capital. Joseph Maria Olbrich built the

mands, man musl constantly give himsell over so as 10 escape

Secession Building in 1898-9 to house the wark 01 radical art-

the weight 01 lile and material things."

-> 7

For the industrialist

ists. Its pediment was inscribed with the slogan, "To the age its

Karl Ernst Osthaus, Van de Velde built in the small manulacturing

art, to art its Ireedom." He also built houses that aspired to pro-

town 01 Hagen lirst the Folkwang Museum (1900-2) then the

vide an architectural

large villa Hohenhol (1908), culminating

interpretation

01 his clients' personalities.

a decade 01 work.

Josel Hoffmann undertook a search lar a geometric

While these developments

language

Duke Ernst Ludwig created the Darmstadt arlisls' colony. The

based on the square and on the interplay 01 black

and white. With the Purkersdorl Vienna, he developed surlaces,

Sanatorium

an orthogonal

(1904-5)

architecture

14

near

with white

inspired by houses he had sketched on his trav-

els in the south 01 Italy. The Slovenian native .Joze Plecnik built the Zacherlhaus

in 1903-5

using prismatic shapes; this

outside world discovered

were unlolding in Saxony, the Grand it in 1901 on the occasion 01 an

exposition there entitled Ein Ookument deutscher

Kunst (A

Document 01 German Art). Olbrich was the star 01 the show. Having completed the Secession Building in Vienna a tew years belore, he built the Ernst-Ludwig

House

was a bold departure trorn the excessive subtleties lhat had

arlisls' warkshop that dominaled

the Darmstadt colony, as well

quickly diminished

as his own house, in which he conceived

15

the Secession's

the Portois & Fix (1899-1900)

impact. Max Fabiani erected

and Artaria (1900) buildings, as

21

ter the exposition, an every detail, frorn tex~

tiles to cutlery. Peter Behrens, a painter-turned-architect

trorn

well as the more classical Urania inslilute 01 popular science

Hamburg with a more austere artistic language, lollowed suit by

(1909-10). Wagner's students Jan Kotéra and Pavel Janák

designing

Chapter 02

I

The search lar modern lorm

no less inclusively every leature 01 the house he built

22

Elvira Photo Studio, August Endell, Munich,

1897, demolished

Germany,

23 ~

Glasgow School 01 Art, Charles Rennie

Mackintosh,

21

Ernst-Ludwig

1944

Glasgow, United Kingdom,

1897-1908

House, Joseph Maria Olbrich,

Darmstadt, Germany, 1899-1901

20

Behrens House, Peter Behrens, Darmstadt,

Germany, 1899-1901

adjacent to Olbrich's. 20 Elsewhere other contemporary were more superficial, demolished

designs

including the Elvira Photo Studio, (1897,

1944),22 in Munich realized by August Endell, with

[true] architectural

tradition would remain with us still." ..•10

In practical terms, the Arts and Crafts heritage was represented principally

by the houses 01 Charles Francis Annesley Voysey,

its decorative facade treatmenl. Familiar with Heinrich Wblfflin's

whose puritanical approach resulted in what he called "mod-

psychology

est country houses." His own residence, The Orchard (1899) 19,

of art, Endell believed that a Formgefühl

sense) was at the root of all architectural

(form

designo According

to

in Chorleywood,

Hertfordshire, was an example 01 such a house,

him, "The architect must be a form-artist; only the art 01 form

with a rectangular

leads the way to a new architecture."

lectually inclined owner. Although in Voysey's view "too much

.• 8

layout designed lor a middle-class,

intel-

luxury is death to the artistic soul,' .• 11 his New Place, a resi-

Great Britain after the Arts and Crafts

dence commissioned

by the publisher A. M. M. Stedman in

The close ti es between Germany and Great Britain were exem-

Several ligures contributed to the modernization

plified by Charles Rennie Mackintosh's

scene during this periodo The lurniture designer Charles Robert

Haslemere, Surrey (1899), certainly did not lack complexity.

"House lor an Art l.over' competition schrift für Innendekoration

participation organized

in the 1901

by the Zeit-

(Journal lar Interior Decoration)

Ashbee proposed to "reconstruct" and

01the British

the industrial system rather

than rebel against it; he pointed out that in the "modern mechan-

by his attention to Olbrich's work. Around this time, the Arts

ical industry 'standard' is necessary, and 'standardization'

and Crafts movem'ent, which had been centered on William

essary," given that "the great social movement"

Morris, began taking a new direction, and William A. Lethaby

Crafts had degenerated

became its principal theorisl. A lormer assistant to the architect

tocracy working with great skill lor the very rich." ..•12 Following

is nec-

01the Arts and

into "a narrow and tiresome little aris-

Richard Norman Shaw, Lethaby lounded the Central School

his design 01 the central hall 01 the Vienna Secession's exhibi-

01 Arts and Crafts in 1888 in London, where he insisted on a

tion in 1900, Ashbee's ideas were lelt all the way to Chicago.

socially generous curriculum.

There he met Frank Lloyd Wright, who drew on Ashbee's thinking

Mysticism

In his 1892 book Architecture,

and Myth, he called lor architecture

thesis of the fine arts, the commune he also expressed

to be a "syn-

01 all the cralts." .• 9 But

a firm beliel in the present, in agreement

with his contemporaries.

As Reyner Banham noted, an exten-

sion 01 Lethaby's position may be read in a 1905 article in The Architectural architects

Review, which asks rhetorically:

live in perpetual

"Why should we

rebellion with the present? ... [I]f we

could only think of our building as an entirely modern problem without precedent

... just as the railway engine is, then, with-

out doubt ... the ruins 01 the past might crumble to dust but the

in his 1901 book The Arts and Crafts of the Machine. Another English designer, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, locused on the interior space 01 houses, and his ideas met with such success in Germany that he was invited to join Ashbee in litting out the Grand Duke 01 Hesse's palace in Darmstadt (1897-8). More spectacular, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's activity centered on Glasgow, a city with a solid classical tradition. With Herbert McNair and the sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald, who were close to the Symbolist lounded

movement on the Continent, he

"The Four," also known as "The Mac Group." Their

030

I

031

24

Hill House, Charles Rennie Mackintosh,

Helensburgh,

United Kingdom,

25

1902-3

La Samaritaine

Jaurdain,

Department

Store, Frantz

Paris, France, 1904-5

designs were shown in 1896 at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition

small cutouts, resembled

Society. Mackintosh

when suffused with daylight from the glass roof. Mackintosh's

also designed

Glasgow, including

several tearooms

"The Willow" (1903-4),

in

whose name was

work had considerable

a kind of sacred forest, especially resonance

drawn from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet "The Willow

orthogonal

Wood." Mackintosh

there for more plantlike motifs.

scored the interior with a pattern of ver-

on the Continent,-and

shapes of his library countered

the

the preference

tical lines that was echoed in the high backs of the chairs, while the use of white lacquer contrasted The stained-glass especially

inventive. Mackintosh

on hilly terrain, their prismatic

built a handful of houses

volumes

these, Hill House, (1902-3),24 in Helensburgh,

roofed with slates. Of

publisher

was particularly

house whose walls seem to embrace white-Iacquered

home

for the way its

recalled Scottish houses of

century. For Windyhill,

William Davidson, Mackintosh

W. W. Blackie's

remarkable

walls of stone and rough concrete the seventeenth

with natural oak.

Art Nouveau and the Paris-Nancy axis

door panels and the lighting fixtures were

in Kilmacolm

(1900), a

the garden of its owner,

designed

chairs and decarated

built-in furniture and the walls with geo-

On the other si de of the Channel, Art Nouveau branched out into two principal centers: Paris and Nancy. In the capital city, critics derided the "noodle style" (le style nouille) of Hectar Guimard, whose entrances to metro stations began to appear on Paris streets in 1900. The most remarkable of them looked like insects spreading diaphanous

wings. The outcry by critics

and the hostility of the conservative

Commission

for Old Paris

prevented Guimard from realizing other such projects, including a kiosk he designed for the Place de l'Opéra in 1905. Inspired

metric motifs. But his major work, to which he devoted him-

by his encounter with Horta's buildings, Guimard had become

self intermittently

well known thanks to his Castel Béranger (1894-8), 28 a Paris

for more than ten years, was the Glasgow

School of Art. 23 He first completed which opened large rectangular incorporating

windows onto the street,

allusions to Gothic religious buildings

medieval fortresses. (1907-8)

the east wing (1897-8),

Built considerably

had a fundamentally

and

later, the west wing

different designo A gable struc-

ture with three vertical bow windows extending

much of the

height of the elevation, it was a revision of a scheme with small arched windows also designed

he had proposed

initially. Mackintosh

two large glass boxes on the roof to serve as

building noted for its poetic assemblage

of cast iron, brick,

and rough and carved stone. Guimard densely covered the building's

surfaces from its front gate, which opened onto an

evocation of an underwater grotto, to the wainscoting

of its

apartments, with a vinelike web of lines. The building's facades revealed the interior articulation

and abandoned

any vertical or

horizontal alignment. It was rare far Guimard's for the ceramicist

houses, such as the one he designed

Louis Coillot in Lille (1898-1900),

to sit

studios. But his majar focus was on the library, which occu-

quietly between parallel walls. Both the Castel Henriette in

pied two levels and included

Sevres (1899-1903,

building's

masonry envelope ..•

of wooden elements,

Chapter 02

a balcony floating inside the

I

illuminated

The search lar modern lorrn

13

This warm composition

by light coming through

demolished

in Villemoisson-sur-Orge

(1900-3)

of the Castel Béranger, displaying

1969) and the Castel Orgeval extended the vocabulary an acrobatic

assembly

of

26

27

Entrance Gate at the 1900

International

Exposition,

28

Louis Majorelle House, Henri Sauvage, Nancy, France, 1898-1901

Castel Béranger, Hector Guimard, Paris,

France, 1894-8

René Binet,

?aris, France, 1900, as featured on a publicity

blotting paper

cylindrical enclosed

turrets, elabarate windows, and conical roofs that ingenious

plans and made no concession

to

symmetry. In 1929 Salvador Dalí interpreted Guimard's designs as "nothing but the cylindrical itary symmetries."

anamorphosis

Jourdain (the son 01 Frantz Jourdain) and Henri Sauvage lar the playful

of hered-

.• 14 In fact, Guimard had already revealed

his kinship with Viollet-Ie-Duc. École du Sacré-Coeur

He confirmed

it with his

(Lectures on Architecture)

like the ones Viollet had included

twenty-five

used in her performances. Together with the ceramicist Alexandre Bigot and the glassmaker Jacques Gruber, Sauvage also built a house for the Louis Majorelle (1898-1901) 27 in Nancy. Frantz

Jourdain saw it as the culmination ist approach, a "mathematical

in an imaginary view in his Entretiens sur /'architecture time, Guimard's

American dancer l.oie Fuller, evoked the undulating fabrics she

cabinetmaker

(1898) in Paris, where he constructed

V-shaped cast-iron supports

studies." .• 15 Another pavilion at the fair, designed by Francis

years earlier. At the

unencumbered

largest building was the Humbert de Romans

01 Viollet-Ie-Duc's

rational-

solution to the problem posed,"

by any concern lor symmetry: "Sauvage applies

this same respect lor truth to his decorative work, which proves

Concert Hall in Paris (1899-1901), the roof 01 which was held

to be impeccably

in place by branching

neously with the structure, in one impulse, the consequence

impression

wood columns that created the decorated

buildings, such as the

Céramic Hotel (1904) and his apartment

the philosopher

building on Avenue

Rapp, provoked oútraqe Irom contemporaries

comparable

to

by eclecticism,

the 1900 International

Paul Souriau, the bard 01 "rational beauty,"

the Nancy artists developed

a body of work remarkable far its

vitality and consistency, with Lucien Weissenburger's representing

that elicited by Guimard's work. Though dominated

01

an idea and the corollary of a theorem." .• 16 In dialogue with

of a natural lorest. Elsewhere in Paris only Jules

Lavirotte's extravagantly

rational and which was conceived simulta-

particularly

Frantz Jourdain

elegant examples ..•

houses

17

was more than a radical critico In 1891 he

Exposition in Paris did feature a few pavilions related to the

became the lirst architect to join the Société Nationale des

new aesthetic, including the Bing pavilion by Bonnier, who

Beaux-Arts

lounded

by Auguste Rodin, Euqene Carriere, and

also designed a stunning unbuilt giant globe lar the geogra-

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

pher Élysée Reclus and who later built two elementary schools

against his anti-Semitic

in Paris. Above all, the fair's entrance pavilion, 26 designed

Zola, whose lunerary

by René Binet, later the author of the new Printemps depart-

1903 he lounded

ment stares (1907-10), reconnected

case for Parisian innovation

01 Art Nouveau. Binet's interpretation

with the organic sources was inspired by the

monument

His most brilliant architectural Department

entilic investigations

in Paris. The exuberance

Alfred Dreylus

and was a friend of Émile he designed

the Salon d'Automne,

German biologist Ernst Haeckel, the author 01 a series 01 sciillustrated with brilliant color plates show-

He supported

accusers

in 1902. In

the principal

show-

over the next twenty years. work was the Samaritaine

Store 25 built between 1904-5 01 the wrought-iron

ing the structures of underwater organisms. As Binet wrote to

floral motifs on its front contrasted

Haeckel of his design: "Everything about it, lrom the general

side facades, whose large rectangular

composition to the smallest details, has been inspired by your

oflice buildings

along the Seine decorations

with the rationality windows

with

of its

evoked the

01 Chicago.

034

I

035

29

Riabushinsky

30

House, Fiador Shekhtel, Moscow, Russia, 1900-2

Botter House, Raimondo

d'Aronco,

Constantinople

(Istanbul), Oltoman

Empire

(Turkey),1900-1

From Italian "Floreale" to Russian "Modern"

development

since the abolition 01 serfdom in 1861, the

At the turn of the century, the intellectual

gathered together by its architects

Muscovite bourgeoisie cipation already underway spread throughout ideas manilested

and aesthetic eman-

in Austria and Belgium began to

Europe. In Italy the dominance

01 Viennese

itsell in the work 01 several architects.

was quick to take hold 01 those themes under the banner- of the

"Modern" style. Though Viollet-Ie-Duc's

reflections on a national

style in his 1879 volume L'art russe (Russian Art) remained on everyone's mind, architects now turned to popular themes

Raimondo d'Aronco was one 01 many Italian architects work-

rather than those of religious structures. The leading protagonist

ing in the Near Easl. Active in Istanbul Irom 1894 to 1909,

01 the Modern was Fiodor Shekhtel, the creator 01 the Russia

he created, in the words 01 his Roman compatriot

Pavilion at the Glasgow World's Fair (1901), which was praised

Piacentini, "a vast, variable, multilaceted acterized by an "exuberant, colorlul

body 01 work," char-

restless, impulsive"

houses on the Bosphorus

Marcello

spirit.

His

-> 18

and his designs in Pera,

such as the Botter House (1900-1), 30 were characterized

by

lor its inventiveness and its coloration. In Moscow he organized the 1902 Exhibition 01 Architecture

and Design in the New

Style, displaying Viennese and Scottish works. Shekhtel built the Riabushinsky

House in Moscow (1900-2),29

with a sculp-

the plasticity 01 their surfaces and the graphic effect of their

tural staircase that ranks high as a realization 01 European Art

metallic components.

Nouveau. He also built the Yaroslavl Train Station in Moscow

Giuseppe Sommaruga

and Ernesto Basile, active in Milan and

Palermo, respectively, indulged in monumental imagery when designing

and historicist

public structures but used more Ilex-

ible lorms lor their private commissions.

Sommaruga's

Castiglione on Corso Venezia in Milan (1903-4)

31

Palazzo

caused a

(1902) for the industrialist Savva Mamontov, the patron 01 the Abramtsevo

artists' colony, tapping into a repertory of popu- .

lar and medieval Russian lorms with the collaboration

01 the

painter Konstantin Korovin. The Modern approach was not limited to big cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. It was also

scandal - not because 01 its innovative concrete Iloors, which

adopted in the rest 01 the Russian empire, as, lor example, in

were invisible, but because 01 its rough lacade and its anatomi-

Mikhail Eisenstein's buildings in Lvov and Riga.

cally explicit decor. Two voluptuous

-> 20

sculpted lemale ligures on

either side 01 the entrance were removed under pressure lrom

The Catalan renaissance

critics and relocated to his Villa Romeo in Milan (1907-12). The latter was a sophisticated

composition

01 materials and

Catalonia presented what was probably the most remarkable

colors and probably the most apt example 01 an architecture

European scene 01 the period, experiencing

described

renaissance,

by the key terms "living organism, logic, lunction,

constructed

objecl."

-> 19

Among Basile's abundant contributions

rooted in its rediscovery

a renaixensa, or

01 its own medieval

history and the adoption 01lorms from the Orient. Several vari-

to the city 01 Palermo, the Villino Florio (1900.,..2) and the Villa

ations 01 Barcelona modernism

Igiea Hotel (1898-1900)

de Gracia, a wide bourgeois avenue in the city's extension

stood out lor their decorative whimsy.

In Russia, which had been plunging headlonq into industrial

Chapter 02

I

The search lar modern lorm

are clearly visible on the Paseo

planned in 1859 by Ildelonso Cerda. Three buildings laced off

31

Palazzo Castiglione.

Sommaruga.

Giuseppe

Milan. ltaly, 1903-4

036

I

037

32

Casa Milá (La Pedrera; the

Quarry), Antoni Gaudí, Barcelona, Spain, 1906-10

on the "Manzana de la Discordia"

(its name meaning both

"block of discord" and "apple 01 discord," playing on the double meaning 01 manzana). The Lleó Moreira Building (1902) by Lluís Dornenech i Montañer is reminiscent

of Parisian Art

Nouveau. Farther along, the Amatller Building (1898-1900) by Josep Puig y Cadalalch, who was not only an architect but al so an international traveler, archaeologist, tured medieval-style

decoration

and politician, lea-

and a stepped gable, evoking

Hanseatic merchant houses and concealing

its owner's photo-

graphy studio. Next door, the Casa Battló by Antoni Gaudí (1906), a renovation 01 an older building, was nicknamed

Casa

de los Huesos (House 01 Bones) because of the bone-shaped columns along its front facade, which opens into a stairhall clad with blue ceramic tiles. The building is topped with a carapace 01 colored ti les. The medievalizing

leatures 01 Puig's Casa Terrades, also known

as the Casa de les Punxes (House 01 Spikes) (1903-7),33 express a clear nostalgia lor Catalonia's golden age. Decorated with mosaics depicting

nationalist motifs, the edilice caused a

political scandal. A lew blocks away, Dornenech built the San Pau Hospital (1902-10), where the brick patterning is more playlul. He combined with extraordinary

an iron structure and wide glass openings

sculptural inventiveness

in the Palau de la

Música Catalana (Palace 01 Catalan Music; 1905-8),35

built lor

the Orféo Catala choir as a symbol 01 the regional renaissance. The sense 01 imagination

manilest in the decoration

01 the

Palau is even more vivid in Gaudí's buildings. A genius inventor of structural and ornamental

lorms, this fervent Catholic was

born into a family 01 craltsmen 01 Ruskin and Viollet-Ie-Duc, connection

with his materials.

and, inspired by his readings retained a direct and permanent ->

21

Alter some initial buildings

such as the Palacio Güell (1886-9), whose forms reflected

038

I

039

33

Casa Terrades (Casa de les Punxes; House 01 Spikes), Josep Puig y

Cadatalch,

Barcelona,

strong neo-Gothic

Spain, 1903-7

and neo-Moorish

inlluences

(the latter

Throughoul

Europe, mosl 01 Ihe impulses initiated by the revolt

derived Irom a trip to Tangier), Gaudí pursued two parallel lines

01 young archilecls and artists betore 1900 persisled unlil 1914,

01 research. On the one hand, he conceived

and sometimes

structures based

beyond. The rigidily 01 classical composition

on slender trames and narrow arches, tested in innovative

was lundamenlally

scale models that used strings to simulate the catenary curves

egies aimed at inventing a new urban picturesque

distributing

modaling

the structure's weight. On the other, he created an

and successlully

challenged

Ihanks to straland accom-

modern ways 01 lile. The legacy 01 Ihe Secession

exuberant ornamental language with pieces 01 broken ceramic,

and Arl Nouveau was also visible in Ihe decorative elemenls

wrought iron, and sculptures 01 his own invention.

Ihal were soon lo be mass produced - in direcl contradiclion

Every tacet 01 Gaudí's experimentation

lo Iheir movements'

with structures is repre-

sented in the galleries and the cistern at Park Güell (1900-14), 34 while his investigation

01 residential types led him to the Paseo

initially individualistic

aims. Easily imitated

and industrialized, Ihese expressions were subject to both commercialization

and the widest popular consumplion,

slrelching

de Gracia, where he built the Casa Mila (1906-10) 32 across

lo the larlhest reaches 01 Lalin America and Asia.

frorn the Casa Battló. Known as the "Pedrera" (quarry), the Casa

At Ihe same lime, the experiments

Milá evokes the rocky cliffs 01 the Pyrenees at Montserrat, a

Glasgow and trorn Moscow to Barcelona also led to the dis-

privileged

covery 01 new geometries, trorn Ihe experimental,

site tor Catalan regional identity. Inside, the steel

column-and-beam

structure supports the hanging stone

guage 01 Gaudí lo the orthogonal,

lacade, while the roof bristles with shapes covered in ceramic tiles and the underground

level serves as a parking garage.

Maria Jujol, a collaborator

01 Gaudí who later carried on his project was the Sagrada

in 1926. He linished the crypt begun by his lormer employer, Juan Martorell Montells, as well as the walls 01 the apse and the eastern lacade 01 the transept, which contains a stunning 01 statues enmeshed

abandoned replacing

in vines. Most importantly,

the Gothic system originally it with stable hyperboloids

curvatures construclion

Chapter 02

he

planned ter the nave,

- surlaces with double

- without a single Ilying buttress. The church's progressed

episodically

ongoing loday.

I

The search tor modern íorrn

Hoffmann. This polarily between expressionism lore in Ihe 1920s.

Familia Basilica, which he oversaw trorn 1883 until his death

grouping

Iyrical lan-

modular approach 01 Josel and lunction-

alism, evident in their divergent directions, would come lo Ihe

In the apartments, wavy ceilings were sculpted by Josep research. Gaudí's most ambitious

undertaken trorn Vienna to

tor a century and is still

34

Park Guéll, Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona,

35

Palace of Catalan Music, Lluís Doménech

Spain, 1900-14

i Montañer, Barcelona,

Spain, 1905-8

040

I

041

Domestic innovation and tectonic • expression

The collective search for a new "style" would never have begun

countryside

without a more profound process of modernization

type of bourgeois residence characterized

underway.

a series of stunning weekend houses - a new by a great num-

It operated on two distinct yet related planes: as a response to

ber of guest rooms. Often nestled against stone walls and fea-

unprecedented

turing striking contrasts between volumes and textures, these

construction

social needs and as a dissemination

technologies.

of new

The years between the Paris

houses were laid out in conjunction

with their gardens, gen-

International Exposition of 1889 and World War I corresponded

erally designed by Jekyll. Their relative modesty was dis-

to the zenith of British and French imperialism, to Germany's

guised by artifices, among them a play with perspective, that

belated but robust expansion, and to the emergence of the

Lutyens used to exaggerate their scale. The apparent symme-

United States on the world stage. In this competitive

try of L-shaped plan s, as at Tigbourne Court in Witley, Surrey

ment, national hegemonies

exercised contradictory

environeffects

on architects, reshaping their strategies and aesthetics.

(1899-1901),38

was no more than a visual illusion: the actual

landscape is picturesque

and irregular. At Deanery Garden

in Sonning, Berkshire (1899-1902), built for Edward Hudson, founder of the popular periodical

The central place of Great Britain

Country Life, a double-height

entry hall illuminated by a large bay window contrasts with The method of composition

developed at the École des Beaux-

Arts continued to dominate the design of public architecture, whereas a domestic architecture Georges-Eugéne

inspired by the Paris of Baron

Haussmann spread to a wide array of cities,

from Bucharest to Buenos Aires to New York. Yet the central-

the solid walls enclosing it. At the Bois des Moutiers (1898) in Varengeville, on the French side of the Channel, commissioned by the banker Guillaume Mallet, the garden descends to the sea as if in an idyllic landscape

painted by Claude Lorrain.

These English houses were studied by critics eager to under-

ity of the role played by Great Britain in the sphere of domestic

stand and replicate their essential features. One such observer,

architecture was undeniable. The principies applied to British

the Berlin architect Hermann Muthesius, published three vol-

residential design in the last decade of the nineteenth century

umes entitled Das englische Haus (The English House) 36 in

found enthusiasts among Parisians like Viollet-Ie-Duc Sédille, who praised them in 1890 ..• plans became widespread,

1

and the double-height

"English"

hall became a common feature in French homes ..• At the beginning

and Paul

The use of more open

2

of the twentieth century, Edwin Lutyens inau-

1908-11, which had a profound effect on German architecture ..• 3

37

The idealization of British material culture also domi-

nated the thinking of critics of the established aesthetic order, among them Austrian Adolf Loos, who made it the pretext for his polemical project to "introduce Western culture into Austria." .• 4

gurated a break with the Arts and Crafts movement. He exam-

In the years leading up to World War 1,Germany's rapid

ined everyday dwellings and their close relationship to their

modernization

gardens, which he was better able to understand after coming

between industry and the decorative arts diminished

and the close relationships

established

there Britain's

into contact with the landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll.

preeminence

Between 1889 and 1903 he designed

same time, relentless press coverage made both professionals

Chapter 03

I

in the English

Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

in the production

of industrial objects. At the

s

ENGLISCHE HAUS

36

Das Englische

Haus (The English House),

ermann Muthesius,

1908-11

37

Freudenberg

38 ~

House, Hermann

Tigbourne

Muthesius,

Berlin, Germany, 1907-8

Court, Edwin Lutyens, Witley, United Kingdom,

1899-1901

and the public in Germany aware of American urban and archi-

building, whose layouts were already well defined. Structures

tectural developments.

devoted to artist's studios, which had first appeared in Paris

Mimicking

published Das amerikanische 1910, introducing

Muthesius, F. Rudolf Vogel

Haus (The American House) in

the work of Henry Hobson Richardson

his successors to a German readership ..•

and

during the Second Empire, were given new interpretations, with André Arfvidson's terra-cotta-clad Studio Building (1912)

5

39

as

reinforced-concrete

on Rue Carnpaqne-Prerniere

in

Paris. Apartment or residential hotels, offering apartments with in-house hotel services for bachelors and couples without

Residential reform

children, spread throughout the United States and occasionDomestic architecture

reflected the transformations

in pro-

ally grew to the size of skyscrapers ..•

The idea of col lec-

7

cess. The reforms that took place in the United States, France,

tivizing domestic services engendered

England, and Germany were touched off by social, political,

the Einküchenhaus,

technological,

Hermann Muthesius and Albert GeBner each built an example

architectural

spatial, and aesthetic factors. At the social level, creativity was extended for the first time to a field

other types, such as

or communal-kitchen

building; in 1909

in Berlin, at Friedenau and at Lichterfelde, respectively ..•

8

it had previously ignored: housing for the poor. As hygiene became a fundamental government

concern in municipal and state policy,

Unifying the urban landscape

regulations were brought to bear on lower-class

housing projects, éxplicitly requiring the services of architects.

It was no easy task to shape a harmonious

urban landscape

The entire sphere of residential architecture reflected the deep

composed

changes in the living habits of most social classes. Bourgeois

originality, particularly under the influence of Art Nouveau ide-

residences became increasingly complex, with more rooms

als. The question of how to regulate facades was hotly debated

devoted to receiving guests, larger and more numerous openings

in most European cities and some North American ones, some-

to the outdoors, and the addition of bathrooms or, in the case

times at precisely the same time that competitions

of France, less hospital-like cabinets de toilette ..• 6 The relative

ing the facades of the year's most original buildings. The unified

of buildings by creators who individually aspired to

were reward-

amenity of different floors changed drastically with the installation

urban street wall, or einheitliche

of electrical elevators, which replaced early hydraulic-powered

advocates in Germany, while in New York the demand for visual

StraBenfront, found many

ones. These made upper levels - previously left to servants

continuity among buildings, based on the classicizing

and inhabitants of lesser means - and roof terraces more valu-

of Haussmann's

model

Paris, often went under the name of "munici-

able and stimulated the construction of ever taller buildings. The

pal improvement."

almost universal availability of electric lighting extended daytime

of 1902,

living into the night and modified the use of every type of room.

what critics like Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo had

40

.• 9 At the same time, the Paris building code

written by Louis Bonnier, encouraged

There was little uniformity. New building types augmented

perceived as Haussmann's tyrannical

established

question of uniformity generated divided opinions.

ones such as the town house and the apartment

a break with

horizontality. Thus the

042

1

043

41 Automobile

Garage, Auguste

Perret,

Paris, France, 1906-7, demolished

39

40

Studio Building, André Arfvidson,

Drawing illustrating

the new Paris urban regulations,

1971

Louis Bonnier, 1902

Paris, France, 1912

The preoccupation more lar-reaching

with hygiene at the turn 01 the century had

II the nineteenth century saw the improvement

results than just increasing the number 01

01 bank-linanced

housing projects, the early twentieth century was characterized

apartments with bathrooms and toilets. II led to a reconceptual-

by public programs beneliting white-collar

ization 01 the very lorm that buildings should take. The building

as lactory workers. The Woníngwet (Housing Law) adopted in

codes 01 major cities prescribed

the Netherlands

and courtyards

the enlargement

01 air shafts

tor ventilation, while also aiming to broaden

in 1901 called ter public linancing

built with municipal

streets so as to space out housing blocks. For example, the

employees as well

or cooperative

quality standards and imposing

sponsorship,

01 dwellings

mandating

regulatory authority. Between

New York State Tenement House Act 011901 not only modilied

1894 and 1912 France passed a body 01 laws putting in place

the lacades 01 apartment

a program of low-cost housing that was guaranteed,

blocks by requiring open spaces to

be regularly placed along the street-Iacing proloundly

walls, but al so

altered their tloor plans by mandating

yards ..• 10 The lear 01 tuberculosis

eventually linanced,

larger court-

by the state. As a result, the number 01

housing projects increased through the initiatives 01 philan-

led to a veritable obsession

thropic societies such as the Rothschild Foundation and the

with sunlight. Projects by the Paris architect Adolphe-Augustin

Lebaudy Foundation, and subsequently

Rey, notably in his housing complex tor the Rothschild

specialized

Foundation

was further developed

(1905), where the open courtyard was adopted

after wind-tunnel tem lor apartment

tests determined the optimal ventilation sysbuildings, clearly displayed this concern ..•

At the same time, the growing number 01 automobiles

and

combined

government

through the work 01

agencies. The cooperative

system

in Germany, while in the UK the system

municipal action with private philanthropy.

11

also had

The advent of reinforced concrete

a direct effect on the design 01 domestic buildings. Initial solutions based on stables that had been used tor horse-drawn

Construction

carriages since the sixteenth century were quickly replaced by

place at every

specialized

duction 01 reinforced

garages, such as the one Auguste Perret designed

on Rue de Ponthieu in Paris (1906-7, demolished by parking spaces constructed automobile

underneath

1971),41

and

new buildings. The

augured new ways 01 perceiving the urban land-

scape, blurring the perception

01 contrasts and thereby

was another lield in which transformations level 01 architecture,

rial on the planning were as profound Produced

particularly

concrete. The effects 01 this new mateand management

01 building

as its impact on architectural

by combining

construction theory.

a mixture 01 cement, stone aggre-

gates, and water with steel reinlorcement,

reinlorced

radically changing the very idea 01 the monument. In 1910

was considered

Peter Behrens declared, "Individual

a direct result 01 progress

in both chemistry

ics ..•

between the rediscovery

tor themselves. The only architecture 01 viewing our surroundings,

buildings no longer speak appropriate

to such a way

which has now become a habit, is

13

by Siglried Giedion a "Iaboratory

The lew decades

material - originally

zation were marked by the invention 01 dependable to calculate

Chapter 03

I

Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

i'".:

01 this

used by the Romans - and its industriali-

one that produces surlaces as unilorm and calm as possible, .• 12

concrete

material,"

and mathemat-

which in their simplicity

present no obstacles."

took

with the intro-

the proportions

01 the concrete

methods

ingredients

with

· A u guste ent Buildmg, Apartm 1903-4 ::>erre, t Paris , France,

42

43

Hennebique

Headquarters,

Rue Danton, Edouard Arnaud, Paris, Franee, 1901

44

Chureh of Saint-Jean

de Montmartre,

Anatole de Baudot, Paris, Franee, 1894-1904 45

Baron Empain's "Hindu" Palaee, Alexandre Egypt, 1907-10

Mareel, Heliopolis,

rigorous

precision

construction

and the development

competed

to master the techniques

Alexandre

of patent-licensed

systems. Engineers, contractors,

and architects

concrete

imagination.

to the constructive

became one of the first multinationals business, opening

(Architecture:

in the construction

branches abroad in the 1890s to assist

tion to their projects. The Hennebique

simple system of columns and beams, allowed for

adventurous

torrns.

-> 15

The company

built both historicist

edifices, such as the "Hindu" palace designed Marcel for Baron Empain in Heliopolis

(1907-10),

utilitarian structures devoid of any ornamentation

45

and totally

for its indus-

trial clients. The building that Édouard Arnaud designed the firm's Paris headquarters Bourg-Ia-Reine treatments

for

(1901) 43 appeared to be made

of smooth carved stone, while Hennebique's

striated, stuccoed

concrete

once and for all,

Beaux-Arts

with. In one, the engireinforced

forms made of brick, which subsequently

served as cladding

for the building. The material was put to its most spectacular use by Anatole de Baudot in the Church of Saint-Jean Montmartre

(1894-1904).

44

With its arches seemingly

pended in midair, the building municipal

Chapter 03

authorities

I

de

sus-

so terrified Parisians that the

nearly forced the parish priest to raze it.

Domestie innovation and teetonie expression

-> 17

the primacy of

An alumnus of the École des

Gustave and Claude, Perret broke the mold of Parisian urban architecture

with his building

Its concrete

structure was plainly visible from the street,

on Rue Franklin (1903-4),42 In 1908 the American

critic

Arthur C. David made no attempt to hide his contempt: has its interest; but the interest is assuredly

Full-Iledqed

members

participated

in the activities

rather as the

than as the finished

product."

of the Passy circle, founded the poets Guillaume

and Paul Fort; the artists Francis Picabia, Albert

Gleizes, and Raymond Voirol.

->

19

-> 18

of the Parisian art scene, the Perrets

in July 1912, which al so included

Sébastien

not aes-

has not made any attempt to give it a

raw material of architecture

Apollinaire

"As

in the frank treatment of a new material, this

pleasing aspect; and it should be considered

with wire into

reinforced

and resolves with

who had gane into business with his brothers

building

poured concrete

/e passé, /e présent

incontestable sureness the profound flaws found in the direct use of metal." -> 16

thetic. The architect

were experimented

the power

in iron. In his posthu-

concrete, which has all of its advantages,

an experiment

- and

halls;

Past and Present; 1916), Baudot referred to iron

provided an example of a roof terrace used as a garden, in

neer Paul Cottancin

had envisioned

book L'architecture,

this case for growing vegetables. Other processes

to be striving to rediscover

barely clad by Bigot's ceramics.

own villa in

(1903) explored all kinds of concrete surface

- washed, aggregated,

meeting or concert

It would fall to Auguste Perret to establish

by Alexandre

nature

to develop numer-

as little more than a "step" toward "its successor,

method, based on an

decorations

and light of the great Gothic naves and to realize what his mously published

company

in adapting the new process of concrete construc-

apparently

projects for concrete

mentor Viollet-Ie-Duc

-> 14

The French engineer Francois Hennebique's

architects

ous theoretical

in these he appeared

seemed to have reached their limits, reinforced offered new spatial possibilities

brick and terra-cotta

of its interior. Until 1914 Baudot continued

and to control a mar-

ket that quickly became global. Just at the moment that iron structures

Bigot's exposed

gave the church a warmth that offset the cavernous

Duchamp-Villon;

and the critic

"""-e.' ~.~,.,.,-,--.~~~~.

46

Woman's Club, Irving Gill, La Jolla, California,

USA, 1912-13

In 1913 Auguste Perret made his name in Paris with the Champs

1902, and he laid the first concrete road, Route 57, in Warren

Élysées Theater. 48 This "philharmonic

County, New Jersey. But Edison's effort in 1906 to mold

palace" combining three

separate halls, inspired by Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building

individual houses and all their furniture out of a single pour of

in Chicago, had first been entrusted to the Swiss architect Henri

concrete in Stewartville, New Jersey, was a commercial

Fivaz, then to Henry van de Velde. When it came to its construc-

The engineer Ernest L. Ransome had more success in develop-

failure.

tion, however, the Belgian architect found himself competing with

ing concrete in the United States. Southern California turned out

Perret, who had been consulted concerning the concrete struc-

to be particularly fertile ground for research on the new material.

ture. Though certain aspects of Van de Velde's conception were

Irving Gill invented a tilt-slab system of monolithic walls, poured

conserved in Perret's final design, they were worked into a con-

on the ground, then hoisted to a vertical position; these were

crete cage held by four bowstring arches of a type previously

used in the La Jolla Woman's Club (1912-13) ...• 21 46

used exclusively for bridges. The outline of this structure is trace-

In New York the most interesting experiment in concrete was

able on the facade in the design of the stone facing by the sculp-

Grosvenor Atterbury's buildings at the Forest Hills Gardens

tor Antoine Bourdelle, who recruited the painters Maurice Denis,

complex in Queens (1909-13), which had a romantic touch.

Edouard Vuillard, and Ker-Xavier Roussel in an exceptional col-

European civil engineers devoted themselves to inventing new

laboration. Nicknamed the "zeppelin of avenue Montaigne" by

processes and new forms adapted to the properties of the

Germanophobe

material. The Swiss engineer Robert Maillart designed unprec-

critics, this edifice hosted the world premiere of

Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913...• 20

edentedly elegant works spanning Alpine rivers and ravines,

Perret was the most radical of the architects to explore the

beginning

potential of concrete. His experiments

Tavanasa Bridge (1905).47

quickly led him to erect

with the bridge over the Inn at Zuoz (1900) and the His curved and taut forms went

factories and warehouses with slender vaults, the most widely

beyond the limits of the Hennebique

publicized example of which was built for the Wallut agricultural

in 1938, "Reinforced concrete does not grow like wood, is not

supply company in Casablanca, for French colonization

a city that was a bridgehead

in Morocco. But Perret was not the only

method; as he explained

rolled like steel, and has no joints like masonry. It is best compared

with cast iron as a material that is cast in forms, and

Parisian to experiment with the new material. Francois Le Coeur

perhaps we can learn directly from the long development

introduced

the latter something

concrete in public building with his extension to the

Postal Administration exchange

buildings

Building

in Paris (1907) and in telephone

- a new type of program - on Rue du

Faubourq-Poissonniere

(1912) and Rue du Temple (1914).

of

about how, by avoiding rigidity in form, we

can achieve a fluid continuity

between members that serve

different functions." ..•22 The diaphanous

shapes designed by

the French civil engineer Euqene Freyssinet broke radically with

After the French state bought up private patents, concrete

the language of iron and stone structures. Freyssinet built a

entered the public domain, and its use fascinated all types of

bridge in Ferrieres-sur-Sichon

innovators. In the United States, the prolific American

in Vichy (1913), among others, before going on to invent pre-

inven-

tor Thomas Alva Edison took an interest in concrete as early as

Chapter 03

I

Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

(1906) and the Boutiron Bridge

stressed concrete in the 1920s ...• 23

47

48

Champs-Elysées

Concrete

Bridge, Robert Maillart, Tavanasa, Switzerland,

1905

Theater, Auguste Perret, Paris, France, 1910-3

050

I

051

49

Seaplane

Hangars, S. Schultz, K. N. Hbjgaard and H. Forschammer,

Reval (Tallinn), Russia (Estonia), 1917

F'-' - -w_~. -.-. - , ~- ~~

50

Dom-ino

Chapter 03

House, project, Charles-Édouard

I

Jeanneret

Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

(Le Corbusier),

France, 1914

51 ~

Centenary

Hall, Max Berg,

Breslau (Wroc!aw), Germany (Poland),1912-13

Bois, who had translated German handbooks

Concrete nationalisms

French, he was a draftsman

on concrete into

in the Perret office from 1908 to

Despite its apparent objectivity, concrete design was una-

1909. In 1914 Jeanneret conceived

voidably animated by national characteristics.

relying on columns and horizontal slabs to generate a poten-

It was soon in

a construction

principie

use all over Europe, as in the stunning seaplane hangars 49

tially infinite number of conligurations

built in 1917 by the engineers S. Schultz and K. N. Hbjgaard,

The Dom-ino House 50 - its name combines

and H. Forschammer

the words domus (house) and innovation and also evokes the

for the Danish firm Christian & Nielsen

in Reval (now Tallinn), Estonia. est conception

-> 24

Though French in its earli-

- a product of the research 01 Joseph Monier,

whose name was long attached to the material in early German

of plans and facades. references to

game of dominoes - was the most striking example 01 an arcnitecture based on the building skeleton.

-> 26

In just a few decades this material born of the research 01

literature - and claimed by France for decades, concrete sub-

chemists and engineers radically altered building practices and

sequently came to be considered

the conception

"Germanic"

by conserva-

01 civil engineering

works. It also changed the

tive critics who interpreted the "brutality" 01 certain buildings

relationship

as an expression 01Teutonic hardness. In tact, the Germans

partitions, and the exterior 01 the building, leading to a break

developed their own technologies.

with the principies of both stone or brick masonry and wood or

pany devised techniques

The Wayss & Freytag com-

based on the Monier system, placing

between the load-bearing

iron structures. Though they only partially met Viollet-Ie-Duc's

so much emphasis on methods 01 calculation that Hennebique

expectations

declared his "horror at this hodgepodge

mental constructions

of science" and his

preference for the "plain old recipes" 01 the first concrete formulas.

-> 25

The most spectacular

concrete building erected in

the German empire was Max Berg's Jahrhunderthalle

in what is

regarding the "truth" 01 the structure, the experipoured in concrete promised a new tec-

tonic expression, in the sense given that term by Gottfried Semper, who saw tectonics as "a conscious attempt by the artisan to express cosmic laws and cosmic order when molding

now Wroctaw (Centenary Hall; 1912-13),51 which for a time was

material."

the most voluminous

Kernform and Kunstform

structure in the world. With a 65-meter

(213-100t) diameter, the Jahrhunderthalle

structure, the internal

-> 27

The tectonics of concrete heralded the fusion 01 01 which Semper had dreamed.

was the lirst building

to outdo the Roman Pantheon's 43 meters (141 leet). The structure consisted of four large arches bearing thirty-two radial ribs plus additional concentric

ones. Its exterior, with rather static

stacks 01 window strips, did not hint at the spectacular, almost Piranesian space inside. The ideas of the young Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret - later to be known as Le Corbusier - had roots in both Germany and France. A lriend 01 the engineer

Max Du

052

I

053

America rediscovered, tall and wide

In Oemocracy

in America

(1835), Alexis de Tocqueville

solely concerned

char-

complex of large buildings

with classical exteriors. These

as being

inspired its nickname, the White City. The primary exception to

with "the present moment": "They quickly

the dominant classicism was the entrance to the Transportation

acterized the most ambitious men in democracies achieve many endeavors, durable monuments."

-> 1

rather than erect a few particularly For many decades this was exactly

how Europeans perceived American architecture. Less impressed

Building, 56 designed by Louis Sullivan, which displayed an imaginative

use of Turkish ornaments. Certain pavilions, such

as the Japanese

He-o-den,

aroused visitors' curiosity. Yet for

with grand public buildings like the Capitol in Washington, D.C.,

many travelers, the ultimate impression of Chicago was not that

than with the nation's bridges, factories, and skyscrapers,

of Burnham's monumental

saw the latter as expressions of a technological to the New World's economic

power.

-> 2

they

sublime linked

At the time, John and

yet ephemeral city, but the "black

city" that had arisen since the great fire of 1871. Chicago's

giant slaughterhouses,

most especially its conveyor-

Washington Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge (1867-82) was prob-

belt system, conceived for the dismembering

ably the most renowned structure in the United States. After

served as models for many subsequent factories.

the U.S. census bureau officially confirmed the closing of the

more vivid were Chicago's commercial

American frontier in 1890, a new epoch began that combined

steel frames. People referred to them interchangeably

the end of westward territorial expansion

"cloud-pressers"

thrust overseas. The development tation companies

with an imperialist

of great steel and transpor-

gave rise to projects of unprecedented

scale.

and "sky-scrapers,"

of carcasses, -> 3

But even

buildings with their as both

the latter name borrowed

from that given to the tallest sail on a ship. The Parisian novelist Paul Bourget described these structures ayear after the fair in

The architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who died in 1886, had

his book Outre-Mer: Impressions

anticipated

"simple power of necessity is to a certain degree a principie

such grand projects. He left an imaginative body

of work that brilliantly deployed Romanesque

models, as in his

beauty; and these structures

of America, noting that the .

Trinity Church in Boston (1872-7). Richardson also recycled the

that you feel a strange emotion in contemplating

tectonics of the Renaissance

first draught of a new sort of art - an art of democracy

palazzo, as in his Marshall Field

Warehouse in Chicago (1885-7, demolished

1930), with its

by the masses and for the masses." The buildings

austere stone walls.

of

so plainly manifest this necessity them. It is the made

-> 4

had begun to appear in Chicago's downtown

Loop during the 1880s in response to the fourfold effect of urban

Chicago in white and black

concentration,

the development

of the steel frame, the elevator,

and the telephone. William Le Baron Jenney built the Home The 1893 World's Columbian

Exposition 55 held in Chicago

introduced American architecture

both to a national audi-

Insurance Building (1885-6, ond Leiter Building (1889-91)

ence and to the fair's many foreign visitors. Built under the

non-bearing

authoritative

made John Wellborn

direction

of Daniel H. Burnham, with gardens

designed

by Frederick Law Olmsted, the fair centered on a

Chapter 04

I

America rediscovered,

tall and wide

demolished

1931) 52 and the sec-

using a steel skeleton and partly

facades. Efficient organization

and management

Root and Daniel H. Burnham's

archi-

tectural firm the most modern in the world, to the point that the

11 OO!J

53 Auditorium

Building,

. 1" 11 ¡m ~~

54

Dankmar Adler and Louis

Sullivan, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1886-9, section

Auditorium

Building, Dankmar Adler and Louis

Sullivan, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1886-9, interior 01 opera house

55 ~

World's Columbian

Home Insurance -ET

Exposition,

Daniel H.

Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1893

Burnham,

Building, William Le Baron

ey, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1885-6,

::=-:lOlished 1931

:: an 01 its offices was published

:3

in the European press,

-> 5

rnham and Root built the Rookery (1886-7), whose great

courtyard covered in glass was clad in marble and reminiscent

== 5-

ichardson's work; the Monadnock een stories constituted ad-bearing

Building (1889-92), whose

the culminating

wall construction;

achievement

01

the Masonic Temple (1890-2),

suspended within its metal skeleton with a hotel and offices. Its use 01 electricity was advanced, its ornamentation restrained. In 1892 Sullivan pronounced

dense yet

himsell in favor 01 a

moratorium on ornament, "in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production 01 buildings well lormed and comely in the nude." Yet this nudity was not to be total, and

:: iefly the tallest building in the world at twenty-two stories;

his "strong, athletic and simple lorms" would be hall-concealed

= d the Reliance Building (1890-4), whose terra-cotta lacades

"in a garment 01 poetic imagery."

ere, tor the first time in architectural

history, entirely sus-

aended trorn the steel skeleton rather than carrying their own ad. These structures and those by the prolilic lirm 01 William

Ruskin and Viollet-Ie-Duc,

whereas his partner Adler knew

tect Victor Ruprich-Robert's

Flore ornementale

Flora; 1876), and he conceived

888) and the Old Colony Building (1894), were largely clus-

on vegetal rnotits, according

innovation

vhere the final break with the "dry goods box style" occurred as a result 01 the need lar the best possible lighting tor the ices. The first buildings were heterogeneous,

with the street

Sullivan was a reader 01

Semper well. Sullivan was al so familiar with the French archi-

olabird and Martin Roche, such as the Tacoma Building :ered on LaSalle Street, a cradle 01 unprecedented

-> 7

(Ornamental

his system 01 decoration, based

to a metapharical

principie 01

growth. Sullivan continued to rellect on the theme 01 germination and prolileration

until the end 01 his lile.

-> 8

In an 1896 essay Sullivan proposed to examine the question 01 the tall office building "artistically

considered."

Some 01 his

"acades more elaborate than the side elevations, which were

statements would imprint themselves

upon the minds 01 his

oarely decorated. Alter Chicago promulgated

contemporaries:

law 01 all things organic

hich limited buildings

its 1892 code,

heights to 150 leet (45.7 meters),

uildings with tour identical lacades beca me the rule. In any event, the economic crisis 01 the lollowing years would stall eir lurther rise.

->

"It is the pervading

and inorganic, 01 all things physical and metaphysical, things human and all things superhuman,

01 all true maniles-

tations 01 the head, 01 the heart, 01 the soul, that the lile is recognizable

6

01 all

in its expression, that torrn lollows lunction. This

is the law." Relerring to the "tall building," he wondered

how to

Sullivan's inventions

"proclaim

trorn the dizzy height 01 this strange, weird, modern

One 01 the structures rnost admired by visitors lo Chicago

01 a higher lile?" The solution was simple: "It must be tall, every

housetop the peacelul evangel 01 sentiment, 01 beauty, the cult

in 1893 was Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's Audilorium

inch 01 it tall. The toree and power 01 altitude must be in it, the

3uilding (1886-9). 53,54 Covered in stone cladding that echoed

glory and pride 01 exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch

the arches and rusticaled walls 01 the Marshall Field Slore

a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that trorn

and embellished

wilh an almost symphonic

orchestralion

oi

decorative surlaces and details, it combined an opera house

bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." He rejected the column as a uselul model, with "the moulded [sic]

056

I

057

56

Transportation

Building, World's Columbian

Exposition,

57

Louis Sullivan,

Schlesinger

& Meyer Department

Store), Louis Sullivan, Chicago,

Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1891-3

58

Guaranty

Building,

Store (Carson, Pirie & Scott ,

IIlinois, USA, 1899-1904

Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, Buffalo,

New York, USA, 1894-6

base of the column typical of the lower stories of our build-

while employed in his office: part of the Auditorium

ing, the plain or fluted shaft suggesting the monotonous,

and the Charnley House (1892), which featured remarkably

unin-

Building

terrupted series of office-tiers, and the capital the completing

playful interior volumes. But Wright was also taken by-all things

power and luxuriance of the attic," counterposing

Japanese, particularly admiring the Pavilion of the Empire at the

the lessons of

nature to the tyranny of the existing codeso .• 9

1893 world's fair. Through his contacts with the Japan scholar

With the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis (1890-1), the

Ernest Fenollosa, he discovered the writings of Edward Morse

Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1894-6),58

and Arthur Dow ..•

and the Bayard

11

For Wright, this culture offered a lesson

Building in New York (1897-9), Sullivan put his theories to the

in architecture, particularly with respect to the clear separa-

test. Perfectly legible in their vertical stacking, his structures read

tion between the floor and the roof and the central place of

as prismatic volumes crowned with a thin cornice. The principal

the tokonoma - a niche for flower arrangements,

elements of their geometry were visible on their planar facades,

replaced in his houses by the hearth or fireplace. Japan also

which were covered in organic motifs. As autonomous

provided lessons in graphics and in landscape. This would lead

struc-

which Wright

tu res, these buildings tended to fulfill the Neo-Grec ideal of the

him from the gardens he saw on his first trip there in 1905 to the

primitive temple ..•

design of his Taliesin estate in Wisconsin in subsequent years.

10

At the turn of the century, after the depres-

sion of the 1890s interrupted the construction

of skyscrapers,

Wright established

himself in the wealthy Protestant neighbor-

Sullivan designed the Schlesinger & Meyer Department Store

hood of Oak Park, which he described as "a suburb which denies

(1899-1904,

Chicago." .• 12 There, influenced by social movements that

renamed Carson, Pirie & Scott) 57 in Chicago,

establishing a new equilibrium

between the composite build-

ing's overall volume and the modular grid of the facade, which

approached

the reform of domestic space as a way to reform

moral behavior, he built his own house (1889-98).

-> 13 59

Though

featured large rectangular bay windows. The repetitive nature

symmetrical on the outside, the house has an interior that plays

of the rectilinear windows contrasted powerfully with the flo-

on the oppositions

ral explosion of the cast-iron canopy at the building's corner. In

symbolizing

Owatonna, Minnesota, where he built the National Farmers Bank

"inglenooks," a private gathering place for the family. The house's

(1906-7), and elsewhere in the Midwest, Sullivan subsequently

collective aspect, reinforcing the importance

designed boxlike structures clad in brick, the luxuriant deco-

shared dinners, prevails over its individual spaces. Establishing

ration of which seemed to be compressed

but barely contained

between two centers: the vaulted music room,

Oak Park's communal

his studio on the premises, Wright appended a square office and an octagonal

by their geometric frames.

added complexity

Wright and prairie architecture

imagination.

His success was rapid - he

designed

two designs for his lieber Meister (beloved master) Sullivan

an article in Boston's Architectural

America rediscovered,

tall and wide

to the house

reading room (1895), which

and fluidity to the overall structure.

Frank Lloyd Wright, another great American iconoelast, drafted

I

of sociability and

His houses in Oak Park and nearby River Forest reveal Wright's extraordinary

Chapter 04

life, and the fireplace with

ninety buildings

between 1901 and 1909. In 1900, Review referred to Wright's

/

59

Frank Lloyd Wright House and Studio, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oak Park, IIlinois,

60

William H. Winslow House and Stables, Frank Lloyd Wright, River Forest,

IIlinois, USA, 1893-4

USA,1889-98

"perpetual inspiration," contrasting American

usines d'architecture,"

American architecture

it with the wark 01 the "Great the typical large tactorv-like

offices; the 'author declared that "tew

and created a system based on a logic 01 growth and variation using a square-room

architects have given us more poetic translations 01 materi-

generous

als into structure."

tal juxtaposition

-> 14

Inlluenced by relormers such as William

module.

the house and the landscape overhanging

-> 17

The continuity

between

was made more intimate by the

roots, the low ceilings, and the horizon-

01 the windows. Wright's other realized pro-

C. Gannett, whose sermon "The House Beautilul" was typeset

jects 01 this period ranged Irom vast residences

like the

and reprinted by Wright in collabaration

Susan L. Dana House (1902-4)

IlIinois; the

with his client William

61

in Springlield,

H. Winslow in 1897, the architect aimed lar his houses, in

Darwin D. Martin House (1904) in Buffalo, New York; and the

Gannetl's words, to serve the purpose 01 "dear togetherness,"

Avery Coonley House (1908) in Riverside, Illinois; to more

being "Iike a constant love-song without words, whose mean-

modest buildings

ing is 'we are glad that we are alive together.' "

houses in Oak Park (1901 and 1904) and the Isabel Roberts

upper band 01 windows and overhanging

-> 15

With its

root, Winslow's house

like the Frank Thomas and Edwin H. Cheney

House in River Farest (1908). Certain houses were located on

(1893-4) 60 in River Forest initiated Wrighl's exploration 01 hor-

spectacular

izontally extended lorms. Though its relatively orderly, even

in Racine, Wisconsin. Among all 01 these, the Martin House is

terrain, like the Hardy House (1905), built on a clitt

solemn, street-side lacade contrasts with the Ireer nature 01

remarkable

the back, the entire building

ing walls and its use 01 Iree-standing

is striated with clearly articulated

horizontal bands. The lireplace is the pivot 01the structure. Here

coherence

not only tor its almost absolute absence 01 dividsupports, but also lar the

01 its geometry, which extends Irom objects and fur-

the housewile was to preside over a real m that extended to the

niture to the rooms themselves and out into the garden. The

entire interior. In 1901 Wright devised theoretical projects like

continuity between the library, the living room, and the dining

"A Home in a Prairie Town" and "A Small House with 'Lots 01

room is maintained by interstitial spaces that are like walls 01 air.

Room in 11'" lar the Ladies Home Journa/, positioning

Wright remained unlucky with his projects lor major American

himsell

as the theorist 01 a new domestic architecture.

industrialists.

The architecture

the house he designed

he elabarated

wide plains surrounding Cause 01 Architecture,"

was made to measure lar the

Chicago. In his 1908 article "In the he wrote, "The Prairie has a beauty

01 its own, and we should recognize and accentuate

this

proposed

His lormer assistant Marion Mahony completed

Chicago

provided

him with an opportunity

spatial and technological

low proportions,

noted.

quiet skylines, suppressed overhangs,

ing walls sequestering

private gardens."

Ward Willits House in Highland

I

-> 16

Starting with the

Park (1902), Wright developed

ideas he had previously lormulated

Chapter 04

heavyset chim-

low terraces and outreach-

lor the Winslow House

America rediscovered, tall and wide

in Lake Forest (1907-9) was

turned down. Yet the Frederick C. Robie House (1906-8)

natural beauty, its quiet level. Hence, gently sloping rools, neys and sheltering

lar Henry Ford, and the project he

to Harold McCormick

-> 18

62 in

to build a kind 01

manilesto, as Reyner Banham has

The elongated house, extending along the street,

is protected lrom rain and the noonday sun by projecting eaves. In the summer it is shaded by a courtyard on the north, which serves as a cool-air tan k, while its horizontal windows help ventilate it. Inside, the passages are fl.uid between the

62 63 ~

Frederick C. Rabie Hause, Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1906-8,

drawing

made in the 1920s

Unity Temple, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oak Park, IlIinois, USA, 1905-8

Susan L. Dana House, Frank Lloyd Wright, 3:: -ngfield, Illinois, USA, 1902-4

second-floor

living room and the dining room, which are sepa-

rated by the chimney, and between the ground-floor

billiard

-30m and the children's game room. Radiators, heating tubes, z:

Sunday school interact with one another like the formal components of Wright's domestic designs. The concrete mass of the walls, into which all the ducts and pipes were integrated, recalls

d lighting devices are built into the walls. Unlike Sullivan,

the sol id envelopes of Richardson's

right had no interest in purely rational construction;

instead he

interior recaptures the warm centrality of Wright's houses.

ade ornament the starting point 01 his architectural

configura-

Wright carefully studied the path leading into the house 01 wor-

ns and adapted the structure to achieve his design goals. For sxample, the nearly 30-loot (10-meter) I-beams bearing the root - the Robie House were installed lengthwise, once other motifs e the repetitive rhythm 01 the ornamented ~een determined,

without any reservations

windows) had about this seem-

houses, while the church's

ship from the street, and in his eyes it too became a "meeting place." The articulation

of the basic structure and of the sec-

ondary elements, more complex than that in Buffalo, was part of a search for design unity that seemed to constitute a metaphor of the building's purpose ..•

20

gly illogical solution. ::AJmmissioned by Darwin Martin's brother John, the adminis-

Wright and Europe

'8. ive building 01 the Larkin soap lactory in Buffalo (1902-6, cernolished 1950) 64 extended the principies 01 Wright's Prairie

Wright's principies

-ouses to an office scheme. Despite its lortress-like

architects

ance, the building was naturally illuminated - courtyard

by a glassed-

similar to the one at the Rookery, whose lobby

right was remodeling

at the time. He later described

s rnple cliff 01 brick hermetically - nditioned'

appear-

buildings

it as "a

sealed (one of the lirst 'air-

in the country) to keep the interior space

were carried forward by a group of

led by William Drummond,

John Van Bergen,

Marion Mahony, and Walter Burley Griffin and known collectively as the Prairie School. Their form of homage or excessive imitation aroused Wright's pique. Their inspirer spent 1909 and 1910 in Europe, having Iled there with his client (and lover) Mamah Cheney. He visited Josef Hoffmann's and Joseph Maria

:: ear of the poisonous gases in the smoke Irom the New York

Olbrich's buildings, which he already knew from photographs.

8entral trains that puffed along beside it." .• 19 The result 01

He also studied architectural

:::areful analysis of the building's

in the work of Franz Metzner, who was responsible for the sculp-

intended use, Larkin com-

-ned Sullivan's organic conception s: íct orthogonal

01 architecture with a

geometry. Most significantly,

c. new type of open workplace,

it represented

with steel furniture and light-

,g designed as integral to the whole and in keeping with the uasi-familial

vision 01 the company.

oon alter this commission,

tural figures at Bruno Schmitz's Vblkerschlachtdenkmal and Joze Pleónik's Zacherlhaus. Wright developed

extension of the prin-

cipies of his houses. The square masses of the church and the

From observing

in Leipzig

Metzner

a theory of "conventionalization,"

or the trans-

formation of natural forms into abstract shapes, which he later used in his concrete construction

Wright built Unity Temple in Oak

?ark (1905-8), 63 another monumental

sculpture, taking particular interest

units, or "textile blocks."

Europe not only gave Wright an important geometry lesson in the interlocking

squares and circles of the late Secession, but

al so led him to discover pre-Columbian

America ..•

21

062

I

063

64

Larkin Company

Administration

Building, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buffalo, New York, USA, 1902-6

..,¿

Javid B. Gamble House, Charles S. Greene and Henry M. Greene, Pasadena, ia, USA, 1908

66

First Church 01 Christ Scientist, Bernard Maybeck,

Berkeley, California,

USA,191O

--"

buildings he designed upon his return to the United States, as Midway Gardens in Chicago (1914, demolished

~'e visibly

1929),

shaped by these discoveries.

with pergolas, it combines

Wright in Chicago as early as 1900, but it was in Germany

industrial steel sash lor the glass wall in a manner reminiscent

was now most recognized.

He gave a lecture in

of Viollet-Ie-Duc's

a wood and concrete structure with

theoretical projects.

in at Bruno M6hring's invitation, and he saw his reputation greatly when the Wasmuth publishing

-

A large room on a square plan that extends to the outside

right. The British architect Charles Robert Ashbee had --2.~Wright

-::a

in San Diego were also

inlormed by the Arts and Crafts, while in Berkeley, Bernard Maybeck built the First Church 01 Christ Scientist (1910). 66

=::; versely, Europeans were becoming increasingly interested -:

lirst houses that Irving Gill designed

house released a

The skyscraper migrates to New York

nograph on his buildings in 1911; this followed the release

=" a limited-edition

large-size portfolio 01 his works and pro-

scts the year belore. -

->

22 Richardson

erican architect recognized s

had long been the only

in the Old World (notably in the

height 01 new construction. unstoppable.

in Europe almost exactly as in the model

';:,~ ory built by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer lor the Cologne erkbund Exhibition 01 1914.

->

23 California, though, remained

ely unknown to Europeans, despite the signilicant

works

ing the 1870s for newspapers, ished 1955).

->

24 Beginning with the construction

(1901) had served to dis-

inate. In Pasadena, the work of the brothers Charles S. and -enry M. Greene was best exemplilied

by their house lor David

01 the Tower 1914),

the steel skeleton became the rule tor skyscrapers. The cornpletion 01 the Flatiron Building

The Craftsman

Richard Morris

Building by Bradlord Lee Gilbert (1888-9, demolished

contractor

periodical

including

was

was built dur-

Hunt's building lor the New York Tribune (1873-5, demol-

-e Arts and Cralts movement, which cabinetmaker _ckley's

Unlike

In fact, vertical competition

The lirst batch 01 skyscrapers

::~-lt there. It proved fertile ground for American lollowers 01 Gustave

skyscrapers.

Chicago, New York did not pass any regulations limiting the

took center stage in accounts by visitors to the United e reproduced

01 East Coast architects focused on

lactories, silos, and, most conspicuously,

erlands, Germany, and Finland), but Sullivan and Wright

=:a es such as Hendrik Petrus Berlage. At times their designs

-,

Alter 1900 the experiments

(1901-2) 69 - built lor Chicago

George A. Fuller by Daniel H. Burnham - was an

incontestable

milestone. A 22-story vertical extrusion 01 its tri-

angular site, the building was topped with a cornice evoking the capital 01 a column as in the ideal scheme contested by

3_ Gamble (1908),65 heir of a leading soap manulacturer - a

Sullivan. It could be the tip 01 a potentially gigantic imaginary

s -lHul composition

Haussmannian

of sol id wood elements on a masonry loun-

block. Elevators and services were grouped

-~ ion. Like Wright's houses, but designed lor a gentler climate,

in the building's core, allowing the window-lit areas 01 each

-e Gamble House is largely open to the outdoors through a

tloor to be entirely devoted to offices. Standing at the intersec-

~- ies 01 porches. The Greenes devoted the utmost care to

tion 01 Broadway and Filth Avenue, the Flatiron had such iconic

--e assembly 01 the wood Irame and walls, using visible dow-

power that the magazine Camera Work saw in it the promise

_

01 a new aesthetic, and one 01 its admirers, the photographer

hat evoked the techniques

of Japanese builders. The

066

I

067

69

Flatiron Building, Daniel H.

Burnham, New York City, USA, 1901-2, photograph

by

Alfred Slieglitz

67 Woolworth Building,

68

Cass Gilbert, New York City,

New York City, USA, 1913-15

Equitable

Building, Graham, Anderson

and Probst,

USA,1910-13

Allred Stieglitz, responded to the detractors 01 this "monster

buildings between eleven and twenty stories high, and the

ocean steamer" that "it is not hideous, but the new America.

problem 01 sunlight reaching the streets was much discussed.

The Flat lron is to the United States what the Parthenon was

In 1916 the "menace" posed by the skyscraper was remedied by

lo Greece." .• 25 Other buildings, including the New York Times

a zoning regulation that controlled the bulk 01 the tall building but

Building by Eidlitz and McKenzie (1903-5), soon lurther mined

did not restrict its height on up to 25 percent 01 the site. The new

the potential 01 rare triangular sites in Manhattan's grid.

code also established sophisticated

regulations to ensure ample

With the 47-story, 594-loot (181-meter) Singer Building (1906-8,

light by requiring terraces and setbacks 01 upper Iloors. New

demolished

York was therelore able to remain the "standing city" - as the

Company's

1968), Ernest Flagg responded explicit commission

to the Singer

to create a delinitive verti-

cal structure. It was soon lollowed by the Metropolitan

Lile

Insurance Company tower by Pierre L. Lebrun (1907-9), which was grafted to a larger block and made conscious

relerence

novelist Louis-Ferdinand

Céline put it .• 27

-

that would make

such a strong impression on visitors between the world wars. Though his 1920 book L'architecture aux États-Unis (Architecture in the United States) included reproductions

01 these buildings,

to the campanile 01 Saint Mark's in Venice. Next came the

Jacques Gréber persisted in seeing American architecture

Municipal Building by McKim, Mead and White (1909-14),

little more than a rellection 01 French "genius." His younger

which was likened to a modern Colossus of Rhodes in its

colleagues did not suffer Irom this superiority complex. On

straddling

of Chambers

the contrary, they lound the cross-Atlantic scene lascinating

Municipal

Building symbolized

administration.

Street. Built on an open U-plan, the the modernization

01 the city's

Popular Neo-Gothic themes found their place

in the next victor in the ongoing race for height, the Woolworth

as

enough to launch a new path of migration, reversing that of the Americans still coming to Paris to study at the École des BeauxArts. The departure tor Chicago 01 the Viennese architect Rudoll

Building (1910-13) 67 by Cass Gilbert. Though Frank W.

Schindler and his Prague colleague Antonin Raymond heralded

Woolworth, lounder 01 the dime-store

a radical geographic shift in the centers of architecture.

chain, had insisted that

his building be fifty leet taller than the Metropolitan ing, the structure is remarkable

Lile build-

primarily lor the relinement

01 its elevators and interior circulation and the splendor 01 an entrance hall given a Byzantine atmosphere The skyscraper's

soaring appearance

Gothic decor 01 its terra-cotta

by gilt mosaics.

and the Ilamboyant Neo-

exterior quickly led the public to

refer to it as the "cathedral 01 commerce."

.• 26

Construction of the Equitable Building (1913-15) 68 by Burnham's successors

Graham, Anderson and Probst served to crystallize

gathering lears about the unrestrained

individualism

of high-

rise structures. By 1913 Manhattan contained about a thousand

Chapter 04

I

America rediscovered,

tall and wide

The challenge of the metropolis

In 1908 architect August Endell, a major proponent

01 the

German Jugendstil torrns, published a small book entitled Die der grossen Stadt (The Beauty 01 the Metropolis).

Scnonneit

services. The resulting need to design dozens of new types of buildings, from suburban train stations to clinics and public baths, stimulated the architectural

imagination ..•

3

Though he did not turn a blind eye to urban problems such

The dizzying growth in the populations

as poverty and congestion,

the housing crisis, which was already so serious in London,

Endell discovered

a new aes-

thetic potential in the industrial landscape, transportation tems, and smoky city skies, much as the Impressionists lound inspiration in the Gare Saint-Lazare

syshad

in Paris in the 1870s.

Unlike Friedrich Nietzsche, who invited Zarathustra to "spit on

of large cities deepened

Paris, Berlin, and New York that it was becoming a threat to the social arder. 70 Urban relorms related to housing, transportation, hygiene, education, and leisure were put in place during the last decade of the nineteenth century. During this era, munici-

the great city, which is the great swill room where all the swill

palities became essential torees behind building projects that, in

spumes together,"

turn, reflected on a wide range of public policies and coopera-

Endell believed that the city "gathered in

-> 1

its streets a thousand beautilul things, innumerable marvels,

tive programs. Architects

and engineers

saw vast public com-

inlinite riches, accessible to all but seen by very lew." .• 2 Though

missions take shape. Meanwhile the nascent social sciences

he regretted the absence 01 an elusive "intellectual

lound the city to be an irresistible subject. Thewritings

beauty"

01

with which scientilic thinking might have endowed the city, he

sociologists such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel in Germany

praised the beauty created by human organization

and Maurice Halbwachs in France and the research of their

and labor.

counterparts at the University 01 Chicago laid the loundations far a new critical approach to the study 01 social relationships based

An explosion without precedent

on systematic research and veriliable tacts ..• The urban development

that translormed

much 01 the Western

warld had no precedent. It resulted in (and from) increasing

raised by physicians

industrialization,

Paris during the mid-eighteenth

mass exodus Irom the countryside,

and

emigration to the Americas and the colonies. It also disrupted feudal institutions and encouraged

the emergence

01 new

4

Problems of hygiene were of primary significance.

place in philanthropic epidemics

and scientists carrying

An issue first

out studies in

century, hygiene took a central

activities lollowing devastating cholera

a century later. The paradigm 01 the healthy city was

forms of national citizenship. Vast territories were newly urban-

applied not only to strategies related to urban design, but also

ized, and existing cities became denser, pushing municipal

to the design 01 individual structures. It would dominate architec-

outward. The process 01 Eingemeindung

boundaries

(munici-

tural thought until almost the last third 01 the twentieth century ..• 5

pal integration) that ariginated in German urban areas became

Concern for hygiene - initially focused on improving the

an international phenomenon with the creation in 1889 of the

circulation

London County Council, the first metropolitan

materials that would not deteriorate and facades that could be

authority in warld

01 air, then on sunlight, and finally on construction all 01 the thinking behind housing and

histary, and in 1898 of Greater New York. As cities expanded,

washed - transformed

they were equipped

public buildings. The low-cost Paris apartments

Chapter 05

I

with communication

The challenge

of the metropolis

networks and public

designed

by

'~

v.•••••••J--Io:J"-

...L_ •. K....-li.

n.1'taot_~ n•. __ -}o_

71

Street layout, from Town-Planning

Raymond

1\'."-

in Practice,

Unwin, 1909

72

YlL

__

I&"'- __

•••.•••.• ,....

I

._•. a..,..Do •••~ "-114001_".

•. r•.••••• ,..-.

Streets in Bruges, from City Planning According

lo Artistic 73 ~

Principies,

"Hygienic"

Camilla SitIe, 1889

set-back

housing, Henri Sauvage

and Charles Sarrasin, Paris, France, 1912

70

Compared

St8dtebau

growth of big cities c. 1910, from Der

(Town Planning), Werner Hegemann,

Henri Sauvage and Charles Sarrasin

1910

73

represent one exarn-

In just a lew years, urban planning became a world rnove-

pie; they were advertised as "hygienic," even "athletic," thanks

ment. The year 1910 witnessed the nearly simultaneous

to their plans as well as to the white tiling 01 their lacades and

Town-Planning

the provision 01 recreational areas lar their users ...• 6 Elsewhere,

Stadtebau-Ausstellung

the concern to provide middle- and lower-class

Berlin, during which large cities had an opportunity

housing with

adequate ventilation and access to sunlight led to the expan-

Conlerence

in London and the AlIgemeine

(General Urban-Planning

pare their plans 01 action ...• 9 The challenge

Exhibition) in

pate growth and to regulate it not only by understanding

sion and opening up 01 building courtyards.

estate and technical systems but also by imagining architecture

The planners' toolbox used by architects, planners, and policy

makers to calibrate the extension and modernization were translormed

01 cities

by inputs Irom the natural and social sciences.

something

resembling

a collective,

technicians

through lield trips, conlerences,

Periodicals such as Oer Stédiebeu and The Town-Planning

began appearing, joining the handbooks

and advanced the emerging notion 01 "collective"

needs. As a

result, the discipline known in its parallel versions as Stadtebau in Germany, town planning in Great Britain, and urbanisme

71

edited by Josel

as the basis 01 a library lor

prolession ...• 10

in

France took on new importance ...• 7 The old method 01 creating roads and subdividing

and exhibitions.

Review (Iounded in London in 1909)

Stübben and Raymond Unwin an emergent international

and

(Iounded in Berlin in 1904)

Pressure Irom unions and political movements intensilied the housing

barderless

think tan k, bringing together policy makers, intellectuals,

demands lar a more democratic

process 01 providing

real

the luture

01 large cities. Global networks 01 communica-

tion lacilitated The very instruments

to com-

now was to antici-

Town, square, and monument

the land into lots without dilferentiating

their use or their density was replaced by a complex approach

Yet the seeming unanimity 01 relormers and technicians

to regulation and planning based on statistical data and public

shattered the moment it came to putting a specilic lace on the

supervision 01 specialized stages 01 conception and construc-

cities of the luture. Should the modern metropolis be designed

tion. Planning became future oriented and prescriptive.

by reinterpreting the picturesque

The notion 01 the urban plan became lundamental,

expanding on the classical principies of monumentality,

ing the hopes of professionals

symboliz-

lar the rational modernization

was

beauty 01 historical sites; by as rep-

resented by the Beaux-Arts obsession with axiality, hierarchy,

and extension of cities. In the early twentieth century, expan-

and historicism; ar by avoiding all nostalgia and designing

sion and beautilication

new Iramework far the future inspired by a modern mechanized

plans that had evolved over decades

were replaced by regulations based on new, "scientific"

meth-

and rationalized economy? The first position was fueled by the

odologies, including measures to divide cities into zones - the

theories proposed

term zone in both French and German was derived Irom military

Sitte in his book Oer Steoiebeu nach seinen künstlerischen

usage - and the elaboration

Grundsétzer.

01 building regulations ...• 8

a

in 1889 by the Viennese architect Camillo

(City Planning according to Artistic Principies),

070

72

I

071

74

Plan 01 Chicago,

Daniel H. Burnham

and Edward H. Bennett, Chicago,

75

World City, project, Ernest Hébrard, 1912

76

Future New York, Harvey Wiley Corbett, 1913

lllinois,

USA,1909

which attracted a growing number 01 lollowers. Focusing on

the Progressive Era.

->

13

As one 01 its most active agents,

the city in its "Sunday best" - that is, on the city center -

Burnham provided the movement with emblematic

Sitte advocated studying the streets and squares of medieval

such as the Natianal Mall in Washington,

and Renaissance

renovated on the basis of his 1902 plan, and his plan lar San

tawns as a basis for turning modern urban

into "total warks 01 art" on the model of the

campositions

Wagnerian opera he admired.

-> 11

An immediate

images

D.C., which was

Francisco, which remained unrealized after the 1906 earth-

bestseller,

Sitte's book remained the bible of urban planners for decades,

quake despite, or perhaps because 01, its arnbitious scope. Even though the 1909 plan far Chicago 74 that he and Edward

although they often reduced it to caricatural formulas based

H. Bennett prepared at the request al local business associa-

an imitatian al medieval cities. No less successful,

tians was only partially implemented,

Monument

Platz und

(City Square and Manument), published

historian Albert Erich Brinckmann

by the art

in 1908, reserved its praise

tor the Baroque and classical squares 01 Rome and Paris. The principies

put forward far transforming

Vienna were applied throughout

-> 12

Berlin, Paris, and

the rest of Europe as new

it remained ane al the

most resonant images al the era. Its visian was divided into lunctional zones, crisscrossed interconnected

al a large

with new streets and

railways, refreshed by a system of parks linking

it with the lake and surrounding crowned with a monumental

prairies, and, most especially,

city center that would have made it

nation-states like Italy and Romania were established. They also

into a "Paris on Lake Michigan."

found application

also adopted tor certain projects with more humanistic

in independent

Latin American countries,

city

-> 14

Burnham's vocabulary

was

inten-

including Brazil and Argentina; in Meiji Japan; in late Ottoman

tions, such as the Cité Mondiale (World City)

Turkey as it underwent modernization;

1912 by the French architect Ernest Hébrard for the Norwegian

territories. Unlike the picturesque,

and linally in' colonial

contrasting

lorms to which

sculptor and philanthropist

75

designed in

Hendrik Christian Andersen.

->

15

Sitte was attracted, the massive schemes at the heart of these

During this same briel but fertile period extending fram 1890

cities leatured long axes and perspectives

to World War 1, engineers, architects, landscape designers, and

cannecting

vast

esplanades dominated by colon nades and domes. Such "artis-

social relormers who were committed to solving the problems

tic" principies applied the Beaux-Arts model at the expanded

01 the big city put lorward a third set 01 principies that avoided

scale 01 the grand urban structure. Daniel H. Burnham had

both backward-Iooking

used these principies

rapid spread 01 the automobile

in Chicago in 1893 to layout his "White

City," which was imitated at the International Exposition 01 1900 in Paris and elsewhere. The classicizing

imitation and grandiose

rhetoric. The

and the development

01 met-

ropolitan railroads spurred a vis ion of the city as a gigantic machine lar traffic. The architect Euqene Hénard's "Street al the

phantasmagoria

of Chicago and other warld's

Future,'

77

presented at the London Town-Planning

Conlerence

01 Europe's historical

in 1910, elabarated

the ideas he had outlined in his Études sur

cities provided the model far countless projects by American

les transformations

de Paris (Studies on the Translormations 01

fairs and the grand urban compasitions

urban planners, wha were committed to making the metrop-

Paris; 1903), in which he proposed to set buildings back from the

olis a "city beautiful," giving spatial lorm to the ideals of

street through a system 01 redents (alternating indents). Hénard's

Chapter 05

I

The challenge

01 the metropolis

F(0E

FUTUI1E.

C'I11'· .•ur C/J l.'

78 Vienna as an unlimited metropolis, from Die GroBstadt, eine Studie über diese (The Development 01 a Great City), Otto Wagner, 1911

77

Street 01 the Future, Eugéne Hénard, 1910

future street was entirely determined

by traffic - whether auto-

Law Olmsted in Boston and other American

cities-

found European advocates

uments surrounded

Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier and the German architect Fritz

by roads. The streets had multiple levels,

Schumacher,

allowing for the stacking of mass transit, automobiles, and pedestrians ..•

16

In 1913 Hénard's New York counterpart

Harvey

in the French landscape

which

mobile or airplane - and amounted to a series of great mon-

designer

creator of Hamburg's Stadtpark - were deemed

insufficient sources of fresh air. The Spanish engineer Arturo

Wiley Corbett took the fantasy a step further and imagined the

Soria y Mata's project of 1894 for a ciudad lineal (linear city) 79

streets of a future New York

suggested an alternative pattern for the growth of Madrid. The

76

as a network of dizzying can-

yons lined with fast lanes and suspended tating subways connecting Widely reproduced

sidewalks, with levi-

to skyscrapers

at the fortieth floor.

in popular newspapers, these images soon

new suburbs were to extend longitudinally

along either side of

a streetcar making a loop around the city, Only a segment was built, but Soria expanded the concept to the regional scale

fascinated the Italian Futurists.

with a scheme of continuous

Not every city-planning

The German architect Theodor Fritsch and the British social

proposal was so enthusiastic for the

mechanical. Otto Wagner accepted the fact that the modern metropolis was no longer defined by its principal monuments

scale decentralization.

tile to the city, encompassing

Jean-Jacques

not be confused with the traffic systems serving it. In Moderne

of the theories of the Americans

he wrote that a city where anonymity was the rule

onous repetition. Speculating

of cells" governed by monot-

on Vienna's future, he proposed

in 1911 a new GroBstadt (metropolis) 780f potentially unlimited

Bellamy. He didactically

for broad-

Rousseau and

Thomas Jefferson, .• 20 Howard had developed

would become a "conglomerate

his ideas out

Henry George and Edward

expressed his opposition to both the

malevolent "magnet" of the big city and the debilitating of the countryside

19

The latest in a long line of writers hos-

cable to the cities of antiquity. But he argued that the city must Architektur,

cities ..•

reformer Ebenezer Howard reacted with proposals

or by the visual rules of the picturesque

that had been appli-

ribbons connecting

one

in a triangular diagram, touting instead the

atlraction of the "garden city." 80 This last would combine the

growth, meant to spread out like a spider's web. Composed of

advantages of the two other alternatives to become, in his view,

homologous

the type of habitat most likely to appeal to people. In his 1898

neighborhoods

in compact orthogonal

was to be arranged in a checkerboard

blocks, it

pattern around evenly

distributed public spaces and services ..•

17

book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, he described the broad outlines of a program intended to replace the creeping metropolis with a cluster of garden cities linked to the city

The idyll of the garden city

center by railroad, each with a population whose size would be strictly limited ..•

21

Meant to be funded by philanthropic

The "tentacular cities" that the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren

capitalists or cooperatives,

described

experiments

in apocalyptic

verses in 1895 seemed to many

the garden city drew on American

such as Olmsted's Garden Suburb in Riverside,

reformers to be places of perdition from which nothing good

near Chicago, where Howard had lived. His clever oxymo-

could come ..•

ron "garden city" - which for several decades

Chapter 05

I

18

Even the park systems designed by Frederick

The challenge 01 the metropolis

had been one

I!H[PEO~\.~ WIUU

WU.1.1Htf

GO?

T9 . Linear City, Arturo Soria y Mata, 1894

81

Hampstead

Garden Suburb, Raymond

London, United Kingdom,

82 ~

Unwin,

1905-7

Page from Une Cité Industrielle,

Tony Garnier,

France, 1917

80

The Three Magnets, from To-Morrow:

A Peaceful

Path to Real Reform, Ebenezer Howard, 1902

of Chicago's

nicknames

vanized associations,

- quickly became a slogan that gal-

municipalities,

cooperatives,

reformers,

and al so real-estate speculators

around the world. Following

the founding

Association

01 the Garden-City

in Great Britain

in 1901, similar organizations devoted to promoting such exper-

architect Tony Garnier, designs 01 which were published 1917. ->

24

An autonomous

entity in opposition

it was secular and progressive,

in

to the big city,

a more modern version of a

1901 sketch Garnier had based on a plan described

in Émile

Zola's novel Travail (Work).

imental ventures cropped up in Germany and France and reached all the way to Russia. Articles on the subject were published

as far away as Japan.

-> 22

Zoning for the colonies and for Europe's metropoles

The garden city quickly became more than a slogan. Expanding on the principies developed by Camillo Sitte, Raymond Unwin

The reform of existing cities was another goal. Alongside

gave it canonical form with his designs for the first English

attempts to improve the appearance

garden-city, which was sponsored

ing more visually harmonious

by Howard himself, built in

Letchworth I;leginning in 1903; and for Hampstead Suburb (1905-7),81

a private commission

Garden

in London for Dame

Henrietta Barnett. These refined urban compositions

were

of city centers by creat-

streets, such as the Boulevard

Raspail in Paris and the southern extension of Seventh Avenue in New York, programs were implemented

based on Unwin's observations of English and Norman villages.

launched in London at the municipality's

Soon after, Richard Riemerschmid

lollowed. In Paris "insalubrious

conceived

and Heinrich Tessenow

the garden city of Hellerau around the Deutsche

to replace slums with

hygienic housing. The first attempts at urban renovation were initiative. Berlin soon

blocks" were earmarked

and included in the Extension Commission

in 1913

Report written that

Werkstatten factory near Dresden (1909-12). Meanwhile, ground

year by the architect Louis Bonnier and the historian Marcel

was broken on the largest garden city in Europe, Wekerle in

Poete.

Budapest (1909-26). In Russia, Vladimir Semyonov adopted the

advocated

British experiments

was influenced by sociology and turned to a career as an urban

in his design for the city 01 Prozorovskoe

(1913), while Georges Benoit-Lévy drummed

up interest in the

-> 25

To a certain extent the "conservative

surgery"

by Patrick Geddes, a visionary Scottish biologist who

planner, was somewhat similar to these projects in its carelul

movement in France. None of these projects fully met Howard's

atlention to social transformations

requirements; they contributed

in most cases to the spread of

ships between "place, work, and folk," illustrated in his diagram

in the city and to the relation-

nostalgic regionalist forms and responded to different political

01the "Valley Section." 83 Geddes differentiated between what

agendas, ranging from the paternalistic to the Social Democratic.

he saw as the "Utopía" of the garden cities and a "Eutopia" that

By imitating the space of the village, they counterposed

could result from patient modification 01 existing cities.

reassuring context 01 the small community

the

to the threats posed

->

26

Geddes tried but failed to apply his ideas in lndia, at a time

by modern society, following the arguments made by the German

when the colonized territories were becoming

sociologist

planners to experiment. In 1914 the European empires were

Ferdinand Tbnnies in 1887.

to this rule was the Cité Industrielle

-> 23

A rare exception

project 82 of the Lyons

places for urban

at the height 01 their power, and the dominant nations set about

076

I

077

83

The "Valley Section,'

Patrick Geddes,

1915

84

Extension

plan for Berlin competition

85

project,

Bruno Móhring, Rudolf Eberstadt and Richard

Plan far Rabat, Henri Prost, Rabat,

Morocco,

1914

Petersen, 1910

creating new capitals. These were sometimes

a new architecture could appear. Echoing Max Weber's socio-

situated near

historical urban areas, as was the case with Edwin Lutyens

logical analysis 01 bureaucracy,

and Herbert Baker's New Delhi, which began to be planned in

increasing degree 01 organization

he linked the metropolis to the in society, with the clearest

1912 lollowing Baker's design 01the Union buildings in the South

example being the American skyscraper stacking up thousands

Alrican capital 01 Pretoria (1909-13). It evolved into a scheme

01 clerical workers ..•

combining

and New York were now points 01 relerence as pertinent as

major roads and a hexagonal plan that culminated

in Luytens's Viceroy's Palace ..•

27 86

In Rabat, the political capi-

29

For German urban planners, Chicago

London and Paris had been tor previous generations. Site 01 the

tal 01 the French protectorate in Morocco, the Beaux-Arts grad-

mass production

uate Henri Prost designed an administrative

centration 01 service jobs and services, the metropolis was more

applied the characteristics

neighborhood

01 the garden city.

85

that

Other capitals

01 manulactured

goods but also 01 the con-

than a technical challenge tor urban planners. As Endell had

were erected on new sites, such as Australia's Canberra. The

already sensed, the urban landscape,

1911 international competition

ized by the arrival 01 the automobile, was also becoming the

to build Canberra resulted in the

selection 01 the American Walter Burley Griffin over the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen and the French planner Donat-Allred Agache. In Griffin's winning scheme, 87 the city encroached the. surrounding

on

areas, making repeated use 01 elements bor-

rowed Irom the Prairie Houses that Griffin had drafted as an employee in Frank Lloyd Wright's office ..• Following the competition

28

lor the expansion 01 Barcelona - won

in 1905 by the French architect Léon Jaussely, one 01 the lirst advocates 01 zoning - the 1910 competition

lor Greater Berlin

yielded what were probably the most complex strategies 01 the day. The submitted proposals spanned the entire gamut 01 ideas then being discussed on both sides 01 the Atlantic. Grandiose monumental avenues, giant train stations, and garden cities were the basic building blocks advanced by Ihe competitors. proposals were truly revolutionary: grated the surrounding 01 vegetation

Some

Bruno Mbhring's tea m inte-

region with the city through great cones

reaching into the city center,

later met with considerable

84

an approach that

success. In 1912 the Berlin critic

Karl Scheffler, asking what "the architeclure

01 the metropolis"

should be, determined that it was only in the very large city Ihat

Chapter

05

I

The challenge of the metropolis

having been revolution-

milieu and the raw material ter the avant-gardes

01 modernismo

,

COMMOI'\WEALTH cr AVSTRALlA FEDERAL CAPITAL CO!\PETITIOti

4

Behrens's success as the AEG's lead architect projects lor other industrialists

braught him

and lor the state, in which

he explored the archetype 01 the Renaissance

palace. In

of the products

manufactured

within them.

The owner 01 the Fagus Factory, Carl Benscheid, Gropius photographs

had-shown

01 another industrial world, North

America, and in a 1913 essay, "The Development Industrial Architecture,"

lacturing firm Mannesmann

sented the grain silos and factories built in the "motherland

(1911-12), an ally of AEG, basing

he entire complex, with its repetitive, apparently modular lacade

92 Gropius enthusiastically

01 Modern

Düsseldorf he built the administrative affices 01the steel rnanu-

industry." In his eyes, "The compelling

pre-

monumentality

01

01 the

bays, on the basic unit 01the office. With its metal structure cov-

Canadian and South American grain silos, the coal silos built

ered in stone, the building rellected Behrens's interest in Jacob

for the large railway companies,

Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860),

shops of the North American lirms almost bear comparison

and the totally modern work-

082

I

083

-

~yus

Factory, Walter Gropius

-~olf Meyer, Alfeld an der Leine,

DACO"rA EUWATOR

=-=---cllY,1911-13

OETii.ElOES'l.O BUNonyDORN

92

Page from "The Development

Architecture"

in the Deutscher

01 Modern Industrial

Werkbund

annual,

Walter Gropius, 1913

~;¡

the buildings of ancient Egypt. Their individuality

is so

The Deutscher Werkbund

r rnistakable that the meaning of the structure becomes over~elmingly clear to the passer-by." --ough

Other connections

-> 6

Gropius and his successors knew little of the techniques

existing within institutional

alleled personal relationships

networks par-

between architects and indus-

.3ad to operate silos, structures deeply rooted in the American

trial figures. Early twentieth-century

German art reformers

=.;;ricultural economy, they grasped the aesthetic qualities

seeking an aesthetic translormation

of daily lile longed for

-= those concrete cylinders

a mutually beneficial alliance with industry. To this end,

and boxes. The automobile facto-

es of Detroit also captivated Gropius. There is no doubt that -8 studied them while preparing

~n

his project tor Fagus. Albert

had erected a large concrete frame building in Highland

=>ark ter the Ford Motor Company, achieving the ideal of the oaylight lactory."

->

7

More than the skyscraper, which was

they lounded the Verband des deutschen (Association

Kunstgewerbes

01 German Arts and Crafts), presided over by

Hermann Muthesius. The movement's journal Oer Kunstwart what nationalistic

central organ was the

(The Guardian of Art), which was some-

in its orientation.

-> 9

The success of the

sñll beyond the reach 01 German designers, these lactories

1906 Kunstgewerbeausstellung

seemed to open the way to an architecture 01 pure economic

Dresden led to the creation in MiJnich the lollowing

(Arts and Crafts Exhibition)

aiionality. Not all German architects were ready to embrace

Deutscher Werkbund

.nern, though. Paul Bonatz, a student of Theodor Fischer's stu-

industrialists,

:Jio in Munich, chose to evoke a Roman basilica in his Stuttgart

the positions within this organization

'1ailway Station (1912-30), 94 a reinlorced-concrete

the architect Fritz Schumacher,

building

lad in stone, implicitly asserting that modern networks like railroads demanded

a monumentality

that went beyond a rather

objective

the alienation

Irequently

then a prolessor

prominent Berlin architect Hans Poelzig adopted a sig-

01

conllicted, in Dresden,

in his inaugural speech as

between the executive and the

inventive spirit, in order to bridge the existing divide."

=etishistic reliance on steel and glass.

me

(German Work Union), a lederation

state officials, architects, artists, and critics. While

delined the Werkbund's "overcoming

in

year 01 the

-> 10

Unlike their British predecessors in the Arts and Crafts movement;

01 the Kunstgewerbe

nificantly different approach to building lorm and design dur-

with whom the supporters

ing the same periodo His Chemical Factory (1911-12) 95 in Luban

lounders 01 the Werkbund were not opposed to the leading

identilied, the

(Luborí), near Poznan in Silesia, evoked the brick attics 01 build-

capitalist lirms 01 the day. Instead, they tried to ligure out a way

ings in Hanseatic cities like Bremen and Hamburg in the north 01

to cooperate with industry so as to achieve the desired reform

Germany as well as medieval lortilications and Roman aqueducts.

01 material culture. The inspiration tor the organization came

Far removed from Behrens's rhetoric 01 transparency in struc-

primarily lrom Muthesius, who had become a professor of archi-

~res like the Turbine Factory, these buildings Ilaunted their

tecture at the Handelshochschule

(Higher Trade School) in

physical mass while their richly patterned brick surfaces revealed . Berlin, and Irom the relormer Friedrich Naumann, an advocate to the attentive observer the difference between the supporting and supported

parts 01 the masonry.

->

8

01 Christian Socialism and a deputy in the Reichstag. In 1908 Naumann outlined a theory advocating

quality production

084

as

I

085

VER.AC·CUS'fAV ••AMMERS·MiiHCHEH

L. 93

.&

I1'1I1OPIRQ1oION

Ingenieur-aesthetik

(Engineering

94

Railway Station, Paul Bonatz, Stuttgart, Germany, 1912-30

95

Chemical

Aesthetics), Joseph August Lux, 1910 Factory, Hans Poelzig, Luban (Luborí), Germany

well as durability and premised on class collabaration:

"The

(Poland), 1911-12

"taste." .• 14 They portrayed French culture as a holdover Irom an

social needs of the working class can be united with the need

outdated Zivilisation that stood in opposition to the progressive

lar art 01 the progressive

Kultur 01 industry. This distinction operated on many levels.

part 01 the population

by replacing a

theary based on attrition with one based on durability."

->

11

The

-> 15

The extent 01 the Werkbund's success may be gauged by its

same year Naumann drew up most of the Werkbund statutes.

1914 exhibition in Cologne. The decision to hold the exhibition

The organization

in a city so close to France was indicative 01 the association's

grew quickly. By the time it moved its head-

quarters to Berlin in 1912, it had nearly a thousand members,

increasingly

nationalistic stance. At this point the Werkbund had

among them a growing number of businesses. Its activi-

1,870 members and a constantly growing number 01 industrial

ties expanded lurther with the spread of local groups (torty-

sponsors. Yet the exhibition buildings hardly conveyed a sense

five by 1914), the publication conferences,

01 its Jahrbücher

(yearbooks),

and exhibitions. The Werkbund worked indi-

01 unanimity . .., 16 Van de Velde pursued his ideal 01 linear lorm with a theater whose principal innovation was a tripartite stage.

rectly through the Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel

Gropius and Meyer's administration

und Gewerbe (German Museum for Art in Trade and Industry),

experiments they had initiated in Alfeld, with exterior staircases

lounded

housed in glass cylinders. Their building was also reminiscent

in Hagen by Karl Ernst Osthaus, another of its princi-

building continued the

pal leaders, who organized many traveling exhibitions. At the

in many ways of the City National Bank and Hotel built by Frank

instigation of the Werkbund and in imitation of the AEG model,

Lloyd Wright in Mason City, lowa (1909), particularly

companies

metrical composition

recruited architects to design their office buildings

and manufacturing

facilities. The Norddeutsche

Lloyd hired Paul

and overhanging

in its sym-

roof.

In July 1914 the Werkbund organized a conference to coincide

Ludwig Troost and Bruno Paul, who designed tour ships, while

with the exhibition. It was marked by a heated conlrontation

the Hamburg-Amerika-Line

over the notion 01 Typisierung - the creation of type, or

Though the Werkbund's

worked with Muthesius . ..,12 primary goals were to raise the "artis-

tic" level of German industrial production consumer taste, the organization

also devoted itself to promot-

ing a form of aesthetic expression and civil engineering (engineering

and to modernize

unique to technical objects

structures. This ingenieur-aesthetik

aesthetics), opposed to both classicism and Art

standardized

objects. Muthesius believed that standardization

was inevitable: "More than any other art, architecture strives toward the typical. Only in this can it find fullillment. Only in the all-embracing

and continuous

pursuit of this aim can it regain

that effectiveness and undoubted assurance that we admire in the works of past times that marched along the road of

Nouveau, provided the title lar a 1910 book by Joseph August

homogeneity."

Lux,

opposed to the notion of Typisierung, just as he was hostile

-> 13 93

who described the aesthetic effects 01 machines in

->

17

Van de Velde, on the other hand, was strictly

a discourse similar to that of Paul Souriau in France. While try-

to any Kulturpolitik

ing to dispel the German inferiority complex with respect to

cal stance given that he was in the employ 01 the Grand Duke

British industrial production,

of Saxony - and he was supported

Lux and his acolytes also sought to

combat German anxieties regarding the domination

Chapter 06

I

New production,

new aesthetic

of French

(cultural policy) - a somewhat paradoxi-

and by the individualistic

in his argument by Gropius

positions of August Endell and

96

Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund

Exposition,

Bruno Taut, Cologne, Germany,

97

Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund

Exposition,

1914, exterior

1914, interior

Hermann Obrist. The conllict revealed an inherent contradiction

architecture

within the Werkbund between the upholders 01 Kunstgewerbe,

both relorm and redemption.

Bruno Taut, Cologne, Germany,

open to daydreams, with glass as an instrument 01

or the applied arts, and those who wished to place design in the service 01 production, a concept at the heart 01 industrial designo

Futurist mechanization

The most original building at the Cologne exhibition was by Bruno Taut, one 01 the young Werkbund Muthesius. A prismatic polyhedral his Glass Pavilion

rebels hostile to

dome on a circular base,

aimed to demonstrate

96,97

ties 01 glass by incorporating

The Italian Futurists based their efforts to lound a new artistic

all the possibili-

this material in the lorm 01 win-

dows, glass bricks, and polychrome

glass mosaics ..•

Irieze running around the building's lourteen-Iacet was inscribed with slogans such as "Happiness

18

A

discourse

and a new architectural

tance himsell lrom the Jugendstil

01 a Behrensstil

perimeter

style on the sensations

- even il critics still spoke

(Behrens style) - and Perret trorn the Art

Nouveau, so the artists gathered around the poet and provo-

without glass,

cateur Filippo Tommaso Marinetti revolted against the Stile

how crass!"; "Colo red glass destroys hatred"; "Glass opens

Liberty, the Italian version 01 Art Nouveau (also known as

up a new age"; and "Brick building only does harm." Their

Floreale). This literary and artistic uprising was a response

author was the poet and novelist Paul Scheerbart, whom Taut

to the translormations

provoked

had belriended

growth 01 metropoles

such as Milan and Turin. Marinetti's

in 1913 ..•

entitled G/asarchitektur lar ideas, enumerating promising

19

In an aphorism-lilled

(1914), Scheerbart

publication

expressed simi-

"Manilesto

potential types 01 glass buildings while

a new world based on colored-glass

pro-

duced by motion and speed. Just as Behrens came to dis-

sensations and

by industrialization

and the

01 Futurism" appeared in the Paris daily Le Figaro

in 1909. Declaring war on historical cities, Marinetti wrote: "We will sing 01 the multicolored

and polyphonic

tides 01 revolution

declaring that glass had the potential to be the salvation 01

in the modern capitals; we will sing 01 the vibrant nightly fervor

society and individuals.

01 arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons;

In his novel Das graue Tuch (The Gray Cloth), published

the

greedy stations that devour smoke-plumed

serpents; lactories

same year, Scheerbart related the exploits 01 a demiurge archi-

hung on clouds by the crooked

tect Ilying over the world in an airship, building observatories

that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, Ilashing in the sun

on glaciers and glass sanatoriums

with a glitter 01 knives." .• 21

nature 01 the relationship

on lakeshores ..•

20

The

between architects and glass, which

lines 01 their smoke; bridges

In 1910 the painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni

began

01 urban events,

in the nineteenth century had centered on train stations and

expressing

exhibition halts, and more recently on model lactories like the

exalting the movement 01 crowds ano the agitation 01 the

Fagus, now shifted. By celebrating the utopian possibilities glass, Scheerbart and Taut emphasized ised by an architecture

the experiences

01

prom-

no longer obsessed with structure and

tectonics

or with its place in stone cities. They heralded an

Chapter 06

I

New production,

new aesthetic

in his paintings the simultaneity

streets. In his unpublished

"Architettura futurista, manifesto"

(1914), he evoked the possibility sionism," an architecture

01 an "architectural

impres-

01 pure necessity, in which "the

spaces 01 an edilice would provide the maximum

performance,

99

The New City, project, Antonio Sant'Elia, 1914

e a motor." He announced sm lile will necessarily

that the "dynamic

needs 01 mod-

give rise to an evolving architecture"

- ey have encountered, e expression."

their architecture

by mechanics

in the construction

in August 1914, Sant'Elia

made 01 "cement, glass, and iron, without painting and without sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty 01 its lines and reliels."

the more they have gained in artis-

lorrned as those employed

he published

and railroad

Regrettably, in his view, "Processes

letely neglected

In the manilesto

described the Futurist house as "similar to a gigantic machine"

to the needs

:: d noted that "the more ships, automobiles, s.ations have subordinated

Electric Power Plant, project, Antonio Sant'Elia, 1914

as deeply

have been com-

01 housing, roads, etc."

He called tor a radical alteration 01 the organization

01 build-

ings: "Elevators must not be hidden in stair corners like solitary worms; rather, having become useless, staircases must be abolished, and elevators must climb like iron and glass snakes

"he elevator, lollowed by the airplane, allowed lor the con-

along the Ironts 01 buildings."

quest 01 the vertical dimension:

in watercolor drawings tor La Citte Nuova (The New City), 98

crease the architectural

"The luture will progressively

possibilities

with regard to height

and depth. Thus lile will slice through the age-old e 01 the terrestrial surface, the inlinite verticality

would long remain unknown.

01 the eleva-

nying his manilesto,

:or ... and the spirals 01 the airplane and the dirigible."

-> 22

orcphetic

rellections



2

The growing number 01 loreign

students enrolling at the Beaux-Arts beginning in the last third al

a neighborhood

the nineteenth century, the international activities al major French

Gare d'Orsay in Paris, built on an identical principie, was the

took shape on top 01 these sunken spaces. The

academics and prolessionals, and the emigration 01 Beaux-Arts

work al Victor Laloux, the Beaux-Arts prolessor who, not coinci-

instructors also helped propagate the school's curriculum.

dentally, was the mentor to most 01 the school's American stu-

The ongoing success 01 the Beaux-Arts method was due largely

dents. Another monumental New York train station was designec

to its ability to integrate the lunctional requirements 01 moderni-

by the lirm 01 Charles F. McKim, William R. Mead, and Stanlord

zation. The analytical approach taught in Julien-Azais Guadet's

White: Pennsylvania Station (1905-10, demolished

Éléments et théorie de I'architecture

leatured a waiting room inspired by Rome's Baths 01 Caracalla

(Elements and Theory 01

1964), which

Architecture; 1905), the school's principal design treatise, pre-

and remarkable tor its powerlul exposed steel structure.

pared students to evaluate new types 01 buildings that were more

McKim and White had previously worked with Henry Hobson

complex and less grandiloquent than the great palaces studied in

Richardson. In tact, their lirst significant commission

pursuit 01 the Grand Prix de Rome,

the Boston Public Library (1885-95), which stood across the

100

with which the Beaux-Arts

curriculum has toa often been associated. ments applied to nineteenth-century

->

3 The historicist ele-

buildings slowly disappeared,

had been

street frorn their mentor's Trinity Church. Between 1870 and 1919 their lirm constructed

nearly a thousand

buildings. They

while the principies 01 symmetry and hierarchy were adjusted to

explored the principie 01 the Italian Renaissance

new lunctional and symbolic requirements - sometimes with a

a variety 01 New York buildings, including the University Club

great deal 01 imagination - until the late 1940s.

(1900), a grandiose

Chapter 07

I

In search of a language: from classicism lo Cubism

palazzo in

pile on Fifth Avenue, and the more delicate

Grand Prix de Rome project at the École des Beaux-Arts,

Charles Lemaresquier,

Paris, France, 1900

102

Heathcote,

Edwin Lutyens, Ikley, United Kingdom,

1906

103

Page from Um 1800 (Around 1800),

Paul Mebes, 1908

Morgan Library (1906). On an urban scale, they designed the

with Paul Wallot on the Reichstag in Berlin, invented new forms

campus of Columbia University in upper Manhattan, an axial

by using concrete in buildings such as the Garrison Church in

composition

Ulm (1905-10).

(1895-7).

dominated

101

by the dome of Low Memorial Library

Following in the footsteps of several hundred

107

Fischer taught Camillo Sitte's picturesque

urban precepts along with his own reflections on new build-

other architects, John M. Carrete and Thomas Hastings did their

ing types, first in Stuttgart and later in Munich. Some archi-

professional apprenticeship

tects diverged from the prevailing fixation on antiquity and,

having previously extravagant

in McKim, Mead and White's office,

studied in Paris. They went on to design

hotels and homes from Florida to the New York

metropolitan

area, as well as the New York Public Library

(1897-1911), an example of civic magnificence

in the service

even more often, the Renaissance,

idealizing instead other

moments in the history of architecture. was Um 1800 (Around 1800)

103

Mebes . ..,5 In this popular collection

A classical

eighteenth-century

Beginning

was al so underway in England.

in 1904, Edwin Lutyens set about countering

vanity of "villa-dom,"

the

launching what he referred to, with char-

acteristic humor, as a "Wrenaissance,"

a return to Christopher

prior to 1914

by the Berlin architect Paul

of delivering culture to the masses. resurgence

One of the books most

widely used by German and Austrian designers

of nostalgic images of

building types, Mebes celebrated the hon-

esty and formal restraint found in Germany's rural and bourgeois constructions particularly

at the turn of the previous century. He

emphasized

the harmony between buildings and

Wren. But Lutyens's frame of reference extended beyond the

their gardens, as well as the stylistic unity of architectural

architect who had rebuilt Saint Paul's. A self-conscious

ments, decoration,

refer-

ence to Andrea Palladio - "Palladio is the game," he wrote

In some ways this vernacular

in 1903 ..,4

an expression of the GroBstadtfeind/ichkeit

-

was evident in his designs for houses such as

Heathcote (1906)

102

in IIkley, Yorkshire and Nashdom, the res-

idence of Prince and Princess Alexis Dolgorouki Buckinghamshire

(1904-9).

in Taplow,

Erected on a terraced site, the lat-

el e-

and furniture. and bourgeois traditionalism

was

(hostility toward

the big city) that took hold among the German intelligentsia distressed about the erosion of cultural values brought on by urbanization

and internationalization.

This anxiety led to the

ter had two different facades - one in exposed stone, the other

idealization of a carefully edited past. The tendency was exem-

in stuccoed

plified by Julius Langbehn's

brick - creating contrasts of rhythm and texture

that extended the sense of counterpoint

he had previously dis-

played, but now within less of a classical straitjacket.

book Rembrandt

a/s Erzieher

(Rembrandt as Educator; 1890), which the author published anonymously.

Its purpose was to denounce the problems

affecting modern Germany and proclaim art the only possible force for resistance and renewal. The Dürerbund

German nostalgia

Association), There was no shortage of proponents

of classicism

in

(Dürer

organized by the publisher and critic Ferdinand

Avenarius (1902), and the Bund deutscher

Heimatschutz

Germany, though some slowly freed themselves from its ten-

(Society for the Preservation of the German Homeland),

ets. The Munich architect Theodor Fischer, who had worked

founded in 1904 by the teacher Ernst Rudorff, became the

Chapter 07

I

In search of a language: from classicism to Cubism

/

..

-

-_._

...

-

"."

..

"'-

IDAS

._ ..•.... _ .._ ..". _ .. ////

W1ANñERE I

EIN BLATT ZUR EINFUEHRUNG ABENDLAENDISCHER KULTUR IN OESTERREICH: GESCHRIEBEN VON ADOLF LOOS 1. JAHR TA.lLOas

AND

GOLDMAN l.

Sccíéeé Franco ..Autrichienne industritb __

OUTPITTERS

&:SALATSCH

poUf [os uls

u.1t.KOF_

~Y::~~llJI".

School 01 Rhythmical -=ssenow,

Gymnastics,

MOBELSTOFFE' LYONER SElDEN- UND

•• .$

Heinrich

Dresden, Germany, 1910-12

~~

$ 7 105

for the princi-

After the success of his book Hausliche

Loos and the lure of "Western culture"

(Domestic Artistic Care; 1898), in which he argued

. r a refined and traditionalist

culture of domestic architecture,

- e nine volumes of his Kulturarbeiten

(Culture Works), pub-

Adolf Loos was another architect focused on the early architecture of the nineteenth century, particularly on the Viennese

shed from 1901 to 1917, presented a binary vision of German

buildings of Joseph Kornháusel. Praising American technical

ousing, urban landscapes, and gardens, opposing

objects he had discovered

and "counterexamples."

"examples"

This editorial device, which the radical

oderns would later put to good use, butlressed his argument

States, and combating contemporaries

both the outdated approaches

Loos set about introducing

considered the only legitimate answer to the question of rnet-

clothing and plumbing,

-opoütan expansion. It is telling that Schultze-Naumburg

the ephemeral

among the many members of the Bund deutscher Heimatschutz

stay in the United

and the arbitrary aestheticism

for a thoughtful replication of small, preindustrial cities, which he was

on a three-year

of his

of the Secession,

"Western culture," especially

its

into Vienna. As publisher and author of

broadsheet Das Andere (The Other; 1903), 106

he wrote essays in the spirit of the satirist Karl Kraus. Das Andere

ho went on to found the Deutscher Werkbund: in his eyes and

offered a radical critique of the Potemkin city erected around

ose of his colleagues, there was no contradiction

Vienna's RingstraBe in the 1860s, which Loos considered a

between

he fight for good industrial farm and ataste for harmony.

-> 6

monumental

lie, and bitingly atlacked the fashionable

styles

The most elegant yet rigorous reading of the traditional German

of Joseph Maria Olbrich and Henry van de Velde.

architecture

Despite the title of his famous lecture "Ornament and Crime"

produced during the period "around 1800" was

provided by Heinrich Tessenow. In the garden city of Hellerau,

(delivered in 1908, but first published

which was closely associated with the Werkbund, he built sev-

was not categorically

eral sets of houses that achieved an ideal of functionality simplicity

through a geometric achievement

->

8 Loos

and

he espoused an appropriate, judicious use of ornament in which

and abstract rendition of tradi-

each material was used for what it was, without pretense. In an

ional house types. He also provided Hellerau with its culminating

in 1913 in Paris),

opposed to decoration. On the contrary,

and central edifice, the School for

earlier article, "Das Prinzip der Bekleidung"

(The Principie of

Cladding; 1898), he used metaphors barrowed from fashion to

092

I

093

107

Garrison Church, Theodor

Fischer, Ulm, Germany,

1905-10

094

I

095

't .

108

Goldmann

Chapter 07

I

and Salatsch Department

Store, Adolf Loos, Vienna, Austria, 1909-11

In search 01 a language: lrom classicism to Cubism

.(.

ti.

.'

109

Kárntner Bar, Adolf Loos, Vienna, Austria, 1907

ciscuss architecture, and in "Damenmode"

(Ladies' Fashion;

-898), asserting that women were less attractive when they

rete

naked, he praised the anonymous

qualities of English

110

Steiner House, Adolf Loos, Vienna, Austria, 1910

Everything else, everything which serves a purpose, should be excluded Irom the realm 01 art."

-> 10

Many of Loos's houses, which often consist 01 cubic volumes

~shion, the ideal of which was to make the wearer totally invis-

with white surfaces and understated

Die in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

been inspired by houses in London. They were embodiments

--DOS'S

-> 9

attachment to certain classical themes was clear in his

-1Seof Doric columns at the entry of the Villa Karma in Montreux, witzerland Jepartment

(1903-6),

and the Goldmann

Store (1909-11)

108

and Salatsch

on the Michaelerplatz

in Vienna.

openings, appear to have

the argument in his essay "Heimatkunst"

01

(Homeland Art; 1914):

"The building should be dumb on the outside and reveal its wealth only on the inside."

->

11

The exterior, in otherwords,

was meant to belong to society and the interior to the individual.

The latter building provoked a scandal because of the bareness

Differentiating the height of rooms according to their function and

of its lacade on the upper levels, a quality all the more striking

creating complex interpenetrations

since it was located across Irom the entrance to the Imperial

invented the Raumplan, or spatial plan, which revolutionized the

=>alaceand Saint Michael's Church. Soon nicknamed the

conventional vertical superimposition

"Looshaus," the building has a lacade that is divided into three

House (1910)

bands beneath its cornice line: the upper stories, containing

a single story on the street, so he developed the house toward

apartments, are based on a principie of sobriety and anonyrn-

the garden, deeming its centrifugal aspect "Japanese." Also

i1y; the two lower levels, easily visible to passersby, are clad

in Vienna, his house lor Dr. Gustav Scheu (1911-13) seemed to

in green marble. The Doric columns, also in green marble, do

conlirm the analysis 01 his work by another Viennese artist, the

not actually bear the weight of the lacade. This differentiation

composer

on the lacade echoes Louis Sullivan's similar treatment at the

ite, immediate, three-dimensional

Carson, Pirie & Scott Department

thing is thought out, imagined, composed and molded in space

an architectural

primarily of fitting out residential and

interiors. The Karntner Bar (1907)

109

of floors. In the Steiner

in Vienna, local regulations limited Loos to only

Arnold Schonberq,

who saw it as "a non-cornposconception,"

in which "every-

without any expedient, without auxiliary plans, without interrup-

dialogue with Gottlried Semper.

Loos's work consisted commercial

Store, and it also continues

110

of levels and split-Ievels, Loos

in Vienna

s a boxlike space just 7 meters deep, 3.5 meters tall, and

tions and breaks; directly, as if all the structures were transparent; as if the eye 01 the spirit were conlronted parts and as a totality simultaneously."

by space in all its

-> 12

_5 wide (23 by 11 by 11 leet). Loos combined Skyros marble, ~ yx, and wood with mirrors intended to enlarge the sense 01 the

Berlage and the question of proportions

space; the effect was also meant to intensily customers' sense 01 .snsion and disorientation. Loos became involved in designing

Trained at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, the Dutch archi-

lOuses. Yet he did not consider the house to qualily as "art."

tect Hendrik Petrus Berlage was a reader 01 Viollet-Ie-Duc

11 his essay "Architektur"

(1910), he wrote: "Only a very small

oart of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.

and Semper, in whom he found the basis for a practical aesthetic: the only aesthetic capable 01 yielding style as such,

096

I

097

111

Stock Exchange,

Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Amsterdam,

Netherlands,

1896-1903,

elevation

112

Stock Exchange,

Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Amsterdam,

Netherlands,

1896-1903,

interior

Chapter 07

I

In search of a language: from classicism to Cubism

113

Sint Hubertus Hunting Lodge, Hendrik Petrus Berlage and Bart Van der Leck,

Hoenderloo,

to the many styles of the past, In this, Berlage

in opposition

Netherlands,

1914-19

the principal facade on the Damrak, the eastern facade is more

was quite close to such French architects as Frantz Jourdain.

sedate and respects the scale of the neighboring

Visiting North America fifteen years after Loos, he returned to

principal room is the commodity

Europe full of enthusiasm for Louis Sullivan's and Frank L10yd

large steel structural frame. The grain exchange is topped by

Wright's buildings. Like his Viennese contemporary

horizontal beams, while the stock exchange, at the rear of the

rejected the ephemerality

Loos, he

of fashion, borrowing an aphorism

blocks. The

exchange, which features a

building, has lighter trusses. The difference in the spatial quali-

from Thomas Sheraton's 1794 Cabinet Maker: "Time alters

ties of these three rooms expressed Berlage's belief that archi-

fashion ... but what is founded on geometry and real science

tecture "resides in the creation of spaces, not in the design of

will remain unalterable."

facades."

After constructing

-> 13

his first buildings in a Neo-Renaissance

Berlage began to explore systems of proportions

vein,

in the Henny

-> 15

The rooms were enclosed by walls whose solid-

ity was punctuated

by the indispensable

structural bracing ele-

ments of brackets, keystones, and lintels.

House in The Hague (1898) - in this case, square propor-

The principal quality of the Stock Exchange is its serenity.

tions. His major project at this date, his third project overall, was

Berlage said that he aimed to achieve an effect of "repose,"

the Amsterdam

Stock Exchange,

111,112

designed with a Neo-

Gothic plan in 1885 and built in 1896-1903. 143-by-55-meter

(469-by-180-foot)

This enormous

edifice was based entirely

on a modular grid and the "Egyptian triangle" system of propor-

by which he meant both serenity and rest: "In the smaller works of the ancients [there) is a charming repose. In contrast, our present-day architecture gives a very restless impression. I would almost say that the two words 'style' and 'repose' are

tions, with a height-to-base

ratio of eight to five. He drew on the

synonymous; that repose is the same as style and style the same

research of his compatriots

Jan H. de Groot, J. L. M. Lauweriks,

as repose."

-> 16

The Italian architect Aldo Rossi stressed that

and K. P. C. de Bazel, who had developed this system three

the Stock Exchange "does not seem to have the typical appear-

dimensionally

ance of the cathedral of capital, of the temple of cash, which its

opportunity

in competition

proposals that Berlage had the

to study. He asserted: "1 have become convinced

that geometry, the mathematical

science, is not only of great

usefulness in the creation of artistic form but is also an absolute necessity." He hazarded a comparison:

"Why should architec-

ture - the art most frequently compared to music - something that led Schlegel to the well-known - be composed laws?"

-> 14

expression 'frozen music'

without rhythmic, that is to say, geometrical

In keeping with the rationalist credo that the plan

name calls to mind," and that strangely, in its mysterious richness, it "seems instead like a market, a store, a gymnasium; it is devoid of the glorification building had considerable

of bourgeois wealth."

impact throughout

-> 17

The

Europe, notably

on the young Berlin architect Ludwig Mies, who was in competition with Berlage for the commission

for the Krbller-Müller

House. Though the Dutch architect failed to realize that project, he would design others for this rich family from The Hague: the

should determine the elevation, the silhouelte and especially

Sint Hubertus Hunting Lodge (1914-19)

the fenestration paltern of the Stock Exchange reveal the build-

the Holland House in London (1914). In the latter he most ciearly

ing's interior organization. While there is a rhythmic quality to

put his observations

113

in Hoenderloo and

of Sullivan's work to use.

098

I

099

114

"Cubist House" at the Salon d'Automne,

Raymond

Duchamp-Villon,

Paris, France, 1912

the Auguste Rodin exhibition in 1902 - a prime example of

Cubism and cubistics

Prague's focus on Paris. As a student of Wagner, Kotéra favored Certain opponents to the idea of renewing architecture by means

linear patterns, as in his designs for the Urbánek Buildinq in

of its own linguistic codes turned in the direction of new art

Prague (1911-13) and the house of the music publisher Jan

movements

likeCubism,

the geometric

which for a time seemed to promise

rationality sought by Berlage and others. Initial

attempts at incorporating

the devices of early Cubist paint-

Laichter (1908-9). He displayed a more dynamic conception of space in the Hradec Králové Museum (1909-12). His colleague

Pavel Janák found a different precedent for Czech

ing into architecture were rather ineffective, though. In 1912,

Cubism in the sculptural forms of the Bohemian Baroque,

the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon

which he updated in his work. In 1910 Janák criticized Wagner:

exhibited the facade

and ground floor of a rather strange "Cubist House"

114

at the

Salon d'Automne in Paris. Its floor plan was conventional its Cubist touches mostly ornamental.

-7

18

and

Yet Duchamp-Villon

"It is possible to predict the future direction of architecture: ation. Artistic thinking and abstraction of the plastic realization of architectural

establish a new decor of architecture, not only in the character-

to the fore."

istic lines of our times, which would be but a transposition

of

-720

Janák proposed

renewal of architecture

concepts, will come

a complete

and particularly

program for the

of the facade, pro-

pounding the idea that a building should look like the result of a

Rather, we must penetrate the relation of these objects among

process of crystallization.

themselves, in order to interpret, in lines, planes, and synthetic

Groups in Prague such as the Association

of Visual Artists and

volumes, which are balanced, in their place, in rhythms analo-

the Mánes Society carried on heated architectural

gous to those of the life surrounding

this idea. Janák's ideas were realized by Josef Goéár,

us."

-719

His ensemble at

over

practicality, which will recede, and the pursuit of plastic form,

had major ambitions, if a 1916 letter is any evidence: "We must

these lines and forms in other materials, and which is an error.

will predominate

cre-

debates over notably

the Salon, undertaken on the initiative of the painter André Mare,

in his orthogonal glass facade for the Wenke Depattment Store

essentially remained a showcase for his own work and that of

in .larornéf (1909-10) and the House ofthe Black Madonna in

his brother, Marcel Duchamp, as well as of his friends Roger

Prague (1912), 115 whose facade combines

de La Fresnaye, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger,

its structural members with the crystalline prisms of its win-

the dark solids of

and Marie Laurencin. Cubism here was used not to challenge

dows. The house introduced

the spatiality of the living room or bedroom, but to create cor-

a break with the existing codes of eclecticism

into Prague's old city the idea that and the Czech

nices and pediments whose polygonal shapes were essentially

Sezession could lead to a unified aesthetic capable of rivaling

just an ornamental theme.

the Gothic or the Bohemian Baroque. Goóár's

The most fruitful encounter between architecture and Cubism

radicalized by Josef Chochol with a house in thePrague

took place in Prague. At the time, Czech architectural

of vvsehrad

ture was dominated propagated

Chapter 07

I

cul-

by atto Wagner, whose message was

by Jan Kotéra, the designer of a pavilion built for

In search of a language: from classicism to Cubism

(1911-12)

116

approach was district

and a building on Neklanova Street

in the same city (1913). Both were angular structures in which the building's entire volume contributed to highly contrasting

115

116

House of the Black Madonna, Josef Gocár,

Prague, Bohemia

House in Vysehrad, Josef Chochol, Prague, Bohemia (Czech Republic),

1911-12

(Czech Republic), 1912

prismatic effects. Chochol displayed almost Futurist leanings in his declarations

regarding an architecture

of connections

with daily life: "We first and always demand and need the fresh excitement of new artistic intensities, springing from the tumultuous and glowing mass of contemporary In 1930 the functionalist

basic, almost absurd misunderstanding specific postulates of architecture" Czech buildings.

life."

-> 21

critic Karel Teige denounced

Nonetheless,

->

"the

of the fundamental 22

exemplified

they constituted

and

by these

an original and

intense effort to replace classical certainties with the search for a new code, using Cubism as a formula in a paradoxical

effort

to distinguish the individual work.

100

I

101

The

GreatWar and its side effects

Instead of disrupting architecture

the pattern of transformation

was engaged worldwide,

in which

whose watercolors

the first industrial war

in history had the opposite effect: by accelerating tion, World War I revealed and challenged

depicted the operations

French team of camoufleurs.

moderniza-

the nationalist lean-

->

of their own

4

The second, more indirect mobilization

was that of architec-

ture itself, which was called upon to give shape to construc-

ings that had characterized the emerging architectural cultures.

tion programs for a war that had quickly become "total." Though

Some reformers of the prewar era had indeed expressed a

the design of fortifications,

certain admiration for aesthetic aspects of the technology of

expanses of territory, remained essentially a military task, pro-

which spread across unprecedented

war. Members of the Deutscher Werkbund, whose buildings

grams related to aerial forces, the war's great novelty, were

in Cologne were promptly converted into barracks in 1914,

sometimes conceived

were attracted to the extraordinary

Perret designed concrete and steel airplane hangars and shelters

rial navy vessels.

-> 1

rationality of German impe-

The Italian Futurists, for their part, hoped

by architects or civil engineers. Auguste

for dirigibles, while Euqene Freyssinet built airship hangars in

Italy would enter the war on the side of the Allies. As early as

Avord and Istres in 1916 and 1917. Continuing on from his war

his 1909 manifesto Marinetti had declared,

work after peace came, Freyssinet built gigantic parabolic dirig-

"We will glorify war

- the only true hygiene of the world - militarism, the destructive kill."

-> 2

patriotism,

ible hangars at Orly Airfield (1921-3, bombed 1944).

gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas which

Several members

01

the movement joined the Lombard

Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Automobilists.

They would

300-meter-long

and 50-meter-high

119

These

(985-foot by 364-foot) vaults

were made rigid by the wavelike configuration

of their arches,

which were built from precast components.

paya heavy price in the war: Umberto Boccioni died in 1916

The third mobilization was even more diffuse: it had to do with

after falling off a horse, and Antonio Sant'Elia was killed the

the industrial nature of a total war, in which human and material

same year by a bullet to the head.

resources are deployed under the direction of state organizations

A triple mobilization

socialists like Albert Thomas in France. Throughout

run by industrialists - men like Walther Rathenau in Germany and Europe and

the United States, the creation of major munitions and aviation At first, architects were mobilized only for battle. The time they spent in the trenches would be the determining a generation

for

of young European architects, shaping their view

of the world for decades to come. Erich Mendelsohn an architecture Architects

experience

->

3

On the Russian front,

filled his sketchbooks

118

with visions of

that would express the dynamism

of industry.

and painters on the front lines were enlisted in the

earliest efforts to create camouflage.

Among those invotved in

this effort were Franz Marc, Fernand Léger, and André Mare,

Chapter 08

I

The Great War and its side effects

factories and shipyards necessitated the hasty construction of housing developments

to shelter thegrowing

workforce. Archi-

tects took advantage of such projects to continue their pre-war research. Paul Schmitthenner's Staaken Garden City (1914-18)

117

near the munitions factor y in Spandau, west of Berlin, realized the village ideal of Heimatschutz

by using the architectural

guage of the eighteenth-century

Dutch quarter in Potsdam.

lan-

Schmitthenner organized the houses according to five given types and standardized elements like doors and windows.

->

5

118 119 ~

117

Garden City, Paul Schmitthenner,

Industrial Building, from a sketchbook,

1917

Dirigible Hangars, Eugéne Freyssinet, Orly, France, 1921-3, demolished

Staaken, Germany, 1914-18

concept after 1918 by politicians

The spread of Taylorism

metaphorical In all the warring nations, production

was transformed

new concepts related to the scientific organization Conceived

Erich Mendelsohn,

and economists,

and its

use byarchitects.

by

Commemoration

of labor.

and reconstruction

in the United States by the engineer Frederick

Winslow Taylor and described Management

(1911), ->

The first effect of the war, even before it was over, was an unprec-

in his Principies of Scientific

these concepts were known in Europe

6

edented increase in the number and size of military cemeteries.

even before the war, At the time, socialist critics had denounced

Groups such as the Deutscher Werkbund set to work designing

the "organization

them, playing a role in shaping a genuine cult of the warrior.

of overwork."

But the war-driven

need to

-> 9

make do with a reduced workforce and to incorporate women

In Great Britain, the Imperial War Graves Commission, founded

into industrial production

in 1917 by Fabian Ware, developed burial places in France and

archy orrnanaqernent workers' movements.

led to the introduction

of a rigid hier-

in"fhe factory and to strict control over ->

7

Manufactured

products, particularly

Belgium for the bodies of soldiers left on the battlefield. To assist him, Ware hired the writer Rudyard Kipling and the architects

munitions, had to meet new standards of quality, reliability, con-

Reginald Blomfield and Edwin Lutyens. They designed many

sistency, and compatibility.

commemorative

Standardization,

which had been

projects, including the cemetery of Étaples,

initiated during the American Civil War, became a general

overlooking the English Channel near Le Touquet (1918-20),

requirement and soon permeated architecture.

and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

the engineer Heinrich Schaechterle, Fabrikationsbüro

In Germany

(1927-32) 120 - a giant brick and stone arch that is supported by

head of the Kbnigliche

(Royal Manufacturing

Office), known as Fabo,

prompted the founding of the Deutsche Industrie-Normen,

or

several similar arches and suggests a type of classical abstraetion.

-> 10

In contrast to these serene memorial landscapes, the

ossuary built in Douaumont by Léon Azéma to commemorate

DIN (German Industrial Norms), which eventually regulated

the

the entirety of production. The Americans also intensified their

bloody battle of Verdun (1920-32),122 featuring a long concrete

efforts to make manufacturing

vault, resembles a military structure grafted onto a neo-Roman-

processes as rational as possi-

ble. After the war, French architects studied their approach order to make reconstruction The degree of organization mobilized

more efficient.

dissemination

The conduct of military operations industrial production the transformation moting planning

esque steeple. There was no shortage of references to the architectural past in memorials such as Tannenberg (1924-7) 121 in

-> 8

needed to conduct a war that

millions of combatants

to the widespread

in

Hohenstein, Eastern Prussia; its series of towers arranged in a

and even more workers led

circle, built by Johannes and Walter Krüger, evoke the Castel

of the concept of "planning."

del Monte built by the Hohenstaufens

and the organization

required a continuous

of

effort to prepare

of the territory. Wartime propaganda led to the nearly universal adoption

pro-

of this

in Apulia. One excep-

tion to this nostalgic approach was the Monumento ai Caduti (Monument to the Fallen; 1932-3) in Como, built by Giuseppe Terragni, which took an aerodynamic

form basedon

a Futurist

sketch made by Sant'Elia twenty years earlier.

102

I

103

121

Tannenberg

Memorial, Johannes

Krüger and Walter Krüger, Hohenstein,

Germany, 1924-7, destroyed 120

Memorial

122

to the Missing 01 the Somme, Edwin Lutyens, Thiepval,

France, 1927-32

Douaumont

Ossuary, Léon Azéma, Fleury-devant-Douaumont,

France, 1920-32

Even cities lar Irom the lront lines lelt the weight 01 a war that

inhabitants' desire far recognizable

turned them into arsenals and impoverished them.

mon concern among the rebuilders, it led them to propase

reconstruction

-> 11

The

01 destroyed urban areas soon became a high-

interpretations

torrns was certainly a com-

that were lar from literal. These were occasiorially

stakes enterprise. Urban planners and architects rallied to rebuild

combined with authentic technological

even belore the hostilities had come to an end, sometimes work-

tion. Notwithstanding

revolutions in construc-

the fact that iconoclastic systems such as

ing in an international context. In France the American reliel

Le Corbusier's Dom-ino project had little success, the immedi-

elfart was not just military and economic. Beginning in 1917, the

ate postwar period saw the triumph of reinforced concrete in

American urban planner Gearge Burdett Ford assisted the as so-

northeast France, particularly for industrial structures and civil-

ciation La Renaissance des Cités (The Renascence of the Cities)

ian buildings. At the same time, certain impressive structural

in the reconstruction

leats, such as the rebuilding

of Rheims,

123

a city considered

"martyred"

01 the concrete frame 01 Rheims

since the German shelling of its cathedral in 1914. Ford's zoning-

Cathedral

based plan lar that city would be the first reconstruction

preserve an idealized vision of "reconstitution."

approved in France after the war.

-> 12

plan

While the most advanced

by Henri Deneux (1924-6), had to be clad in stone to

tainly al so the case with the Grand'Place

This was cer-

in Arras, which was

French and Belgian urban planners were involved in projects lar

re-created from scratch.

re-creating destroyed cities, their realizations were lar more con-

A careful look at complexes such as the garden cities 01

125

servative. In many cases they represented the triumph 01 region-

Rheims and the railroad towns 01 Lille-Délivrance,

alist ideals. The sale reconstruction

Tergniers, built for the Compagnie

effort in Germany - where

Douai, and

du Nord under the direction

innovative architects were careful to adhere to the principies of

of the engineer Raoul Dautry, reveals that regionalism

Heimatschutz

- was in western Prussia. The showcase of this

hand in hand with standardization

reconstruction

was the city 01 Goldap, rebuilt by Fritz Schophol

In addition to these projects in areas affected by combat,

in 1919-21.

-> 13

Prussian urban centers seemed to lollow to

the letter the traditionalist recommendations Paul Schultze-Naumburg,

which were codified in the work 01the

architect Friedrich Ostendarf.

(The Reconstituted

studies 01 village buildings

City)

the exhibition

La Cité

in 1917 - in which

124

in the regions ruined by the war

were exhibited alongside Tony Garnier's Cité Industrielle the torrns 01 traditional

rural architecture

as a basis for reconstructing

and rationalization.

postwar programs included housing for veterans, who soon became a considerable

lorce on the European political scene.

In German cities, housing developments

for veterans figured

into urban expansion plans. In Great Britain, the government's

-> 14

On the other side of the front, lollowing Reconstituée

of Paul Mebes and

worked

-> 15

specific goal of providing "homes fit far heroes to live in."

-> 16

-

were widely used

urban areas.

interventions during the war years in the sphere of social policy continued with the British Housing Act of 1919, which had the

Postwar recomposition

But to see

these rebuilt structures as no more than an expression of con-

Though the damage caused by World War I was unprecedented,

servative taste would be an oversimplification.

the consequences

Chapter 08

I

The Great War and its side effects

Though the

of war went lar beyond mere destruction.

123

Plan lor the reconstruction

124

01 Rheims, George Burdett Ford, Rheims,

France, 1917

Farm buildings

shown at the La Cité Reconstituée

exhibition,

Epieds,

France, 1917

The new political geography

that took shape had a direct

impact on urban planning and architecture, the intense exchanges

that developed

beginning

New architects between science and propaganda

with

among the defeated

nations and lasted until the early 1930s. The relationships

After being "under fire" and experiencing

between Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union and between

- to borrow the titles of firsthand accounts of the front lines by

Germany and Turkey were as significant

Henri Barbusse (1916) and Ernst Jünger (1920) ~ 17

of Americanization

as the initial inroads

in Germany. During this same period,

forced migrations, population

ing generation was faced with contradictory

such as that of one million Greeks evicted

from Turkey, had drastic effects on cities, quadrupling

the "storm of steel"

the

-

the ris-

aspirations. The

aspiration to a classical "return to order," as announced

in Jean

Cocteau's pamphlet Le coq et /'arlequín (Cock and Harlequin;

of Athens in just a few years. After the collapse

1918), reflected an anxiety stemming from the loss of cultural

of the German and Austrian empires, Czarist Russia and the

reference points. This anxiety was the basis of Oswald Spengler's

Ottoman Empire gave way to new nationalist divisions and

reactionary

emerging

Decline of the West; 1917-22), which became compulsory

nation-states

such as Czechoslovakia,

and Turkey, which used architecture

Finland,

to affirm their identities.

diatribe Oer Untergang

architects such disquietude

Middle East - Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq - were transformed

uncompromised

by

modern plans and construction. As nations dissolved

and re-formed,

(The

reading for many architects. ~ 18 For many intellectuals and

Territories placed under French and British mandates in the

tions were al so transformed

des Abendlandes

coexisted with the desire for an

modernity, to be achieved through a radical

break with the outdated world that had led to the war. Faith in professional

organiza-

and relocated according

to new

the potential of science to enable humanity to transcend conflict led to the notion of experimental, scientific, or "Iaboratory"

political borders. They were run by men who had been pro-

architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. In this work the authority

foundly changed

accorded to the natural sciences was evident.

The emigration

by war, and in some cases even displaced. of thousands

neers as a consequence figured professional

of Russian architects

of the Bolshevik

and engi-

Revolution

recon-

circles in parts of Europe, while other

During the decade between the armistice of 1918 and the stock market crash of 1929, a postwar economy boosted by the spread of Fordism seemed to promise both affordable,

durable con-

groups were faced with forced relocation. Above all, their

sumer goods and high wages. The rise of newly founded

experience

organizations

on the front lines made young architects

contribute

eager to

to building a different society. Shortly after returning

like the League of Nations and the International

Labour Organization

promised to ensure a peaceful world. The

to civilian life, architects

in Germany and Russia established

development

utopian work collectives

and devoted themselves

to translating

try, and the grand spectacles

forms.

ground for the activities of the professional elites. Like political

the need for social change into new experimental

of the illustrated press, the motion picture indusof the world's fairs provided fertile

groups - but also in imitation of the strategies of public relations and advertising firms, whose growth accompanied

Chapter 08

I

The Great War and its side effects

the spread

125

Grand'Place,

Arras, France, rebuilt 1919-34

126

Portrait 01 an Architect,

Schnarrenberger,

01 Fordism and consumerism seduction

- architects

succumbed

01 using slogans to sum up their working

and, more often, their aesthetic positions.

Wilhelm

127

The Architect,

Maria Sironi, 1922

1923

to the methods

-> 19

Le Corbusier thus identilied his "Cinq points d'une architecture moderne" (Five Points 01 a Modern Architecture; Henry-Russell

1927), while

Hitchcock and Philip Johnson enumerated the

"three principies"

01 the International Style (1932). In Athens the

Conqres internationaux

d'architecture

moderne (International

Congresses 01 Modern Architecture), or CIAM, boiled down urban planning to "Iour lunctions" such quantiliable tectural periodicals

lormulations

(1933). The predilection

and the prolileration

revealed to what extent architecture

become a mass medium in its own right, particularly photographic disseminate.

reproduction ->

lor

01 archihad

now that

had become easier to achieve and

20

Architects became the heroes 01 modern times in paintings by Wilhelm Schnarrenberger

126 and Mario Sironi. 127 The strug-

gles and passions 01 the interwar architect later inspired Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead,

whose protagonist was

played by Gary Cooper in King Vidor's lilm adaptation. In 1924 the Dada artist Hans Richter described operating

in an "internationally

the "new architect"

organized"

as

space. According

Richter he had to possess both a "new sensuousness"

to

and the

ability to respond to a society that was "more practical and less sentimental"

in a world 01 "rapid mobility" and "precise calcu-

lations."

The architect attuned to his era soon became, as

-> 21

the Russian Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg noted two years later with respect to Le Corbusier, "the very ligure 01 the new man, lull 01 energy and perseverance which he deploys in delense 01 his ideas."

in the propaganda ->

22

108

I

109

Expressionism in Weimar Germanyand the Netherlands

No nation was more deeply affected by the trauma of World War I

- and a majority of artists - including

than Germany. The caste-bound

Meidner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmitt-Rottluff

society of the Hohenzollern

Empire was replaced by the democratic its highly decentralized

Weimar Republic and

political structure. Architectural

cies began to be shaped principally

by municipal adminis-

trations, though some national organizations financing

poli-

contributed

the

Arbeitsrat

-

put forward the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk

to

Written by Bruno Taut, this programmatic

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 and the repres-

shall no longer be the enjoyment happiness

Social Democratic-dominated

The Arbeitsrat

serious or radicalattempt

any

to transform the modes of produc-

program

laid out the new republic's

by insisting on the "public character the "unitary supervision

"socialization,"

residential

where the

of the few but the life and

of the masses." .., 1

tion. This left on the agenda only the utopia of a progressive notably in the field of construction,

statement featured

slogans such as "Art and people must form a unity" and "Art

sion of the Spartacist League, their revolutionary party, the new abandoned

- the for-

mer were clearly in control. In its "Architektur-Program,"

total work of art - "under the wing of a great architecture."

them. After the assassination of the leftist leaders

government

Georg Kolbe, Ludwig

of all building activity,"

of whole urban districts, streets, and

estates," and the creation of "permanent

model of the Bauhütte - or medieval guild - proved seductive.

mental sites for testing and perfecting

For a few years the unions considered

having the Bauhütten

effects." It demanded

participate directly in the reconstruction

of the war-damaged

of all monuments,

strategies

the dissolution

including

experi-

new architectural of all academies

war memorials,

and

that required an

north of France as part of reparations. These political and eco-

excessive quantity of materials, as well as the creation of a

nomic strateqiestound

"national

a cultural and architectural response in

center to ensure the fostering of the arts within the

Expressionism, an aesthetic orientation born in poetry and in

framework

painting, which favored dynamic forms that embodied

In April 1919 members of the Arbeitsrat

chological

the psy-

torment of wartime Germany.

of future law-making."

tellung für unbekannte Architects).

Architekten

organized the Auss-

(Exhibition for Unknown

In the catalog Gropius wrote that archltecture

was "the crystalline

The Arbeitsrat für Kunst

..,2

expression

of man's noblest thoughts,

his ardor, his humanity, his faith, his religion! ... There are no Following the empire's collapse, organized

demobilized

architects

events intended to reveal new conceptions

architectural

space. In late 1918, with a growing

workers' and soldiers'

councils

being organized,

that means, lord of art, who will build gardens out of deserts

the Arbeitsrat

and pile up wonders to the sky. [italics in original]"

in Berlin

of Walter Gropius, Cesar Klein, and Adolf

Behne. Though the council was composed

of a minority of

architects - including Otto Bartning, and Bruno and Max Taut

Chapter 09

I

Expressionism

the way for

him who will once again deserve the name of architect, for

number of

für Kunst (Work Council for the Arts) was established under the direction

architects today, we are all of us merely preparing of

in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

..,3 Taut

affirmed in the same leaflet that the desire for the future was architecture schauung

in the making: "One day there will be a Weltan[world-view],

crystal - architecture."

and then there will al so be its sign, its ..,4

,.

. '

...

.,.,

..

.¡¡,....•.

:

...•;\.:.

.' ~~t~

.....• hS•..·· 4T¡~h~

129

IIlustration from Architekturentwürfe

(Architectural

Projects), Hermann

Finsterlin, 1919-20

128

Illustration from Die Auflósung

der Stiidte, oder

die Erde eine gute Wohnung (The Dissolution of Cities,

130 ~

Plate from Alpine Architektur

(Alpine Architecture),

Bruno Taut, 1919

or the Earth as a Good Dwelling), Bruno Taut, 1920

_

h a crystalline architecture

had been prophesied

by

adopting as his own the anti-urban arguments 01 Piotr Kropotkin

-",ul 8cheerbart, to whom the Arbeitsrat's manilesto Ruf zum

and other anarchist and socialist theorists. Taut also lounded

=-a.uen (Call to Build; 1920) was dedicated. In 1919 Taut pub-

the periodical

shed his book Die Stadtkrone

(The City Crown), 131 an urban

ion lull 01 relerences to pagodas and temples, pro pos~

to place at the center 01 the luture city a soaring tower that

Frühlicht

(Dawn) and from 1921 to 1923 devoted

his services to the city 01 Magdeburg the social program prescribed Sorne 01 the participants

in an effort to bring about

by the Arbeitsral.

in the Gláserne Kette exchanges

pru-

II }

uld embody its spiritual aspirations. The stunning plates -" his Alpine Architektur,

130 published

the same year, pro-

ed the most systematic expression 01the new architecture

ing site. This was the case with Hablik and with Hermann Finsterlin, whose projects, despite their apparently

- which the Arbeitsrat aspired, while expressing the ideal 01

programs, were mainly situated in an imaginary

::;otherhood among the peoples 01 Europe. Indeed, his depic-

Ausstellungsbauten

;;ons of the multicolored

of pyramidal

glass cupolas 01 this architecture

suspended above the Alps seemed a response to the paci-

Architekturentwürfe were unmistakably

n 01 his German compatriot Thomas Mann's 1924 novel Der

'8

(Exhibition

superimpositions

;; t texts by the French writer Romain Rolland and an anticipazauberberg

I

dently avoided putting their words into action on the buildrealistic

world. Hablik's

Constructions;

1921) consisted

01 prisms, while Finsterlin's

(Architectural zoomorphic,

Projects; 1919-20)

129

evoking snails, seashells,

and sea urchins.

(The Magic Mountain). The origins of these images

both in 8cheerbart's

writings and in the plates published

y Ernst Haeckel in his Kunstformen ature) and Kristallseelen

Dynamism in architecture

der Natur (Art Forms in

(Crystal Souls) ...• 5

The fluid and indeed elusive Expressionist

=rom late 1919 to late 1920, in another exaltation 01 crystal-

architecture

ine transparency, the utopian correspondence

contemporary

known as the

Gléseme Kette (Glass chain) brought together the Taut broth-

that was embodied

pictorial experiments

Behrens, who designed

Scharoun. The pseudonyms

lormed

several new structures

his lormer architectural

in

a world of fractured

dynamic lorms. It also attracted older architects

ers, Wenzel Hablik, Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, and Hans adopted by the authors 01 this

movement

in these projects shared with but

like Peter that trans-

language ...• 6 His headquar-

series of chain letters - among them Anlang (beginning), Mass,

ters for Hbchst in Franklurt am Main (1920-4)

was a more

Stellarius, Prometh, and Angkor - allude to the reconciliation

Iyrical version 01 his classic prewar buildings.

By rellecting

01 man and the cosmos, an aspiration typical 01 the immediate

the vertical light coming through glass rools onto multicolored

postwar periodo Bruno Taut rounded out this series 01 utopian

enameled-brick

pronouncements

with Die Auflosung

der

Steote,

oder die Erde

eine gute Wohnung (The Dissolution of Cities, or the Earth as a Good Dwelling; 1920),128

in which he imagined a great migra-

tion lrom the corrupted cities to the redemptive countryside,

walls, he created one 01 the most striking

interiors associated

with Expressionism.

Hans Poelzig's new projects responded to Taut's call tor transparency by playing with sol id masses. In his contribution the competition

tor the Haus der Freundschaft

to

(House 01

110

I

111

\ \

).'

~\

\,.. I

....

\

1t.

(

I

\

I

\

\

!

I \

\

/

i

\\

\,

/

I

r

I

r1

¡

/

,

!

/

/

,

J

/

/ /

/'

/

,/

/

"

/

/ /'

132

Great Playhouse, Hans

Poelzig, Berlin, Germany, 1918-19

131

Illustration from Die Stadtkrone

(The City Crown), Bruno Taut, 1919

Friendship; 1916) in Constantinople;

the magical grotto he

devised within the GroBe Schauspielhaus 1918-19)

132

performances;

(Great Playhouse;

in Berlin, where Max Reinhardt staged his musical and the successive

variants 01 his Festspielhaus

In 1919 Erich Mendelsohn

exhibited his wartime sketches trorn

the tront lines at the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin. These consisted 01 very small India-ink perspectives houses, and hangars. He associated

01 tactories, ware-

the dynamism

01 their

(Festival Hall; 1920-1) in Salzburg, he introduced a new world

strikingly sculptural torrns, which appeared to be lrozen in motion,

01 imposing and mysterious lorms. In 1919, apropos 01 the post-

with the "elastic qualities" 01 new materials: "The living qual-

war resurrection 01 the German Werkbund, Poelzig declared:

ity 01 architecture depends upon sensuous seizure by means

"True understanding

01 touch and sight: upon the terrestrial cohesion 01 mass, upon

01 architecture is so unspeakably important

because it determines the appearance has been so disligured

01 our homeland, which

by the hall-hearted

architecture 01 recent

the super-terrestrial architecture

liberty 01 light. ... Out 01 its own laws,

lays down the conditions that govern its active

decades .... But it is not possible to reinstate architecture as a

masses."

major art overnight. This will be possible only when a coherent

geois Jewish establishment allowed him to put his ideas into

major revolution 01 souls has taken place, when the conviction

action more quickly than other architects, and his projects had

that we must create things tor eternity has gained general rec-

an impact in the United States as early as 1921.

ognition."

newspaper publisher Rudoll Mosse, Mendelsohn,

->

7

As an architect with close ties to film and theater,

Poelzig designed the set representing

medieval Prague in Paul

->

8

Mendelsohn's social connections in Berlin's bour-

the young Viennese architect Richard Neutra,

->

9

For the

assisted by

built a super-

Wegener's The Golem (1923), creating an atmosphere as dis-

structure on top 01 the Berliner Tageblatt Building

turbing as that in lilms like Robert Wiene's Cabinet of Doctor

translorming

Caligari (1920) and Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). Poelzig

with torceful horizontal lines that overpowered the original

continued to use his Expressionist

lacade. His Hat Factory complex in Luckenwalde, Germany,

stalagmites

throughout

language 01 stalactites and

the 1920s, including

in his studies 01

(1921-3)

the corner 01 the block into a kind 01 ship's prow,

(1923) leatured concrete buildings with oblique roots that

permanent buildings íor the Berlin Fair 01 1928.

resembled tolds 01 paper, creating a spectacular

The Expressionist aesthetic 01 the immediate postwar period also

landscape.

sculptural

affected young architects whose initial works had been 01 a more

Mendelsohn's

rationalist bent. Gropius, for instance, echoed the engravings 01

tor Albert Einstein within the compound

Max Pechstein and Lyonel Feininger in his Márzqefállenen-

Observatory

Denkmal (Monument to the March Dead; 1920-1) in Weimar,

solar spectrum,

with its jagged thrust to the sky. Gropius designed Adoll

a tower topped by a cupola, and a horizontal volume into

Sommerleld's

which light beams trorn above were guided and collected tor

wooden house in Berlin-Steglitz

the same realm 01 angles and interrupted

lines, but with a

calmer symmetry. The house's construction Sommerfeld's

Chapter 09

I

business as a commercial

Expressionism

(1920-1), in

was expedited by

dealer in lumber.

in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

most powerlul building was the laboratory erected (1919-21).

133

01 the Potsdam

Intended lor experiments with the

the lab combined

two distinct elements:

analysis. The two elements were integrated in a plastic sculptural mass whose continuous

surtace made it look as if it were

made 01 concrete rather than stuccoed brick. Though the name

.t.." .'

GUT GAP.I'\AU -.:;.':;:t.

135 Garkau Farm, Hugo Hiiring, Scharbeutz-Klingberg, Germany, 1922-6 Einstein Tower, Erich Mendelsohn,

=-

Potsdam, Germany, 1919-21

steinturm (Einstein Tower) is an unmistakable

-~ series of Bismarcktürme

reference to

(Bismarck Towers) built in many

=-'es throughout Germany before 1914, this structure erected - scientific purposes high above the city was intended, more

=

íoundly, as a kind of urban crown, responding to Taut's ideas.

--3

forward motion that this brick sphinx seems to imply

- ght be a materialization

of the élan vital described

the Glaserne Kette, took part in the reconstruction Novembergruppe

.::'" gson in his L'évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution; 1907), -'ch was translated into German in 1912. In any case, it sug-

- founded in 1918 by Bruno Beye, Cesar

Klein, Moritz Meltzer, Max Pechstein, and Heinrich Richter built the Garkau Farm in Scharbeutz-Klingberg, (1922-6).135

by Henri

of west-

ern Prussia until 1925. Hugo Hárinq, a member of the

near Lübeck

The barn and cowshed leatur~d both angu-

lar and curved shapes, adhering to the Expressionist

ideal

01 dynamic formo They were covered in exposed brick and boards, concealing

their concrete structure and latticelike wood

;38tS a completely different approach to organic form than the

Iraming, which bore a striking modernity

little visible lrom the

+ollusklike

outside. The larm's plan was determined

by its utilitarian pur-

shapes Finsterlin was drawing at the time.

- 1924 Mendelsohn 3Ilg

crossed the ocean with the filmmaker

and discovered

the United States. The experience

Fritz

revo-

_ ionized his way of thinking. He visited Frank l.loyd Wright z:

d, most importantly, absorbed a new visual culture that he ould report on in Amerika, das Bilderbuch erica, an Architect's

Picture Book; 1926).

eines Architekten -> 10

After con-

="onting the spectacle of the streets and skyscrapers ork and Chicago, Mendelsohn ~ture: '926-8) z

transformed

the Schocken department

of New

his own archi-

sto res he built in Chemnitz

134 and Stuttgart (1929) took on almost aerodynamic

ms and accentuated

the play of light. In Berlin, the WOGA

-Bisure Complex on the Kufürstendamm

(1928-9), dominated

~ the Universum Movie Theater, integrated contradictory

pro-

pose - to house and feed cattle - and laithfully lunctional

requirements

The Hanseatic cities of northern Germany were particularly fertile ground for architectural structures

research; their Gothic brick

seemed to anticipate

the vertical

Fritz Hóger designed the Chilehaus (1922-3), 138 a large block with curved, surging facades clad in dark brick and ornamented

with medieval motils. The acute angle of the build-

ing's prow seemed a response to New York's Flatiron Building, toward which the vessels 01 the Hamburg-Amerika Reflecting Hamburg's dominion architect Robert Natus replicated

the Chilehaus

-armonious

associated with Hóger in the construction

-> 11

->

Line sailed.

over the Baltic, the Estonian

in Tallinn in 1936.

urban design, the absence of which Mendelsohn

massing 01 the

shipping company offices built in the 1920s. In Hamburg,

;;;'ams into a single aesthetic entity, reflecting an aspiration to -ad deplored in the United States.

respected the

that its Iyrical exterior seemed to deny.

12 The brothers

in miniature

Hans and Oskar Gerson, of the Sprinkenhol

(1926-9), built the Ballinhaus Office Building (1926-9) more conventionally

orthogonal

using a

geometry. Bernhard Hoetger's

Hanseatic Expressionism

designs broke loose lrom the constraints of the office build-

"he young Expressionists

ony lor radical artists, revisited the vocabulary

ing. His houses (1922) and calé (1924-5) in Worpswede, a colore episodically,

alternated between theorizing and,

building. Hans Scharoun, a contributor to

rural architecture.

of the north's

Perhaps most notable were his buildings

116

I

117

137

De Dageraad

Netherlands, 136

Hendrik Petrus Berlage, 1914-17

Plan lar Amsterdam-Sauth,

on BóttcherstraBe

138

in Bremen, which resembled sculptural

Hausing, Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer, Amsterdam,

1918-23

Chilehaus,

Fritz Hoqer, Hamburg,

Germany, 1922-3

language, also seems to anticipate Hoetger's buildings 01the

collages. These, particularly the house lor the painter Paula

1920s. Among the assistants on the Scheepvaarthuis

was

Modersohn-Becker

the young de Klerk, who designed many competition

projects

(1923-7)

141

where a rough exterior accorn-

panied an oneiric layout 01 oddly convoluted

rooms, lully

belore building the Hillehuis (1912), an apartment house echo-

exploited the resources 01 brick.

ing the complex vertical organization 01 Van der Mey's building. Most signilicantly,

De Klerk and the Amsterdam

de Klerk's three projects Ior the Eigen Haard

(Own Hearth) cooperative

School

in Amsterdam,

to 1926, created a neighborhood

built Irom 1922

in which urban lorm was

The obvious parallels between these buildings in Hamburg and

absorbed into a continuum

Bremen and those erected in Amsterdam

play 01the bricks' colors, which range írom crimson to orange;

beginning

in 1915 were not coincidental.

by Michel de Klerk Though partly attribut-

able to a shared culture 01 brick construction,

the correspond-

01 interrelated sculptural effects. The

the way they are laid both horizontally and vertically; and their diverse shapes, which vary Irom rectilinear to convex to con-

ences went deeper. To some extent, Weimar policies were a

cave, combine to create a rich world in which the modest size

continuation 01 Dutch housing legislation, notably the Woningwet

01 the housing units is partly compensated

011901, which had guaranteed

public linancing

lor working-

ings' sensuous opulence. The lacade is an undulating spec-

class housing. Regulated by a system 01 controls and standards,

tacle with unusual-shaped

Dutch housing was built through municipal or cooperative

and embroidered

pro-

lor by the build-

openings that call to mind woven

textiles. For the third building,

nicknamed

grams. The neutrality 01 the Netherlands during the war allowed

"The Ship," (1917-21)

the country to launch programs more advanced than those 01

with a mechanical

the combatant

in which the meeting hall plays the role 01 rural church while the

nations. While German cities were struggling to

reactivate their construction

industry, Amsterdam

was already

Ilush with building sites ..• 13

140

de Klerk combined

a village theme

motil. The housing wraps around a courtyard

post office serves as a locomotive pulling the entire complex, which in lact stood alongside the city's main railroad tracks.

But the German and Dutch projects also originated in a shared

Next de Klerk collaborated

architectural

scheme 01 De Dageraad (The Dawn; 1918-23),

matrix that incorporated

the Theosophical

theo-

ries 01J. L. M. Lauweriks and the teaching 01 Hendrik Petrus

ative built as a component

Berlage, which had widely circulated in Germany. Meetings 01

South (1914-17).

Architectura

image 01 low-income

et amicitia (Architecture and Friendship), a soci-

ety 01 Amsterdam

prolessionals

established

in 1855, hosted an

136

with Piet Kramer on the housing 137

a cooper-

01 Berlage's plan tor Amsterdam-

Here de Klerk presented a clear, open housing. He aligned the houses along

the street in a continuous

wave in which each unit appears to

intense debate on the question 01 Gemeenschapkunst,

or social

be woven together with its neighbor. Once again he created

art. .• 14 Johan Melchior van der Mey's Scheepvaarthuis

(House

the illusion 01 a village community

01 Shipping Companies;

1911-16) in Amsterdam, which decon-

structed and recomposed

Chapter 09

I

Expressianism

elements 01 traditional architectural

in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

by grouping the units two

by two on a central square to lorm large houses separated tall chimneys ..•

15

by

139

Caver of Wendingen

cover designed

(Turning Points), Issue 2,

140

"The Ship,' Eigen Haard Housing Cooperative,

141

Paula Modersohn-Becker

142 ~

Secand Goetheanum,

De Klerk was the most brilliant member of a group that included Dirk Greiner, Margaret Kropholler, and Jan Frederik Staal, all of whom were committed to the genuinely collective effort required to realize the different stages of Berlage's plan. The main activist behind what would soon come to be known as the Amsterdam School, Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld, was responsible for its publicity organ, Wendingen (Turning Points), 139 a large-format architecture

magazine. He edited the magazine from 1918 to

1931, opening it to both experiments

that had taken place in

Russia since 1917 and new directions in Frank Lloyd Wright's work. In combination

with the Expressionist accents latent in de

Klerk's work, Wright's forms were sometimes

detectable

in the

new buildings in Amsterdam. Like many of the Dutch architects, the Austrian Rudolf Steiner had a background

in the Theosophical

founded the Anthroposophical

movement.

Society, formulating

In 1912 he a secular

doctrine inspired by Nietzsche and Goethe. For the community he established

in Dornach, near Basel, he erected the Goethe-

anum (1913-20), a building with two wood domes surrounded by houses in the shape of rocks. This edifice burned down and was replaced by the second Goetheanum a sculptural

(1924-8),142

concrete volume that held an auditorium,

a library,

and meeting rooms. The large faceted volume inserted into the pastoral Swiss landscape

majestically

conveyed the aspiration

to the total work of art that was one of the founding

precepts

of Expressionism.

Chapter 09

I

Michel de Klerk, Amsterdam,

by Michel de Klerk, 1918

Expressionism

in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

House, Bernard Hoetger, Bremen, Germany, 1923-7 Rudol! Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland,

1924-8

Netherlands,

1917-21

Return to order in Paris

In 1924, seven years alter his permanent move to Paris, Le

In 1918 Jeanneret and Ozenlant published their Purist manilesto

Corbusier diagnosed a case 01 "acute neurasthenia" and the

Apres le cubisme (Alter Cubism). It rellected their equal interest in

symptoms 01 a "breakdown"

Greek temples and in the machines introduced into everyday lile

in the drawings that Bruno Taut

had published tour years earlier in his book Die Auflosung der

by the war. The new term "purism" was intended to "express in an

Stiidte ..•

intelligible word the character 01 the modern spirit." In stressinq the

Well inlormed about the art and architecture 01 impe-

1

rial Germany, Le Corbusier had turned his back on his youthlul

"invariable," Jeanneret and Ozenlant were not "unmoved by the

experiences there in the lirst months 01 World War 1. French art-

intelligence that governs certain machines." .• 5 L'Esprit nouveau

ists, though strongly in support 01 the war effort against Germany,

likewise displayed a keen sense 01 history and an acute attention

had generally resisted the condemnations

to the products 01 technology. It described itselt as an "illustrated

01 Cubism voiced

in more chauvinist circles in Paris, where the style had become

international review 01 contemporary activity," open to experimen-

associated with certain important German-owned

tal psychology, psychoanalysis, and economics. Politically, it sup-

collections and

galleries and branded a boche ("kraut") art lorm. Yet they also

ported Bolshevik Russia and Franco-German reconciliation ..• 6

sought during these years to rediscover the threads 01 a national

In a series 01 controversial essays Le Corbusier reminded

tradition olten identilied with classicism, whether rendered liter-

"Messrs. les architectes" to "open eyes that do not see" to

ally or as a guiding principie open to multiple interpretations.

-> 2

ships, cars, and airplanes. These provocative articles became the chapters 01 the book Vers une architecture

Purist forms and urban compositions

(Toward an

Architecture; 1923) 143, a manilesto that celebrated mechanization, affirmed the necessity 01 using "regulating lines" to propor-

In 1913, in his book Les peintres cubistes, Guillaume Apollinaire

tion buildings, and advised the study 01 ancient and Baroque

challenged architects to reclaim the torch 01 innovation lrom art-

architecture in order to absorb the "Iesson 01 Rome." .• 7 The

ists and to "construct with sublime intentions." .• 3 In 1917 a lellow

impact 01 Le Corbusier's writings was reinlorced by the power 01

poet, Pierre Reverdy, published an essay by yet another poet Paul

his theoretical projects. His Contemporary

Dermée in the lirst issue 01 his periodical Nord-Sud (North-South).

Inhabitants, exhibited at the Salon d'Automne (1922), and his Plan

In it Dermée wrote, "Alter a period 01 exuberance and toree must

Voisin lor Paris 144, shown at the Exposition Internationale des

lollow a period 01 organization, 01 arrangement,

Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition

is to say, a classic age."

-> 4

01 science - that

Such calls to order were heard all the

City lor Three Million

01 Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, 1925), described a new

way to the Netherlands and Russia, and they were also picked

metropolitan organism crisscrossed

up by Le Corbusier (still known at this time as Charles-Édouard

by the glass towers 01 a "city 01 business" - a capitalist version 01

Jeanneret) and the painter Amédée Ozenlant. In 1920, together

Taut's Stadtkrone. Le Corbusier surrounded the city with redent

with Dermée, Jeanneret and Ozenlant lounded L'Esprit nouveau

housing inspired by Euqene Hénard and with immeuble-villas

(The New Spirit), a multidisciplinary journal that served as the

(villa apartments) consisting 01 double-height

major platform lor their theories and critiques until 1925.

individual gardens, creating a radically new urban landscape.

Chapter 10

I

Return to arder in Paris

by highways and dominated

dwellings with

DES YEUX QUI ~E VOIENT PAS",

11

LES AVIONS 143

Page from Vers une architecture

an Architecture),

145

Le Corbusier,

La Roche House, Le Corbusier

(Towards

144

Plan Voisin, project, Le Corbusier,

Paris, France, 1925

1923

and Pierre Jeanneret,

Paris, France, 1923-4

124

I

125

s N

E

POLYCHROMIE

LE CORBUSIER OUARTIERS

ET P. JEANNERET

MODERNES FRUGES. A PESSAC-BORDEAUX 15

• 1927

DES MURS EXTÉRIEURS

146

Workers' Houses

Ouartiers --S

modernes

Corbusier

Frugés),

and Pierre Jeanneret,

Jessac, France, 1924-6

147

Stein/de Monzie House, Le Corbusier

and Pierre Jeanneret,

skeletal system and the Maison Citrohan three-story

Le Corbusier and the modern house

the double-height During this period Le Corbusier

layout;

living room 01 the lalter was inspired by Paris

artists' studios, For the Parisian elite he designed large houses,

injected the latest develop-

ments in painting into two domestic

Garches, France, 1926-7

the most complex 01which was built in the suburb of Garches

projects: a studio lor

Ozenlant (1922-3) and, particularly, a house lor the Basel-

lar Michael Stein (brother 01 the writer Gertrude Stein), his wife

born banker Raoul La Roche (1923-4) 145. In the lalter he

Sarah Stein, and Gabrielle de Monzie (1926-7)

radically modified his design alter seeing an exhibition 01 archi-

house's interplay 01 planar elements and cylindrical

lecture by the De Stijl group at a Paris gallery, which caused

seems to transpose the geometry 01 Purist paintings into space,

im to reconfigure the conventional on the facade as a composition walls.

-78

Inside, he conceived

promenade processions

architecturale,

arrangement

as a

promenade

lines" 01 the lacade draw on the ancient

Colin Rowe found another precedent, detecting

a sirnilarity between the proportions

01 the villa's plan and those

01 Palladio's villas, which Le Carbusier knew well,

in ancient Greece that Auguste

The

stairwells

of the golden section. Twenty years later, the

architect-critic

of

-710

Le

The weekend house that Le Corbusier built in 1929-31 far Pierre

governs the entire interior 01 the house

Savoye, a client in the insurance business, in Poissy, near Paris,

Choisy had recounted in his 1899 Histoire de I'architecture. Carbusier's

proportions

01 opaque planes and glass the house's circulation

inspired by the descriptions

on tfie Acropolis

while the "regulating

of windows

147, -79

from the entrance hall to the painting gallery, which he hung

is one 01 the canonical

with Cubist canvases that he purchased

villa sits in the middle 01 a meadow like a Ilying machine that

lor La Roche at sales

01 the Kahnweiler and Uhde collections. Around the same time,

buildings of the twentieth century, The

has just barely touched down, The boxlike structure leatures three

he built a home tor.his parents in the Swiss village 01 Corseaux

levels interconnected

on the shore 01 Lake Geneva (1923-6), A single horizontal win-

erctiitecturete.

dow provides this modest dwelling with a view 01 the moun-

through which automobiles

inside the residence differs Irom the chiaroscuro

pilotis (stilts),

could slip in and out, and the top-

floor solarium is the main level, an L-shaped Iloor built around a

ains and access to the light 01 the lake. The unshadowed luminosity

by a ramp that guides the promenade

Wedged between the ground-Iloor

01

patio and illuminated by a horizontal strip 01 windows overlook-

typical interiors just as the brightness of lactories differs lrom

ing the landscape, The vast living room is basically doubled

the hall-light 01 churches.

surface by the patio, while the bedrooms and bathroom echo

Despite his tireless courting 01 automobile

and aviation industri-

the Iloor plans 01 eighteenth-century

alists, Le Corbusier, who established a prolessional partnership

These houses demonstrated

with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret in 1922, succeeded

Corbusier

in build-

summed

Paris apartments.

the "Five Points" with which Le

up his contribution

to a new architecture

ing only a single workers' housing complex. 146 This was real-

1927, alluding transparently

ized in 1924-6 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, lor the industrialist

pilotis, freeing up the ground plane; rool terrace, affording

Henri Fruqes. Here he brought together the theoretical

sunlight and commLinion

he had been working on lor ten years, inciuding

models

the Dom-ino

ing the "paralyzed

in

to Vignola's live classical

in

orders:

with the skyline; Iree plan, replac-

plan" 01 load-bearing

structures;

ribbon

126

I

127

148

League 01 Nations competition

Geneva, Switzerland,

project, Le Corbusier

and Pierre Jeanneret,

1927

window, offering horizontal vistas; and Iree lacade, whose openings

were no longer dependent

mechanics. reinlorced

on traditional

AII these points were made possible concrete.

149

Centrosoyuz

Le Corbusier

structural by the use 01

(Central Union 01 Consumer

and Pierre Jeanneret,

Cooperatives),

ground floor punctuated by pilotis. As in his League 01 Nations project, the building combined with orthogonal

a curvilinear auditorium volume

office wings. But the innovative project - which

included a lorerunner 01 central air conditioning

-> 11

.~

Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1928-36

based on a

system 01 "neutralizing walls" and "exact respiration" - was too

Grand vessels in Paris and Geneva

technically

But domestic programs did not satisly Le Corbusier's ambitions;

shortages caused the building's construction many years. -> t4

he aimed for more important commissions. 1927 competition in Geneva

148

tor the headquarters

His lailure to win the

01the League 01 Nations

was a personal trauma. His project elevated the

advanced tor the Soviet Union at this date. Material to drag on tor

In the meantime, the Salvation Army commissioned

Le Corbusier

to design its City 01 Reluge in Paris. Realized in 1929-31, the building is a large concrete vessel whose purpose is to house

principie 01 pilotis and terraces to the scale 01 a grand pub-

the homeless. With this project, Le Corbusier was linally able

lic edilice, making the site seem to Ilow beneath the building

to incorporate

and merge with the Alpine landscape.

ture: he placed the apartment 01 the project's American patron,

ity campaign

-> 12

Despite the public-

mounted by his Iriends throughout

Europe to pro-

his lascination

Winaretta Singer-Polignac,

with ships into his architec-

at the top 01 the building and

test the rejection 01 his project, the conservative jury remained

arranged the communal spaces on the ground Iloor like the

unswayed. Le Corbusier was also thwarted in his efforts to erect

lirst-class

a Mundanéum,

piration" system ter circulating air was rendered. totally ineffec-

or World City, in Geneva; a cultural complex in

lounges of a transatlantic

liner. Though his "exact res-

the spirit 01 Hendrik Christian Andersen's World City, the project

tual by the lack of any device to extract the used air Irom the

was designed lor the philanthropist Paul Otlet using a plan based

building, the Salvation Army hostel remained a didactic exam-

on the golden section. Le Corbusier's proportions and his ziggurat-shaped

invocation 01 classical

pie 01 Le Corbusier's

museum - to be the cen-

did another important

terpiece 01 the project - spurred attacks Irom radical architects

precepts 01 large-scale realization

construction.

So

in Paris 01 this period, the

Swiss Pavilion at the Cité Universitaire (1929-33).

like the Russian El Lissitzky. Lissitzky's criticism 01 Le Corbusier's excessive historicism and monumentality

was echoed by the

Perret and the "sovereign shelter"

Prague critic Karel Teige, who scorned the "puzzling, archaic impression"

made by this "metaphysical

architecture."

-> 13

No other architect on the Paris scene was able to scandal-

Nonetheless, it was in Moscow that Le Corbusier won his lirst

ize people with innovations as much as Le Corbusier, although

major commission,

others tried. In a city where architects Irequently lormulated

headquarters

tor the Centrosoyuz (1928-36)

149, the

01 the Central Union 01 Consumer Cooperatives.

and implemented

their modern ideals in direct competition

Here he greatly amplilied the principie 01 the promenade

with one another, there was no such thing as a united front.

architecturale,

Le Corbusier's

Chapter 10

I

designing

ramps that rose six stories above a

Return to arder in Paris

mentor, Auguste Perret, opposed the younger

Pavilion 01 L'Esprit nouveau, Le Corbusier and

151

::;ere Jeanneret, Paris, Franee, 1924-5

Study lor a Freneh Embassy, projeet, Pierre

Chareau, Paris, Franee, 1925 152

Cortot Hall, École Normale de Musique,

Auguste

architect's use of the ribbon window, insisting that only "the

Perret, Paris, Franee, 1928-9

Paris Art Deco

ertical window Irames man [and] agrees with his silhou-' S." -> 15 In Le Raincy, east of Paris, Perret built Notre-Dame

The 1925 exposition

::e la Consolation (1922)

build his Pavilion 01 L'Esprit nouveau.

153,

a church commemorating

World

ar I fighters. Its vaulted nave of reinforced concrete he Id up

ramas 01 his Ville Contemporaine

slender columns is illuminated by walls of concrete-Iramed staíned glass. Perret's application

gave Le Corbusier the opportun ity to

signilicantly,

of methods developed lor

In it he displayed

150

dio-

and Plan Voisin and, most

a unit of his immeuble-villas

furniture bought Irom manufacturers'

outfitted with typical

catalogs and a prototype

"actories and other secular structures to a religious edifice

of his standard cabinets. The pavilion was an implicit critique

caused critics to describe it as "the holy chapel of reinforced

of the program 01 the exposition, whose directors, Charles

:::oncrete" and scorn it as a vulgar "prayer hangar." At the time,

Plumet and Louis Bonnier, sought to reassert French suprem-

::lerret's thinking was close to that of the poet Paul Valéry, whose

acy in the applied arts in the face of prewar competition

Socratic dialogue Eupalinos, ou I'architecte

Germany. The latter's belated invitation to participate

(Eupalinos, or the

Architect; 1921), suggested a revived classicism with national-

tacto exclusion .

. t accents.

Organized by the Union centrale des arts décoratils

-> 16

monumentality

Using the concrete skeleton to emulate Greek in his public commissions,

Perret tirelessly

Société des artistes décorateurs,

sought to implement his delinition 01 the large building as "a its unity the variety 01 organs necessary to fulfill its lunction."

->

designed the "ensembles" 17

In 1924 Perret opened an off-site studio 01 the École des Beaux-

rts near the Bois de Boulogne. It was known as the Palais de Bois (Wood Palace). Contradicting e encouraged

the school's official stance,

his followers - including

Paul Nelson, Ernb

ment stores as well as to theinterior

of finishes. In 1925 he designed

he Exposition Internationale Modernes;

the theater at

des Arts Oécoratifs et Industriels

its three-part stage recalled the one built by Henry

van de Velde in Cologne eleven years before. Next he built the stunning Cortot Hall (1928-9)

152,

a dizzyingly steep concert hall

18

Ruhlmann and

Two designers stood

cautiously modern: Francis Jourdain, who carefully created unadorned

lerentiation

->

out Irom the crowd for work that was as elegant as it was

allordable

by the interplay of light and shadow and the dif-

with depart-

designers who merged art

the team 01 Louis Süe and André Mare.

an architecture expressive

interior decorators who

01 furniture associated

and commerce. They included Émile-Jacques

Goldlinger, Oscar Nitzchké, and Denis Honegger - to practice leaturing exposed structural elements made

and the

or SAD, the 1925 exposition

gave pride of place to the successful

ressel, a framework, a sovereign shelter capable of housing in

from

was a de

interiors that were in the spirit 01 Adolf Loos but to all

154;

and Pierre Chareau, whose convertible fur-

niture pieces - notably his cylindrical

desk-bookshelf

for the

SAD pavilion's exhibit "A French Embassy"

151 -

the static nature of the main contributions.

In the same pavilion

Robert (Rob) Mallet-Stevens

contrasted with

designed a lobby with a linear,

abstract geometry that was similar in spirit to his Tourism Pavilion, also at the exposition. Four years later, he, Jourdain,

that, by using concrete cantilevers, he was able to squeeze into

and Chareau were among the founders of the Union des

the middle of a tight Paris block.

artistes modernes, or UAM, a group devoted to applying the

128

I

129

153

Notre-Dame

de la Consolation,

Auguste Perret, Le Raincy, France, 1922

J

130

I

131

.-Gl11 ~

:

-

,

-

- ~

Smoking

.

\

IJ

l.

154

-'

Room lar a French Embassy, project, Francis Jourdain,

Paris,

155

Grand Hotel Métropole,

project, Henri Sauvage, Paris, France, 1928

France, 1925

radical modern aesthetic lavored by the elite to the needs 01 a

Jean Prouvé, were involved in building rue Mallet-Stevens. The

larger populace; it held its first exhibition in 1930.

construction site was headed by Gabriel Guevrekian, an Iranian

-> 19

One 01 the most prolific architects involved in the 1925 exhi-

architect 01 Armenian descent trained in Vienna.

bition was Henri Sauvage, who created several pavilions for department

In 1923 Mallet-Stevens began working on a large villa in Hyeres

stores. Sauvage had worked on the development

of

lor the art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles

156,

who

setback terraced buildings in Paris since before the war. After

in 1930 would linance Jean Cocteau's lilm Blood of a Poet and

the war he built both a popular version - a low-income

Luis Buñuel's L'age d'or. For this house, devoted to pleasure

resi-

dence on Rue des Amiraux (1922), with a swimming pool at

and entertainment, he designed a cubic structure hovering above

its center - and a bourgeois version called the Studio Building

the city and extended by terraces. He wrote: "It is no longer just

(1926), inspired by ocean liners. He also designed a megaloma-

some moldings that catch the light, it is the entire lacade. The

niac version for a hotel on the bank of the Seine (1928)

architect sculpts an enormous block, the house."

155.

In

-> 21

Erected

Nantes, Sauvage built the imposing glass structure of the Decré

in sections between 1924 and 1928, the house included a room

Department Sto re (1931, bombed 1944). He also worked on

devoted to flowers, the design 01which was entrusted to Theo

the extension of the Samaritaine Department Store (1928, with

van Doesburg, and it overlooked a Cubist-inspired

Frantz Jourdain) in Paris, where he took a less radical approach

den by Guevrekian. In 1929 the American artist Man Ray declared

since he had to comply with urban-planning

that the "cubic lorms" 01the cháteau "brought to mind the title 01

regulations.

a poem by Mallarmé."

Mallet-Stevens,

-> 22

triangular gar-

He used it as the setting tor his dis-

turbing film Les mystéres du chateau du Dé (TheMysteries

or elegant modernism

01the

Cháteau of Dice), a tableau vivant pertormed by masked guests. In 1927 Robert Mallet-Stevens received a unique honor for a liv-

Having designed the sets for Marcel L'Herbier's L'inhumaine (The

ing architect: he had a Paris street named after him.

Inhuman Woman; 1923-4)

->

20

He would

build six houses on the new Rue Mallet-Stevens (1926-7) His own, featuring a double-height

158.

reception room, stands at the

157,

a lilm intended to promote

French lashion abroad, Mallet-Stevens

began building a cas-

tle in Mézy for the couturier Paul Poiret (1921-3), but the project

entry to the street. Next to it is the studio and residence 01 sculp-

was never completed.

tors Jan and Joel Martel, whose quarters are clustered around

on Rue Marbeul (1927), which has a structure supported

the vertical cylinder of a staircase that leads to a belvedere topped

concrete arches reminiscent 01 those in Perret's Théátre

by a circular "lid." Also on the street is a town house with a 150-

Champs-Élysées,

In Paris he built the Alfa Romeo Garage by des

and an apartment building on Rue Méchain

seat screening room, built lor the lilm director Eric Allatini, and a

(1928-9), which is a kind of vertical extrusion of the Rue Mallet-

house tor Madame Reilenberg, a pianist, featuring open living

Stevens massing system. His largest project was a casino in

spaces extended by terraces, which offer a lull panorama of the

Saint-Jean de Luz on the Basque coast (1927-8), a large rein-

other cubistic houses on the block. Many artists and craftsmen,

forced-concrete

including the glass artist Louis Barillet and the young ironsmith

first seen at the 1925 exposition.

Chapter 10

I

Return to order in Paris

building with interiors that make use of motifs

56

Villa de Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens,

Hyeres, France, 1923-8

157

L'inhumaine

film set, Robert Mallet-Stevens,

1923-4,

for Marcel ~ Herbier (director) 159 ~

Houses on Rue Mallet-Stevens,

Robert M'allet-Stevens,

Hotel Nord-Sud,

André l.urcat, Calvi, France, 1929-30

Paris, France, 1926-7

132

I

133

161

Apartment

Roux-Spilz,

160

E 1027, Eileen Gray, Roquebrune

Cap-Martin,

Building,

Michel

Paris, France, 1925-8

France, 1929

The extent of French modernism

lor the Radical-Socialist mayor 01 Lyons, Édouard Herriot. ..,24 Alter completing the La Mouche Cattle Market and Slaughterhouse

Having made his reputation as a member 01 Mallet-Stevens's

(1906-14), which leatured a great market hall constructed 01 steel

circle, Gabriel Guevrekian received a commission through the

trusses and inspired by the Galerie des Machines, Garnier contin-

painter Sonia Delaunay to design a town house lor the couturier

ued his work in Lyons with the États-Unis low-income housing

Jacques Heim in Neuilly (1927), reinlorcing the signilicant link

development (1921-34), a suburban complex 01 airy concrete

between architecture and lashion. No less close to Mallet-Stevens

blocks, and the Grange-Blanche

was the engineer and architect Georges-Henri Pingusson, who

pavilions connected by a network 01 underground passages. The

remodelled the lacade and neo n marquee 01 the Théátre des

structural clarity 01 Garnier's work was increasingly inllected by

hospital (1910-34), a series 01

Menus-Plaisirs (1926-9) and built the Paul Arrighi power plant in

cla,ssical nostalgia, however. A more monumental aspect 01 his

Vitry-sur-Seine (1926-32), a rare French example 01 modern aes-

work was visible in his many designs lor memorials, while Mediter-

thetics intersecting with a lull-Iledged industrial programo

ranean accents surlaced in his more intimate patio houses.

At the initiative 01 his brother Jean, at that time a painter with ties to

Trained in Lyons as part 01 Garnier's circle, Michel Roux-Spitz com-

Surrealism, André Lurcat built the Villa Seurat (1925-7), an alley 01

bined the smooth geometry 01 the moderns with more static

artist studios in Paris begun two years belore Rue Mallet-Stevens.

modes 01 composition in his Paris apartment buildings, such as

The scheme consists 01 a sequence 01 six buildings made 01 cubic

the ones on Rue Guynemer (1925-8)

volumes with corner window openings. There are clear Loosian

(1930-1). In the latter he incorporated leatures borrowed Irom

accents and above all a play with the continuity 01 the street wall.

161

and Avenue Henri Martin

. naval architecture, with a certain heaviness. Poi Abraham and

Across lrom Parc Montsouris, l.urcat built a house lor the painter

Charles Siclis provided their own interpretations, whether more tec-

Walter Guggenbühl (1927). A cube set on a trapezoidal base

tonic or more spectacular, 01 the passion lor structural expression

extended by a bow window and a pergola, its simplilied geometry

that had spread in the 1920s. Eileen Gray, an Irish designer active

and the repetitive conliguration 01 openings on its planar surlaces

in Paris, was the only woman to see her contribution acknowl-

had nothing to do with the underlying structural skeleton. This led

edged, with E 1027 (1929), 160a villa she built on the Riviera tor

the critic Marie Dormoy justly to contrast turcat's "Iake concrete" to

and with Jean Badovici, the editor 01 L'Architecture vivante. While

Perret's use 01 the material. ..,23 The purest expression 01 l.urcat's

the end 01 the decade saw an international alliance 01 radical

approach may be seen in the linear and prismatic architecture 01

architects throughout Europe, French architecture seemed to have

the small Hotel Nord-Sud (1929-30)

two laces. The lirst was embodied in the experimental, sometimes

159,

near the Corsican city 01

Calvi, which resembles a ship run aground on a reef.

provocative work that came out 01 the circle around Le Corbusier.

While the most radical laction 01 French architecture managed to

Also innovative but more commercial, the second lace, initially

consolidate its positions during the 1920s, it occupied a small lield.

revealed in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Oécoratits et

Large public and private projects continued to be awarded to more

Industriels Modernes, produced reverberations that would be lelt in

conservative lirms. One notable exception was Tony Garnier's work

North America and Britain as well as in colonial settings.

Chapter 10 [ Return lO order in Paris

Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness to elementarism

By the final months of World War I there were already con-

well developed, although they had a longstanding

flicting attempts to overthrow the dominant forces in art and

"machine art" announced by Vladimir Tatlin's first eonstructions in

architecture. Among the new movements,

Expressionism

interest in the

had

Russia. From Berlin, Dada seattered to Cologne with Arp and Max

roots in prewar Europe, but other contenders, which appeared

Ernst, and to Hanover with Kurt Schwitters, until Pieabia and Tzara

even before the German surrender, lacked such antecedents,

linally shifted the movement's eenter 01 gravity to Paris, where it

instead emerging from the deep crisis provoked by battles

led to the birth 01 Surrealism in 1924. The legaey 01these intense

among intellectuals

years was a vigorous impulse to challenge the·traditional eatego-

and artists.

ries 01 art and architecture. It would have widespread and lasting effeets, espeeially in Weimar Germany. The network connect-

The Dada blast

ing the members of the Dada galaxy to architectural movements Dada, the most destructive of these movements, had its moment

branched out across the map; artists and architects at the edges

between 1915 and 1923. It was characterized by the subversion

01the movement went on to play important roles in less radical

01traditional representation, a prelerence tor the new technique

groups like the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and the German Werkbund.

01 montage, and a bluntly asserted nihilism. A nomadic phenomenon that changed aceording to its setting, it was lounded in

The new forms of De Stijl

Zurich, then gravitated to New York and Germany, and linally settled in Paris ..•

1

The evenings organized at Zurieh's Cabaret

In the Netherlands,

the Expressionism

01 the Amsterdam

Voltaire by the Germans Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, and Richard

School was still the dominant force. But beginning

Huelsenbeck; the Alsatian Hans (Jean) Arp; and the Romanians

a radical movement took shape under the name De Stijl, a

Tristan Tzara and Mareel Janco were the opening act of a eollee-

term that may be traced back to both Gottfried Semper's trea-

tive revolt against the very concept 01art. The arrival 01 Francis

ti se Der Stil (Style) and Viollet-Ie-Duc's

Picabia and Marcel Duchamp in New York marked another dis-

define "the" style for modern architecture

tinctive Dada phase, particularly alter they met Man Ray. Picabia's

opposed

to choosing

in 1916

call to architects to and eonstruction

among a range 01 competing

collages 01 mechanical parts and Duehamp's Fountain, a uri-

styles). Hendrik Petrus Berlage advanced

nal that served as a "ready-made"

the Dutch context. De Stijl never became a structured

art objeet, exhibited in 1917,

(as

historical

both these ideas in move-

signaled the Dadaists' interest in anonymous production and

ment; its unstable and dynamic sphere 01 inlluenee was een-

maehines, which they derisively parodied and destroyed.

tered around a monthly journal and a slogan. This irregularity

Leaving Zurieh for Berlin, Ball and Huelsenbeck expanded their

seemed to contradict

aetivities alter meeting George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann

nect visual experience

162,

its main objective: for the artist to conto metaphysical

ideas, thereby creating

and John Heartfield, combining an ironic play on the icons 01

harmonic works 01 art and reclaiming

a central place in soci-

American eivilization with an exploration 01 photomontage tech-

ety. The search for a nieuwe beelding

or neue Gestaltung

niques. The Dadaists' involvement with architeeture was not

Neo-Plasticism

Chapter 11

I

Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness

to elementarism

oía highly metaphysical

- a

order - was at odds

164 ~

Les Architectes

du Groupe

De Stij/, Theo van Doesburg Comelis

and

van Eesteren exhibition,

Galerie de I'effort moderne,

Paris,

France, 1923

162

Tatlin at Home, Raoul Hausmann,

Germany

Pavilion (Barcelona

1920

Pavilion), Lúdwig Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona,

Spain, 1929, rebuilt 1983-6

138

I

139

·1.-

.

, 1

I

11.

.-I I

I

165

Factory, project, J. J. P. Oud, Pomerand,

Netherlands,

1919

with Dada's biting irony. The members 01 the De Stijl circle

In purely architectural

ultimately aspired to positive creation, even if they tirst had to

distinct palhs, with their production taking very different shapes.

go through a phase 01 deslroying

Van Doesburg was more theoretical and experimental, while

conventions.

The initial issues 01 the journal De Stijl appeared in mid-1917 in

terms, the lounders 01 De Stijl lollowed

Oud, Wils, and Gerrit Rietveld, an associate 01 the group begin-

Leiden under the editorship 01 the painter Theo van Doesburg.

ning in 1919, were more prolessionally

Contributors

experimented

included the painters Piel Mondrian, Barl van der

in three dimensions,

oriented. Mondrian also

notably on the interior 01 his

Leck, and Gino Severini; the architecl J. J. P. Oud; and Vilmos

studio on Rue du Départ in Paris (1921-36)

Huszár, who designed Ihe journal's lago. The group Ihat assem-

ject lar the Salan de Madame B. in Dresden (1926).

bled around De Stijl had already shared several experiences.

Van Doesburg's

Van der Leck had collaborated

1917 and developed

with Berlage in building the Sint

involvement in architectural

166

and on his pro-

projects began in

with the interior 01 the De Ligt House in

Huberlus Hunling Lodge in Hondersloo lar Ihe Krbller-Müller

Katwijk (1919), lurnished by Rietveld. Van Doesburg told Oud that

lamily (19J9). Van Doesburg and Oud had collaborated

the house was Ha painting in three dimensions."

on Ihe

.• 4 In 1923 he

creation 01 a colorful, rhylhmic interior lar the De Vonk Vacation

collaborated

House in Noordwijkerhout

whom he had met in Weimar, on the design 01 a concourse

(1917) and on the Allegonda Villa

with the young architect Cornelis van Eesteren,

lar the University 01 Amsterdam

in Katwijk aan Zee (1917). Oud and Van Doesburg later went

(1923). The stained-glass

ceil-

their separale ways lollowing disputes over a project lar the

ing and the Ilat planes 01 colors painted on the walls conllicted

Spangen Low-Income

with the orthogonal

Housing Development

in Rotterdam,

where the architect insisted on respecting economic that the painter could not tolerate.

limitations

geometry 01the plan, as il the chromatic

and the spatial aspects 01 the project were totally unconnected. He al so realized in collaboration

-> 2

with Van Eesteren three mod-

Van Doesburg and Jan Wils together built the De Lange House

els shown in October and November

in Alkmaar (1916-17), and Huszár and P. J. C. Klaarhamer, a

Les Architectes

Iriend 01 Berlage, joined efforts on the De Arendshoeve

moderne in Paris 164. This exhibilion

House

1923 at the exhibition

du Groupe De Stijl at the Galerie de I'efforl marked a crucial turning

in Voorburg (1916-19). During this initial phase, each member

point in postwar architecture. The models were genuine three-

01 De Stijl sought to establish his place in a collective endeavor.

dimensional

But starting in 1921, each participant began trying to achieve his

horizontal planes 01 color entirely dispensed with conventional

own synthesis 01 painting, sculpture, and architecture.

notions 01 the window. The least radical 01the three was a town

new phase, Van Doesburg became so domineering

-> 3

In this

that by the

objects in their own right, but their vertical and

house project supposedly

intended lar Léonce Rosenberg, the

time Mondrian and Oud left the group, he had totally isolated

gallery's owner, which had a realistic-Iooking

himsell. Nonetheless,

ond model, a project lar an artist's house, had welded-Iead

work by associating

he was able to establish a European netwith El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, and

he lived lar a period in Weimar, where he was unsuccesslul

I

Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness

trames and planar color surlaces and recalled Mondrian's painted compositions

with black lines. The third, a project lar

a private house 169, was the most complex, and provided the

securing a teaching position at the Bauhaus.

Chapter 11

in

setting. The sec-

to elementarism

166

Mondrian

Studio, Piet Mondrian,

Paris, France, 1921-36

167

The Aubette Cinema and Dance Hall, Theo van Doesburg,

France, 1926-8. 168 ~

basis for Van Doesburg's subsequent "counter-constructions,"

in

recontruction

Schróder

1990-4

House, Gerrit Rietveld, Utrecht, Netherlands,

elements were based upon orthogonal

which "plane, line, and mass [were] freely arranged in a three-

had to accommodate

dimensional

to a counter-composition

relationship." .• 5 The models offered as synthetic a

representation

of three-dimensional

space as the axonometrics

Strasbourg,

and 2006-8 1924

relationships, this room

itself to a diagonal arrangement

of colors,

which, by its nature, was to resist all

the tensions of architecture .... If I were asked what I had in

drawn by Auguste Choisy in his 1899 Histoire de /'architecture.

mind when I constructed

They had a strong impact on architects in Paris like Robert

oppose to the material room in three dimensions

Mallet-Stevens

terial and pictorial, diagonal space." ..•7 The originality of Van

and Le Corbusier. In turn, De. Stijl annexed the

French architects'

work in the issue of its journal published

1927 commemorating

in

the group's tenth anniversary.

this room, I should be able to reply: to a superma-

Doesburg's design, which was executed by Oscar Nitzchké and Denis Honegger, two students of Perret, was reinforced by com-

On the occasion of the 1923 exhibition, Van Doesburg attempted

parisons with the undulating forms of Jean Arp's dance hall in

to provide a theoretical

the Aubette's cellar and Sophie Taueber-Arp's two-dimensional

context for his work with a manifesto

entitled "Vers une construction

collective"

(Toward a Collective

work in its tearoom. Van Doesburg ventured into the realm of

Construction). Published the following year, it declared: "The idea

urban planning with his City of Circulation

that art is an illusion divorced from real life must be abandoned.

complex of square eleven-story towers supported

The word 'Art' means nothing to usoWe demand that it be

ners by sturdy piers that opened the ground level to automobiles.

replaced by the construction

of our environment

according

to

creative laws derived from well-defined

principies. These laws,

which are akin to those of economics,

mathematics, technology,

hygiene, and so forth, encourage a new plastic unity." ..•6

project (1924-9), a at their cor-

Finally, with the help of the young Dutch architect Abraham Elzas, he built his own house-studio of Paris (1927-30). to accommodate

in Meudon Val-Fleury, south

Both in its details and in the use of pilotis a small car, it was closer to Le Corbusier's

villas than to his own more geometric

work of 1923. A hyper-

active figure, Van Doesburg used numerous pseudonyms

Van Doesburg builds

to

cloak his identity, which allowed him both to put forward quasiThe only large-scale the Aubette

167,

project realized by Van Doesburg was

Kléber in Strasbourg composition

(1926-8, resto red 2008). The diagonal

of his addition totally upturned the orthogonality

Jacques-Francois

Constructivist ideas and to indulge in Dadaist games. He founded

a dance hall, cinema, and restaurant on Place

the Concrete Art movement and later participated lishing the Abstraction-Création

of

in estab-

group, and he continued to pur-

sue a central role on the European scene until he died in 1931.

Blondel's existing building of 1778. The dis-

connection

intensified by the use of color in the University of

Amsterdam

concourse

characterized

the project in Strasbourg

Oud and Rietveld, from furniture to house design

as well. As Van Doesburg asserted, the principie of diagonal "counter-construction"

called into question the horizontality

and verticality of the architectural

box: "Since the architectonic

At the Paris exhibition of 1923, Oud showed his Purmerend Factory (1919)

165,

a project that dated from the early, more

142

I

143

170

Housing Development,

Holland, Nelherlands,

J. J. P. Oud, Hoek van

1924-7 171

Kielhoek

Rotterdam, 172

Schrbder

Netherlands,

169

Private House, project, Theo van Doesburg

Housing Development,

Netherlands,

J. J. P. Oud,

1925-9

House, Gerrit Rietveld, Utrecht,

1924, axonometic

01 the second Iloor

and

Cornelis van Eesteren, 1923

collective phase of De Stijl and contained echoes of Frank Lloyd

inlinitely expanded on all sides. Tellingly, the church builtin

Wright. In his essay "Kunst en machine" (Art and Machine;

tor the development

1917), Oud denounced

"romantic" approaches,

describing

style

Other architects

was a rigidly rectangular, factory-like

1929 box.

explored ideas similar to those ol-De Stijl.

as the result of two different trends: "the one, the technically

Robert van't Hoff was the most literal of the many Dutch archi-

industrial, which one might call the positive trend, aims at the

tects who used a vocabulary derived from Frank Lloyd Wright's

aesthetic representation

of products of a technical

ingenuity.

houses, notably in his Henny House in Huis ter Heide (1915-19),

The second, which one might, in comparison, call the negative

where he emulated a Prairie House exterior. Wright's hold on

trend (although it is equally positive in its expression!) - i.e., art -

the imagination 01 Dutch architects was equally evident in Wils's

aims to arrive at objectivity by reduction (abstraction). The unity

design for the De Dubbele Sleutel (The Double Key) Restaurant

of these two trends forms the essence of the new style."

(1918), where the exterior of the building clearly expressed its

-> 8

After a series of visually powerful theoretical projects, such as his

interior volumes. The sculptural aspects 01 Wils's Papaverhof

seaside apartments of 1917, Oud built several significant hous-

Residential Development (1919-22) in The Hague contrasted

ing developments. In the design of the Oud-Mathenesse

with the more industrial leanings of Oud's developments.

Garden

Suburb in Rotterdam (1922-3) he had to tollow existing design

The cabinetmaker

guidelines, and his contribution was limited to selecting color

ies of Frank Lloyd Wright's furniture for Robert van't Hoff, was

schemes for the doors. Only in the superintendent's

house, with

its vivid colors and orthogonal shapes, was he able to implement

Gerrit Rietveld, who had briefly made cop-

involved with De Stijl's activities lrom the beginning.

He con-

ceived lurniture prototypes composed of basic shapes - wood

the ideal of formal balance prescribed by De Stijl. Two years later

planes and standard proliles - sliced in ways that visually

Oud's facade for the Café De Unie (1925, bombed 1940) brought

extended the volume 01the objects. His most provocative piece

the new aesthetic to the very heart of Rotterdam.

frorn this period was the Red and Blue Armchair 011918, which

With his next housing developments,

Oud introduced

new ele-

he later explairíed "was made to the end of showing that a thing

ments - for instance, the treatment of his buildings' exterior walls

01 beauty, e.g., a spatial object, could be made 01 nothing but

simply as skin rather than as load-bearing

straight, machined materials."

structures. His Hoek

van Holland Housing Development (1924-7)

170

->

9

Rietveld, who rejected the inhibiting patronage 01 Van Doesburg,

is the most

Iyrical. Built near the estuary of the Maas River, the develop-

gave the most convincing

ment has rounded end-units, and the uniform line of balconies

a synthesis of the arts with his Schrbder House (1924)

reflects Oud's interpretation

in Utrecht. Located at the end 01 a row 01 banal brick buildings,

of Le Corbusier's

"reminder"

ocean liners. Though the Kiefhoek Development

about

(1925-9)

171

interpretation

of De Stijl's longing tor 168,172

the house plays with vertical and horizontal planes in three

in Rotterdam was lar larger, Oud treated it in a more elemen-

dimensions.

tal manner. He abandoned the symmetry still in use in Hoek van

each other. Sliding partitions make it possible to modily the floor

Holland, instead aligning the parallel rectangular blocks 01 the

plans of the two main levels, which are partly lit by a small sky-

two-story houses as if they formed part of a fabric that could be

light. The intersection

Chapter 11

I

Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: lrom subversiveness

to elementarism

Individually, the rooms are very small but llow into

of planes and linear elements and the

.c r-I T~ 1_' L.~

-174

Concrete

Office Building,

Berlin, Germany, 175

project, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,

1923

Otfice Building,

FriedrichstraBe

competition

project, Ludwig Mies van der

Rohe, Berlin, Germany, 1921

173

Brick Country House, project, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin, Germany, 1923

articulation 01 joints and railings make the house's interior

"Zur elementaren Gestaltung" (On Elemental Farm-Creatian) in G.

spaces as difficult to grasp from the inside as they are trorn the

One 01 the principal supporters 01 and contributors to G was

outside. Walls are no longer the single determining factor 01

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who published his theoretical pro-

space. Actually very compact, the house was not intended to be

ject tor a Concrete Office Building

174

in the same issue that

a manilesto tor an aesthetic reinterpretation 01 domestic lunc-

carried Van Doesburg's manilesto. It was accompanied

tions but rather, according to Rietveld, to create lormal clarity and

own manilesto "Bürohaus"

intensily the experience 01 space.

his theoretical positions, in which he declared that "Architecture

-> 10

Projects by the Vienna-

based artist and architect Friederich Kiesler, invited in 1923 to

by his

(Office Block), a lirst expression 01 will 01 the epoch," drawing an the

is the spatially apprehended

join De Stijl, seem to echo Rietveld's lurniture and to translorm

ideas 01 Berlage, the precursor he most admired, and Behrens,

it into broader, more inclusive spatial systems: the Leger- und

who had considered architecture the "rhythmic incorporation

Tragersystem, a flexible and independent hanging system lor

01 the spirit 01 the time."

gallery displays, and the Raumbühne, or space stage, were con-

invited Mies to participate in the De Stijl exhibiHon at the Galerie

(Exhibition 01

structed at the Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik

-> 13

de l'Effort moderne.

New Theater Technology) in Vienna in 1924; while the "City in

Beginning

Space" appeared at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts

projects. In a competition

Oécoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris.

on the FriedrichstraBe

-> 11

A lew months later, Van Doesburg

in 1921, Mies conceived

in Berlin, he submitted

glass prism with a triangular appeared between the Nether-

lands and Germany not only through his presence on the doorstep 01 the Bauhaus but also through his participation

in the

Congress 01 Revolutionary Artists held in Düsseldorl

in 1922.

There he lounded a short-lived "Constructivist together with Hans Richter and El Lissitzky. Richter, Lissitzky, and Werner Gráff Doesburg's

International"

-> 12

In July 1923

who had attended Van

lectures at the Bauhaus, published the lirst issue

to extend the glazing 01 the nearby train station

Berlin Dadaists had illustrated constructian

world and to pro pose an or objectivity, 01 con-

struction systems. Van Doesburg published

his own manilesto

Chapter 11 , Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness

to elementarism

in their journal - M.ies's project

sites. Access to the upper Iloors was pravided

by

a central elevatar care, while narrow canyons lined with glass allowed light to penetrate to the interior 01 the site. The transparent lacades revealing stacks 01 offices called to mind a ing in the competition.

based on the Sachlichkeit,

structure. A radi-

seemed to materialize Allred Stieglitz's phatos 01 Manhattan

beehive - a metapharical

Its program was to dis-

(260-loot)

cal response to New York's Flatiron Building - which the

(Materials tor Elemental Form-Creation). seminate images 01 the technological

plan. The angular volume con-

over the entirety 01 its 80-meter

01 the journal G, subtitled Material zur elementare Gestaltung

architecture

175

a design lor a

sisted entirely 01 a curtain wall, without base or cornice, which

Mies van der Rohe's theoretical projects Van Doesburg lorged a close connection

several iconoclastic

entry lar a glass affice building

-> 14

term Mies used toidentify In 1922 he elabarated

the build-

a secand

version 01 the project in which the angular lacades gave way to a more Iluid and sinuous outline, praised by critics lar its "Gothic power."

-> 15

177

176

Monument

to Karl Liebknecht

and Rosa Luxemburg,

Rohe, Berlin, Germany, 1926, demolished

Hermann Lange House, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Krefeld, Germany, 1928-9

Ludwig Mies van der

1935

Alter his Concrete Office project, which was an abstract inter-

Country House began to be palpable in this sequence of open

pretation of the palazzo block that Peter Behrens had built ear-

rooms resting on a podium and evoking the garden structures

lier for Mannesmann,

of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, which Mies admired. Its stone and

Mies conceived a concrete "Country

House" (1923), about which he would declare, "We know no

glass partitions defined a free-flowing

forms, only problems of construction."

distinct from the load-bearing

.• 16 The house extended

space and were clearly

steel frame - despite a few invis-

horizontally across the site and reflected Mies's awareness of

ible compromises.

Wright's houses. His Brick Country House 173, designed the

onyx, intended as a backdrop for the king of Spain's reception

same year, was more provocative. An assemblage

by German officials. In this space - unregulated

ments, the house consisted of orthogonal free-flowing

continuum.

of brick ele-

volumes joined in a

For Mies, this "series of spatial effects"

The dominant element was a wall of golden by any axial

system, open to diagonal views, and designed to accommodate visitors' movements - the only perceptible

symmetry was the

was the result of "the wall [Iosing) its enclosing character and

horizontal one between floor and ceiling, making the vertical

[serving) only to articulate the house organism." .• 17

space of the pavilion practically reversible ..•

Up to this point, Mies's only real commissions

were for bour-

geois houses, for which he employed a traditionalist

language.

18

The promise of a new type of domestic space first glimpsed in Barcelona was brought to fruition in the house of Fritz and Grete

He was able to impose more radical views upon his clients

Tugendhat (1928-30)

only alter 1925. Initially, he used brick in an aesthetic, expres-

on a hill overlooking the city, the house reproduced the fluid floor

sive way, as in the Wolf House in Guben and especially

in the

" Monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926) in Berlin, a sculptural interpretation

176

of a wall evoking the execu-

tion of the two Spartacist leaders. Beginning with his houses for the textile industrialists

Hermann Lange (1928-9)

177

and Josef

178,179

in Brno, Czechoslovakia.

Perched

plan of the Barcelona Pavilion, but this time areas had welldefined purposes, as if the partitions between rooms had been erased once the plan was completed. According to the critic Paul Westheim, Mies conceived the house as "a circulation route leading from room to room according to [the owners') style of living."

Esters (1928) in Krefeld, his use of brick ceased to be load

Westheim continued: "[T)he home must be considered entirely as

bearing. These two opulent hornes, whose facades brought to

a kind of business that, like any other business, is based on the

mind the factories of the neighboring

principie of an articulation of various functions. No room should

Ruhr region, had steel

structures, which made it possible to superimpose

very different

be isolated and cut off from the others. Even more, continuity

floor plans on two different levels: large rooms to display the

between the rooms is to be pursued. The entire space is to be

owners' collections

arranged organically, according to its envisaged uses." .• 19 As at

on the ground floor, bedrooms above.

Mies soon applied himself to a more radical annihilation

Barcelona, the living room, which overlooked the city, was backed

of traditional domestic space. The first building to undergo

with an onyx wall. The dining room was defined by a cylindrical

such treatment, the Germany Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona

partition of rosewood. In 1930, thanks to his very public success

International Exposition 163, did not have much of a program

in Barcelona, Mies was named director of the Bauhaus in Dessau,

beyond its ceremonial

where he would radically change the pedagogy of architecture.

Chapter 11

I

purpose. The latent fluidity of his Brick

Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness

to elementarism

·e '

T

L" 178,179

Tugendhat

House, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Brno, Czechoslovakia

e eco

{SCHOS

(Czech Republic),

S,

1928-30

150

I

151

Architectural education in turmoil

World War I had contradictory

effects on architectural

schools.

months. Even though Auguste Perret's atelier at the Palais de

A number of innovations shook them to their very core during

Bois was officially associated with the École des Beaux-Arts,

the 1920s, yet in most countries education

his students consistently received failing grades in the École's

conservative privileged

and the established

remained staunchly

centers did not relinquish their

position. At the same time, students in the postwar

project reviews and sornetirnes even had to disguise their affiliation with the atelier to have any chance of passing. In 1934

era moved more easily between schools, gravitating to the new

André Lurcat set up an autonomous

polarities represented

art historian Max Raphaél gave a few lectures, but this effort

by pedagogical

programs in Germany,

atelier, where the Marxist

Russia, and America, in search of learning that conveyed both

was also short lived ..•

the excitement of modern technologies

In the United States, where the teaching of architecture

and the energy of the

3

radical movements that had appeared in the wake of the war.

universally

based on the Beaux-Arts

The Beaux-Arts and the alternatives

attempts at modernization

was

model, teachers who had

been trained in Paris but were aware of new trends initiated in the early 1920s. Paul Philippe Cret,

who had been a student in Jean-Louis At the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the memorial to hun-

Pascal's atelier at the

Beaux-Arts, became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania

dreds of students who had died in the war served as a power-

in 1903, adjustinq .Julien-Azals Guadet's doctrine of composi-

fui reminder of the recent bloodbath. After the Allied victory, the

tion to modern programs. In 1927 Jean Labatut, one of Victor

school fell back on established

Laloux's former students, began teaching at the American surn-

routines,

180

and attempts at

renewal that had emerged before the war were shelved ..• Nonetheless, the school retained its worldwide

1

prestige for a

while, and, despite weaker enrollment by students from the

mer school in Fontainebleau,

France, which had been founded

by his master in 1923. The following year Labatut was hired to teach at Princeton University, where he would remain until the

United States, it continued to attract Latin Americans, including

1960s ..•

the Venezuelan Carlos Raúl Villanueva, and East Europeans like

tor at Fontainebleau,

4

Another former student of Laloux and an instrucJacques Carlu, started teaching at the

the Romanian Horia Creanqá, A reversal of sorts took place

Massachusetts

when French graduates,

there as head professor of architecture

including

Marcel Chappey, Robert

Camelot, and Raymond Lopez, received the Delano grants

Institute of Technology

in 1924 and remained until 1933. Jean-

Jacques Haffner, who had been at Harvard since 1922, was

created after the war by the American Institute of Architects to

appointed to Carlu's position in 1938.

draw the most brilliant young professionals to North America,

Yet by the mid-1920s, the French were beginning to lose their

thus inaugurating

a modern grand tour in which Chicago and

New York replaced Athens and Rome ..• In Paris, all alternatives

preeminence in American universities. The 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition

2

to the official mode of architectural

tia n of academic

brought new design concepts to the atteninstitutions. Eliel Saarinen, winner of the com-

training failed. The atelier opened by Robert Mallet-Stevens in

petition's second prize, was recruited by Emil Lorch to teach

1925 at the École Spéciale d'Architecture

at the University of Michigan Architecture

Chapter 12

I

Architectural

education

in turmoil

181

closed after a few

School in Ann Arbor.

180

Grand Prix de Rome project, École des Beaux-Arts,

Bernard Zehrfuss, 1939

181

Le Corbusier,

Robert Mallet-Stevens

École Spéciale d'Architecture,

There he implemented

a new curriculum

colleague, Knud Lonberg-Holm,

with his Danish

and Auguste Perret at the

Paris, France, c. 1939

ultimate, if distant aim 01 the Bauhaus is the unilied work

who had designed, but not

01 art - the great building - in which there is no distinction

submitted, a radically modernist entry to the Tribune Tower

between monumental

contest. In 1925 Saarinen designed the campus 01 the Cran-

program was steeped in a mystical, Expressionist

and decorative art."

-> 7

Initially this mood. The

brook Kingswood School (Iater the Cranbrook Academy

original faculty consisted primarily of artists: Lyonel Feininger,

of Art), and he became director there in 1932.

Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer. Within a few years László Moholy-Nagy IlIen. The Bauhaus curriculum

The Weimar Bauhaus

ductory course developed

replaced

began with a Vorkurs, an intro-

by Itten dedicated

to the explora-

The most intense search lar new educational methods took place

tion 01 drawing, color, and materials. It continued

in Germany, often picking up where prewar efforts had left off.

geared to producing

Didactic proqrarns were developed

although not taught as such until 1927, was the ultimate goal

tion 01 architecture

in accord with the concep-

as an experimental

discipline

tor which

01 the curriculum,

in workshops

designs tor actual clients. Architecture,

which aimed ter "mutual planning of exten-

knowledge 01 modern art, psychology, and industry was nec-

sive, utopian structural designs - public buildings and build-

essary. Apart Irom art schools like the Kunstschule Debschitz

ings íor warship - aimed at the luture."

in Munich, the Franklurter Kunstschule, the Akademie tür Kunst

Europe discovered Gropius's ambitious program at an exhibition

und Kunstgewerbe in Breslau, and the Reimann-Schule

held in Weimar in 1923.

in Berlin,

by lar the most innovative program was launched in Weimar

relationship

in 1919.

tive specilically

-> 5

Five years earlier, the B.elgian Henry van de Velde,

183

-> 8

Its aim was to maintain an ongoing

between the school and the public, an objecset out in the 1919 manilesto. An integral part

who had lounded a school there, had resigned under pres-

01 the exhibition, the Haus am Horn,

sure from nationalist

Muche, provided an idea 01 the Bauhaus's architectural

attacks. He recommended

that it be

185

designed

by Georg orien-

entrusted to Walter Gropius, August Endell, or Hermann Obrist.

tation. Built on a square plan, this experimental

Though the youngest of the three, Gropius was chosen, and it

central room suggested a family life without any servants; the

was through his initiative that the Kunstgewerbeschule

kitchen was treated as a workstation

Crafts School) and the Hochschule

(Arts and

tür Bildende Kunst (Higher

house with a

and, with its panoptic

view, a site 01 visual control over the household. Bauhaus stu-

School 01 Fine Arts) were united in April 1919 under the name 01

dents, including

the Staatliches Bauhaus (State Bauhaus).

interiors. The exhibit at the Bauhaus, entitled Kunst und Technik

In his lounding

-> 6

program, Gropius described

the goal 01 the

Marcel Breuer, lurnished the Haus am Horn's

- eine neue Einheit (Art and Technology:

A New Unity), made

new school: "to bring together all creative efforts into one

clear the school's new orientation toward industrial produc-

whole, to reunily all the disciplines

tion, while the projects gathered under the title "Internationale

ture, painting, handicrafts, rable components

01 practical art - sculp-

and the crafts - which are insepa-

01 a new architecture."

He continued,

"The

Architektur"

clearly positioned

of the European avant-garde.

its experiments ->

at the lorelront

9

152

I

153

183

Bauhaus exhibition,

182

Staatliches

Walter Gropius, Weimar, Germany, 1923

Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, Dessau, Germany, 1925-6

154

I

155

184

Torten Housing

Estate, Walter Gropius, Dessau, Germany,

1926-8

185

Haus am Horn, Georg Muche, Weimar, Germany, 1923

siting 01 buildings became an important component

The Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin

01 the cur-

riculum. The students built an apartment house in Dessau (1930) In 1924 the local government

in Saxony rejected Gropius's

during Meyer's tenure, while the school became increasinqly

program, lorcing him to move the school to a new building in Dessau,

182

a manulacturing

center closer to Berlin. Opened in

1926, the new lacility, which Gropius designed, exemplilied principies

01 lunctional

clarity and modularity

now taught in

its studios. Each element 01 the pinwheel-plan conceived

the

receptive to its director's communist

ideas.

Meyer's political activism and his conllict-ridden

relationships

with many 01 the other Bauhaus Meister (masters) led to his being lired and replaced by Mies van der Rohe in 1930. With

structure was

to supply the space and light needed lor its spe-

the support 01 his Iriend Lilly Reich, an interiors architect, Mies accentuated

cilic lunctions. The workshops, lor example, had glass rools,

the shift 01 the Bauhaus toward architecture

while the students' living quarters had vertical windows and bal-

prolessional.

conies. Gropius al so built houses lor the laculty nearby, pro-

locused

viding his staft

the extended urban labrics that interested Hilberseimer.

188

with ample dwellings designed lor artistic

work and lor entertaining. Housing Estate (1926-8),

-> 10

With the experimental

commissioned

184

Tbrten

tions at an urban scale. In conceiving lor working-class

ques-

these modest modules

down to his linear organization

assembly line,

01 the construction

built in Tbrten was a prelabricated

courtyard

houses and studying -> 13

01 Dessau, which had been taken over

by the Nazis, evicted the Bauhaus. Mies reconstituted the school as a private institution based in an abandoned

lactory in Berlin-

Steglitz until pressure lrom the Nazis lorced him to close it down

tenants in buildings made 01 precast concrete

components, Gropius emulated the automobile

Exercises ceased to be utopian, and students

instead on designing

In 1932 the municipality

by the municipality

01 Dessau, the school was able to address architectural

that

had begun under Meyer and strove to make the school more

in the summer 01 1933. This triggered

a diaspora that would c.

have lasting effects on schools around the world.

site. Also

Steel House by Muche and

The Vkhutemas in Moscow

Richard Paulick, another example 01 the Bauhaus's eftort to emulate lactory production.

Though its reverberations

-> 11

were lelt less on an international

In 1928 Gropius stepped down as director and was succeeded

scale, an equally signilicant

by Hannes Meyer. Under the left-wing Swiss architect the teach-

during the same years. Like the Bauhaus, it was based on an

ing 01 architecture became more structured. Meyer's lunctionalist

impulse to synthesize art and architecture,

agenda was encapsulated

interaction - at least during the initial phase 01 the curriculum

in a manilesto entitled "bauen" ("to

~I'Y"lAnr'1

LlI""

IUIIIIUld.

\IUlIlAIUII

LIIII""::;

""GUIIUllly!

...

organization: social, technical, economic, zation."

-> 12

I

1::; IIULIIIII\J

psychological

UUL

organi-

Ludwig Hilberseimer began oftering courses in urban

planning, and preliminary

Chapter 12

UUIIUIII\J

Architectural

research on lunctional data and the

education

in turmoil

nl\JII""1

r"\l'"lj.-IlCI':>,

MI L dllU

':>LlUlt-... JlUI.::l,

I ""GI 11IIGdl

experiment took place in Moscow

ClIIU

OLUUIU::;,

UUIIUGI

'u16

u.

and therelore on lile;

v r'I.IIUlC;1 J r cr o ,

VI

resulted lrom a merger

in 1920 between the School 01 Painting and Sculpture and the Stroganov School 01 Applied Arts. The most original 01 the initial two departments

was the Rablak, or Workers' Faculty,

_

- ------

------

- -- ------

186 188 ~

------

Studio work at Vkhutemas,

Moseow, USSR (Russia), 1928

Bauhaus stall on the rool at the opening 01 Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building, Dessau,

Germany, 1926. From lelt: Josel Albers, Hinnerk Seheper, Georg Muehe, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Sehmidt, Walter Gropius, Mareel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stólzl and Oskar Sehlemmer.

187

A studio at the Institut Supérieur

des Arts Déeoratils, Abbaye de la Cambre, Brussels, Belgium,

1930

156

I

157

189

Student project at Vkhutemas,

Moscow, USSR

190

(Russia), 1923

Lenin Institute, project, Ivan Leonidov, Moscow,

USSR (Russia), 1927

which offered accelerated

remedial classes to workers with-

191

Student project, Jean de Maisonseul,

Dokuchaev, and Krinsky, and the Constructivists,

out a high school education. At lirst glance the school's toun-

Ladovsky was the most active in developing

dation course appears similar to the Bauhaus's

method 01 teaching through his "psychotechnical

Vorkurs. Its

around Vesnin.

an experimental laboratory,"

students carried out exercises in lour basic disciplines

taught

in which he perfected a battery 01 tests and techniques

by olten ideologically

with

lrom Hugo Münsterberg's

neoclassicist

opposed

instructors: "graphics,"

Vladimir Favorsky and Constructivist

Rodchenko;

"surface/color,"

Alexander

with Alexander Vesnin and Lyubov

Popova, both also active Constructivists;

"volurne," which grad-

ually became little more than an introduction

to sculpture;

Algiers,

Algeria, 1931

derived

research in applied psychology at

Harvard University; his aim was to measure the "psychotechnic qualities 01 architects"

and their ability to perceive lorms

in space. In 1922-3 students al so began to participate

in the

constantly increasing number 01 architecture competitions

tak-

and "s pace:' which was devoted to the study and assembly 01

ing place in Moscow.

basic volumes, under the direction 01 Nikolai Ladovsky, Nikolai

projects were included in the "New Moscow" plan designed

189

In 1924-5 all 01 the school's thesis

Dokuchaev, and Vladimir Krinsky, the luture lounders 01 the

by Shchusev. Students next turned their attention to new pro-

rationalist group ASNOVA ...• 14

grams lor stadiums, workers' palaces, and communal

Alter one or two years at the school, students were divided

Specialization

among faculties specializing

tecture, public buildings, urban planning, and so on - began

in painting, typography, sculp-

tu re, textiles, ceramics, wood, metal, and architecture. In 1923 departments

devoted to music and theater were introduced; in

1924 a department

devoted to literature opened. The vertical

housing.

by individual workshops - in residential archi-

to take shape in 1925. During this phase, the school developed projects lor aviation lactories, industrial lacilities, lilm studios, and apartment and office buildings.

integration 01 individual disciplines was thus more pronounced

The projects for skyscrapers

than at the Bauhaus, where specialization

were no longer the order 01 the day. Nonetheless, certain thesis

took place later.

that were common belore 1925

Studio work remained central in laculties such as the Metfak,

projects still explored radical hypotheses lor public buildings.

which specialized in metalwork. Inspired by Vladimir Tatlin and

Ivan Leonidov designed a Lenin Institute (1927)

headed by Rodchenko, it emphasized

prophetic structure made 01 cables and luturistic electronic

and lunctional

nature. The school's more politicized, highly

production-oriented conlrontation

projects 01 a collective

students Irequently came into head-on

with colleagues they considered

to be either

technology;

190

with a

Georgei Krutikov designed a Flying City (1928).

After visiting the Vkhutemas in 1928, Le Corbusier described the school in his journal as an "extraordinary demonstration

01

"pure" or decorative artists. Students 01 the Arkhlak, or archi-

the modern credo:' adding: "Here a new world is being rebuilt"

tecture studio, were divided into olear-cut camps: the conserva-

out 01 a "mystique which gives rise to apure

technique." ..•15

tives, under prolessors Ivan Zholtovsky and Alexei Shchusev; the

During the 1930s, methods developed in the school's Ioun-

"New Academy," under Ilya Golosov and Konstantin Melnikov;

dation course continued to be used, but traditional methods

and the remainder split between two directly competing

derived lrom the Beaux-Arts were gradually reinstated and the

ments: the "Rationalists,"

Chapter 12

I

Architectural

move-

gathered around the trio 01 Ladovsky,

education in turmoil

school's utopian passions died out.

192

New Bauhaus, Chicago,

lllinois, USA, c. 1938

193

School 01 Architecture,

Liang Ssu Ch'eng, Nanjing, China, c. 1930

Innovative schools in the new and old worlds

The most consequential

migration was the one that drove

The new schools in Europe at times lavo red conllicting

American students had attended the Bauhaus in Berlin, .• 17

approaches.

but the German experience did not bear fruit in American

many of the Bauhaus teachers to the United States. A lew In 1927 Henry van de Velde lounded the Institut

Supérieur des Arts Décoratils at the Abbaye de la Cambre

schools until the wave 01 emigration

in Brussels,

the 1930s. Seven years alter a lirst exhibition organized at

187

which he would head until 1936, recruiting

the modern architects

Huib Hoste and Victor Bourgeois

and

provoked by Nazism in

the Chicago Art Club, an exhibition at the Museum 01 Modern

the urban planner Louis Van der Swaelmen. In Italy a national

Art in 1938, Bauhaus 1918-1928, lirmly established

relorm led to the creation in 1924 01 independent

sion 01 the school's history propagated

architecture

the ver-

by its founder ..•

18

laculties in the academies 01 line art, but these remained solidly

Gropius had been recruited by Harvard as chair 01 the archi-

under the control 01 conservative

tecture department

architects. In Turkey, Bruno

two years earlier and tasked by the school's

Taut, whe resettled there alter an initial exile in Japan, taught

dean, Joseph Hudnut, with the revision 01 the design curricu-

lrom 1936 until his death in 1938 at the Istanbul Academy 01

lum. Under Gropius the school de-emphasized

Fine Arts, where he pursued the relorm 01 the school's curricu-

architectural

history and locused on analytical and collective

lum begun by the Austrian Ernst Egli.

approaches

to design as well as on the modernization

The 1930s were characterized

by the establishment

01 a grow-

ing number 01 architecture schools outside Europe. Modest ateliers were opened in connection Arts in Algiers by Léon Claro, Boyer. The Beaux-Arts

191

01 studio

programs. In 1938 Mies van der Rohe was hired to head the architecture

with the School 01 Fine

the teaching 01

program at the Armour Institute 01 Chicago, which

two years later merged with the Lewis Institute to become the

and in Casablanca by Marius

model, diffracted through the prism

IIlinois Institute 01 Technology ..•

19

Other Bauhaus Meister

also took up places in new institutions. Josel Albers headed

01 Paul Philippe Cret's teaching, served as the loundation for Chinese schools. The lirst 01 these, largely inspired by the

the program at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, while

Japanese, was lounded in Suzhou in 1923, then taken over by

the Institute of Design, in Chicago.

the Central University in Nanjing

who had been an assistant to Gropius in Dessau, landed in

193

tour years later and staffed

László Moholy-Nagy

lounded the New Bauhaus, later renamed 192

In 1933 Richard Paulick,

with professors who had studied with Cret at the University

Shanghai, where he worked as an urban planner and taught

of Pennsylvania. The lollowing

at the university from 1940 to 1949 ..•

Mukden (Shenyang)

year a school was opened in

by Liang Ssu Ch'eng, another lormer stu-

dent 01 Cret. .• 16 In Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier's

1929 lectures

so inspired Lucio Costa that he was moved to modernize curriculum

20

In a single decade the

scattering 01 Beaux-Arts alumni around the world had been largely superseded

by the diaspora 01 the Bauhaus.

the

01 a school that had been lounded by the French

in the early nineteenth century.

160

I

161

Architecture and revolution in Russia

During the lifteen years between the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

councils known as "soviets" changed the circumstances

and Joseph Stalin's 1932 campaign

those who remained - including architects graduating

and artistic organizations

to consolidate

intellectual

under strict party rule, Russia was a

new schools. The launch 01 a monumental

tor trorn the

propaganda

plan

laboratary lar an astonishing range 01 urban and architectural

in 1918 stimulated designs lor the ephemeral translormation

invention. Priar to 1914 the Czarist empire had kept up to date tain 01 the empire's territories, such as Finland and the Baltic

01 streets and squares as part 01 the celebration 01 the revolution and May Day. Initially limited to a display 01 banners and the erection 01 isolated sculptures, these spectacles eventu-

states, had developed their own innovative architecture. Western

ally transligured

theories were studied with great attention: John Ruskin's works

Petrograd and provided a glimpse 01 how an "emancipated"

were popular, and Russian readers had access to translations 01

workers' city might look. The most ambitious 01 these projects

books by Auguste Choisy and Heinrich Wblfflin. But develop-

was artist Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International

with translormations

in European architectural

culture, and cer-

vast public spaces such as Palace Square in

ments in Russia's own architecture had been glimpsed outside

(1919),

its borders only at world's fairs such as the 1900 Paris expo-

through its projecled

194

which explicitly competed

with the Eiffel Tower

height 01 400 meters (1,312 leet) and steel

sition and, especially, the 1901 fair in Glasgow, where Fyodor

skeleton. Built 01 "steel, glass, and revolution," in the words 01

Shekhtel's Russia Pavilion made a strong impression.

the critic Nikolai Punin, the tower was designed to hold within

Belore 1914, the experiments 01 architects like Shekhtel operating

its spiraling Iramework a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder, and a

under the "modern"

banner had developed contemporaneously

with research on tensile-steel

structures undertaken

by the civil

engineer Vladimir Shukhov and the tirst use 01 reinlorced crete by Russian builders.

->

1

con-

But the social relorms that had

hall-sphere

whose rotation was intended to represent the Ire-

quency 01 meetings 01 Ihe Communisl sleering committees.

->

lnternational's

various

2

Until 1920, conllicts between the Red and White armies led to

come to the lore in Western Europe had been only marginally

widespread

destruction, which was intensilied by Bolshevik

lollowing the revolution 01 1905, and the compre-

campaigns

against the Russian Orthodox Church. During

implemented

hensive plans that had stimulated the creation 01 new building

these uncertain years belore the Reds' power was consoli-

types in Germany and larther west were lacking, largely owing

dated, Sinskulptarkh,

to the weakness 01 municipal governments.

sculpture and architecture

a group dedicated to the synthesis 01 (which became the Zhivskulptarkh

once painters joined its ranks), tried to promote cooperation

The shock of revolution

between various disciplines. They warked logether on theoretical schemes lor "people's houses" like those built in Weslern

The effects 01 the October 1917 revolution were as immediate

Europe belore 1914, lar communal

as they were manilold. The civil war and then the Bolshevik

01 Iriendship" that paralleled the utopian programs 01 German

01 prolessionals into exile, while 01 land and the rise to power 01 new local

houses,

196

and lar "temples

repression sent thousands

Expressionism.

the nationalization

designed Ihe most evocative 01 these projects, also helped

Chapter 13 1 Architecture

and revolution in Russia

Nikolai Ladovsky and Vladimir Krinsky, who

194

Monument

to the Third International,

project, Vladimir Tatlin, Petrograd

(Saint Petersburg),

Russia, 1919

162

I

163

f-n.~'7-t' df_¿ 1IAI_....,yA .•....í_

,

196

Communal

9-,,-----.....

1920

House, project, Nikolai Ladovski,

197

(Society 01 Young Artists) exhibition, Moscow, Russia, 1921

Obmokhu

195 Komintern Radio Tower, Vladimir Shukhov, Moscow, Russia, 1922

transform pre-revolutionary Concurrent discussions

art schools into the Vkhutemas.

within the state-supported

and a few mavericks regularly participated.

Inkhuk

who had had successful

(Institute of Artistic Culture), where creative methods grounded

Fomin, a Saint Petersburg neoclassicist;

in construction

neo-Palladian;

and inspired by engineering

those based on artistic "composition"

were opposed to

and anchored in aca-

Several architects

careers before 1914 - such as Ivan Zholtovsky, a Moscow

and Alexei Shchusev, an opportunist

who in

1923 reconstituted the MAO (Society 01 Moscow Architects) -

demic tradition, clearly revealed the differences separating

continued to receive significant commissions.

ladovsky

lormed in reaction to this old guardo The ASNOVA (Association

and Krinsky from the supporters

of Constructivism.

Two groups were

The former aspired to create dynamic forms but were uninter-

of New Architects) 198 included Ladovsky, Krinsky, Dokuchaev,

ested in their relationship with materials, while the latter insisted

and, for a time, El Lissitzky. 200 This group was very influential

on adapting the model of engineering design to the sphere of

among young pea pie. It stood lar strong tectonic expression

art and architecture. The Constructivists

01 the building's structure and visual exaltation of its tunc-

exhibited sculptures

made out of metal and inspired by engineering

structures at the

Already a teacher at the Vkhutemas, the artist Alexander Rodchenko

tion. The second group, whose members were Constructivists, was lormally launched with the creation 01 the OSA (Un ion 01

Obmokhu (Society of Young Artists) exhibition 197 in 1921.

Contemporary

played a crucial role in these formative stages.

-> 3

Architects) in 1925. It was no coincidence

that

neither group's name included the term "modern," which had

In 1920 the Bolsheviks launched the GOELRO plan (named

been discredited

for the State Comission for the Electrilication

of Art Nouveau. Chaired by Alexander Vesnin, the OSA was

of Russia) to

build a network of power plants, and embarked Economic

on their New

Policy (NEP), which loosened restrictions on com-

merce. New types of architectural

commissions

- including Iac-

by its association with the Russian version

largely run by Moisei Ginzburg, whose book-manifesto

Sti/ i

Epokha (Style and Epoch; 1924) echoed Le Corbusier's theories by suggesting that a new design method should be based

tories, workers' housing, and electric power plants such as Ivan

on the study 01 machines and the application

Zholtovsky's

to architecture.

-> 4

(Contemporary

[i.e., Modern] Architecture), or SA, published

MOGES - were generated by needs related to this

national electrification

plan. There was also demand for more

office buildings in connection with revived business activity and new trading cornpánies such as Arcos and Mosselprom.

Local

of their systems

The periodical Sovremennaia

Arkhitektura

under Ginzburg's direction lrom 1926 to 1930, presented OSA's new projects, as well as numerous Western examples, in a radi-

soviets and social-action groups created within various compa-

cally new graphic formo

nies initiated projects to build housing and create workers' clubs.

Independent

->

5

architects such as Ilya Golosov, a proponent 01 a

colorlul, lormally striking architecture, and especially

A profession renewed

Melnikov rase to prominence through competitions.

Architecture

Agricultural

Konstantin Melnikov

created a sensation with his Makhorka Tobacco Pavilion at the in the USSR was shaped by constant competi-

tions in which members of different professional associations

Exhibition held in Moscow in 1923 and, two years

later, with the pavilion he designed to represent the USSR at

164

I

165

198

Izvestia

Association

ASNO VA (News 01 the 01 New Architects),

199

layout

USSR Pavilion, Konstantin

200

Skyhook,

project, El Lissitzky, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1925

201

Zuev Workers' Club, lIya Golosov, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1928

Melnikov, Paris, France, 1925

by El Lissitzky, 1926

202 ~

Rusakov Workers' Club, Konstantin

Melnikov, Moscow,

USSR (Russia), 1927-9

the Exposition

Internationale

Modernes.

Composed

199

des Arts Oécoratits

et Industrie/s

of two glazed triangular volumes

used their income to provide social services and housing for their labor forces, as in the Armenikend

bisected diagonally by a staircase, it was the most conspicu-

Alexander

ous structure at the Paris exhibition ...• 6 It revealed to the West

district of collective

the existence of a new Russian architecture, confirmed

which was further

by the presentation elsewhere at the fair of over one

hundred projects conceived The commissions

in the USSR since 1920.

Ivanitsky in Baku (1925-8). A fully equipped housing was established

by .

model

in Leningrad

near the Putilov Factory; the schools, communal

kitchens, and

workers' clubs around Alexander Gegello's housing on Tractor Street (1925-7) formed something

emanating from the new regime's institutions

neighborhood

like a small autonomous

city

centered on the collective workforce ...• 7

began to generate buildings. Among them was Grigory Barkhin's design for new headquarters for Izvestia, the Moscow daily news-

The "social condensers"

paper, which reached back to classical architecture for its large metope-like

oculi. Alexander Vesnin and his brothers Leonid

In the second half of the 1920s, neighborhoods

and Victor failed to realize their 1924 project for the Moscow

according

office of Pravda , a cage inspired by the metal chassis of the

tion to their counterparts

newspaper's

printing presses, which was to have functioned

as a base for billboards, megaphones,

and projectors inscrib-

to the model of collectivized

multiplied

life - in strong distinc-

in Germany and Austria. Each Soviet

building type was subjected to elaborate and specific research. In order to transform the population's

daily habits as quickly as

ing slogans on the clouds. But the three brothers did succeed

possible, buildings

in building the Mostorg Department Store (1927-9), which was

to as "social condensers,'

wrapped in a glass facade, as was Boris Velikovsky's Gostorg

changes in the everyday life of the working class. An unacknowl-

Office Building apartment

(1926). In addition to newly built traditional

buildings, many new types of complexes

including Shchusev and Nikolai Markovnikov's

sprang up,

Sokol Garden

became what the Constructivists

referred

which were meant to accelerate

edged successor to the pre-1914 "people's houses,' the workers' club became the principal place of acculturation site where the confrontation

and the

between different architectural ideas

Suburb, inspired by the planning of Raymond Unwin. There

proved most fruitful. The clubs retained the auditoriums,

were also workers' housing blocks on Usacheva Street and

taurants, and sometimes the athletic equipment of the people's

in the Shabolovka

area, which Nikolai Travin erected near the

Komintern Radio Tower (1922). up hyperboloids materialization

designed

195

The latter, a lattice of stacked-

by Shukhov, seemed to be the real

of Tatlin's tower. Shukhov was also responsible

res-

houses, but libraries were given more prominence, with a strong emphasis on literacy campaigns.

Above all, the buildings them-

selves were meant to serve as a new and more enduring form of monumental

propaganda.

The Zuev Workers' Club,

201

built

for the roof structure of two bus depots built by Melnikov.

by Golosov in Moscow, pivots expressively on a glass cylin-

Workers, the "victors" of the revolution, were at the heart of

der that houses a staircase connecting

the new urban policies. Prosperous companies

such as the

Ivanovo textile milis, Sverdlovsk steelworks, and Baku oil firms

Chapter 13 I Architecture

and revolution in Russia

the different parts of the

building. Located at the intersection of two streets, it appears as the hinge of the whole block.

203

Workers' Club, Konstantin

Burevestnik

Melnikov, Moscow,

USSR (Russia), 1927-9

204

Narkomfin

Communal

House, Moisei

Ginzburg and Ignati Milinis, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1928-30

The five clubs in Moscow that Melnikov built practically taneously

in 1927-9 were a testament

inexhaustible

imagination

simul-

both to this architect's

and to the potential of a building

type that was in a perpetual state of experimentation.

The three

House, 204 was carried out under the aegis of Nikolai Miliutin, head of the People's Commissariat

for Finance. A veteran

Bolshevik who had studied architecture,

Miliutin commissioned

Ginzburg and Ignati Milinis to design a project to house his

balconies of the theater of the Rusakov Workers' Club 202 canti-

employees

lever over the street, while inside the seats face a stage wedged

itly taken from Le Corbusier - pilotis, ribbon windows, and roof

into a triangular

plan. The Burevestnik

terraces - the project combined

was remarkable

for its large convertible

Workers' Club 203 theater and flanking

in the heart of Moscow. Using a vocabulary

a glazed unit for communal

services with a long housing block. Most of the living quarters

tower, with a floor plan in the shape of a flower. Between the

were two- or three-Ievel "cells" whose spatial complexity

Kauchuk Workers' Club, a rather static vertical cylinder, and

pensated somewhat for their cramped dimensions.

the Svoboda Workers' Club, a horizontal cylinder with mobile

as a "transition"

walls, Melnikov's forms evolved from an almost conventional

all become "domestic communes"

monumentality

and a new, still undefined form of totally collectivized

to a search for kineticism,

an approach

he had

explic-

com-

Described

between traditional apartments, which had now shared by several tenants, dwelling,

pursued in his proposal for the Pravda Building competition

the building was remarkable for its precise design and care-

in 1924 and would further develop in his project for a theater

fui execution.

with a rotating stage in 1931.

ing in Sverdlovsk, 206 while Mikhail Barshch and Alexander

The second type of "social condenser"

was the "communal

->

8

Ginzburg followed it with another such build-

Pasternak built a more compact communal house in Moscow.

house," a residential complex with integrated services that was

AII these buildings were based on the model dwelling schemes

a direct descendant

developed

of the phalanstery, a utopian community

by Stroikom, or the State Building Committee

of the

inspired by the early socialist Charles Fourier in nineteenth-

Russian Republic, which carried out studies on how to reduce

century France. Like the "garden city," the "communal

the size of rooms and integrate services based on German

was more a slogan than a well-defined used to describe equipped

house"

concept. The term was

a wide variety of installations,

from the barely

dormitory recalling the dreariest workers' residences

and American examples. But radical projects such as Ivan Nikolaev's dormitory for students at the Moscow Textile Institute and the extremist ideas of young Constructivists

such as Sergei

of the pre-1914 period to Moscow apartment buildings with

Kuzmin, who insisted that life be regulated down to the minute,

standards that seem almost luxurious given the difficult condi-

quickly discredited

tions during the NEP. In the second half of the 1920s, full-scale

Moscow also became the site of residential buildings with less

experiments were carried out in an attempt to "reconstruct"

ambitious ideological

everyday life through the collectivization

of food services and

the very idea of the communal

house.

programs but powerful monumental

pres-

ence. These included the Dynamo Building by Fomin (1928-9),

reduction in the size of apartments; the provision of new, shared

which explored the potential of a "proletarian

facilities was intended to offset the small living unit. The most

House on the Embankment

productive of these experiments, the Narkomfin Communal

ment block built on the Moskva River across from the Kremlin.

Chapter 13

I

Architecture

and revolution in Russia

Doric," and the

by Boris lofan (1930), a huge apart-

205

Melnikov House, Konstantin Melnikov, Moscow,

..JSSR (Russia), 1927-9

206

Communal

House, Moisei Ginzburg,

Sverdlovsk

(Yekaterinburg),

USSR (Russia), 1930

"he private house that Melnikov built lor himsell 205 with the

The disurbanist

=ees he earned Irom his workers' clubs commissions

remains

houses reached by automobiles

nique, as individual residences were unauthorized:

it consists

01 the time. In 1931 the Communist

brick walls

the "irresponsible"

01 two interlocking

cylindrical

and lozenge-shaped

towers with stuccoed

windows that are reminiscent 01 peasant

ouses and the towers of Russian fortresses.

model 01 a territory dol1ed with individual was impracticable

in the USSR

Party called to account

architects who had proposed such plans,

decreeing the "socialist reconstruction"

01 existing cities. This

policy would be carried out with the participation

of hundreds

01 architects and engineers lrom Germany, who had been led to emigrate either by the economic

Polemics and rivalries

crisis in Germany, as was

the case with Ernst May, or by an al1raction to the USSR's revNith the launch 01 the USSR's lirst Five Year Plan in 1927, the

olutionary ideals, as with Hannes Meyer. From 1930 to 1935

forced march toward industrialization

these loreigners designed most 01 the new neighborhoods

ion 01 thousands assistance

ollactories

builtthe

Factory in Leningrad 01932

and hundreds 01 new cities. The

01 Western architects

endelsohn

spurred the construc-

was solicited. Thus Erich

components

and housing lor decades to come.

Krasnoe Znamia (Red Banner) Textile

The 1931 decision

in 1926-8,

made at a time when disagreements

and in the period leading up

Albert Kahn's lirm built several hundred lactories

with

shipped Irom the United States. The brutal indus-

in favor 01 socialist urban planning was

become particularly

bitter, with young architects who delined

01 rural areas raised the ques-

themselves as "proletarians"

ion 01 what lorm the country's

urban planning should take. In

course. The competing

the creation 01 a dense

network 01 medium-sized

cities - the "urbanists"

against the "disurbanists,"

who sprang Irom the OSA and were

proponents

01 a radical decentralization

eradication

01 cities. Formulated

- laced 011

leading to the total

on the occasion

01 compe-

between ASNOVA and

OSA - which had steadily escalated through the 1920s - had

rialization and collectivization

1929 and 1930 those who supported

and

delined the standards that would be applied to Soviet planning

campaigns

politicizing the architectural

dis-

lactions radicalized their positions, and

targeted several architects. Leonidov, lor one, was

harshly criticized tor the "lack 01 realism" 01 his glass prísrns, while Melnikov was taken to task lor his relentless individualism. The work 01the Leningrad architect lakov Chernikhov, whose boundless visual imagination took shape in unbuildable

"archi-

titions held in 1929 lor a "green city" near Moscow and in

tectural lantasies" 207 based on machine torrns, lurther contrib-

1930 lor the plan 01 the industrial city 01 Magnitogorsk,

uted to the characterization utopians ..• 10

dis-urbanist Okhitovich

position - as theorized - may be understood

to the communal ported ..•

9

by the sociologist

as a sell-critical

the Mikhail

01 the Constructivists

as complete

reaction

house projects they had previously sup-

The Palace of the Soviets competition

Miliutin proposed a third option: the "linear city," 208

based on the late nineteenth-century planner Soria y Mata.

concept 01 the Spanish

The project ter a Palace 01 the Soviets, intended to symbolize the return 01the Russian capital to Moscow alter two centuries

170

I

171

207

Architectural

Fantasy, lakov Chernikhov,

1931

01 a new proletarian state, served as a

and the establishment

pretext tor the Communist

Party - which up till then had cau-

The competition Communist

coincided with a 1932 decision by the

01 literary and

Party regarding the "reorganization

tiously avoided taking sides in the rival currents 01 revolution-

artistic unions." AII existing groups were dissolved - to the

ary fervor - to lormulate an oflicial position on architecture.

reliel 01 some - and architects were invited to join a central-

lor a Palace 01 Labor had been held in

An initial competition

ized union. Projects already underway were carried through

1923. Though the Vesnin brothers' proposal lor a composition

in aclimate

01 volumes leaturing allusions to Auguste Perret made the big-

the decision in the Palace 01 the Soviets competition

gest impact, Noa Trotsky won that competition

direction ter public architecture, which soon became the only

with a neo-

international

set a new

option available, moving it in the direction 01 historicist mon-

Byzantine project that was soon abandoned. In 1931 an ambitious

that remained pluralistic lor a lew more years. But

competition,

launched

as

umentality. While the Vesnin brothers were still able to real-

il in emulation

01 those tor the Tribune Building in Chicago and the League 01 Nations in Geneva, called ter a project

ize their Palace 01 Culture lor the ZIL Automobile Moscow 209 unhampered

to be built on a site along the Moskva River across Irom the

ers' club ever built - Le Corbusier was able to linish his

Factory in

- without doubt the largest work-

Kremlin. Alter a lirst round restricted to Soviet teams, notable

Centrosoyuz Building in 1936 only in the lace 01 violent attacks

Western architects,

on its radical modernity. The trends 01 the 1920s, beginning

including

Gropius, Poelzig, Perret, and Le

Corbusier, were invited to submit proposals proceedings collectives"

a veneer 01 impartiality

so as to give the

and openness.

were also asked to contribute

"Workers'

their own naive

with Constructivism, proponents

were now rejected and their most radical

marginalized,

as was the case with Leonidov, or

killed, as with Okhitovich, who died in a Gulag camp in 1937.

designs. In early 1932, three 01 the 272 projects received were

Stigmatized lor his impenitent idiosyncratic

selected: those by Zholtovsky,

was lorced into retirement at the age 01 lilty.

young American

lolan, 210 and an unknown

named Hector Hamilton. Alter another round,

lolan was awarded the commission, and Vladimir Gellreikh tial project combined auditoriums

with Vladimir Shchuko

named as his collaborators. the requested

15,000- and 5,000-seat

with a statue 01 Vladimir Lenin standing on a tall

base. Directly intervening many architectural

in the design process, Stalin made

"suggestions."

->

11

One 01 them resulted in

the statue being placed atop one 01 the auditoriums, making the project virtually unbuildable, recognized

lolan's ini-

in the late 1940s.

Chapter 13 [ Architecture

and revolution in Russia

thereby

as was inevitably

gestures, Melnikov ->

12

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Linear City, project, Nikolai Miliutin, Nizhny Novgorod,

USSR (Russia), 1930

Palace 01 Soviets, project, Boris lolan, 1931-4

)j' ..,.-

~

~

,

.<

I

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,

209

Palace 01 Culture lar the ZIL Automobile

Factory, Alexander

Vesnin, Leonid Vesnin and Viktor Vesnin, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1931-6

172

I

173

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1 KellbHcKHH co(5op-160 M. 2. nHpBMHAa Xeonca-137 M. 3. WTpacc6yorcKHH c060p-142 M. 4. Ll,epKoBb CTeepBHB B BeHe-139 M. 5. Ll,ePlwBb MapTHHa B naHAcxYTe-137 M. s. Co60p neTpa B PHMe-143 M. 7. AHTBepneHcKHH co(5op-130 M. 8. Ll,ePKoBb MHxaHllB B raM6ypre-143 M· 9. AMbeHCKHH c060p-126 M. 10. Qlpai't(5yprcKHH co(5op-126 M. 11. XeeppeHCKall nHpaMHAB-126 M. 12. PyaHcKHA CoGop (KOllOKOllbHll)-151 M. 18. Co(5op B WBpTpe-122 M. 14. C060p B MeTl~e-1I8 M. 15. WnH~ neTponaBlloecKoH KpenOCTH B neHHHrpBAe-l09 M.

Chapter 13

I

Architecture and revolution in Russia

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