The Futureof Architecture.Since1889.-Jean-Louiseohen

I

~,1

f

S eds to rails:e dominion of steel

018 - The lamp 01 style

019 - The eminence 01 the Beaux-Arts

023 - Proqrarns 01 modernization

023 - Networks 01 internationalization

07In search of a language:from classicism to Cubism

090 - Anglo-American classicisms

092 - German nostalgia

093 - Loos and the lure 01 "Western culture"

097 - Berlage and the question 01 proportions

100 - Cubism and cubistics

13Architecture andrevolution in Russia

162 - The shock 01 revolution

165 - A pro/ession renewed

166 - The "social condensers"

171 - Polemics and rivalries

171 - The Palace 01 the Soviets competition

02The searchfor modern form

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

031 - Great Britain alter the Arts and Crafts

034 - Art Nouveau and the Paris-Nancy axis

036 - From Italian "Floreale" to Russian "Modern"

036 - The Catalan renaissance

08The Great War and itsside effects

102 - A triple mobilization

103 - The spread 01Taylorism

103 - Commemoration and reconstruction

106 - Postwar recomposition

108 - New architects between

science and propaganda

14The architectureof social reform

176 - Modernizing cities

180 - Red Vienna

181 - The new Frank/urt

185 - Taut's housing developments in Berlin

186 - French suburbs

186 - Echoes overseas

189 - Equipping the suburbs

IntroductionArchitecture's expanded field

010 - Two thresholds in time

013 - The carousel 01 hegemonies

014 - The continuity 01 type

015 - Historians versus architects,

or the problem 01 inclusion

03Domestic innovationand tectonic expression

042 - The central place 01 Great Britain

043 - Residential re/orm

043 - Uni/ying the urban landscape

046 - The advent 01 rein/orced concrete

053 - Concrete nationalisms

09Expressionism inWeimar Germany andthe Netherlands

110 - The Arbeitsrat lür Kunst

111 - Dynamism in architecture

117 - Hanseatic Expressionism

118 - De Klerk and the Amsterdam School

15Internationalization,its networksand spectacles

190 - The journal as printed stage

191 - Model cities and open-air exhibitions

194 - Modern architecture enters the museums

195 - The International Congresses

01 Modern Architecture (CIAM)

198 - Networks 01 in/luence and historical narratives

04American rediscovered,tall and wide

056 - Chicago in white and black

057 - Sullivan's inventions

060 - Wright and prarie architecture

063 - Wright and Europe

067 - The skyscraper migrates to New York

10Return to order in Paris

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

16Futurism and Rationalismin Fascist Italy

200 - A second Futurism

200 - Muzio and the Novecento

204 - The regime and Rationalism

207 - Terragni's geometries

208 - An ambiguous "Mediterraneanism"

209 - New territories

05The challenge of themetropolis

070 - An explosion without precedent

071 -_The planners' toolbox

071 - Town, square, and monument

076 - The idyll 01 the garden city

077 - Zoning tor the colonies and

lor Europe's metropoles

11Dada, De Stijl, and Mies:from subversivenessto elementarism

138 - The Dada blast

138 - The new lorms 01 De Stijl

143 - Van Doesburg builds

143 - Oud and Rietveld, Irom

lurniture to house design

148 - Mies van der Rohe's theoretical projects

17The spectrum ofclassicismsand traditionalisms

212 - Literal classicism

215 - Modern classicism

216 - Traditionalism and selt-crttlcal modernism

217 - Opportunism without borders

217 - Islands 01 coexistence

06New production,new aesthetic

082 - The AEG model in Berlin

083 - Factory as inspiration

085 - The Deutscher Werkbund

088 - Futurist mechanization

12Architectural educationin turmoil

152 - The Beaux-Arts and the alternatives

153 - The Weimar Bauhaus

156 - The Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin

156 - The Vkhutemas in Moscow

161 - Innovative schools in the

new and old worlds

18North Americanmodernities

224 - Wright, the return

231 - Los Angeles - lertile ground

232 - The skyscraper reloaded

236 - Industrial products:

between lactory and market

238 - The New Deal's housing relorm

and the European immigration

19Functionalism andmachine aesthetics

240 - Taylorism and architecture

241 - From ergonomics to

standard dimensions

242 - Poetic lunctionalism:

Chareau and Nelson

243 - Dynamic lunctionalism in

France and the United States

25Le Corbusier reinventedand reinterpreted

322 - The Unité d'Habitation

322 - 01 palaces and houses

324 - The surprise 01 Ronchamp

325 - Indian adventures

326 - Invention and introspection

326 - Corbusian mannerisms

330 - Anglo-American Brutalism

334 - The saga 01 Brasilia

31lhe postmodernseason

- - - From nostalgia to play

- The "end 01 prohibitions"

.: - - Retrieving urbanity's ligures

- America turns postmodern

.:~ - e uncertain Iront 01 postmodernism

e city - composition or collage?

20Modern languagesconquer the world

250 - British reticence deleated

255 - Northern European modernisms

258 - The modern as Czechoslovakia's

national brand

260 - The moderns in Hungary and Poland

261 - Balkan ligures

262 - Iberian modernization

264 - Japanese experiments

265 - Brazilian curves

26The shape of Americanhegemony

338 - The second skyscraper age

342 - Mies the American

345 - Wright's last return

346 - Research out west

349 - Gropius and Breuer: the

assimilation 01 the Bauhaus

351 - Saarinen's Iyricism and Johnson's anxiety

352 - The solitude 01 Kahn

353 - From experimentation to commerce

32From regionalism to criticalinternationalism

424 - Scarpa, or the rediscovery 01 craft

426 - Siza's poetic rigor

427 - Collective endeavor in the Ticino

431 - Moneo and Iberia

432 - Europe as a lield 01 experience

433 - Research in South Asia

434 - Latin American personalities

434 - A critical internationalism

21Colonial experiencesand new nationalisms

272 - From Arabizing to modernizing

in North Alrica

275 - Near Eastern and Alrican endeavors

275 - Italian cities around the Mediterranean

277 - The modernization 01 Turkey and Iran

279 - Chinese pluralism

283 - Modern hegemony in Palestine

27Repression and diffusionof modernism

358 - Seven Sisters in Moscow

359 - Socialist realism exported

359 - Khrushchev's critique

360 - Aalto's eminent position

366 - Japan's new energy

367 - Latin Americanisms

372 - Archipelagoes 01 invention

33The neo-Futuristoptimism of high tech

438 - Beaubourg establishes a canon

439 - Composition according to Rogers

439 - Experimentation according to Piano

441 - Structure according to Foster

445 - Architects and engineers

446 - New geometries

22Architecture of a total war

286 - Front lines and home Ironts

287 - Extreme scales

288 - Air raid protection

291 - Constructive and destructive techniques

291 - Mobility and Ilexibility

292 - Architecture 01 military occupation

292 - Imagining the postwar world

294 - Converting to peace

294 - Memory and memorials

28Toward new utopias

378 - Italy: critical continuity

381 - Independent together

385 - Technology: ethos or icon?

386 - Hovering cities 01 indeterminacy

388 - Metabolism in Japan

388 - Megastructures and global agitation

389 - Technology and its double

34Architecture'souter boundaries

- - Gehry, or the seduction 01 art

- - Koolhaas, or lantastic realism

-- - Nouvel, or mystery recovered

- Herzog and de Meuron,

or the principie 01 the collection

.:; - Deconstructivists and rationalists

- Fragmentation and poetry in Japan

23 24Tabula rasa to horrorvacui: reconstructionand renaissance

The fatal crisis ofthe Modern Movement,and the alternatives

298 - An American age

299 - Literal reconstruction or radical

modernization?

301 - The "neighborhood unit" as model

302 - The traditionalists at work

302 - In search 01 a British model

303 - German debates

309 - A modernist triumph?

310 - The Festival 01 Britain

312 - Italian Neorealism

314 - Planet Brazil

318 - Housing and innovation

in North Alrica

319 - CIAM in turmoil

320 - The end 01 CIAM

29 30Between elitism andpopulism: alternativearchitecture

After 1968: architectureforthe city

394 - Research and technocracy

395 - Venturi's critique

396 - Grays and Whites

401 - From lunctionalism to

advocacy planning

404 - 1968, annus mirabilis

405 - Observing the extended city

405 - The shape 01 the city

408 - The input 01 the user

35Vanishing points

469 - Strategic geographies

471 - Reinvented materials

471 - Sustainable buildings

472 - The city reborn yet threatened

473 - Landscape as horizon

473 - Hypermodern media

474 - Persistent social expectations

476 - Notes

494 - Bibliography

506 - Index

526 - Acknowledgments and credits

Architecture'sexpanded field

William Morris's News from Nawhere and H. G. Wells's Whenthe Sleeper Wakes, published in 1890 and 1899 respectively,depict a future society - a socialist utopia in the former case,a capitalist dystopia in the latter - encountered by the novels'protagonists after a long period of sleep. If the contemporaryinhabitants of the planet had awakened in the early twenty-firstcentury, they would have been at a loss to recognize not justthe cities constellating the world's surface, but also the build-ings making them up. Both cities and buildings have under-gone fundamentaltransformations, more so than at any timein the past. Likewise, the quantity of building stock producedsince 1900 has surpassed the sum total of that which existedin all previous human history.Not only did the population of urban areas exceed that of thecountryside for the first time shortly after the year 2000, butalso the very forms of human presence on the face of the earthreflected tharoughgoing changes. In the nineteenth century, thetrain station and department store joined the hause, palace,and temple in the existing inventory of building types. In thetwentieth century, office and apartment towers, large housingdevelopments, vast hangars enclosing factories and shoppingcenters, and a wide variety of infrastructures ranging fromdams to airports followed. Contradicting the British historianNikolaus Pevsner, who famously wrote that "a bicycle shed isa building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture," .• 1

the most prosaic programs came to be considered objectsworthy of aesthetic altention. This unprecedented surge in con-struction was meager compensation for a previously unim-aginable level of destructian ot natural resources and culturaltreasures, the effects ot industrialization, urbanization, and war.

. Architecture's mutations were not limited to the invention ofprograms responding to the new demands of production and

Introduction I Architecture's expanded field

consumption. The field also expanded with the rise of newtypes and classes of users. Architecture ceased to be a dis-cipline exclusively in the service of the wealthy and began toaddress broader constituencies, including municipalities, coop-eratives, and a wide range of institutions and social groups ..• 2

It also responded to the breaking down of classical codes, therejection of historical imitation, and the introduction of newmaterials. Its new relations to technology, the arts, and the citywere affected by external conditions as well as by internal anes.At times it had recourse to sources outside the discipline,adopting metaphors based on biological organisms, machines,or language; at other times it found inspiration within its owndisciplinary traditions ..• 3 In view of all these transformations,it has been impossible to limit architecture's definition in thisbook to realized constructions. Unbuilt designs, as well asbooks, journals, and public manifestations embodying the cul-ture of architecture in its broadest sense, have also been takeninto account. Indeed, realized buildings are always informed byideas, narratives, and repressed memories of past projects.

Two thresholds in time

The very delimitation "twentieth century" is open to debate.Rejecting a strictly chronological definition, the present narrativebegins with the period from 1880 to 1914. It finds its temporalbrackets between the "short century" that the British historianEric Hobsbawm condensed into the years from 1914 to 1991 .• 4and a longer span that places the twentieth century's originswithin a continuum that goes as far back as the Enlightenment.This initial mament is characterized by the convergence ofindustrialization and urbanization, the rise of social democracy

throughout Europe, the emergence of the social sciences asdisciplinary specializations, and the dissemination of thethought of important philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche toHenri Bergson. It also coincides with the rise of revolutionaryart movements such as Symbolism in poetry and the arfs, andCubism in painting. While the European powers were fightinga war for world domination and orchestrating the triumph ofimperialism, designers, and the images of their work, alsobegan to make inroads around the globe, thanks to the unprec-edented acceleration of modes of transport and new networks ofprinted information, which disseminated the cultural norms of theleading-nations.A pair of almost contemporaneous events were crucial to thisbeginning: the Universal Exposition in Paris of 1889 and theWorld's Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893. The Parisfair coincided with the climactic moment of European colonial-ism, while the Chicaco fair signaled the emergence of the NewWorld on the international scene. Both everits called the verydefinition of architecture into question, in its purpose - as itsaddressees became much broader social groups - as well asits forms. Mass production, of which Fordism became the mostsignificant system of organization, led to the creation of a world-wide market and encouraged the most radical architects tosearch for new forms consonant with the machine aesthetic. Atthe same time, traditionalists, who were often no less engagedsocially and no less hostile to eclecticism, sought to perpetuatethe more comforting archetypes of the past by adjusting themo new demands.Almost one century later - after decolonization, which culmi-nated with Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990, and

e end of the Cold War, which was marked by the West'siumph over the Soviet bloc in 1989 - the winding down of the

second millennium appeared to signal the next radical break inthe culture of architecture. It is this moment that provides theclosing bracket for this book. The automation of processes ina digital age had the effect of modifying the division of profes-sional labor as well as the relationship between the design stu-dio and the building site. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,Spain, completed by Frank Gehry in 1997, was a highly visibleexemplar of these new practices while also a demonstration ofthe potential importance of architecture in urban planning andpublic policy; together with dozens of other surprising build-ings, Gehry's museum called into question the traditional defini-tion of the architectural object. With architecture firms, clients,and cultural organizations enjoying unprecedented mobility,the rise of a generation of designers hyped by the internationalmedia, but initially engaged in theoretical and critical activ-ity and open to utopian discourse, coincided with a crisis in thesocial policies that had developed over the course of the twen-tieth century. Coming on the heels of several generations ofarchitects who had nurtured high aspirations to social trans-formation, designers at the end of the twentieth century oftenrelinquished to developers and politicians tools that they mighthave used to achieve substantive reforms.The span from 1889 to 2000 does not divide easily into tidy,self-contained segments. Rather, it is necessary to take intoaccount multiple, overlapping temporalities throughout thecentury, as suggested by the historian Fernand Braudel in hishistorical interpretation of the Mediterranean world. -> 5 Braudelused the architectural metaphor of multidimensional "planes"to describe these multiple temporalities. In twentieth-centuryarchitecture they include state policies and their highly volatileconfigurations; life cycles of institutions and organizations aswell as cities and regions, which undergo slow processes of

010 I 011

Introduction I Architecture's expanded field

3 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at theIllinois Institute 01 Technology, c. 1945

growth and decline; and, most simply, the construction of majorbuildings and the lives of architects, critics, clients, and histori-ans. More fleeting temporalities, in which concepts and idealsappear and disappear only to resurface a few decades later,also play their par!. The problem of writing a history of twentieth-century architecture is precisely that of relating these differentialrates of temporal change to specific designs and built objects.Given this framework, I have resisted the temptation to write ahistory of what has been known as the "Modern Movement"ever since Nikolaus Pevsner made a rather partisan identi-fication of its "pioneers" in 1936, celebrating Walter Gropiusas its major figurehead. -> 6 I have also avoided perpetuat-ing the rubric of the "International Style," formulated in 1932 inNew York, -> 7 preferring instead to shape a broader definitionof modernity that cannot be reduced to the fetish of novitas,of the new for newness's sake. From this point of view, it wasessential not to disreqard architectural interpretations of moder-nity based on conservative or traditionalist concepts, even ifthey were frequently rejected or ridiculed by militant critics act-ing, as is often the case, on behalf of the leading architects.Resurgences of classicism and the occasional subversive erup-tion of the vernacular are part of this bigger picture. Indeed, farfrom being a rigid category, and even less a sterile one, tradi-tion - though sometimes wholly fabricated - has consistentlyserved as an intellectual stimulan!. -> 8

An exploration of the shifting boundaries between architectureand the related fields of art, urban planning, and technologyalso proved indispensable for understanding the changingmethods of form-giving. The elevated ideals with which radi-cal architects have often identified themselves - such as themachine aesthetic or organicism - needed to be taken intoaccount, along with the effects of the apparently most abstract

manifestoes, which have sometimes exerted their influence ata distance of several decades. An attempt has been madethroughout the book to identify the visual documents allowingthe clearest understanding of these resonances and reverbera-tions. Together with images of completed buildings, sometimeswithin their urban contexts, pages of magazines, book covers,and architects' portraits help to reconstruct the complexity ofcontinuously changing networks of signs and forms.

The carousel of hegemonies

In the following pages, the different national "scenes" of archi-tecture have been treated as porous to international strategiesand debates - as contexts in which the latter were subjected todiscussion, modification, and adaption - rather than as territo-ries with impermeable borders. The history of twentieth-centuryarchitecture could be written by following the thread - or, rather,untangling the knot - of consecutive systems of hegemonyimposed on national and regional cultures. -> 9 The period underconsideration was characterized in crucial ways by recurrenteconomic and political conflicts between dominant states,including their military consequences. These conflicts had tre-mendous impact on culture. In 1941 the media tycoon HenryLuce declared that the twentieth century was destined to bethe "American Century," following centuries implicitly perceivedas "French" and then "English." -> 10 There is no doubt that the

United States exercised considerable influence on architecture- as on many other fields of culture - even before the massiveincrease in its power following victory over the Axis forces in1945 and a second triumphal moment at the end of the ColdWar. -> 11 The vocabulary of architecture faithfully reflected

012 I 013

these shifts. After 1945 American terminology supplementedthe Italian language of architecture that had emerged duringthe Renaissance and then was supplemented by French andBritish terms in the eiqhteenth and nineteenth centuries and byGerman terms in the early twentieth century. -> 12

But the hegemony of this relatively new civilization was notthe only thing to have an impact on global architeclure.Considering each national scene as a porous rather thanclosed real m reveals systems of domination of varying types,intensity, and duration, from industrial modes of productionlo patlerns of leisure. National scenes have remained opendespite recurrent attempts by authoritarian or xenophobicregimes to shore up their borders. Far from giving way to ahomogenizing internationalism, national systems have con-stantly redefined themselves, shaped by the interplay of inter-nal and external forces. Long before the advent of air travel andnew information technologies, the global circulation of ideasand images by way of the steamship, the telegraph, and themechanical reproduction of pictures - all nineteenth-centuryinventions - shaped every local scene.These patterns may also be detected within colonial empires,which both reached their apogee and underwent their finalcollapse in the twentieth century, then were partially perpetu-ated under postcolonial conditions after 1945. But the relation-ship of the colonizer to the colonized was never unidirectional,and the hybridization that characterized urban planning andarchitecture in many colonies, where local themes wereassimilated into constructions built by the dominant power,also operated between colonizing nations. -> 13 The generalplan of Chandigarh, capital of the Punjab - initially entrustedto the American architect Albert Mayer, then to Paris-based LeCorbusier - was rooted in town-planning principies that had

Introduction I Architecture's expanded field

been perfected by the British. The architecture of the Moroccancity of Casablanca was defined in relation not just to Paris butalso to Berlin and Los Angeles, while Buenos Aires containedechoes of Madrid, Budapest, Milan, New York, and Paris.

The continuity of type

On each national scene, the groups competing for dominancein architecture at times indulged in exaggerated polemics inorder to consolidate their own "symbolic capital," in sociologistPierre Bourdieu's sense of the termo -> 14 It was therefore impos-sible to limit a history of the relationships structuring twentieth-century architecture to a list of aesthetic "influences" - a termI have consciously avoided. Instead, following Hans Robert Jauss,I found it essential to analyze the reception met by works andideas, as this often redefined the professional identity of archi-tects, even those working at a considerable distance from thebuildings they were interpreting and sometimes emulating. -> 15

This book proposes to map the relationships establishedamong theoretical systems, seminal concepts, urban plans,paper projects, and completed buildings. This last, however,along with individual architects, remains the central focus,although, once again, with their local and international recep-tion taken into account. The connection between imaginedspaces and built ones was particularly strong in the twentiethcentury, given that the principal types of structures were oftendeveloped in a kind of leap from the shelf of the "ideal projectlibrary," as identified by Bruno Fortier, -> 16 to the reality of theconstruction site.The glass towers imagined by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in1921, for example, were built only in the 1950s. They then

became a tiresome cliché - an easy target for critics advocat-ing "postmodernism" - before being reborn at the end of thecentury thanks to new technological advances. Likewise, theimmeuble-villa conceived by Le Corbusier in 1922, a collec-tive dwelling with individual living spaces, has contínued'toinspire projects in the third millennium. The machine-build-ing that Antonio Sant'Elia envisioned just before World War Iwould appear in a modified form in the Centre Pompidou inParis, while the contorted, biomorphic structures dreamed ofby the Expressionists have finally become feasible today in anage when digital modeling has made it possible to break downcomplex shapes into components that can be calculated andindustrially produced.

Historians versus architects,or the problem of inclusion

Until the 1970s the histories told by Sigfried Giedion, BrunoZevi, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Leonardo Benevolo per-petuated a view of modern architecture that gave priority to theradical character of its innovations. Each narrative carried itsown particular biases ...• 17 As early as 1929 Giedion was inter-ested in observing "national constants." ..•18 By 1941 he spokeof the creation of a "new tradition," a notion Hitchcock hadproposed in 1929 ...• 19 In 1951 Zevi responded to Giedion by

highlighting the historical relationship of architectural cultureto politics and surveying a vast array of buildings ...• 20 In 1958

Hitchcock described the "reintegration" of the arts of the engi-neer and the architect; he also preferred to write about build-ings that he had actually had the opportunity to visit. ..•21 As for

Benevolo, he placed the development of modern architecture

within an optimistic picture of the encounter between formaland technological invention and social advances ...• 22 Twenty

years later, but in a similar vein, Kenneth Frampton proposeda "critical history" of the Modern Movement, seeking to pro-long its "incomplete project." ..•23 Soon after, William Curtis

took into account the global expansion of modern architecture,a perspective rooted in his own experiences in Asia and LatinAmerica ...• 24 In 2002, Alan Colquhoun published a concise sur-

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

Reyner Banham, who as early as 1960 saw roots of modernarchitectural strategies in both Italian Futurism and FrenchClassicism, was among those to propose a more subversivereading ...• 26 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co also ana-

Iyzed the relationship of aesthetics and politics in twentieth-century architecture, underlining the ideological forces thatshaped the field, ..•27 which Tafuri had addressed previously inhis enigmatic but magisterial Architecture and Utopía (1973).Several generations of biographical dictionaries and encyclo-pedias have allowed readings parallel to those offered by thesehistorical narratives. Recently Adrian Forty attempted, in Wordsand Buíldíngs, to define the semantic field of modern archi-tecture by identifying some of its key terms, whereas AnthonyVidler unveiled the strategies determining many of these found-ing histories ...• 28 Yet few of these works have attempted toreveal the continuities that characterize modern architecture- an often broken thread, but one that runs throughout theepisodes discussed in this book.From Giedion to Tafuri to Frampton, these discourses of archi-tectural history have revealed the fact that the supposed auton-omy or objectivity of the author is a quasi-fiction. Many of thesebooks originated from a commission by a particular architect

014 I 015

- in Giedion's case, by Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius - orreflected an intellectual position developed in close contactwith architects - in Tafuri's case, with Aldo Rossi and VittorioGregotti. Through such relationships, architects have undeni-ably shaped historians' thinking and writing and at times biasedtheir interpretations.The following pages try to place less emphasis on the creativityof incontestable "masters" like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier,and Mies -> 29 than on the sometimes unfairly neglected work ofarchitects who had less heroic careers but have been rediscov-ered through the publication of a plethora of monographs dur-ing the last two decades. The importance of the "masters" ofmodern architecture needs to be assessed as much through acareful reconsideration of their ascendancy and period of dom-ination as through a celebration of their work. From this point01 view - and unlike many 01 the volumes named above - thisbook attempts to be as inclusive as possible, within the limits 01its format and at the risk 01 occasionally oversimplilying corn-plex trajectories. I have frequently devoted more attention tothe experimental beginnings 01 architects' careers than to theirlate periods, when their work often regressed or was simply fro-zen in place by success and repetition.In order to avoid reproducing the kind 01 epic narrative withwhich many previous histories have interpreteo the theories anddesigns of the most innovative architects 01 the nineteenth cen-tury - reducing their immediate predecessors to the dubiousstatus 01 "pioneers" - I have taken a broad view 01 the untold-ing of architectural modernity. The continuity between the ide-als and reform strategies lorged during the first decades of theIndustrial Revolution and those 01 the "mature" modernism ofthe 1920s cannot be denied. Indeed, a definition 01 modernitylimited to the aesthetic and design precepts of high modernism

Introduction I Architecture's expanded field

appears all the more obsolete thirty years after the eruptionof the last of several short-lived postmodernisms. Withoutgoing so far as to extend the definition of the modern condi-tion to the vast configurations of scientific and political thoughtexplored by, tor example, Bruno Latour, -> 30 I have venturedbeyond the limits of the movements literally proclaiming theirown modernity to consider changes brought about by the con-vergence 01 the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, andthe rise of the nation-state. The adjustment of conservative build-ing codes to the lunctional requirements 01 modernization - theobjective process of the material transformation of society -belongs to this chronicle as much as do innovations in buildingtypology and torrn, even if the former respond more to the man-dates of state power and capital than to ideal s of social relorm.It is difficult and perhaps impossible to communicate in a singlenarrative a spectrum of experiences that thousands of mono-graphs, exhibition catalogs, doctoral theses, and thematic stud-ies have not yet exhausted. Yet by alternating wide brushstrokeswith specific details, I have endeavored to evoke a landscape ofrecurrent themes and at times to reveal different ways of think-ing about the past. Among these recurrent themes is thepassionate search by modern architects for an architectureconsidered to be "rational" - a term that has enjoyed muchsuccess over many decades - or in any case to be justifiedby a ratio related to construction, function, or economy. Thissearch led in extreme cases to a reduction of the conceptionof "rational" building to little more than the implementation ofprincipies like the provision of optimal ventilation or an align-ment guaranteeing maximum sunlight. Another recurrenttheme in twentieth-century architecture has been the relation-ship of architectural programs to the needs of exploited socialclasses - a subject taken into consideration by professional

architects for the first time in history during this periodoThroughout the twentieth century, diverse populist movementsconstantly addressed this subject, whether structurally - forexample, in terms of social housing - or aesthetically, by draw-ing on vernacular rather than "pedigreed" forms.I have aspired to trace projects, alongside the dazzling accom-plishments of the "rnasters" and their trailblazing experimentsthat claimed to free architecture from the weight of history, thatare more reflective of the slow, cumulative, and irresistibleprocess of modernization. During the golden age of Hollywoodcinema, the major studios and leading producers categorized

eir movies as "A," "B," or "e" according to their budget. Thisnarrative, though most often focused on A buildings, wasinitially written with the intention not to neglect the relation-ship between the "major" architecture of the most spectacular• orks and the "minor" architecture of mass production, whichconstituted the urban backdrop for the monumental projects.The physical limitations of a single volume have constrained thisarnbítíon, But if the pages that follow cannot unravel all the mys-zsries 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 dominionof steel

The historical cycle referred to by the Scottish urban plannerPatrick Geddes and his American disciple Lewis Mumford asthe "paleotechnic age" was symbolized by the invention of thesteam engine, the diffusion of the telegraph, and the expansionof the railroads ..• 1 As it unfolded, the crisis of rapidly growingcities and the erosion of historicist architectural languages pro-voked a late-nineteenth-century revision of ideals that had beenformulated in response to the Industrial Revolution. Most of thetheoretical positions and slogans of the following decadessprang from these precocious visions of a new culture basedon induslry. The effects of scientific discoveries combinedwilh Romanlicism and belated echoes of the Enlighlenmenl lobroaden Ihe ambilions of new nation-states thal rapidly came loboth support and depend upon imperialism and colonial expan-sion. National and inlernalional economic growth heighlenedthe demand for public policies that would satisfy the expecla-tions of increasingly well-organized workers.In 1889 an international exposition opened in Paris to com-memorale the hundredlh anniversary of the fall of the Baslille.With Iheir Galerie des Machines, 11 Ferdinand Dulert andVictor Conlamin soughl lo ouldo Joseph Paxlon's CrystalPalace al Ihe London world exposition, which in 1851 hadrevealed Ihe vast gap between the mechanical elegance of itsprefabricated glass envelope and the eclectic ornamentationof the industrial objects it housed ..• 2 The sight of these newproducts featuring mass-produced decoration had spurredJohn Ruskin to pen diatribes against the machines that werestripping workers of their rale in handcrafting objects. But the"Caribbean hut" also on view at the 1851 fair inspired the ideasthat would fuel Gottfried Semper's treatise Oer Stil in den tech-nischen und tektonischen Künsten (Style in the Technical andTectonic Arts; 1860-3) ..• 3 4

Chapter 01 I Sheds to rails: the dominion 01 steel

The lamp of style

At a time when national identity was developing in parallel with apassion for history, Semper and his French contemporary EugeneEmmanuel Viollet-Ie-Duc shared the beliefs that architecture mustfree itself from the multiple styles inherited from the past and thatthe logic embedded in the history of architecture, when releasedfrom the baggage of historical styles, would give rise to the onetrue style of the contemporary age. Semper declared, "Style is theaccord of an art object wilh its genesis and with all the precondi-tions and circumstances of its becoming." .• 4 Viollet-Ie-Duc addedin his Lectures on Architecture 5 that style was no longer merelythe result of the will to create a form, but rather the logical outcomeof a given set of conditions: "As long as we are used to proceedingby reasoning, as long as we have a principie, any compositionaltask is possible, if not easy, and follows an orderly, methodicalpath, the results of which, though they may not be masterpieces,are at the very least fine, acceptable pieces of work that can havestyle." .•5 Thus a locomotive or a sleamboat could be stylish in thesense meant by Viollet-Ie-Duc so long as it did not imitate a stage-coach or a sailboat but embraced its own lechnical requirements.The bold gestures represented by the Galerie des Machines,in which three-hinged arches spanned 110 meters (360 feet),and by the 300-meter (986-foot) tower that would soon takethe name of Gustave Eiffel, 13 the man responsible for itsdesign and erection, were made possible by the use of iron,the preeminenl material of nineteenth-century industry. Thoughclearly visible in both these emblematic edifices, iron was care-fully disguised in other contexts, including most of the buildingserected in Europe and North America in the middle of the cen-tury. Architectural theorists therefore took particular interest inthe question of how to sheathe metallic structures ..• 6

,-

,It===~=

I el gCaribbean Hut, Irom Der Stil in den

zecnniscnen und tektonischen KünstenSlyle in the Technical and Tectonic Arts),30ttlried Semper, 1860-3

5 Vaulting 01 Large Spaces, Irom Entretienssur I'architecture (Lectures on Architecture),Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-Ie-Duc, 1872

11 his 1849 volume The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin hadeñounced "structural deceit" as inimical to architectural "truth."e wrote, "The architect is not bound [italics in original] to exhibit

structure; nor are we to complain 01 him ter concealing it, anyore 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

.~in, Semper - borrowing the notion 01 "tectonics," or the exterioraxpression 01 interior structure, lrom the historian Karl Bbtlicher- proposed to differentiate the Kernform (corelorm) lrom the«unsttorm (artform) in buildings. -> 8 Filty years later Walter

3enjamin no longer resorted to these kinds 01organic images tocharacterize nineteenth-century Parisian architecture but ratheroorrowed a ligure lrom psychoanalysis. In a clarilication 01astaternent by Giedio'n, he noted that the engineering structure 01e ildings played "the role 01 bodily processes - around whichertistic' architectures gather, like dreams around the Iramework 01~ ysiological processes." -> 9 He thus updated Semper's distinc-zon between Kernform and Kunstform using a concept proposed

Sigmund Freud tor the interpretation 01dreams.

The eminence of the Beaux-Arts

~~e relationship 01the outer skin to the internal structure rern-z: ed a kind 01mystery in the great Parisian buildings 01the late- ,eteenth century, such as Charles Garnier's Opéra (1860-75)=..1<1Victor Laloux's Gare d'Orsay (1887-1900). The metal used- lheir construction was totally hidden by their lacades, which,lhe case 01the Opéra, were expertly decorated with sculp-

::...·eand architectural ornament. These two buildings epitomized

6 ~ Firth 01 Forth Bridge, BenjaminBaker and John Fowler, Edinburgh,Inchgarvie and File, United Kingdom,1880-90

the dominant status 01the methods inculcated at the Écoledes Beaux-Arts in Paris, which was uncontested as the lead-ing school in Europe and much 01the world. Among its stu-dent body were young Americans and Central and EasternEuropeans, whose adherence to its principies would vary widelyalter they returned home. The Beaux-Arts approach lavored axialcomposition, symmetry, and hierarchy - above all in the con-text 01the competitions in which its students engaged - andit neglected the relationship 01 buildings to the urban labric infavor 01an abstract vision that generally imposed them on emptysites. -> 10 But as the New York architect and Beaux-Arts alumnusErnest Flagg underlined in a lively article written upon his returnIrom France, such an approach provided ballast against thehazards 01prolessional practice. -> 11

The École was hardly characterized by complete unanimity, how-ever; contradictory positions were olten embraced even by thosewho adhered to its central principies. In contrast to the carica-tures drawn by modernist critics, many exponents 01eclecticismused the past not as a supermarket ter historical ornaments butrather as a source lor evaluating the "true" and "correct" languagesuited to each project; in this respect they differed Irom both thechampions 01a rigorous classicism and the hard-line rational-ists. The Beaux-Arts "eclectics" olten proclaimed their allegianceto Viollet-Ie-Duc, tor whom a building's plan was a lunction 01 itspurpose and its lacade deduced Irom its plan. The Paris architectand critic Frantz Jourdain expressed this position by praising thearchitects 01the 1889 exposition lor having "put aside senile anddangerous formulas and understood that ... social requirementscannot be subjected to the tyrannical rule 01a style," and particu-larly lor having understood that "it is the necessities 01everydaylile that have the right to dictate the structure and to demand thatit provide rational exteriors, plans, and proportions." -> 12

018 I 019

7 Postsparkasse, atto Wagner,Vienna, Austria, 1903, first version01 the main elevation

DIE KOMPOSITION,

DIE KUNST 1ST, WIE SCHONDAS WORT ANDEUTET,ElN KONNEN, SJE 1ST ElNEFAHIOKElT, WELCHE, VON

WENIGEN AUSERwAHLTEN ZURVOLLENDUNG ERHOSEN, DERSCHONHEIT SlNHLICHEN AUS.nauca VERLEIHT. 11111111 WIRDDIESERAUSDRUCKDURCHDAS AUGE W AHRGENOMMEN, SOENTSPRICHTDlESEP'~OKEITDEMBEORIFFE ,,an.DENDE KUNST". tiiI VON DEN BILDENDEN KONsTENHlt.BEN MALEREI 1.TND BlLDNEREIIHRE VORBILDER STETS IN DERNATUR, wAHREND DIE BAUKUNSTOlE MENSCHLICHE SCHAFFEH5-KRAFT DIREKT ZUR BASlS HATUNO ES VERS'I'EHT, DAS VERAR-BErrETE ALS VOLUG NEUGESTAL-TETES ZU BlETEN. [J 1111

8 Page from Moderne Architektur (ModernArchitecture), Otto Wagner, 1896

9 Postsparkasse, Otto Wagner, Vienna, Austria, 1903-6

10 ~ History 01 Human Habitation, section at the Universal Exposition, Charles Garnier, Paris, France, 1889

Programs of modernization

The "everyday life" referred to by Jourdain had been radicallytransformed since the beginnings of industrialization, Increasedmanufacturing needs and expanded communication and dis-tribution networks required more factories, train stations, mar-kets, and department stores, The establishment of nation-stateshad stimulated the construction of palaces for the governing elitesand large halls for parliamentary assernblies. New penal, health-care, and education policies took material form in prisons, hospi-tals, schools, and universities. Above all, the dawn of the age oforganization led to the proliferation of a new type of edifice, par-ticularly in the United States: the large building devoted exclu-sively to otfices. Traditional construction techniques relying onstone and brick masonry, though ingeniously reinforced with tiebeams, girders, and iron frames, were reaching their limits, andthe invention of new types of structures became crucial.Many contemporaries recognized the new horizons openedup by the great iron and glass halls built to serve the agendas01 the Industrial Revolution and the nation-state, Decades ear-lier, the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol had put forward a vision 01a new transparent, vertical architecture derived from his anal-ysis of Gothic architecture and based on "one principal idea:height." --> 13 Later in the century Émile Zola studied the concept

01 the new Parisian department sto res in writing his novel Aubonheur des dames (The Ladies' Paradise; 1883) and solicitedme advice of Jourdain, who would later design the SamaritaineDepartment Store in Paris, Zola's contemporary Joris-KarlHuysmans observed that the new iron edifices did not include"Greek, Gothic or Renaissance borrowings; they are a new, origi-nal form, unachievable with stone, possible only with the metal-lurgical products of our tactories." --> 14 As for Henry James, he

returned to the United States alter several years abroad and dis-covered the skyscrapers of New York with an admiration tingedwith horror, writing in 1906 that they resembled "extravagant pinsin a cushion already overplanted, --> 15

The tension between civil engineering and architecture, so obvi-ous in international exhibitions where historicist ornament con-trasted sharply with structural innovations, was toned downsomewhat in the great works of the engineers, often achievedwithout archítects. Photographs of Eiffel's viaducts in Porto andGarabit (1876-7 and 1881-4, respectively) and of Benjamin Bakerand John Fowler's spectacular bridge over the Firth of Forth(1880-90) 6 publicized the idea of an architecture based on theelasticity of the frame rather than the massiveness of the walls,Images of bridges, dams, locks, and other marvels of civil engi-neering free of any applied artistic forms inspired many careersin engineering and architecture. It is no coincidence that the illus-tration opening Le Corbusier's manifesto Vers une architecture(Toward an Architecture; 1923) is a view of the Garabit Viaduct. 12

Networks of internationalization

Once travel by steamship and the rapid long-distance trans-mission and increasingly accurate reproduction of photographsencouraged the circulation of people and images, international-ization intensified. World's fairs became mass spectaclescrowded with travelers from far-flung places, while professionalarchitects hopped on trains and boats to go see their colleagues'work. --> 16 Architectural periodicals provided plans and photo-

graphs of even the most distant structures, while a genuinelyglobal market for architecture took shape through major compe-titions, such as the one in 1898 for the campus of the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, and those held between 1905 and 1914 for

022 I 023

13 Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel andMaurice Koechlin, Paris, France, 1888-9

·I-:--....,~~~JII!!!IIII'IIII..·- ~ "S.;..

ESTHÉTIQUE DE L'INGENIEURARCHITECTURE

12 Garabit Viaduct, Gustave Eiffel,Loubaresse/Ruynes-en-Margeride,France, 1881-4, page lrom LeCarbusier, Vers une Architecture(Towards an Architecture, 1923)

11 Galerie des Machines, Ferdinand Dutert andVictar Contamin, Paris, France, 1889

the design of new capital cities like Canberra and for extensionsto Barcelona, Berlin, and Antwerp. Photography, already a wide-spread practice, became a powerful medium in the circulation ofarchitectural forms and the study of urban environments. In fact,both architects and writers seized on the young medium andpracticed it themselves: Émile Zola photographed the CrystalPalace as reconstructed in Sydenham, outside London, and FrankLloyd Wright returned from his first trip to Japan with a collectionof his own photographs of temples and gardens ...• 17 Artists' inter-pretations of modern life were no less significant. In Paris, ClaudeMonet painted memorable views of the Gare Saint-Lazare, thetrain station closest to his studio, while Gustave Caillebotte andGeorges Seurat took an interest in the nearby Pont de l'Europeand the bridge in Asnieres ...• 18 This acute attention to the met-

ropolitan scenery would continue with the Expressionists and theFuturists. Though architects had a close working relationship withthe practitioners of the decorative arts, it was the work of paint-ers that especially transformed their sensibility. There were manydomains of internationalization. The rapid growth of colonialempires, notably those of Great Britain and France, was accompa-nied by an assimilation and transformation of the visual languagesof colonized peoples, which the European public encounteredespecially through the ephemeral extravaganzas of world's fairs.The Human Habitation pavilions built by Charles Garnier for the1889 exposition 10 - and strongly criticized by the academy fortheir "Iack of taste" - opened multiple cultures to observation ...• 19

Architects also had access to handbooks and portfolios contain-ing examples of building designs and ornamental motifs from, forinstance, the Far and Near East, which they could copy or adaptto their own purposes. The world's fair held in 1900 in Paris wassomething of a regression compared to its 1889 predecessor.Henri Oeglane's Grand Palais and Charles Girault's Petit Palais

Chapter 01 I Sheds to rails: the dominion 01steel

lacked the structural rigor of the Galerie des Machines. Rare werethe pavilions displaying a new, more fluid aesthetic or even hintingat an organic life. The most remarkable contributions, such as thepavilion devoted to a novel evocation of a village church designedby Eliel Saarinen, who was representing Finland, served to crys-tallize the national forms for which the past century had constantlysearched. From this time on, the most successful experiments wereto take the form of houses and modest public buildings rather thanthe grand official architecture of nation-states and municipalities.The most coherent and revolutionary architectural hypothesis putforward during this period between the two Paris world's fairs wasprobably that of the Viennese architect Otto Wagner. In ModerneArchitektur (1896), 8 written for his students at the Vienna Academyof Fine Arts, he advocated a Nutzsti/ (utilitarian style) that was freeof historical references and that transposed the rhythms of indus-trial society to architecture: "One idea inspires the book, namelythat the basis of today's predominant views on architecture mustbe shifted, and we must become fully aware that the sole depar-ture point for our artistic work can only be modern life." ..•20 After

his metropolitan railroad stations, which he began building in 1895,and the two buildings he erected on the Wienzeile in 1898, fea-turing bold floral decorations on ceramics and more conservativesculptural ornament, Wagner's designs underwent a spectaculartransformation. The glazing of the main hall of his Postsparkasse(Post Office Savings Bank; 1903-6) 9 was free of any such deco-rative detail. On the exterior, the aluminum rivets attesting to thelogic of the building's on-site assembly became the ornamentation,punctuating the still-symmetrical facade that the building turned tothe RingstraBe. 7 These rivets, which affixed the stone building'scladding along the great monument-lined boulevard built in thelast third of the nineteenth century, paradoxically pointed forwardto an architecture freed from the weight of masonry.

The search formodern form

By the turn 01 the twentieth century, lew progressive architectshad lailed to read the work 01 Friedrich Nietzsche. In ThusSpoke Zarathustra, the German philosopher had affirmedthe role of "the creator" as an iconoclast, a "Iawbreaker." -> 1

Equally rare were those architects ignorant 01 the writings ofJohn Ruskin and William Morris, which called for artistic crea-tion to be rooted in manual labor. A shared cult of youth drovearchitects and artists of the new generation to break with insti-tutions that were now considered as outdated as they weretyrannica!. The 1897 "secession" 01 Viennese artists and archi-tects lrom the prevailing aesthetic culture in Austria - thosewho shared the realization that there were no longer any tradi-tions left to reject - was the most spectacular example of thismodern trend toward rupture with art and architecture's past.The movement included a group 01 young artists who, startingin 1898, gathered around the periodical Ver sacrum (SacredSpring), its title an allusion to a poem by the Romantic writerLudwig Uhland.The unification between architecture and the decorative artswas a constant feature of the practice of these young proles-sionals, who sought in different ways to turn each edifice intoa "total wark of art." The latter concept derived from the musi-cal dramas of Richard Wagner, another figure venerated byEuropean and North American intellectuals. -> 2 Stone, brick,metal, glass, wood, and ceramics became the instruments ofa new orchestral composition in which the specific quality ofeach component was accentuated in a variety 01 design strat-egies known as Art Nouveau in France, Sezession in Austria,Jugendstil in Germany, Floreale or Liberty in Italy, and Modernin Russia.

Chapter 02 I The search lar modern lorm

Toward a "new art" from Paris to Berlin

The label "Art Nouveau" (new art) was borrowed from theeponymous Paris art gallery owned by Samuel Bing anddesigned by Louis Bonnier in 1895. It was applied to the experi-ments carried out in Paris by architects such as Hector Guimardand Jules Lavirotte. But the real starting point of the movementwas lound in a series of town houses that Victar Horta built inBrussels beginning in 1893. Here Harta lollowed the agendathat had been set lorth in the first issue 01 the periodical L'Artmoderne in 1881, which informed its readers: "The artist is notsatisfied merely with building in the ideal, he is involved witheverything that interests and touches uso Our monuments,houses, furniture, clothes, the slightest objects of everyday useare constantly revisited and transformed by Art, which com-bines with everything and constantly renews our entire life tomake it more elegant and more noble, more cheerful and moresocia!." -> 3 Horta followed Viollet-Ie-Duc's injunction to create

rational and ethically "true" architecture. To do so, he devotedhimself to the study of plant life, which inspired the motils usedin the columns and joists of his houses. He also conceiveddesigns that allowed light to reach deep into the lots on whichhis houses were set. Horta's masterpiece, which made his visionlegible to the working class, was the Maison du Peuple (People'sHouse; 1898-9, demolished 1965) 16 in Brussels, a buildingthat enclosed a meeting hall and a brasserie in a metallic cage.It would remain one of the clearest interpretations of this newtype of building commissioned by warkers' unions ar coopera-tives to serve as a proletarian alternative to bourgeois gatheringplaces. French Socialist leader Jean .Jaures declared on theday 01 its opening: "Here dreams take the solidity of stonewithout losing their spiritual elevation." -> 4

14 Sanatorium, Josef Hoffmann, Purkersdorf, Austria, 1904-5

15 Zacherlhaus, Joze Plecnik, Vienna, Austria, 1903-5

16 Maison du Peuple (People's House), Victar Harta, Brussels, Belgium, 1898-9, demolished 1965

028 I 029

17 Bloemenwerl House, Henry Van de Velde,Uccle, Belgium, 1895-6

18 Museum 01 Decoralive Arts, Odón Lechner,Budapesl, Hungary, 1893-6

19 The Orchard, Charles F.A. Voysey, Chorleywood,United Kingdom, 1899

Horta's compatriot Henry van de Velde, born in Antwerp andtrained as a painter, sought an aesthetic principie that wouldapply to every object 01 daily lile. Looking back in 1916, hewrote, "Ruskin and Morris tried to chase ugliness Irom man'sheart; I preached that we had to chase it trorn his mind." -> 5 HisBloemenwerl House (1895-6) 17 in Uccle, structured around acentral double-height hall in the English lashion, and theresidencies he built in Germany after 1900 were treated ascreations in which "the ornamental rnotií becomes an organ-ism." He proclaimed that "ornamentation is subject only to thelaws 01the goal it sets for itsell: harmony and equilibrium. It isnot expected to represent anything, it must be Iree to not rep-resent anything since without this Ireedom it could not exist." -> 6

In Vienna a group 01young architects trorn all over CentralEurope gathered around Otto Wagner and saw their first worksgo up in the Austrian capital. Joseph Maria Olbrich built theSecession Building in 1898-9 to house the wark 01 radical art-ists. Its pediment was inscribed with the slogan, "To the age itsart, to art its Ireedom." He also built houses that aspired to pro-vide an architectural interpretation 01 his clients' personalities.Josel Hoffmann undertook a search lar a geometriclanguage based on the square and on the interplay 01 blackand white. With the Purkersdorl Sanatorium (1904-5) 14 nearVienna, he developed an orthogonal architecture with whitesurlaces, inspired by houses he had sketched on his trav-els in the south 01 Italy. The Slovenian native .Joze Plecnik builtthe Zacherlhaus 15 in 1903-5 using prismatic shapes; thiswas a bold departure trorn the excessive subtleties lhat hadquickly diminished the Secession's impact. Max Fabiani erectedthe Portois & Fix (1899-1900) and Artaria (1900) buildings, aswell as the more classical Urania inslilute 01 popular science(1909-10). Wagner's students Jan Kotéra and Pavel Janák

Chapter 02 I The search lar modern lorm

disseminated their teacher's ideas in Bohemia. Wagner alsohad an impact in Budapest, where Odon Lechner cornbinedWagner's approach with Hungarian ornamenlal themes in suchbuildings as the Museum 01Decorative Arts (1893-6). 18

Having settled in Berlin, Van de Velde was invited by CountHarry Kessler to establish new art schools in Weimar, the capi-tal 01 the Grand Duchy 01Saxony. Van de Velde both designedbuildings and put in place a curriculum based on a conception01 lorm embodied in the "modern line," which he imagined 10 beas "expressive as the line that reveals the rush 01 blood beneathlhe epidermis, the breath that makes Ilesh rise, the energy thatlifts our limbs." He added that the modern line had to transcribelhe movemenls 01 lile "whether we are devoling ourselves topractical daily chores or we are in a state 01ecstasy, drunk ordrawn into that divine dance, to which, as Zarathustra com-mands, man musl constantly give himsell over so as 10 escapethe weight 01 lile and material things." -> 7 For the industrialistKarl Ernst Osthaus, Van de Velde built in the small manulacturingtown 01Hagen lirst the Folkwang Museum (1900-2) then thelarge villa Hohenhol (1908), culminating a decade 01work.While these developments were unlolding in Saxony, the GrandDuke Ernst Ludwig created the Darmstadt arlisls' colony. Theoutside world discovered it in 1901 on the occasion 01 anexposition there entitled Ein Ookument deutscher Kunst (ADocument 01German Art). Olbrich was the star 01the show.Having completed the Secession Building in Vienna a tew yearsbelore, he built the Ernst-Ludwig House 21 ter the exposition, anarlisls' warkshop that dominaled the Darmstadt colony, as wellas his own house, in which he conceived every detail, frorn tex~tiles to cutlery. Peter Behrens, a painter-turned-architect trornHamburg with a more austere artistic language, lollowed suit bydesigning no less inclusively every leature 01 the house he built

22 Elvira Photo Studio, August Endell, Munich,

Germany, 1897, demolished 1944

23 ~ Glasgow School 01Art, Charles RennieMackintosh, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 1897-1908

21 Ernst-Ludwig 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 designswere more superficial, including the Elvira Photo Studio, (1897,demolished 1944),22 in Munich realized by August Endell, withits decorative facade treatmenl. Familiar with Heinrich Wblfflin'spsychology of art, Endell believed that a Formgefühl (formsense) was at the root of all architectural designo According tohim, "The architect must be a form-artist; only the art 01 formleads the way to a new architecture." .• 8

Great Britain after the Arts and Crafts

The close ti es between Germany and Great Britain were exem-plified by Charles Rennie Mackintosh's participation in the 1901"House lor an Art l.over' competition organized by the Zeit-schrift für Innendekoration (Journal lar Interior Decoration) andby his attention to Olbrich's work. Around this time, the Artsand Crafts movem'ent, which had been centered on WilliamMorris, began taking a new direction, and William A. Lethabybecame its principal theorisl. A lormer assistant to the architectRichard Norman Shaw, Lethaby lounded the Central School01Arts and Crafts in 1888 in London, where he insisted on asocially generous curriculum. In his 1892 book Architecture,Mysticism and Myth, he called lor architecture to be a "syn-thesis of the fine arts, the commune 01 all the cralts." .• 9 Buthe also expressed a firm beliel in the present, in agreementwith his contemporaries. As Reyner Banham noted, an exten-sion 01 Lethaby's position may be read in a 1905 article in TheArchitectural Review, which asks rhetorically: "Why should wearchitects live in perpetual rebellion with the present? ... [I]f wecould only think of our building as an entirely modern problemwithout precedent ... just as the railway engine is, then, with-out doubt ... the ruins 01the past might crumble to dust but the

[true] architectural tradition would remain with us still." ..•10

In practical terms, the Arts and Crafts heritage was representedprincipally by the houses 01Charles Francis Annesley Voysey,whose puritanical approach resulted in what he called "mod-est country houses." His own residence, The Orchard (1899) 19,

in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, was an example 01such a house,with a rectangular layout designed lor a middle-class, intel-lectually inclined owner. Although in Voysey's view "too muchluxury is death to the artistic soul,' .• 11 his New Place, a resi-dence commissioned by the publisher A. M. M. Stedman inHaslemere, Surrey (1899), certainly did not lack complexity.Several ligures contributed to the modernization 01the Britishscene during this periodo The lurniture designer Charles RobertAshbee proposed to "reconstruct" the industrial system ratherthan rebel against it; he pointed out that in the "modern mechan-ical industry 'standard' is necessary, and 'standardization' is nec-essary," given that "the great social movement" 01the Arts andCrafts had degenerated into "a narrow and tiresome little aris-tocracy working with great skill lor the very rich." ..•12 Followinghis design 01 the central hall 01 the Vienna Secession's exhibi-tion in 1900, Ashbee's ideas were lelt all the way to Chicago.There he met Frank Lloyd Wright, who drew on Ashbee's thinkingin his 1901 book The Arts and Crafts of the Machine. AnotherEnglish designer, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, locused on theinterior space 01 houses, and his ideas met with such successin Germany that he was invited to join Ashbee in litting out theGrand Duke 01Hesse's palace in Darmstadt (1897-8).More spectacular, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's activity centeredon Glasgow, a city with a solid classical tradition. With HerbertMcNair and the sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald, whowere close to the Symbolist movement on the Continent, helounded "The Four," also known as "The Mac Group." Their

030 I 031

24 Hill House, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Helensburgh, United Kingdom, 1902-3

designs were shown in 1896 at the Arts and Crafts ExhibitionSociety. Mackintosh also designed several tearooms inGlasgow, including "The Willow" (1903-4), whose name wasdrawn from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet "The WillowWood." Mackintosh scored the interior with a pattern of ver-tical lines that was echoed in the high backs of the chairs,while the use of white lacquer contrasted with natural oak.The stained-glass door panels and the lighting fixtures wereespecially inventive. Mackintosh built a handful of houseson hilly terrain, their prismatic volumes roofed with slates. Ofthese, Hill House, (1902-3),24 publisher W. W. Blackie's home

in Helensburgh, was particularly remarkable for the way itswalls of stone and rough concrete recalled Scottish houses ofthe seventeenth century. For Windyhill, in Kilmacolm (1900), ahouse whose walls seem to embrace the garden of its owner,William Davidson, Mackintosh designed built-in furniture andwhite-Iacquered chairs and decarated the walls with geo-metric motifs. But his major work, to which he devoted him-self intermittently for more than ten years, was the GlasgowSchool of Art. 23 He first completed the east wing (1897-8),which opened large rectangular windows onto the street,incorporating allusions to Gothic religious buildings andmedieval fortresses. Built considerably later, the west wing(1907-8) had a fundamentally different designo A gable struc-ture with three vertical bow windows extending much of theheight of the elevation, it was a revision of a scheme withsmall arched windows he had proposed initially. Mackintoshalso designed two large glass boxes on the roof to serve asstudios. But his majar focus was on the library, which occu-pied two levels and included a balcony floating inside thebuilding's masonry envelope ..• 13 This warm compositionof wooden elements, illuminated by light coming through

Chapter 02 I The search lar modern lorrn

25 La Samaritaine Department Store, FrantzJaurdain, Paris, France, 1904-5

small cutouts, resembled a kind of sacred forest, especiallywhen suffused with daylight from the glass roof. Mackintosh'swork had considerable resonance on the Continent,-and theorthogonal shapes of his library countered the preferencethere for more plantlike motifs.

Art Nouveau and the Paris-Nancy axis

On the other si de of the Channel, Art Nouveau branchedout into two principal centers: Paris and Nancy. In the capitalcity, critics derided the "noodle style" (le style nouille) of HectarGuimard, whose entrances to metro stations began to appearon Paris streets in 1900. The most remarkable of them lookedlike insects spreading diaphanous wings. The outcry by criticsand the hostility of the conservative Commission for Old Parisprevented Guimard from realizing other such projects, includinga kiosk he designed for the Place de l'Opéra in 1905. Inspiredby his encounter with Horta's buildings, Guimard had becomewell known thanks to his Castel Béranger (1894-8), 28 a Parisbuilding noted for its poetic assemblage of cast iron, brick,and rough and carved stone. Guimard densely covered thebuilding's surfaces from its front gate, which opened onto anevocation of an underwater grotto, to the wainscoting of itsapartments, with a vinelike web of lines. The building's facadesrevealed the interior articulation and abandoned any vertical orhorizontal alignment.It was rare far Guimard's houses, such as the one he designedfor the ceramicist Louis Coillot in Lille (1898-1900), to sitquietly between parallel walls. Both the Castel Henriette inSevres (1899-1903, demolished 1969) and the Castel Orgevalin Villemoisson-sur-Orge (1900-3) extended the vocabularyof the Castel Béranger, displaying an acrobatic assembly of

26 Entrance Gate at the 1900International Exposition, René Binet,

?aris, France, 1900, as featured on apublicity blotting paper

27 Louis Majorelle House, Henri Sauvage, Nancy, France, 1898-1901 28 Castel Béranger, Hector Guimard, Paris,France, 1894-8

cylindrical turrets, elabarate windows, and conical roofs thatenclosed ingenious plans and made no concession tosymmetry. In 1929 Salvador Dalí interpreted Guimard's playfuldesigns as "nothing but the cylindrical anamorphosis of hered-itary symmetries." .• 14 In fact, Guimard had already revealedhis kinship with Viollet-Ie-Duc. He confirmed it with hisÉcole du Sacré-Coeur (1898) in Paris, where he constructedV-shaped cast-iron supports like the ones Viollet had includedin an imaginary view in his Entretiens sur /'architecture(Lectures on Architecture) twenty-five years earlier. At thetime, Guimard's largest building was the Humbert de RomansConcert Hall in Paris (1899-1901), the roof 01which was heldin place by branching wood columns that created theimpression of a natural lorest. Elsewhere in Paris only JulesLavirotte's extravagantly decorated buildings, such as theCéramic Hotel (1904) and his apartment building on AvenueRapp, provoked oútraqe Irom contemporaries comparable tothat elicited by Guimard's work.Though dominated by eclecticism, the 1900 InternationalExposition in Paris did feature a few pavilions related to thenew aesthetic, including the Bing pavilion by Bonnier, whoalso designed a stunning unbuilt giant globe lar the geogra-pher Élysée Reclus and who later built two elementary schoolsin Paris. Above all, the fair's entrance pavilion, 26 designedby René Binet, later the author of the new Printemps depart-ment stares (1907-10), reconnected with the organic sources01Art Nouveau. Binet's interpretation was inspired by theGerman biologist Ernst Haeckel, the author 01 a series 01 sci-entilic investigations illustrated with brilliant color plates show-ing the structures of underwater organisms. As Binet wrote toHaeckel of his design: "Everything about it, lrom the generalcomposition to the smallest details, has been inspired by your

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

Jourdain (the son 01Frantz Jourdain) and Henri Sauvage lar theAmerican dancer l.oie Fuller, evoked the undulating fabrics sheused in her performances.Together with the ceramicist Alexandre Bigot and the glass-maker Jacques Gruber, Sauvage also built a house for thecabinetmaker Louis Majorelle (1898-1901) 27 in Nancy. FrantzJourdain saw it as the culmination 01Viollet-Ie-Duc's rational-ist approach, a "mathematical solution to the problem posed,"unencumbered by any concern lor symmetry: "Sauvage appliesthis same respect lor truth to his decorative work, which provesto be impeccably rational and which was conceived simulta-neously with the structure, in one impulse, the consequence 01an idea and the corollary of a theorem." .• 16 In dialogue with

the philosopher Paul Souriau, the bard 01 "rational beauty,"the Nancy artists developed a body of work remarkable far itsvitality and consistency, with Lucien Weissenburger's housesrepresenting particularly elegant examples ..• 17

Frantz Jourdain was more than a radical critico In 1891 hebecame the lirst architect to join the Société Nationale desBeaux-Arts lounded by Auguste Rodin, Euqene Carriere, andPierre Puvis de Chavannes. He supported Alfred Dreylusagainst his anti-Semitic accusers and was a friend of ÉmileZola, whose lunerary monument he designed in 1902. In1903 he lounded the Salon d'Automne, the principal show-case for Parisian innovation over the next twenty years.His most brilliant architectural work was the SamaritaineDepartment Store 25 built between 1904-5 along the Seinein Paris. The exuberance 01 the wrought-iron decorations withfloral motifs on its front contrasted with the rationality of itsside facades, whose large rectangular windows evoked theoflice buildings 01 Chicago.

034 I 035

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

From Italian "Floreale" to Russian "Modern"

At the turn of the century, the intellectual and aesthetic eman-cipation already underway in Austria and Belgium began tospread throughout Europe. In Italy the dominance 01 Vienneseideas manilested itsell in the work 01 several architects.Raimondo d'Aronco was one 01 many Italian architects work-ing in the Near Easl. Active in Istanbul Irom 1894 to 1909,he created, in the words 01 his Roman compatriot MarcelloPiacentini, "a vast, variable, multilaceted body 01 work," char-acterized by an "exuberant, restless, impulsive" spirit. -> 18 His

colorlul houses on the Bosphorus and his designs in Pera,such as the Botter House (1900-1), 30 were characterized bythe plasticity 01 their surfaces and the graphic effect of theirmetallic components.Giuseppe Sommaruga and Ernesto Basile, active in Milan andPalermo, respectively, indulged in monumental and historicistimagery when designing public structures but used more Ilex-ible lorms lor their private commissions. Sommaruga's PalazzoCastiglione on Corso Venezia in Milan (1903-4) 31 caused ascandal - not because 01 its innovative concrete Iloors, whichwere invisible, but because 01 its rough lacade and its anatomi-cally explicit decor. Two voluptuous sculpted lemale ligures oneither side 01the entrance were removed under pressure lromcritics and relocated to his Villa Romeo in Milan (1907-12).The latter was a sophisticated composition 01 materials andcolors and probably the most apt example 01 an architecturedescribed by the key terms "living organism, logic, lunction,constructed objecl." -> 19 Among Basile's abundant contributionsto the city 01 Palermo, the Villino Florio (1900.,..2) and the VillaIgiea Hotel (1898-1900) stood out lor their decorative whimsy.In Russia, which had been plunging headlonq into industrial

Chapter 02 I The search lar modern lorm

30 Botter House, Raimondod'Aronco, Constantinople(Istanbul), Oltoman Empire(Turkey),1900-1

development since the abolition 01serfdom in 1861, theMuscovite bourgeoisie was quick to take hold 01 those themesgathered together by its architects under the banner- of the"Modern" style. Though Viollet-Ie-Duc's reflections on a nationalstyle in his 1879 volume L'art russe (Russian Art) remainedon everyone's mind, architects now turned to popular themesrather than those of religious structures. The leading protagonist01 the Modern was Fiodor Shekhtel, the creator 01the RussiaPavilion at the Glasgow World's Fair (1901), which was praisedlor its inventiveness and its coloration. In Moscow he organ-ized the 1902 Exhibition 01Architecture and Design in the NewStyle, displaying Viennese and Scottish works. Shekhtel builtthe Riabushinsky House in Moscow (1900-2),29 with a sculp-tural staircase that ranks high as a realization 01 European ArtNouveau. He also built the Yaroslavl Train Station in Moscow(1902) for the industrialist Savva Mamontov, the patron 01theAbramtsevo artists' colony, tapping into a repertory of popu- .lar and medieval Russian lorms with the collaboration 01thepainter Konstantin Korovin. The Modern approach was not lim-ited to big cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. It was alsoadopted in the rest 01the Russian empire, as, lor example, inMikhail Eisenstein's buildings in Lvov and Riga. -> 20

The Catalan renaissance

Catalonia presented what was probably the most remarkableEuropean scene 01the period, experiencing a renaixensa, orrenaissance, rooted in its rediscovery 01 its own medievalhistory and the adoption 01lorms from the Orient. Several vari-ations 01 Barcelona modernism are clearly visible on the Paseode Gracia, a wide bourgeois avenue in the city's extensionplanned in 1859 by Ildelonso Cerda. Three buildings laced off

31 Palazzo Castiglione. GiuseppeSommaruga. Milan. ltaly, 1903-4

036 I 037

32 Casa Milá (La Pedrera; theQuarry), Antoni Gaudí, Barcelona,Spain, 1906-10

on the "Manzana de la Discordia" (its name meaning both"block of discord" and "apple 01discord," playing on thedouble meaning 01manzana). The Lleó Moreira Building (1902)by Lluís Dornenech i Montañer is reminiscent of Parisian ArtNouveau. Farther along, the Amatller Building (1898-1900)by Josep Puig y Cadalalch, who was not only an architect butalso an international traveler, archaeologist, and politician, lea-tured medieval-style decoration and a stepped gable, evokingHanseatic merchant houses and concealing its owner's photo-graphy studio. Next door, the Casa Battló by Antoni Gaudí(1906), a renovation 01an older building, was nicknamed Casade los Huesos (House 01 Bones) because of the bone-shapedcolumns along its front facade, which opens into a stairhall cladwith blue ceramic tiles. The building is topped with a carapace01 colored ti les.The medievalizing leatures 01 Puig's Casa Terrades, also knownas the Casa de les Punxes (House 01Spikes) (1903-7),33express a clear nostalgia lor Catalonia's golden age. Decoratedwith mosaics depicting nationalist motifs, the edilice caused apolitical scandal. A lew blocks away, Dornenech built the SanPau Hospital (1902-10), where the brick patterning is moreplaylul. He combined an iron structure and wide glass openingswith extraordinary sculptural inventiveness in the Palau de laMúsica Catalana (Palace 01 Catalan Music; 1905-8),35 built lorthe Orféo Catala choir as a symbol 01the regional renaissance.The sense 01 imagination manilest in the decoration 01 thePalau is even more vivid in Gaudí's buildings. A genius inven-tor of structural and ornamental lorms, this fervent Catholic wasborn into a family 01craltsmen and, inspired by his readings01 Ruskin and Viollet-Ie-Duc, retained a direct and permanentconnection with his materials. -> 21 Alter some initial buildingssuch as the Palacio Güell (1886-9), whose forms reflected

038 I 039

33 Casa Terrades (Casa de les Punxes; House 01 Spikes), Josep Puig yCadatalch, Barcelona, Spain, 1903-7

strong neo-Gothic and neo-Moorish inlluences (the latterderived Irom a trip to Tangier), Gaudí pursued two parallel lines01 research. On the one hand, he conceived structures basedon slender trames and narrow arches, tested in innovativescale models that used strings to simulate the catenary curvesdistributing the structure's weight. On the other, he created anexuberant ornamental language with pieces 01 broken ceramic,wrought iron, and sculptures 01 his own invention.Every tacet 01 Gaudí's experimentation 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 Paseode Gracia, where he built the Casa Mila (1906-10) 32 acrossfrorn the Casa Battló. Known as the "Pedrera" (quarry), the CasaMilá evokes the rocky cliffs 01 the Pyrenees at Montserrat, aprivileged site tor Catalan regional identity. Inside, the steelcolumn-and-beam structure supports the hanging stonelacade, while the roof bristles with shapes covered in ceramictiles and the underground level serves as a parking garage.In the apartments, wavy ceilings were sculpted by JosepMaria Jujol, a collaborator 01 Gaudí who later carried on hisresearch. Gaudí's most ambitious project was the SagradaFamilia Basilica, which he oversaw trorn 1883 until his deathin 1926. He linished the crypt begun by his lormer employer,Juan Martorell Montells, as well as the walls 01 the apse andthe eastern lacade 01 the transept, which contains a stunninggrouping 01 statues enmeshed in vines. Most importantly, heabandoned the Gothic system originally planned ter the nave,replacing it with stable hyperboloids - surlaces with doublecurvatures - without a single Ilying buttress. The church'sconstruclion progressed episodically tor a century and is stillongoing loday.

Chapter 02 I The search tor modern íorrn

Throughoul Europe, mosl 01 Ihe impulses initiated by the revolt01 young archilecls and artists betore 1900 persisled unlil 1914,and sometimes beyond. The rigidily 01 classical compositionwas lundamenlally and successlully challenged Ihanks to stral-egies aimed at inventing a new urban picturesque and accom-modaling modern ways 01 lile. The legacy 01 Ihe Secessionand Arl Nouveau was also visible in Ihe decorative elemenlsIhal were soon lo be mass produced - in direcl contradiclionlo Iheir movements' initially individualistic aims. Easily imitatedand industrialized, Ihese expressions were subject to both com-mercialization and the widest popular consumplion, slrelchinglo the larlhest reaches 01 Lalin America and Asia.At Ihe same lime, the experiments undertaken trorn Vienna toGlasgow and trorn Moscow to Barcelona also led to the dis-covery 01 new geometries, trorn Ihe experimental, Iyrical lan-guage 01 Gaudí lo the orthogonal, modular approach 01 JoselHoffmann. This polarily between expressionism and lunction-alism, evident in their divergent directions, would come lo Ihelore in Ihe 1920s.

34 Park Guéll, Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona, Spain, 1900-14

35 Palace of Catalan Music, Lluís Doménech i Montañer, Barcelona, Spain, 1905-8

040 I 041

Domesticinnovationand tectonic

•expression

The collective search for a new "style" would never have begunwithout a more profound process of modernization underway.It operated on two distinct yet related planes: as a response tounprecedented social needs and as a dissemination of newconstruction technologies. The years between the ParisInternational Exposition of 1889 and World War I correspondedto the zenith of British and French imperialism, to Germany'sbelated but robust expansion, and to the emergence of theUnited States on the world stage. In this competitive environ-ment, national hegemonies exercised contradictory effectson architects, reshaping their strategies and aesthetics.

The central place of Great Britain

The method of composition developed at the École des Beaux-Arts continued to dominate the design of public architecture,whereas a domestic architecture inspired by the Paris of BaronGeorges-Eugéne Haussmann spread to a wide array of cities,from Bucharest to Buenos Aires to New York. Yet the central-ity of the role played by Great Britain in the sphere of domesticarchitecture was undeniable. The principies applied to Britishresidential design in the last decade of the nineteenth centuryfound enthusiasts among Parisians like Viollet-Ie-Duc and PaulSédille, who praised them in 1890 ..• 1 The use of more openplans became widespread, and the double-height "English"hall became a common feature in French homes ..• 2

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edwin Lutyens inau-gurated a break with the Arts and Crafts movement. He exam-ined everyday dwellings and their close relationship to theirgardens, which he was better able to understand after cominginto contact with the landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll.Between 1889 and 1903 he designed in the English

Chapter 03 I Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

countryside a series of stunning weekend houses - a newtype of bourgeois residence characterized by a great num-ber of guest rooms. Often nestled against stone walls and fea-turing striking contrasts between volumes and textures, thesehouses were laid out in conjunction with their gardens, gen-erally designed by Jekyll. Their relative modesty was dis-guised by artifices, among them a play with perspective, thatLutyens used to exaggerate their scale. The apparent symme-try of L-shaped plan s, as at Tigbourne Court in Witley, Surrey(1899-1901),38 was no more than a visual illusion: the actuallandscape is picturesque and irregular. At Deanery Gardenin Sonning, Berkshire (1899-1902), built for Edward Hudson,founder of the popular periodical Country Life, a double-heightentry hall illuminated by a large bay window contrasts withthe solid walls enclosing it. At the Bois des Moutiers (1898) inVarengeville, on the French side of the Channel, commissionedby the banker Guillaume Mallet, the garden descends to thesea as if in an idyllic landscape painted by Claude Lorrain.These English houses were studied by critics eager to under-stand and replicate their essential features. One such observer,the Berlin architect Hermann Muthesius, published three vol-umes entitled Das englische Haus (The English House) 36 in1908-11, which had a profound effect on German architec-ture ..• 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 hispolemical project to "introduce Western culture into Austria." .• 4In the years leading up to World War 1,Germany's rapidmodernization and the close relationships established therebetween industry and the decorative arts diminished Britain'spreeminence in the production of industrial objects. At thesame time, relentless press coverage made both professionals

sENGLISCHE HAUS

36 Das Englische Haus (The English House),ermann Muthesius, 1908-11

building, whose layouts were already well defined. Structuresdevoted to artist's studios, which had first appeared in Parisduring the Second Empire, were given new interpretations, aswith André Arfvidson's terra-cotta-clad reinforced-concreteStudio Building (1912) 39 on Rue Carnpaqne-Prerniere inParis. Apartment or residential hotels, offering apartments within-house hotel services for bachelors and couples withoutchildren, spread throughout the United States and occasion-ally grew to the size of skyscrapers ..• 7 The idea of col lec-

tivizing domestic services engendered other types, such asthe Einküchenhaus, or communal-kitchen building; in 1909Hermann Muthesius and Albert GeBner each built an examplein Berlin, at Friedenau and at Lichterfelde, respectively ..• 8

37 Freudenberg House, Hermann Muthesius, Berlin, Germany, 1907-8

38 ~ Tigbourne Court, Edwin Lutyens, Witley, United Kingdom, 1899-1901

and the public in Germany aware of American urban and archi-tectural developments. Mimicking Muthesius, F. Rudolf Vogelpublished Das amerikanische Haus (The American House) in1910, introducing the work of Henry Hobson Richardson andhis successors to a German readership ..• 5

Residential reform

Domestic architecture reflected the transformations in pro-cess. The reforms that took place in the United States, France,England, and Germany were touched off by social, political,technological, spatial, and aesthetic factors. At the social level,architectural creativity was extended for the first time to a fieldit had previously ignored: housing for the poor. As hygienebecame a fundamental concern in municipal and state policy,government regulations were brought to bear on lower-classhousing projects, éxplicitly requiring the services of architects.The entire sphere of residential architecture reflected the deepchanges in the living habits of most social classes. Bourgeoisresidences became increasingly complex, with more roomsdevoted to receiving guests, larger and more numerous openingsto the outdoors, and the addition of bathrooms or, in the caseof France, less hospital-like cabinets de toilette ..• 6 The relativeamenity of different floors changed drastically with the installationof electrical elevators, which replaced early hydraulic-poweredones. These made upper levels - previously left to servantsand inhabitants of lesser means - and roof terraces more valu-able and stimulated the construction of ever taller buildings. Thealmost universal availability of electric lighting extended daytimeliving into the night and modified the use of every type of room.There was little uniformity. New building types augmentedestablished ones such as the town house and the apartment

Unifying the urban landscape

It was no easy task to shape a harmonious urban landscapecomposed of buildings by creators who individually aspired tooriginality, particularly under the influence of Art Nouveau ide-als. The question of how to regulate facades was hotly debatedin most European cities and some North American ones, some-times at precisely the same time that competitions were reward-ing the facades of the year's most original buildings. The unifiedurban street wall, or einheitliche StraBenfront, found manyadvocates in Germany, while in New York the demand for visualcontinuity among buildings, based on the classicizing modelof Haussmann's Paris, often went under the name of "munici-pal improvement." .• 9 At the same time, the Paris building code

of 1902, 40 written by Louis Bonnier, encouraged a break withwhat critics like Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo hadperceived as Haussmann's tyrannical horizontality. Thus thequestion of uniformity generated divided opinions.

042 1 043

41 Automobile Garage, Auguste Perret,Paris, France, 1906-7, demolished 1971

39 Studio Building, André Arfvidson,Paris, France, 1912

40 Drawing illustrating the new Paris urban regulations, Louis Bonnier, 1902

The preoccupation with hygiene at the turn 01 the century hadmore lar-reaching results than just increasing the number 01apartments with bathrooms and toilets. II led to a reconceptual-ization 01the very lorm that buildings should take. The buildingcodes 01 major cities prescribed the enlargement 01air shaftsand courtyards tor ventilation, while also aiming to broadenstreets so as to space out housing blocks. For example, theNew York State Tenement House Act 011901 not only modiliedthe lacades 01apartment blocks by requiring open spaces tobe regularly placed along the street-Iacing walls, but alsoproloundly altered their tloor plans by mandating larger court-yards ..• 10 The lear 01 tuberculosis led to a veritable obsessionwith sunlight. Projects by the Paris architect Adolphe-AugustinRey, notably in his housing complex tor the RothschildFoundation (1905), where the open courtyard was adoptedafter wind-tunnel tests determined the optimal ventilation sys-tem lor apartment buildings, clearly displayed this concern ..• 11

At the same time, the growing number 01automobiles also hada direct effect on the design 01domestic buildings. Initialsolutions based on stables that had been used tor horse-drawncarriages since the sixteenth century were quickly replaced byspecialized garages, such as the one Auguste Perret designedon Rue de Ponthieu in Paris (1906-7, demolished 1971),41 andby parking spaces constructed underneath new buildings. Theautomobile augured new ways 01 perceiving the urban land-scape, blurring the perception 01 contrasts and therebyradically changing the very idea 01the monument. In 1910Peter Behrens declared, "Individual buildings no longer speaktor themselves. The only architecture appropriate to such a way01viewing our surroundings, which has now become a habit, isone that produces surlaces as unilorm and calm as possible,which in their simplicity present no obstacles." .• 12

Chapter 03 I Domestic innovation and tectonic expression i'".:

II the nineteenth century saw the improvement 01 bank-linancedhousing projects, the early twentieth century was characterizedby public programs beneliting white-collar employees as wellas lactory workers. The Woníngwet (Housing Law) adopted inthe Netherlands in 1901 called ter public linancing 01 dwellingsbuilt with municipal or cooperative sponsorship, mandatingquality standards and imposing regulatory authority. Between1894 and 1912 France passed a body 01 laws putting in placea program of low-cost housing that was guaranteed, andeventually linanced, by the state. As a result, the number 01housing projects increased through the initiatives 01 philan-thropic societies such as the Rothschild Foundation and theLebaudy Foundation, and subsequently through the work 01specialized government agencies. The cooperative systemwas further developed in Germany, while in the UK the systemcombined municipal action with private philanthropy.

The advent of reinforced concrete

Construction was another lield in which transformations tookplace at every level 01 architecture, particularly with the intro-duction 01 reinforced concrete. The effects 01 this new mate-rial on the planning and management 01 building constructionwere as profound as its impact on architectural theory.Produced by combining a mixture 01 cement, stone aggre-gates, and water with steel reinlorcement, reinlorced concretewas considered by Siglried Giedion a "Iaboratory material,"a direct result 01 progress in both chemistry and mathemat-ics ..• 13 The lew decades between the rediscovery 01 thismaterial - originally used by the Romans - and its industriali-zation were marked by the invention 01 dependable methodsto calculate the proportions 01 the concrete ingredients with

· A gusteent Buildmg, u42 Apartm 1903-4t Paris France,::>erre, ,

43 Hennebique Headquarters, Rue Danton, Edouard Arnaud, Paris, Franee, 1901 44 Chureh of Saint-Jean de Montmartre,Anatole de Baudot, Paris, Franee, 1894-1904

rigorous precision and the development of patent-licensedconstruction systems. Engineers, contractors, and architectscompeted to master the techniques and to control a mar-ket that quickly became global. Just at the moment that ironstructures seemed to have reached their limits, reinforcedconcrete offered new spatial possibilities to the constructiveimagination. -> 14

The French engineer Francois Hennebique's companybecame one of the first multinationals in the constructionbusiness, opening branches abroad in the 1890s to assistarchitects in adapting the new process of concrete construc-tion to their projects. The Hennebique method, based on anapparently simple system of columns and beams, allowed foradventurous torrns. -> 15 The company built both historicistedifices, such as the "Hindu" palace designed by AlexandreMarcel for Baron Empain in Heliopolis (1907-10), 45 and totallyutilitarian structures devoid of any ornamentation for its indus-trial clients. The building that Édouard Arnaud designed forthe firm's Paris headquarters (1901) 43 appeared to be madeof smooth carved stone, while Hennebique's own villa inBourg-Ia-Reine (1903) explored all kinds of concrete surfacetreatments - washed, aggregated, striated, stuccoed - andprovided an example of a roof terrace used as a garden, inthis case for growing vegetables.Other processes were experimented with. In one, the engi-neer Paul Cottancin poured concrete reinforced with wire intoforms made of brick, which subsequently served as claddingfor the building. The material was put to its most spectacu-lar use by Anatole de Baudot in the Church of Saint-Jean deMontmartre (1894-1904). 44 With its arches seemingly sus-pended in midair, the building so terrified Parisians that themunicipal authorities nearly forced the parish priest to raze it.

Chapter 03 I Domestie innovation and teetonie expression

45 Baron Empain's "Hindu" Palaee, AlexandreMareel, Heliopolis, Egypt, 1907-10

Alexandre Bigot's exposed brick and terra-cotta decorationsgave the church a warmth that offset the cavernous natureof its interior. Until 1914 Baudot continued to develop numer-ous theoretical projects for concrete meeting or concert halls;in these he appeared to be striving to rediscover the powerand light of the great Gothic naves and to realize what hismentor Viollet-Ie-Duc had envisioned in iron. In his posthu-mously published book L'architecture, /e passé, /e présent(Architecture: Past and Present; 1916), Baudot referred to ironas little more than a "step" toward "its successor, reinforcedconcrete, which has all of its advantages, and resolves withincontestable sureness the profound flaws found in the directuse of metal." -> 16

It would fall to Auguste Perret to establish the primacy ofconcrete once and for all, -> 17 An alumnus of the École desBeaux-Arts who had gane into business with his brothersGustave and Claude, Perret broke the mold of Parisian urbanarchitecture with his building on Rue Franklin (1903-4),42Its concrete structure was plainly visible from the street,barely clad by Bigot's ceramics. In 1908 the American criticArthur C. David made no attempt to hide his contempt: "Asan experiment in the frank treatment of a new material, thisbuilding has its interest; but the interest is assuredly not aes-thetic. The architect has not made any attempt to give it apleasing aspect; and it should be considered rather as theraw material of architecture than as the finished product." -> 18

Full-Iledqed members of the Parisian art scene, the Perretsparticipated in the activities of the Passy circle, foundedin July 1912, which also included the poets GuillaumeApollinaire and Paul Fort; the artists Francis Picabia, AlbertGleizes, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon; and the criticSébastien Voirol. -> 19

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

46 Woman's Club, Irving Gill, La Jolla, California, USA, 1912-13

In 1913 Auguste Perret made his name in Paris with the ChampsÉlysées Theater. 48 This "philharmonic palace" combining threeseparate halls, inspired by Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Buildingin Chicago, had first been entrusted to the Swiss architect HenriFivaz, then to Henry van de Velde. When it came to its construc-tion, however, the Belgian architect found himself competing withPerret, who had been consulted concerning the concrete struc-ture. Though certain aspects of Van de Velde's conception wereconserved in Perret's final design, they were worked into a con-crete cage held by four bowstring arches of a type previouslyused exclusively for bridges. The outline of this structure is trace-able on the facade in the design of the stone facing by the sculp-tor Antoine Bourdelle, who recruited the painters Maurice Denis,Edouard Vuillard, and Ker-Xavier Roussel in an exceptional col-laboration. Nicknamed the "zeppelin of avenue Montaigne" byGermanophobe critics, this edifice hosted the world premiere ofIgor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913...• 20

Perret was the most radical of the architects to explore thepotential of concrete. His experiments quickly led him to erectfactories and warehouses with slender vaults, the most widelypublicized example of which was built for the Wallut agriculturalsupply company in Casablanca, a city that was a bridgeheadfor French colonization in Morocco. But Perret was not the onlyParisian to experiment with the new material. Francois Le Coeurintroduced concrete in public building with his extension to thePostal Administration Building in Paris (1907) and in telephoneexchange buildings - a new type of program - on Rue duFaubourq-Poissonniere (1912) and Rue du Temple (1914).After the French state bought up private patents, concreteentered the public domain, and its use fascinated all types ofinnovators. In the United States, the prolific American inven-tor Thomas Alva Edison took an interest in concrete as early as

Chapter 03 I Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

1902, and he laid the first concrete road, Route 57, in WarrenCounty, New Jersey. But Edison's effort in 1906 to moldindividual houses and all their furniture out of a single pour ofconcrete in Stewartville, New Jersey, was a commercial failure.The engineer Ernest L. Ransome had more success in develop-ing concrete in the United States. Southern California turned outto be particularly fertile ground for research on the new material.Irving Gill invented a tilt-slab system of monolithic walls, pouredon the ground, then hoisted to a vertical position; these wereused in the La Jolla Woman's Club (1912-13) ...• 21 46

In New York the most interesting experiment in concrete wasGrosvenor Atterbury's buildings at the Forest Hills Gardenscomplex in Queens (1909-13), which had a romantic touch.European civil engineers devoted themselves to inventing newprocesses and new forms adapted to the properties of thematerial. The Swiss engineer Robert Maillart designed unprec-edentedly elegant works spanning Alpine rivers and ravines,beginning with the bridge over the Inn at Zuoz (1900) and theTavanasa Bridge (1905).47 His curved and taut forms wentbeyond the limits of the Hennebique method; as he explainedin 1938, "Reinforced concrete does not grow like wood, is notrolled like steel, and has no joints like masonry. It is bestcompared with cast iron as a material that is cast in forms, andperhaps we can learn directly from the long development ofthe latter something about how, by avoiding rigidity in form, wecan achieve a fluid continuity between members that servedifferent functions." ..•22 The diaphanous shapes designed bythe French civil engineer Euqene Freyssinet broke radically withthe language of iron and stone structures. Freyssinet built abridge in Ferrieres-sur-Sichon (1906) and the Boutiron Bridgein Vichy (1913), among others, before going on to invent pre-stressed concrete in the 1920s ...• 23

47 Concrete Bridge, Robert Maillart, Tavanasa, Switzerland, 1905

48 Champs-Elysées 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 House, project, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), France, 1914

Chapter 03 I Domestic innovation and tectonic expression

Concrete nationalisms

Despite its apparent objectivity, concrete design was una-voidably animated by national characteristics. It was soon inuse all over Europe, as in the stunning seaplane hangars 49

built in 1917 by the engineers S. Schultz and K. N. Hbjgaard,and H. Forschammer for the Danish firm Christian & Nielsenin Reval (now Tallinn), Estonia. -> 24 Though French in its earli-

est conception - a product of the research 01Joseph Monier,whose name was long attached to the material in early Germanliterature - and claimed by France for decades, concrete sub-sequently came to be considered "Germanic" by conserva-tive critics who interpreted the "brutality" 01 certain buildingsas an expression 01Teutonic hardness. In tact, the Germansdeveloped their own technologies. The Wayss & Freytag com-pany devised techniques based on the Monier system, placingso much emphasis on methods 01 calculation that Hennebiquedeclared his "horror at this hodgepodge of science" and hispreference for the "plain old recipes" 01the first concrete for-mulas. -> 25 The most spectacular concrete building erected inthe German empire was Max Berg's Jahrhunderthalle in what isnow Wroctaw (Centenary Hall; 1912-13),51 which for a time wasthe most voluminous structure in the world. With a 65-meter(213-100t) diameter, the Jahrhunderthalle was the lirst buildingto outdo the Roman Pantheon's 43 meters (141 leet). The struc-ture consisted of four large arches bearing thirty-two radial ribsplus additional concentric ones. Its exterior, with rather staticstacks 01window strips, did not hint at the spectacular, almostPiranesian space inside.The ideas of the young Swiss architect Charles-ÉdouardJeanneret - later to be known as Le Corbusier - had roots inboth Germany and France. A lriend 01 the engineer Max Du

51~ Centenary Hall, Max Berg,Breslau (Wroc!aw), Germany(Poland),1912-13

Bois, who had translated German handbooks on concrete intoFrench, he was a draftsman in the Perret office from 1908 to1909. In 1914 Jeanneret conceived a construction principierelying on columns and horizontal slabs to generate a poten-tially infinite number of conligurations of plans and facades.The Dom-ino House 50 - its name combines references tothe words domus (house) and innovation and also evokes thegame of dominoes - was the most striking example 01 an arcni-tecture based on the building skeleton. -> 26

In just a few decades this material born of the research 01chemists and engineers radically altered building practices andthe conception 01 civil engineering works. It also changed therelationship between the load-bearing structure, the internalpartitions, and the exterior 01the building, leading to a breakwith the principies of both stone or brick masonry and wood oriron structures. Though they only partially met Viollet-Ie-Duc'sexpectations regarding the "truth" 01the structure, the experi-mental constructions poured in concrete promised a new tec-tonic expression, in the sense given that term by GottfriedSemper, who saw tectonics as "a conscious attempt by the arti-san to express cosmic laws and cosmic order when moldingmaterial." -> 27 The tectonics of concrete heralded the fusion 01

Kernform and Kunstform 01 which Semper had dreamed.

052 I 053

Americarediscovered,tall and wide

In Oemocracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville char-acterized the most ambitious men in democracies as beingsolely concerned with "the present moment": "They quicklyachieve many endeavors, rather than erect a few particularlydurable monuments." -> 1 For many decades this was exactlyhow Europeans perceived American architecture. Less impressedwith grand public buildings like the Capitol in Washington, D.C.,than with the nation's bridges, factories, and skyscrapers, theysaw the latter as expressions of a technological sublime linkedto the New World's economic power. -> 2 At the time, John andWashington Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge (1867-82) was prob-ably the most renowned structure in the United States. Afterthe U.S. census bureau officially confirmed the closing of theAmerican frontier in 1890, a new epoch began that combinedthe end of westward territorial expansion with an imperialistthrust overseas. The development of great steel and transpor-tation companies gave rise to projects of unprecedented scale.The architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who died in 1886, hadanticipated such grand projects. He left an imaginative bodyof work that brilliantly deployed Romanesque models, as in hisTrinity Church in Boston (1872-7). Richardson also recycled thetectonics of the Renaissance palazzo, as in his Marshall FieldWarehouse in Chicago (1885-7, demolished 1930), with itsaustere stone walls.

Chicago in white and black

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition 55 held in Chicagointroduced American architecture both to a national audi-ence and to the fair's many foreign visitors. Built under theauthoritative direction of Daniel H. Burnham, with gardensdesigned by Frederick Law Olmsted, the fair centered on a

Chapter 04 I America rediscovered, tall and wide

complex of large buildings with classical exteriors. Theseinspired its nickname, the White City. The primary exception tothe dominant classicism was the entrance to the TransportationBuilding, 56 designed by Louis Sullivan, which displayed animaginative use of Turkish ornaments. Certain pavilions, suchas the Japanese He-o-den, aroused visitors' curiosity. Yet formany travelers, the ultimate impression of Chicago was not thatof Burnham's monumental yet ephemeral city, but the "blackcity" that had arisen since the great fire of 1871.Chicago's giant slaughterhouses, most especially its conveyor-belt system, conceived for the dismembering of carcasses,served as models for many subsequent factories. -> 3 But evenmore vivid were Chicago's commercial buildings with theirsteel frames. People referred to them interchangeably as both"cloud-pressers" and "sky-scrapers," the latter name borrowedfrom that given to the tallest sail on a ship. The Parisian novelistPaul Bourget described these structures ayear after the fair inhis book Outre-Mer: Impressions of America, noting that the ."simple power of necessity is to a certain degree a principie ofbeauty; and these structures so plainly manifest this necessitythat you feel a strange emotion in contemplating them. It is thefirst draught of a new sort of art - an art of democracy madeby the masses and for the masses." -> 4

The buildings had begun to appear in Chicago's downtownLoop during the 1880s in response to the fourfold effect of urbanconcentration, the development of the steel frame, the elevator,and the telephone. William Le Baron Jenney built the HomeInsurance Building (1885-6, demolished 1931) 52 and the sec-ond Leiter Building (1889-91) using a steel skeleton and partlynon-bearing facades. Efficient organization and managementmade John Wellborn Root and Daniel H. Burnham's archi-tectural firm the most modern in the world, to the point that the

11 . 1" 11OO!J ¡m ~~

53 Auditorium Building, Dankmar Adler and LouisSullivan, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1886-9, section

Home Insurance Building, William Le Baron-ET ey, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1885-6,::=-:lOlished 1931

:: an 01 its offices was published in the European press, -> 5

:3 rnham and Root built the Rookery (1886-7), whose greatcourtyard covered in glass was clad in marble and reminiscent== ichardson's work; the Monadnock Building (1889-92), whose5- een stories constituted the culminating achievement 01ad-bearing wall construction; the Masonic Temple (1890-2),

:: iefly the tallest building in the world at twenty-two stories;= d the Reliance Building (1890-4), whose terra-cotta lacadesere, tor the first time in architectural history, entirely sus-

aended trorn the steel skeleton rather than carrying their ownad. These structures and those by the prolilic lirm 01Williamolabird and Martin Roche, such as the Tacoma Building888) and the Old Colony Building (1894), were largely clus-

:ered on LaSalle Street, a cradle 01 unprecedented innovationvhere the final break with the "dry goods box style" occurredas a result 01 the need lar the best possible lighting tor the

ices. The first buildings were heterogeneous, with the street"acades more elaborate than the side elevations, which wereoarely decorated. Alter Chicago promulgated its 1892 code,hich limited buildings heights to 150 leet (45.7 meters),uildings with tour identical lacades beca me the rule. In any

event, the economic crisis 01the lollowing years would stalleir lurther rise. -> 6

Sullivan's inventions

One 01the structures rnost admired by visitors lo Chicagoin 1893 was Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's Audilorium3uilding (1886-9). 53,54 Covered in stone cladding that echoedthe arches and rusticaled walls 01the Marshall Field Sloreand embellished wilh an almost symphonic orchestralion oidecorative surlaces and details, it combined an opera house

54 Auditorium Building, Dankmar Adler and LouisSullivan, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1886-9, interior 01opera house

55 ~ World's Columbian Exposition, Daniel H.Burnham, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1893

suspended within its metal skeleton with a hotel and offices.Its use 01electricity was advanced, its ornamentation dense yetrestrained. In 1892 Sullivan pronounced himsell in favor 01amoratorium on ornament, "in order that our thought might con-centrate acutely upon the production 01 buildings well lormedand comely in the nude." Yet this nudity was not to be total, andhis "strong, athletic and simple lorms" would be hall-concealed"in a garment 01 poetic imagery." -> 7 Sullivan was a reader 01Ruskin and Viollet-Ie-Duc, whereas his partner Adler knewSemper well. Sullivan was also familiar with the French archi-tect Victor Ruprich-Robert's Flore ornementale (OrnamentalFlora; 1876), and he conceived his system 01 decoration, basedon vegetal rnotits, according to a metapharical principie 01growth. Sullivan continued to rellect on the theme 01germina-tion and prolileration until the end 01 his lile. -> 8

In an 1896 essay Sullivan proposed to examine the question01 the tall office building "artistically considered." Some 01 hisstatements would imprint themselves upon the minds 01 hiscontemporaries: "It is the pervading law 01 all things organicand inorganic, 01all things physical and metaphysical, 01allthings human and all things superhuman, 01 all true maniles-tations 01 the head, 01 the heart, 01 the soul, that the lile isrecognizable in its expression, that torrn lollows lunction. Thisis the law." Relerring to the "tall building," he wondered how to"proclaim trorn the dizzy height 01 this strange, weird, modernhousetop the peacelul evangel 01sentiment, 01 beauty, the cult01a higher lile?" The solution was simple: "It must be tall, everyinch 01 it tall. The toree and power 01 altitude must be in it, theglory and pride 01exaltation must be in it. It must be every incha proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that trornbottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." Herejected the column as a uselul model, with "the moulded [sic]

056 I 057

56 Transportation Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Louis Sullivan,Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1891-3

base of the column typical of the lower stories of our build-ing, the plain or fluted shaft suggesting the monotonous, unin-terrupted series of office-tiers, and the capital the completingpower and luxuriance of the attic," counterposing the lessons ofnature to the tyranny of the existing codeso .• 9

With the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis (1890-1), theGuaranty Building in Buffalo (1894-6),58 and the BayardBuilding in New York (1897-9), Sullivan put his theories to thetest. Perfectly legible in their vertical stacking, his structures readas prismatic volumes crowned with a thin cornice. The principalelements of their geometry were visible on their planar facades,which were covered in organic motifs. As autonomous struc-tu res, these buildings tended to fulfill the Neo-Grec ideal of theprimitive temple ..• 10 At the turn of the century, after the depres-sion of the 1890s interrupted the construction of skyscrapers,Sullivan designed the Schlesinger & Meyer Department Store(1899-1904, 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, whichfeatured large rectangular bay windows. The repetitive natureof the rectilinear windows contrasted powerfully with the flo-ral explosion of the cast-iron canopy at the building's corner. InOwatonna, Minnesota, where he built the National Farmers Bank(1906-7), and elsewhere in the Midwest, Sullivan subsequentlydesigned boxlike structures clad in brick, the luxuriant deco-ration of which seemed to be compressed but barely containedby their geometric frames.

Wright and prairie architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright, another great American iconoelast, draftedtwo designs for his lieber Meister (beloved master) Sullivan

Chapter 04 I America rediscovered, tall and wide

57 Schlesinger & Meyer Department Store (Carson, Pirie & Scott ,Store), Louis Sullivan, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1899-1904

58 Guaranty Building, Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, Buffalo,New York, USA, 1894-6

while employed in his office: part of the Auditorium Buildingand the Charnley House (1892), which featured remarkablyplayful interior volumes. But Wright was also taken by-all thingsJapanese, particularly admiring the Pavilion of the Empire at the1893 world's fair. Through his contacts with the Japan scholarErnest Fenollosa, he discovered the writings of Edward Morseand Arthur Dow ..• 11 For Wright, this culture offered a lesson

in architecture, particularly with respect to the clear separa-tion between the floor and the roof and the central place ofthe tokonoma - a niche for flower arrangements, which Wrightreplaced in his houses by the hearth or fireplace. Japan alsoprovided lessons in graphics and in landscape. This would leadhim from the gardens he saw on his first trip there in 1905 to thedesign of his Taliesin estate in Wisconsin in subsequent years.Wright established himself in the wealthy Protestant neighbor-hood of Oak Park, which he described as "a suburb which deniesChicago." .• 12 There, influenced by social movements thatapproached the reform of domestic space as a way to reformmoral behavior, he built his own house (1889-98). -> 13 59 Though

symmetrical on the outside, the house has an interior that playson the oppositions between two centers: the vaulted music room,symbolizing Oak Park's communal life, and the fireplace with"inglenooks," a private gathering place for the family. The house'scollective aspect, reinforcing the importance of sociability andshared dinners, prevails over its individual spaces. Establishinghis studio on the premises, Wright appended to the housea square office and an octagonal reading room (1895), whichadded complexity and fluidity to the overall structure.His houses in Oak Park and nearby River Forest reveal Wright'sextraordinary imagination. His success was rapid - hedesigned ninety buildings between 1901 and 1909. In 1900,an article in Boston's Architectural Review referred to Wright's

/

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

USA,1889-98

"perpetual inspiration," contrasting it with the wark 01the "GreatAmerican usines d'architecture," the typical large tactorv-likeAmerican architecture offices; the 'author declared that "tewarchitects have given us more poetic translations 01 materi-als into structure." -> 14 Inlluenced by relormers such as WilliamC. Gannett, whose sermon "The House Beautilul" was typesetand reprinted by Wright in collabaration with his client WilliamH. Winslow in 1897, the architect aimed lar his houses, inGannetl's words, to serve the purpose 01 "dear togetherness,"being "Iike a constant love-song without words, whose mean-ing is 'we are glad that we are alive together.' " -> 15 With its

upper band 01windows and overhanging root, Winslow's house(1893-4) 60 in River Forest initiated Wrighl's exploration 01 hor-izontally extended lorms. Though its relatively orderly, evensolemn, street-side lacade contrasts with the Ireer nature 01the back, the entire building is striated with clearly articulatedhorizontal bands. The lireplace is the pivot 01the structure. Herethe housewile was to preside over a real m that extended to theentire interior. In 1901 Wright devised theoretical projects like"A Home in a Prairie Town" and "A Small House with 'Lots 01Room in 11'" lar the Ladies Home Journa/, positioning himsellas the theorist 01a new domestic architecture.The architecture he elabarated was made to measure lar thewide plains surrounding Chicago. In his 1908 article "In theCause 01 Architecture," he wrote, "The Prairie has a beauty01 its own, and we should recognize and accentuate thisnatural beauty, its quiet level. Hence, gently sloping rools,low proportions, quiet skylines, suppressed heavyset chim-neys and sheltering overhangs, low terraces and outreach-ing walls sequestering private gardens." -> 16 Starting with the

Ward Willits House in Highland Park (1902), Wright developedideas he had previously lormulated lor the Winslow House

Chapter 04 I America rediscovered, tall and wide

60 William H. Winslow House and Stables, Frank Lloyd Wright, River Forest,IIlinois, USA, 1893-4

and created a system based on a logic 01 growth and varia-tion using a square-room module. -> 17 The continuity betweenthe house and the landscape was made more intimate by thegenerous overhanging roots, the low ceilings, and the horizon-tal juxtaposition 01 the windows. Wright's other realized pro-jects 01 this period ranged Irom vast residences like theSusan L. Dana House (1902-4) 61 in Springlield, IlIinois; theDarwin D. Martin House (1904) in Buffalo, New York; and theAvery Coonley House (1908) in Riverside, Illinois; to moremodest buildings like the Frank Thomas and Edwin H. Cheneyhouses in Oak Park (1901 and 1904) and the Isabel RobertsHouse in River Farest (1908). Certain houses were located onspectacular terrain, like the Hardy House (1905), built on a clittin Racine, Wisconsin. Among all 01 these, the Martin House isremarkable not only tor its almost absolute absence 01 divid-ing walls and its use 01 Iree-standing supports, but also lar thecoherence 01 its geometry, which extends Irom objects and fur-niture to the rooms themselves and out into the garden. Thecontinuity between the library, the living room, and the diningroom is maintained by interstitial spaces that are like walls 01air.Wright remained unlucky with his projects lor major Americanindustrialists. His lormer assistant Marion Mahony completedthe house he designed lar Henry Ford, and the project heproposed to Harold McCormick in Lake Forest (1907-9) wasturned down. Yet the Frederick C. Robie House (1906-8) 62 inChicago provided him with an opportunity to build a kind 01spatial and technological manilesto, as Reyner Banham hasnoted. -> 18 The elongated house, extending along the street,is protected lrom rain and the noonday sun by projectingeaves. In the summer it is shaded by a courtyard on the north,which serves as a cool-air tan k, while its horizontal windowshelp ventilate it. Inside, the passages are fl.uid between the

62 Frederick C. Rabie Hause, Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago, IIlinois, USA, 1906-8, drawing made in the 1920s

63 ~ 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: d lighting devices are built into the walls. Unlike Sullivan,right had no interest in purely rational construction; instead heade ornament the starting point 01 his architectural configura-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 motifse the repetitive rhythm 01 the ornamented windows) had

~een determined, without any reservations about this seem-gly illogical solution.

::AJmmissioned by Darwin Martin's brother John, the adminis-'8. ive building 01 the Larkin soap lactory in Buffalo (1902-6,cernolished 1950) 64 extended the principies 01 Wright's Prairie-ouses to an office scheme. Despite its lortress-like appear-ance, the building was naturally illuminated by a glassed-- courtyard similar to the one at the Rookery, whose lobbyright was remodeling at the time. He later described it as "a

s rnple cliff 01 brick hermetically sealed (one of the lirst 'air-- nditioned' buildings in the country) to keep the interior space:: ear of the poisonous gases in the smoke Irom the New York8entral trains that puffed along beside it." .• 19 The result 01:::areful analysis of the building's intended use, Larkin com--ned Sullivan's organic conception 01 architecture with a

s: íct orthogonal geometry. Most significantly, it representedc. new type of open workplace, with steel furniture and light-,g designed as integral to the whole and in keeping with theuasi-familial vision 01 the company.oon alter this commission, Wright built Unity Temple in Oak

?ark (1905-8), 63 another monumental extension of the prin-cipies of his houses. The square masses of the church and the

Sunday school interact with one another like the formal compo-nents of Wright's domestic designs. The concrete mass of thewalls, into which all the ducts and pipes were integrated, recallsthe sol id envelopes of Richardson's houses, while the church'sinterior recaptures the warm centrality of Wright's houses.Wright carefully studied the path leading into the house 01 wor-ship from the street, and in his eyes it too became a "meetingplace." The articulation of the basic structure and of the sec-ondary elements, more complex than that in Buffalo, was partof a search for design unity that seemed to constitute a meta-phor of the building's purpose ..• 20

Wright and Europe

Wright's principies were carried forward by a group ofarchitects led by William Drummond, John Van Bergen,Marion Mahony, and Walter Burley Griffin and known collec-tively as the Prairie School. Their form of homage or excessiveimitation aroused Wright's pique. Their inspirer spent 1909 and1910 in Europe, having Iled there with his client (and lover)Mamah Cheney. He visited Josef Hoffmann's and Joseph MariaOlbrich's buildings, which he already knew from photographs.He also studied architectural sculpture, taking particular interestin the work of Franz Metzner, who was responsible for the sculp-tural figures at Bruno Schmitz's Vblkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzigand Joze Pleónik's Zacherlhaus. From observing MetznerWright developed a theory of "conventionalization," or the trans-formation of natural forms into abstract shapes, which he laterused in his concrete construction units, or "textile blocks."Europe not only gave Wright an important geometry lesson inthe interlocking squares and circles of the late Secession, butalso led him to discover pre-Columbian America ..• 21

062 I 063

64 Larkin Company AdministrationBuilding, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buffalo,New York, USA, 1902-6

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

--" buildings he designed upon his return to the United States,as Midway Gardens in Chicago (1914, demolished 1929),

~'evisibly shaped by these discoveries.=::; versely, Europeans were becoming increasingly interested

right. The British architect Charles Robert Ashbee had-: Wright in Chicago as early as 1900, but it was in Germany--2.~Wright was now most recognized. He gave a lecture in-::a in at Bruno M6hring's invitation, and he saw his reputation

greatly when the Wasmuth publishing house released a- 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 had long been the only- erican architect recognized in the Old World (notably in thes erlands, Germany, and Finland), but Sullivan and Wright

took center stage in accounts by visitors to the United=:a es such as Hendrik Petrus Berlage. At times their designs

e reproduced in Europe almost exactly as in the model';:,~ory built by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer lor the Cologneerkbund Exhibition 01 1914. -> 23 California, though, remained

-, ely unknown to Europeans, despite the signilicant works::~-lt there. It proved fertile ground for American lollowers 01-e Arts and Cralts movement, which cabinetmaker Gustave_ckley's periodical The Craftsman (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 David3_ Gamble (1908),65 heir of a leading soap manulacturer - as -lHul composition of sol id wood elements on a masonry loun--~ ion. Like Wright's houses, but designed lor a gentler climate,-e Gamble House is largely open to the outdoors through a~- ies 01 porches. The Greenes devoted the utmost care to--e assembly 01 the wood Irame and walls, using visible dow-_ hat evoked the techniques of Japanese builders. The

66 First Church 01 Christ Scientist, Bernard Maybeck, Berkeley, California,USA,191O

lirst houses that Irving Gill designed in San Diego were alsoinlormed by the Arts and Crafts, while in Berkeley, BernardMaybeck built the First Church 01 Christ Scientist (1910). 66A large room on a square plan that extends to the outsidewith pergolas, it combines a wood and concrete structure withindustrial steel sash lor the glass wall in a manner reminiscentof Viollet-Ie-Duc's theoretical projects.

The skyscraper migrates to New York

Alter 1900 the experiments 01 East Coast architects focused onlactories, silos, and, most conspicuously, skyscrapers. UnlikeChicago, New York did not pass any regulations limiting theheight 01 new construction. In fact, vertical competition wasunstoppable. The lirst batch 01 skyscrapers was built dur-ing the 1870s for newspapers, including Richard MorrisHunt's building lor the New York Tribune (1873-5, demol-ished 1955). -> 24 Beginning with the construction 01 the TowerBuilding by Bradlord Lee Gilbert (1888-9, demolished 1914),the steel skeleton became the rule tor skyscrapers. The corn-pletion 01 the Flatiron Building (1901-2) 69 - built lor Chicagocontractor George A. Fuller by Daniel H. Burnham - was anincontestable milestone. A 22-story vertical extrusion 01 its tri-angular site, the building was topped with a cornice evokingthe capital 01 a column as in the ideal scheme contested bySullivan. It could be the tip 01 a potentially gigantic imaginaryHaussmannian block. Elevators and services were groupedin the building's core, allowing the window-lit areas 01 eachtloor to be entirely devoted to offices. Standing at the intersec-tion 01 Broadway and Filth Avenue, the Flatiron had such iconicpower that the magazine Camera Work saw in it the promise01 a new aesthetic, and one 01 its admirers, the photographer

066 I 067

67 Woolworth Building,Cass Gilbert, New York City,USA,1910-13

68 Equitable Building, Graham, Anderson and Probst,New York City, USA, 1913-15

Allred Stieglitz, responded to the detractors 01 this "monsterocean steamer" that "it is not hideous, but the new America.The Flat lron is to the United States what the Parthenon waslo Greece." .• 25 Other buildings, including the New York TimesBuilding by Eidlitz and McKenzie (1903-5), soon lurther minedthe potential 01 rare triangular sites in Manhattan's grid.With the 47-story, 594-loot (181-meter) Singer Building (1906-8,demolished 1968), Ernest Flagg responded to the SingerCompany's explicit commission to create a delinitive verti-cal structure. It was soon lollowed by the Metropolitan LileInsurance Company tower by Pierre L. Lebrun (1907-9), whichwas grafted to a larger block and made conscious relerenceto the campanile 01 Saint Mark's in Venice. Next came theMunicipal Building by McKim, Mead and White (1909-14),which was likened to a modern Colossus of Rhodes in itsstraddling of Chambers Street. Built on an open U-plan, theMunicipal Building symbolized the modernization 01 the city'sadministration. Popular Neo-Gothic themes found their placein the next victor in the ongoing race for height, the WoolworthBuilding (1910-13) 67 by Cass Gilbert. Though Frank W.Woolworth, lounder 01 the dime-store chain, had insisted thathis building be fifty leet taller than the Metropolitan Lile build-ing, the structure is remarkable primarily lor the relinement01 its elevators and interior circulation and the splendor 01 anentrance hall given a Byzantine atmosphere by gilt mosaics.The skyscraper's soaring appearance and the Ilamboyant Neo-Gothic decor 01 its terra-cotta exterior quickly led the public torefer to it as the "cathedral 01 commerce." .• 26

Construction of the Equitable Building (1913-15) 68 by Burnham'ssuccessors Graham, Anderson and Probst served to crystallizegathering lears about the unrestrained individualism of high-rise structures. By 1913 Manhattan contained about a thousand

Chapter 04 I America rediscovered, tall and wide

69 Flatiron Building, Daniel H.Burnham, New York City, USA,1901-2, photograph byAlfred Slieglitz

buildings between eleven and twenty stories high, and theproblem 01 sunlight reaching the streets was much discussed.In 1916 the "menace" posed by the skyscraper was remedied bya zoning regulation that controlled the bulk 01 the tall building butdid not restrict its height on up to 25 percent 01 the site. The newcode also established sophisticated regulations to ensure amplelight by requiring terraces and setbacks 01 upper Iloors. NewYork was therelore able to remain the "standing city" - as thenovelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline put it .• 27 - that would makesuch a strong impression on visitors between the world wars.Though his 1920 book L'architecture aux États-Unis (Architecturein the United States) included reproductions 01 these buildings,Jacques Gréber persisted in seeing American architecture aslittle more than a rellection 01 French "genius." His youngercolleagues did not suffer Irom this superiority complex. Onthe contrary, they lound the cross-Atlantic scene lascinatingenough to launch a new path of migration, reversing that of theAmericans still coming to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. The departure tor Chicago 01 the Viennese architect RudollSchindler and his Prague colleague Antonin Raymond heraldeda radical geographic shift in the centers of architecture.

The challengeof the metropolis

In 1908 architect August Endell, a major proponent 01 theGerman Jugendstil torrns, published a small book entitled DieScnonneit der grossen Stadt (The Beauty 01 the Metropolis).Though he did not turn a blind eye to urban problems suchas poverty and congestion, Endell discovered a new aes-thetic potential in the industrial landscape, transportation sys-tems, and smoky city skies, much as the Impressionists hadlound inspiration in the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in the 1870s.Unlike Friedrich Nietzsche, who invited Zarathustra to "spit onthe great city, which is the great swill room where all the swillspumes together," -> 1 Endell believed that the city "gathered in

its streets a thousand beautilul things, innumerable marvels,inlinite riches, accessible to all but seen by very lew." .• 2 Thoughhe regretted the absence 01 an elusive "intellectual beauty"with which scientilic thinking might have endowed the city, hepraised the beauty created by human organization and labor.

An explosion without precedent

The urban development that translormed much 01 the Westernwarld had no precedent. It resulted in (and from) increasingindustrialization, mass exodus Irom the countryside, andemigration to the Americas and the colonies. It also disruptedfeudal institutions and encouraged the emergence 01 newforms of national citizenship. Vast territories were newly urban-ized, and existing cities became denser, pushing municipalboundaries outward. The process 01 Eingemeindung (munici-pal integration) that ariginated in German urban areas becamean international phenomenon with the creation in 1889 of theLondon County Council, the first metropolitan authority in warldhistary, and in 1898 of Greater New York. As cities expanded,they were equipped with communication networks and public

Chapter 05 I The challenge of the metropolis

services. The resulting need to design dozens of new typesof buildings, from suburban train stations to clinics and publicbaths, stimulated the architectural imagination ..• 3

The dizzying growth in the populations of large cities deepenedthe housing crisis, which was already so serious in London,Paris, Berlin, and New York that it was becoming a threat to thesocial arder. 70 Urban relorms related to housing, transportation,hygiene, education, and leisure were put in place during thelast decade of the nineteenth century. During this era, munici-palities became essential torees behind building projects that, inturn, reflected on a wide range of public policies and coopera-tive programs. Architects and engineers saw vast public com-missions take shape. Meanwhile the nascent social scienceslound the city to be an irresistible subject. Thewritings 01sociologists such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel in Germanyand Maurice Halbwachs in France and the research of theircounterparts at the University 01 Chicago laid the loundations fara new critical approach to the study 01 social relationships basedon systematic research and veriliable tacts ..• 4

Problems of hygiene were of primary significance. An issue firstraised by physicians and scientists carrying out studies inParis during the mid-eighteenth century, hygiene took a centralplace in philanthropic activities lollowing devastating choleraepidemics a century later. The paradigm 01 the healthy city wasapplied not only to strategies related to urban design, but alsoto the design 01 individual structures. It would dominate architec-tural thought until almost the last third 01 the twentieth century ..• 5Concern for hygiene - initially focused on improving thecirculation 01 air, then on sunlight, and finally on constructionmaterials that would not deteriorate and facades that could bewashed - transformed all 01 the thinking behind housing andpublic buildings. The low-cost Paris apartments designed by

'~n.1'taot_~

n•. __ -}o_

1\'."- •••.•••.• ,....

v.•••••••J--Io:J"-...L_ •. K....-li.YlL __ I&"'- __ I

._-•. a..,..Do ••• ~"-114001_".•. r•.••••• ,..-.71 Street layout, from Town-Planning in Practice,

Raymond Unwin, 1909 72 Streets in Bruges, from City Planning Accordinglo Artistic Principies, Camilla SitIe, 1889

70 Compared growth of big cities c. 1910, from DerSt8dtebau (Town Planning), Werner Hegemann, 1910

Henri Sauvage and Charles Sarrasin 73 represent one exarn-pie; they were advertised as "hygienic," even "athletic," thanksto their plans as well as to the white tiling 01their lacades andthe provision 01 recreational areas lar their users ...• 6 Elsewhere,the concern to provide middle- and lower-class housing withadequate ventilation and access to sunlight led to the expan-sion and opening up 01 building courtyards.

The planners' toolbox

The very instruments used by architects, planners, and policymakers to calibrate the extension and modernization 01citieswere translormed by inputs Irom the natural and social sciences.Pressure Irom unions and political movements intensilied thedemands lar a more democratic process 01 providing housingand advanced the emerging notion 01 "collective" needs. As aresult, the discipline known in its parallel versions as Stadtebauin Germany, town planning in Great Britain, and urbanisme inFrance took on new importance ...• 7 The old method 01 creating

roads and subdividing the land into lots without dilferentiatingtheir use or their density was replaced by a complex approachto regulation and planning based on statistical data and publicsupervision 01specialized stages 01conception and construc-tion. Planning became future oriented and prescriptive.The notion 01the urban plan became lundamental, symboliz-ing the hopes of professionals lar the rational modernizationand extension of cities. In the early twentieth century, expan-sion and beautilication plans that had evolved over decadeswere replaced by regulations based on new, "scientific" meth-odologies, including measures to divide cities into zones - theterm zone in both French and German was derived Irom militaryusage - and the elaboration 01 building regulations ...• 8

73 ~ "Hygienic" set-back housing, Henri Sauvageand Charles Sarrasin, Paris, France, 1912

In just a lew years, urban planning became a world rnove-ment. The year 1910 witnessed the nearly simultaneousTown-Planning Conlerence in London and the AlIgemeineStadtebau-Ausstellung (General Urban-Planning Exhibition) inBerlin, during which large cities had an opportunity to com-pare their plans 01 action ...• 9 The challenge now was to antici-pate growth and to regulate it not only by understanding realestate and technical systems but also by imagining the luturearchitecture 01 large cities. Global networks 01 communica-tion lacilitated something resembling a collective, barderlessthink tan k, bringing together policy makers, intellectuals, andtechnicians through lield trips, conlerences, and exhibitions.Periodicals such as Oer Stédiebeu (Iounded in Berlin in 1904)and The Town-Planning Review (Iounded in London in 1909)began appearing, joining the handbooks edited by JoselStübben and Raymond Unwin 71 as the basis 01 a library loran emergent international prolession ...• 10

Town, square, and monument

Yet the seeming unanimity 01 relormers and technicians wasshattered the moment it came to putting a specilic lace on thecities of the luture. Should the modern metropolis be designedby reinterpreting the picturesque beauty 01 historical sites; byexpanding on the classical principies of monumentality, as rep-resented by the Beaux-Arts obsession with axiality, hierarchy,and historicism; ar by avoiding all nostalgia and designing anew Iramework far the future inspired by a modern mechanizedand rationalized economy? The first position was fueled by thetheories proposed in 1889 by the Viennese architect CamilloSitte in his book Oer Steoiebeu nach seinen künstlerischenGrundsétzer. (City Planning according to Artistic Principies), 72

070 I 071

74 Plan 01Chicago, Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Chicago, lllinois,USA,1909

which attracted a growing number 01 lollowers. Focusing onthe city in its "Sunday best" - that is, on the city center -Sitte advocated studying the streets and squares of medievaland Renaissance tawns as a basis for turning modern urbancampositions into "total warks 01 art" on the model of theWagnerian opera he admired. -> 11 An immediate bestseller,Sitte's book remained the bible of urban planners for decades,although they often reduced it to caricatural formulas basedan imitatian al medieval cities. No less successful, Platz undMonument (City Square and Manument), published by the arthistorian Albert Erich Brinckmann in 1908, reserved its praisetor the Baroque and classical squares 01 Rome and Paris. -> 12

The principies put forward far transforming Berlin, Paris, andVienna were applied throughout the rest of Europe as newnation-states like Italy and Romania were established. They alsofound application in independent Latin American countries,including Brazil and Argentina; in Meiji Japan; in late OttomanTurkey as it underwent modernization; and linally in' colonialterritories. Unlike the picturesque, contrasting lorms to whichSitte was attracted, the massive schemes at the heart of thesecities leatured long axes and perspectives cannecting vastesplanades dominated by colon nades and domes. Such "artis-tic" principies applied the Beaux-Arts model at the expandedscale 01 the grand urban structure. Daniel H. Burnham hadused these principies in Chicago in 1893 to layout his "WhiteCity," which was imitated at the International Exposition 01 1900in Paris and elsewhere.The classicizing phantasmagoria of Chicago and other warld'sfairs and the grand urban compasitions 01 Europe's historicalcities provided the model far countless projects by Americanurban planners, wha were committed to making the metrop-olis a "city beautiful," giving spatial lorm to the ideals of

Chapter 05 I The challenge 01 the metropolis

75 World City, project, Ernest Hébrard, 1912

76 Future New York, Harvey Wiley Corbett, 1913

the Progressive Era. -> 13 As one 01 its most active agents,Burnham provided the movement with emblematic imagessuch as the Natianal Mall in Washington, D.C., which wasrenovated on the basis of his 1902 plan, and his plan lar SanFrancisco, which remained unrealized after the 1906 earth-quake despite, or perhaps because 01, its arnbitious scope.Even though the 1909 plan far Chicago 74 that he and EdwardH. Bennett prepared at the request al local business associa-tians was only partially implemented, it remained ane al themost resonant images al the era. Its visian was al a large citydivided into lunctional zones, crisscrossed with new streets andinterconnected railways, refreshed by a system of parks linkingit with the lake and surrounding prairies, and, most especially,crowned with a monumental city center that would have made itinto a "Paris on Lake Michigan." -> 14 Burnham's vocabulary wasalso adopted tor certain projects with more humanistic inten-tions, such as the Cité Mondiale (World City) 75 designed in1912 by the French architect Ernest Hébrard for the Norwegiansculptor and philanthropist Hendrik Christian Andersen. -> 15

During this same briel but fertile period extending fram 1890to World War 1, engineers, architects, landscape designers, andsocial relormers who were committed to solving the problems01 the big city put lorward a third set 01 principies that avoidedboth backward-Iooking imitation and grandiose rhetoric. Therapid spread 01 the automobile and the development 01 met-ropolitan railroads spurred a vis ion of the city as a giganticmachine lar traffic. The architect Euqene Hénard's "Street al theFuture,' 77 presented at the London Town-Planning Conlerencein 1910, elabarated the ideas he had outlined in his Études surles transformations de Paris (Studies on the Translormations 01Paris; 1903), in which he proposed to set buildings back from thestreet through a system 01 redents (alternating indents). Hénard's

F(0E FUTUI1E.C'I11'· .•ur C/J

l.'

77 Street 01 the Future, Eugéne Hénard, 1910

future street was entirely determined by traffic - whether auto-mobile or airplane - and amounted to a series of great mon-uments surrounded by roads. The streets had multiple levels,allowing for the stacking of mass transit, automobiles, andpedestrians ..• 16 In 1913 Hénard's New York counterpart HarveyWiley Corbett took the fantasy a step further and imagined thestreets of a future New York 76 as a network of dizzying can-yons lined with fast lanes and suspended sidewalks, with levi-tating subways connecting to skyscrapers at the fortieth floor.Widely reproduced in popular newspapers, these images soonfascinated the Italian Futurists.Not every city-planning proposal was so enthusiastic for themechanical. Otto Wagner accepted the fact that the modernmetropolis was no longer defined by its principal monumentsor by the visual rules of the picturesque that had been appli-cable to the cities of antiquity. But he argued that the city mustnot be confused with the traffic systems serving it. In ModerneArchitektur, he wrote that a city where anonymity was the rulewould become a "conglomerate of cells" governed by monot-onous repetition. Speculating on Vienna's future, he proposedin 1911 a new GroBstadt (metropolis) 780f potentially unlimitedgrowth, meant to spread out like a spider's web. Composed ofhomologous neighborhoods in compact orthogonal blocks, itwas to be arranged in a checkerboard pattern around evenlydistributed public spaces and services ..• 17

The idyll of the garden city

The "tentacular cities" that the Belgian poet Émile Verhaerendescribed in apocalyptic verses in 1895 seemed to manyreformers to be places of perdition from which nothing goodcould come ..• 18 Even the park systems designed by Frederick

Chapter 05 I The challenge 01 the metropolis

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

Law Olmsted in Boston and other American cities- whichfound European advocates in the French landscape designerJean Claude Nicolas Forestier and the German architect FritzSchumacher, creator of Hamburg's Stadtpark - were deemedinsufficient sources of fresh air. The Spanish engineer ArturoSoria y Mata's project of 1894 for a ciudad lineal (linear city) 79

suggested an alternative pattern for the growth of Madrid. Thenew suburbs were to extend longitudinally along either side ofa streetcar making a loop around the city, Only a segment wasbuilt, but Soria expanded the concept to the regional scalewith a scheme of continuous ribbons connecting cities ..• 19

The German architect Theodor Fritsch and the British socialreformer Ebenezer Howard reacted with proposals for broad-scale decentralization. The latest in a long line of writers hos-tile to the city, encompassing Jean-Jacques Rousseau andThomas Jefferson, .• 20 Howard had developed his ideas outof the theories of the Americans Henry George and EdwardBellamy. He didactically expressed his opposition to both themalevolent "magnet" of the big city and the debilitating oneof the countryside in a triangular diagram, touting instead theatlraction of the "garden city." 80 This last would combine theadvantages of the two other alternatives to become, in his view,the type of habitat most likely to appeal to people. In his 1898book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, he describedthe broad outlines of a program intended to replace the creep-ing metropolis with a cluster of garden cities linked to the citycenter by railroad, each with a population whose size would bestrictly limited ..• 21 Meant to be funded by philanthropiccapitalists or cooperatives, the garden city drew on Americanexperiments such as Olmsted's Garden Suburb in Riverside,near Chicago, where Howard had lived. His clever oxymo-ron "garden city" - which for several decades had been one

I!H[PEO~\.~WIUU WU.1.1Htf GO?

T9 . Linear City, Arturo Soria y Mata, 1894 81 Hampstead Garden Suburb, Raymond Unwin,London, United Kingdom, 1905-7

82 ~ Page from Une Cité Industrielle, Tony Garnier,

France, 1917

80 The Three Magnets, from To-Morrow: A PeacefulPath to Real Reform, Ebenezer Howard, 1902

of Chicago's nicknames - quickly became a slogan that gal-vanized associations, municipalities, cooperatives, reformers,and also real-estate speculators around the world. Followingthe founding 01 the Garden-City Association in Great Britainin 1901, similar organizations devoted to promoting such exper-imental ventures cropped up in Germany and France andreached all the way to Russia. Articles on the subject werepublished as far away as Japan. -> 22

The garden city quickly became more than a slogan. Expandingon the principies developed by Camillo Sitte, Raymond Unwingave it canonical form with his designs for the first Englishgarden-city, which was sponsored by Howard himself, built inLetchworth I;leginning in 1903; and for Hampstead GardenSuburb (1905-7),81 a private commission in London for DameHenrietta Barnett. These refined urban compositions werebased on Unwin's observations of English and Norman villages.Soon after, Richard Riemerschmid and Heinrich Tessenowconceived the garden city of Hellerau around the DeutscheWerkstatten factory near Dresden (1909-12). Meanwhile, groundwas broken on the largest garden city in Europe, Wekerle inBudapest (1909-26). In Russia, Vladimir Semyonov adopted theBritish experiments in his design for the city 01 Prozorovskoe(1913), while Georges Benoit-Lévy drummed up interest in themovement in France. None of these projects fully met Howard'srequirements; they contributed in most cases to the spread ofnostalgic regionalist forms and responded to different politicalagendas, ranging from the paternalistic to the Social Democratic.By imitating the space of the village, they counterposed thereassuring context 01the small community to the threats posedby modern society, following the arguments made by the Germansociologist Ferdinand Tbnnies in 1887. -> 23 A rare exceptionto this rule was the Cité Industrielle project 82 of the Lyons

architect Tony Garnier, designs 01which were published in1917. -> 24 An autonomous entity in opposition to the big city,it was secular and progressive, a more modern version of a1901 sketch Garnier had based on a plan described in ÉmileZola's novel Travail (Work).

Zoning for the colonies and forEurope's metropoles

The reform of existing cities was another goal. Alongsideattempts to improve the appearance of city centers by creat-ing more visually harmonious streets, such as the BoulevardRaspail in Paris and the southern extension of Seventh Avenuein New York, programs were implemented to replace slums withhygienic housing. The first attempts at urban renovation werelaunched in London at the municipality's initiative. Berlin soonlollowed. In Paris "insalubrious blocks" were earmarked in 1913and included in the Extension Commission Report written thatyear by the architect Louis Bonnier and the historian MarcelPoete. -> 25 To a certain extent the "conservative surgery"advocated by Patrick Geddes, a visionary Scottish biologist whowas influenced by sociology and turned to a career as an urbanplanner, was somewhat similar to these projects in its carelulatlention to social transformations in the city and to the relation-ships between "place, work, and folk," illustrated in his diagram01the "Valley Section." 83 Geddes differentiated between whathe saw as the "Utopía" of the garden cities and a "Eutopia" thatcould result from patient modification 01existing cities. -> 26

Geddes tried but failed to apply his ideas in lndia, at a timewhen the colonized territories were becoming places for urbanplanners to experiment. In 1914 the European empires wereat 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 project,Bruno Móhring, Rudolf Eberstadt and RichardPetersen, 1910

creating new capitals. These were sometimes situated nearhistorical urban areas, as was the case with Edwin Lutyensand Herbert Baker's New Delhi, which began to be planned in1912 lollowing Baker's design 01the Union buildings in the SouthAlrican capital 01 Pretoria (1909-13). It evolved into a schemecombining major roads and a hexagonal plan that culminatedin Luytens's Viceroy's Palace ..• 27 86 In Rabat, the political capi-tal 01 the French protectorate in Morocco, the Beaux-Arts grad-uate Henri Prost designed an administrative neighborhood thatapplied the characteristics 01the garden city. 85 Other capitalswere erected on new sites, such as Australia's Canberra. The1911 international competition to build Canberra resulted in theselection 01the American Walter Burley Griffin over the Finnisharchitect Eliel Saarinen and the French planner Donat-AllredAgache. In Griffin's winning scheme, 87 the city encroached onthe. surrounding areas, making repeated use 01 elements bor-rowed Irom the Prairie Houses that Griffin had drafted as anemployee in Frank Lloyd Wright's office ..• 28

Following the competition lor the expansion 01 Barcelona - wonin 1905 by the French architect Léon Jaussely, one 01 the lirstadvocates 01zoning - the 1910 competition lor Greater Berlinyielded what were probably the most complex strategies 01theday. The submitted proposals spanned the entire gamut 01 ideasthen being discussed on both sides 01the Atlantic. Grandiosemonumental avenues, giant train stations, and garden cities werethe basic building blocks advanced by Ihe competitors. Someproposals were truly revolutionary: Bruno Mbhring's tea m inte-grated the surrounding region with the city through great cones01vegetation reaching into the city center, 84 an approach thatlater met with considerable success. In 1912 the Berlin criticKarl Scheffler, asking what "the architeclure 01the metropolis"should be, determined that it was only in the very large city Ihat

Chapter 05 I The challenge of the metropolis

85 Plan far Rabat, Henri Prost, Rabat,

Morocco, 1914

a new architecture could appear. Echoing Max Weber's socio-logical analysis 01 bureaucracy, he linked the metropolis to theincreasing degree 01organization in society, with the clearestexample being the American skyscraper stacking up thousands01 clerical workers ..• 29 For German urban planners, Chicago

and New York were now points 01 relerence as pertinent asLondon and Paris had been tor previous generations. Site 01themass production 01 manulactured goods but also 01the con-centration 01service jobs and services, the metropolis was morethan a technical challenge tor urban planners. As Endell hadalready sensed, the urban landscape, having been revolution-ized by the arrival 01 the automobile, was also becoming themilieu and the raw material ter the avant-gardes 01 modernismo

86 Viceroy Palace and its surroundings, Edwin Lutyens, New Delhi, India, 1912-31

,~-COMMOI'\WEALTH cr AVSTRALlAFEDERAL CAPITAL CO!\PETITIOti

<::.ITYA~D EfiVIROI1S·':'CALE

87 Plan lar Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin, Canberra, Australia, 1911

080 I 081

New production,new aesthetic

With the invention 01 the automobile, the spread 01 electricity,advances in scientilic research - especially in chemistry andphysics - and the increasing unilication 01 the world's markets,architecture became both a factor for increasing industrialproductivity and a key component of new visual strategiesdeveloped by big business. Concurrently, and to a certaindegree in response, artists and architects devoted themselvesto interpreting a new stage in the machine age's evolutionaryadvancement. Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumlord described itas "neotechnic" in opposition to the "paleotechnic" age 01 coaland steam power ..• 1 A variety 01 relationships betweenarchitects and industry began taking shape, ranging from thecomplete integrafion 01 architects into major corporations, toarchitects' eflorts to promote the creative coordination 01 artand industry at all levels, to - last but not least - architects'independent and at times critical activities within buildingprograms and cultural institutions.

The AEG model in Berlin

The emerging power and imperialism 01 Wilhelmine Germany,where industrialization had taken hold later than in Great Britainand France, found its economic strength in the rapid development01 giant companies in the fields of steel, chemistry, and electric-ity. At a time when Britain dominated world commerce, the "madein Germany" label was seen as second-rate and derivative.German companies were thus driven to technical and aes-thetic innovation in order to improve the image of their productsat home and abroad. The most remarkable example of sucha strategy was that 01 the Allgemeine Elektrizitatsgesellschaft(General Electricity Company, known as AEG), founded by EmilRathenau in Berlin. Rathenau's son Walther, on whom the

Chapter 06 I New production, new aesthetic

character of Dr. Arnheim in Robert Musil's novel The Man with-out Qualities is based, eventually succeeded his father andplayed a leading role in German public life. The Rathenausretained Peter Behrens, whose fame had spread lollowingthe design of his own house in Darmstadt as well as of hisExhibition Pavilion in Oldenburg (1905) and the Crematorium(1906-7) 88 that he designed in a Florentine manner in' Hagen.The large design oflice Behrens established quickly becameinvolved in all the AEG's activities. It created electric productstor mass consumption - fans, toasters, teakettles, and otherdevices - with designs so definitive that they remain practi-cally unchanged to this day. The company's visual communi-cations, from posters to all types 01 printed matter, were carriedout according to Behrens's specifications ..• 2 At a more monu-mental scale, Behrens was involved in the design of all the AEGbuildings throughout Berlin, from factories to housing estates.Indeed, each product line called for a specific building, partic-ularly if its components required highly specialized handling.The lirst building to be constructed was the Turbine Factory(1908-9), 89 which Behrens designed with the engineer KarlBernhard. Its great form resembles a temple, as if to maintaina link between the industry-minded "Chicago on the Spree" -which Rathenau saw as replacing the Prussian monarchs' art-oriented "Athens on the Spree" - and the models 01 antiquity ..• 3Flanked by a lower building with a wall consisting of a largeplane 01 glass rhythmically divided by steel frames, the factoryfeatures a 25-meter (82-foot) triple-hinged frame, beneath whicha crane moved the rnassive rotors and stators. On the frontfacade, the polygonal shape 01 the pediment evokes the contourof a bolt head at giant scale. Most interesting, Behréns playedwith a paradoxical contrast between mass and transpar-ency. The corner pylons, which look like stone piers, are made

Crematorium, Peter Behrens, Hagen, Germany,-306-7

89 Turbine Factary, Peter Behrens and KariBernhard, Berlin, Germany, 1908-9

90 The staf al Ihe Behrens affice, Neubabelsberg,Germany, 1910

f concrete yet carry only their own weight, leaning inward astney rise. The glass plane, on the other hand, tips at an angle:0 the exterior edge of the frame, as il bearing the heavy load01 the giant rool, which in lact is supported by the underlyingsteel-trarne structure.3ehrens also built the Kleinmotorenlabrik (Small Motor Factory;910-13), the lront 01 which is distinguished by a series 01ark brick columns without capitals standing five stories tall.

The Hochspannungswerk (High Voltage Factory; 1909-10) isa more complex structure, in which the main halls were sand-

iched between two taller volumes containing additional workareas. Here the study, coordination, and control 01 productionclearly were integral to the manulacturing process: the era oforganization was at hand. Like Charles Garnier's firm during thedesign 01the Paris Opéra in the previous century, Behrens'sfirm attracted ambitious young architects from all over Germanyand neighboring countries. 90 From 1908 to 1911 he recruitedWalter Gropius, Adolf Meyer, Ludwig Mies (Iater known as Miesvan der Rohe), and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Iater known asLe Corbusier), who constantly complained about the tyrannicalrule of the "bear Behrens." Having recently read Thus SpakeZarathustra tor the lirst time, Jeanneret identified Behrens withthe formidable Nietzschean superman. -> 4

Behrens's success as the AEG's lead architect braught himprojects lor other industrialists and lor the state, in whichhe explored the archetype 01the Renaissance palace. InDüsseldorf he built the administrative affices 01the steel rnanu-lacturing firm Mannesmann (1911-12), an ally of AEG, basinghe entire complex, with its repetitive, apparently modular lacadebays, on the basic unit 01the office. With its metal structure cov-ered in stone, the building rellected Behrens's interest in JacobBurckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860),

which he referred to in discussions 01the designo -> 5 In SaintPetersburg, Behrens enlisted Mies to help him build the Germanembassy (1912), a palace with a red granite colonnade rerninis-cent of the Kleinmotorenfabrik lor the AEG but with a far moreluxurious interior featuring black Doric columns.

Factory as inspiration

Walter Gropius and Adoll Meyer strove to lollow the exampleset by their mentor, Behrens, in building the Fagus Factory inAlfeld an der Leine (1911-13). 91 Designed to produce beech-wood shoe lasts, the factory was begun by the architect EduardWerner in a Neo-Gothic style. Gropius and Meyer preservedWerner's masonry foundations, but used them as the base andIrame lor a light steel-and-glass curtain-wall lacade. In contrastto the piers at Behrens's Turbine Factory, Gropius and Meyer'stransparent corners contributed to dematerializing the building,and the image of a modular structure with razor-sharp outlinesechoed the processes taking place inside the building. Thisheralded a new era in industrial architecture: lactories were nolonger reminiscent 01castles and temples; instead, their designbecame an allusion to the precise handling of materials and tothe sleekness of the products manufactured within them.The owner 01 the Fagus Factory, Carl Benscheid, had-shownGropius photographs 01 another industrial world, NorthAmerica, and in a 1913 essay, "The Development 01 ModernIndustrial Architecture," 92 Gropius enthusiastically pre-sented the grain silos and factories built in the "motherland 01industry." In his eyes, "The compelling monumentality 01theCanadian and South American grain silos, the coal silos builtfor the large railway companies, and the totally modern work-shops of the North American lirms almost bear comparison

082 I 083

- ~yus Factory, Walter Gropius-~olf Meyer, Alfeld an der Leine,

=-=---cllY,1911-13

~;¡ the buildings of ancient Egypt. Their individuality is so

rrnistakable that the meaning of the structure becomes over-~elmingly clear to the passer-by." -> 6

--ough Gropius and his successors knew little of the techniques.3ad to operate silos, structures deeply rooted in the American=.;;ricultural economy, they grasped the aesthetic qualities-= those concrete cylinders and boxes. The automobile facto-es of Detroit also captivated Gropius. There is no doubt that-8 studied them while preparing his project tor Fagus. Albert~n had erected a large concrete frame building in Highland=>ark ter the Ford Motor Company, achieving the ideal of theoaylight lactory." -> 7 More than the skyscraper, which wassñll beyond the reach 01 German designers, these lactoriesseemed to open the way to an architecture 01 pure economicaiionality. Not all German architects were ready to embrace.nern, though. Paul Bonatz, a student of Theodor Fischer's stu-:Jio in Munich, chose to evoke a Roman basilica in his Stuttgart'1ailway Station (1912-30), 94 a reinlorced-concrete buildinglad in stone, implicitly asserting that modern networks like rail-roads demanded a monumentality that went beyond a rather=etishistic reliance on steel and glass.me prominent Berlin architect Hans Poelzig adopted a sig-nificantly different approach to building lorm and design dur-ing the same periodo His Chemical Factory (1911-12) 95 in Luban(Luborí), near Poznan in Silesia, evoked the brick attics 01 build-ings in Hanseatic cities like Bremen and Hamburg in the north 01Germany as well as medieval lortilications and Roman aqueducts.Far removed from Behrens's rhetoric 01 transparency in struc-~res like the Turbine Factory, these buildings Ilaunted theirphysical mass while their richly patterned brick surfaces revealed .to the attentive observer the difference between the supportingand supported parts 01 the masonry. -> 8

DACO"rAEUWATOR

OETii.ElOES'l.OBUNonyDORN

92 Page from "The Development 01 Modern IndustrialArchitecture" in the Deutscher Werkbund annual,Walter Gropius, 1913

The Deutscher Werkbund

Other connections existing within institutional networks par-alleled personal relationships between architects and indus-trial figures. Early twentieth-century German art reformersseeking an aesthetic translormation of daily lile longed fora mutually beneficial alliance with industry. To this end,they lounded the Verband des deutschen Kunstgewerbes(Association 01 German Arts and Crafts), presided over byHermann Muthesius. The movement's central organ was thejournal Oer Kunstwart (The Guardian of Art), which was some-what nationalistic in its orientation. -> 9 The success of the1906 Kunstgewerbeausstellung (Arts and Crafts Exhibition) inDresden led to the creation in MiJnich the lollowing year 01 theDeutscher Werkbund (German Work Union), a lederation 01industrialists, state officials, architects, artists, and critics. Whilethe positions within this organization Irequently conllicted,the architect Fritz Schumacher, then a prolessor in Dresden,delined the Werkbund's objective in his inaugural speech as"overcoming the alienation between the executive and theinventive spirit, in order to bridge the existing divide." -> 10

Unlike their British predecessors in the Arts and Crafts movement;with whom the supporters 01 the Kunstgewerbe identilied, thelounders 01 the Werkbund were not opposed to the leadingcapitalist lirms 01 the day. Instead, they tried to ligure out a wayto cooperate with industry so as to achieve the desired reform01 material culture. The inspiration tor the organization cameprimarily lrom Muthesius, who had become a professor of archi-tecture at the Handelshochschule (Higher Trade School) inBerlin, and Irom the relormer Friedrich Naumann, an advocate01 Christian Socialism and a deputy in the Reichstag. In 1908Naumann outlined a theory advocating quality production as

084 I 085

VER.AC·CUS'fAV••AMMERS·MiiHCHEH

L. I1'1I1OPIRQ1oION .&93 Ingenieur-aesthetik (EngineeringAesthetics), Joseph August Lux, 1910

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

outdated Zivilisation that stood in opposition to the progressiveKultur 01 industry. This distinction operated on many levels. -> 15

The extent 01 the Werkbund's success may be gauged by its1914 exhibition in Cologne. The decision to hold the exhibitionin a city so close to France was indicative 01 the association'sincreasingly nationalistic stance. At this point the Werkbund had1,870 members and a constantly growing number 01 industrialsponsors. Yet the exhibition buildings hardly conveyed a sense01 unanimity . ..,16 Van de Velde pursued his ideal 01 linear lorm

with a theater whose principal innovation was a tripartite stage.Gropius and Meyer's administration building continued theexperiments they had initiated in Alfeld, with exterior staircaseshoused in glass cylinders. Their building was also reminiscentin many ways of the City National Bank and Hotel built by FrankLloyd Wright in Mason City, lowa (1909), particularly in its sym-metrical composition and overhanging roof.In July 1914 the Werkbund organized a conference to coincidewith the exhibition. It was marked by a heated conlrontationover the notion 01 Typisierung - the creation of type, orstandardized objects. Muthesius believed that standardizationwas inevitable: "More than any other art, architecture strivestoward the typical. Only in this can it find fullillment. Only in theall-embracing and continuous pursuit of this aim can it regainthat effectiveness and undoubted assurance that we admire inthe works of past times that marched along the road ofhomogeneity." -> 17 Van de Velde, on the other hand, was strictlyopposed to the notion of Typisierung, just as he was hostileto any Kulturpolitik (cultural policy) - a somewhat paradoxi-cal stance given that he was in the employ 01 the Grand Dukeof Saxony - and he was supported in his argument by Gropiusand by the individualistic positions of August Endell and

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

95 Chemical Factory, Hans Poelzig, Luban (Luborí), Germany (Poland), 1911-12

well as durability and premised on class collabaration: "Thesocial needs of the working class can be united with the needlar art 01 the progressive part 01 the population by replacing atheary based on attrition with one based on durability." -> 11 Thesame year Naumann drew up most of the Werkbund statutes.The organization grew quickly. By the time it moved its head-quarters to Berlin in 1912, it had nearly a thousand members,among them a growing number of businesses. Its activi-ties expanded lurther with the spread of local groups (torty-five by 1914), the publication 01 its Jahrbücher (yearbooks),conferences, and exhibitions. The Werkbund worked indi-rectly through the Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handelund Gewerbe (German Museum for Art in Trade and Industry),lounded in Hagen by Karl Ernst Osthaus, another of its princi-pal leaders, who organized many traveling exhibitions. At theinstigation of the Werkbund and in imitation of the AEG model,companies recruited architects to design their office buildingsand manufacturing facilities. The Norddeutsche Lloyd hired PaulLudwig Troost and Bruno Paul, who designed tour ships, whilethe Hamburg-Amerika-Line worked with Muthesius . ..,12

Though the Werkbund's primary goals were to raise the "artis-tic" level of German industrial production and to modernizeconsumer taste, the organization also devoted itself to promot-ing a form of aesthetic expression unique to technical objectsand civil engineering structures. This ingenieur-aesthetik(engineering aesthetics), opposed to both classicism and ArtNouveau, provided the title lar a 1910 book by Joseph AugustLux, -> 13 93 who described the aesthetic effects 01 machines ina discourse similar to that of Paul Souriau in France. While try-ing to dispel the German inferiority complex with respect toBritish industrial production, Lux and his acolytes also sought tocombat German anxieties regarding the domination of French

Chapter 06 I New production, new aesthetic

96 Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund Exposition, Bruno Taut, Cologne, Germany,1914, exterior

Hermann Obrist. The conllict revealed an inherent contradictionwithin the Werkbund between the upholders 01 Kunstgewerbe,or the applied arts, and those who wished to place design in theservice 01 production, a concept at the heart 01 industrial designoThe most original building at the Cologne exhibition was byBruno Taut, one 01 the young Werkbund rebels hostile toMuthesius. A prismatic polyhedral dome on a circular base,his Glass Pavilion 96,97 aimed to demonstrate all the possibili-ties 01 glass by incorporating this material in the lorm 01 win-dows, glass bricks, and polychrome glass mosaics ..• 18 A

Irieze running around the building's lourteen-Iacet perimeterwas inscribed with slogans such as "Happiness without glass,how crass!"; "Colo red glass destroys hatred"; "Glass opensup a new age"; and "Brick building only does harm." Theirauthor was the poet and novelist Paul Scheerbart, whom Tauthad belriended in 1913 ..• 19 In an aphorism-lilled publicationentitled G/asarchitektur (1914), Scheerbart expressed simi-lar ideas, enumerating potential types 01 glass buildings whilepromising a new world based on colored-glass sensations anddeclaring that glass had the potential to be the salvation 01society and individuals.In his novel Das graue Tuch (The Gray Cloth), published thesame year, Scheerbart related the exploits 01 a demiurge archi-tect Ilying over the world in an airship, building observatorieson glaciers and glass sanatoriums on lakeshores ..• 20 The

nature 01 the relationship between architects and glass, whichin the nineteenth century had centered on train stations andexhibition halts, and more recently on model lactories like theFagus, now shifted. By celebrating the utopian possibilities 01glass, Scheerbart and Taut emphasized the experiences prom-ised by an architecture no longer obsessed with structure andtectonics or with its place in stone cities. They heralded an

Chapter 06 I New production, new aesthetic

97 Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund Exposition, Bruno Taut, Cologne, Germany,1914, interior

architecture open to daydreams, with glass as an instrument 01both relorm and redemption.

Futurist mechanization

The Italian Futurists based their efforts to lound a new artisticdiscourse and a new architectural style on the sensations pro-duced by motion and speed. Just as Behrens came to dis-tance himsell lrom the Jugendstil - even il critics still spoke01 a Behrensstil (Behrens style) - and Perret trorn the ArtNouveau, so the artists gathered around the poet and provo-cateur Filippo Tommaso Marinetti revolted against the StileLiberty, the Italian version 01 Art Nouveau (also known asFloreale). This literary and artistic uprising was a responseto the translormations provoked by industrialization and thegrowth 01 metropoles such as Milan and Turin. Marinetti's"Manilesto 01 Futurism" appeared in the Paris daily Le Figaroin 1909. Declaring war on historical cities, Marinetti wrote: "Wewill sing 01 the multicolored and polyphonic tides 01 revolutionin the modern capitals; we will sing 01 the vibrant nightly fervor01 arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons;greedy stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; lactorieshung on clouds by the crooked lines 01 their smoke; bridgesthat stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, Ilashing in the sunwith a glitter 01 knives." .• 21

In 1910 the painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni beganexpressing in his paintings the simultaneity 01 urban events,exalting the movement 01 crowds ano the agitation 01 thestreets. In his unpublished "Architettura futurista, manifesto"(1914), he evoked the possibility 01 an "architectural impres-sionism," an architecture 01 pure necessity, in which "thespaces 01 an edilice would provide the maximum performance,

99 Electric Power Plant, project, Antonio Sant'Elia, 1914The New City, project, Antonio Sant'Elia, 1914

e a motor." He announced that the "dynamic needs 01 mod-sm lile will necessarily give rise to an evolving architecture":: d noted that "the more ships, automobiles, and railroads.ations have subordinated their architecture to the needs- ey have encountered, the more they have gained in artis-e expression." Regrettably, in his view, "Processes as deeplylorrned as those employed by mechanics have been com-letely neglected in the construction 01 housing, roads, etc."

"he elevator, lollowed by the airplane, allowed lor the con-quest 01 the vertical dimension: "The luture will progressively

crease the architectural possibilities with regard to heightand depth. Thus lile will slice through the age-old horizontal

e 01 the terrestrial surface, the inlinite verticality 01 the eleva-:or ... and the spirals 01 the airplane and the dirigible." -> 22

"he young architect Antonio Sant'Elia repeated Boccioni's

orcphetic rellections almost literally in his July 1914 mani-<esto "L'architettura luturista." A colounder with the critic Ugo

ebbia, the artist Leonardo Dudreville, and the architectario Chiattone 01 the Nuove Tendenze (New Tendencies)

group, which had exhibited its work two months earlier atthe Famiglia Artistica gallery in Milan, Sant'Elia had previ-ously been inspired by the aesthetics 01 Otto Wagner. He hadalso undertaken a series 01 theoretical projects lor monu-ments and industrial structures like electric power plants. 99

Impressed by images 01 such American constructions as the3rooklyn Bridge and Grand Central Station, and even moreby Harvey Wiley Corbett's "Future New York" - which was

reproduced in L'illustrazione italiana in 1913 - he imaginedcities designed like an "immense, tumultuous, agile, mobilebuilding site, dynamic in every part," and proclaimed: "Roolsmust be exploited, basements utilized, the importance 01facades diminished."

In the manilesto he published in August 1914, Sant'Eliadescribed the Futurist house as "similar to a gigantic machine"made 01 "cement, glass, and iron, without painting and withoutsculpture, rich only in the innate beauty 01 its lines and reliels."He called tor a radical alteration 01 the organization 01 build-ings: "Elevators must not be hidden in stair corners like soli-tary worms; rather, having become useless, staircases must beabolished, and elevators must climb like iron and glass snakesalong the Ironts 01 buildings." -> 23 He also expressed his ideas

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

shown in the Nuove Tendenze exhibition. Yet these ideaswould long remain unknown. Only the illustrations accompa-nying his manilesto, published in Lacerba, had wide circula-tion. Alter the Second World War, the Communist philosopherAntonio Gramsci described Futurism, by then discreditedby its alliance with Fascism, as nothing more than a kind of"Fordist lanlare" based on the "exaltation 01 big cities." -> 24Yet the attention the Futurists drew to machines and to theindustrial milieu of modernization constituted a precedentwithout which the most relined new architecture of the 1920swould not have emerged.

088 I 089

In searchof a language:from Classicismto Cubism

Some architects sought a source 01 renewal not in new tech-nologies and responses to industrial production but rather in thediscipline 01 architecture itsell. Their prelerences ranged lrom nos-talgia tor the classical to a radical rupture with all existing codesand torrns al representation, even those locused on the machine,in order to return to the more abstract dimensions 01 designo Yetdespite many attempts to overturn it, the architecture taught at theÉcole des Beaux-Arts in Paris remained the dominant paradigmtor the first two decades 01 the twentieth century. In tact, the Écolewas responsible ter the spread 01 a genuine "international style"years belore this term was coined. -> 1 Its dissemination was abelated expression 01 French dominance in matters al taste, con-tinuing a pattern that had developed in the eighteenth century andwas reinlorced by the school's location in a city that was still thecultural capital 01 the world. -> 2 The growing number 01 loreignstudents enrolling at the Beaux-Arts beginning in the last third althe nineteenth century, the international activities al major Frenchacademics and prolessionals, and the emigration 01 Beaux-Artsinstructors also helped propagate the school's curriculum.The ongoing success 01 the Beaux-Arts method was due largelyto its ability to integrate the lunctional requirements 01 moderni-zation. The analytical approach taught in Julien-Azais Guadet'sÉléments et théorie de I'architecture (Elements and Theory 01Architecture; 1905), the school's principal design treatise, pre-pared students to evaluate new types 01 buildings that were morecomplex and less grandiloquent than the great palaces studied inpursuit 01 the Grand Prix de Rome, 100 with which the Beaux-Artscurriculum has toa often been associated. -> 3 The historicist ele-ments applied to nineteenth-century buildings slowly disappeared,while the principies 01 symmetry and hierarchy were adjusted tonew lunctional and symbolic requirements - sometimes with agreat deal 01 imagination - until the late 1940s.

Chapter 07 I In search of a language: from classicism lo Cubism

Anglo-American classicisms

The center 01 gravity 01 monumental classicism had largelyshifted trorn Paris to the United States by the end 01 the nine-teenth century. The scale 01 American commissions, whetherlunded by big business, the government, or philanthropists,resulted in buildings - and architectural lirms - 01 unprecedenteosize. For instance, the development 01 railroads and 01 alliancesamong rail companies led Daniel H. Burnham to build UnionStation in Washington, D.C., as a marble edilice that could bevisually identilied with the Capitol and the White House. In NewYork, Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore with Charles Reedand Allen Stern built Grand Central Station (1903-13). Basedon a spatial concept evoking the Roman baths, its giant con-course was erected over a network 01 underground tracks whilea neighborhood took shape on top 01 these sunken spaces. TheGare d'Orsay in Paris, built on an identical principie, was thework al Victor Laloux, the Beaux-Arts prolessor who, not coinci-dentally, was the mentor to most 01 the school's American stu-dents. Another monumental New York train station was designecby the lirm 01 Charles F. McKim, William R. Mead, and StanlordWhite: Pennsylvania Station (1905-10, demolished 1964), whichleatured a waiting room inspired by Rome's Baths 01 Caracallaand remarkable tor its powerlul exposed steel structure.McKim and White had previously worked with Henry HobsonRichardson. In tact, their lirst significant commission had beenthe Boston Public Library (1885-95), which stood across thestreet frorn their mentor's Trinity Church. Between 1870 and1919 their lirm constructed nearly a thousand buildings. Theyexplored the principie 01 the Italian Renaissance palazzo ina variety 01 New York buildings, including the University Club(1900), a grandiose 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

Morgan Library (1906). On an urban scale, they designed thecampus of Columbia University in upper Manhattan, an axialcomposition dominated by the dome of Low Memorial Library(1895-7). 101 Following in the footsteps of several hundredother architects, John M. Carrete and Thomas Hastings did theirprofessional apprenticeship in McKim, Mead and White's office,having previously studied in Paris. They went on to designextravagant hotels and homes from Florida to the New Yorkmetropolitan area, as well as the New York Public Library(1897-1911), an example of civic magnificence in the serviceof delivering culture to the masses.A classical resurgence was also underway in England.Beginning in 1904, Edwin Lutyens set about countering thevanity of "villa-dom," launching what he referred to, with char-acteristic humor, as a "Wrenaissance," a return to ChristopherWren. But Lutyens's frame of reference extended beyond thearchitect who had rebuilt Saint Paul's. A self-conscious refer-ence to Andrea Palladio - "Palladio is the game," he wrotein 1903 ..,4 - 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 in Taplow,Buckinghamshire (1904-9). Erected on a terraced site, the lat-ter had two different facades - one in exposed stone, the otherin stuccoed brick - creating contrasts of rhythm and texturethat extended the sense of counterpoint he had previously dis-played, but now within less of a classical straitjacket.

German nostalgia

There was no shortage of proponents of classicism inGermany, though some slowly freed themselves from its ten-ets. The Munich architect Theodor Fischer, who had worked

Chapter 07 I In search of a language: from classicism to Cubism

103 Page from Um 1800 (Around 1800),Paul Mebes, 1908

with Paul Wallot on the Reichstag in Berlin, invented new formsby using concrete in buildings such as the Garrison Church inUlm (1905-10). 107 Fischer taught Camillo Sitte's picturesqueurban precepts along with his own reflections on new build-ing types, first in Stuttgart and later in Munich. Some archi-tects diverged from the prevailing fixation on antiquity and,even more often, the Renaissance, idealizing instead othermoments in the history of architecture. One of the books mostwidely used by German and Austrian designers prior to 1914was Um 1800 (Around 1800) 103 by the Berlin architect PaulMebes . ..,5 In this popular collection of nostalgic images of

eighteenth-century building types, Mebes celebrated the hon-esty and formal restraint found in Germany's rural and bour-geois constructions at the turn of the previous century. Heparticularly emphasized the harmony between buildings andtheir gardens, as well as the stylistic unity of architectural ele-ments, decoration, and furniture.In some ways this vernacular and bourgeois traditionalism wasan expression of the GroBstadtfeind/ichkeit (hostility towardthe big city) that took hold among the German intelligentsiadistressed about the erosion of cultural values brought on byurbanization and internationalization. This anxiety led to theidealization of a carefully edited past. The tendency was exem-plified by Julius Langbehn's book Rembrandt a/s Erzieher(Rembrandt as Educator; 1890), which the author publishedanonymously. Its purpose was to denounce the problemsaffecting modern Germany and proclaim art the only possi-ble force for resistance and renewal. The Dürerbund (DürerAssociation), organized by the publisher and critic FerdinandAvenarius (1902), and the Bund deutscher Heimatschutz(Society for the Preservation of the German Homeland),founded in 1904 by the teacher Ernst Rudorff, became the

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:: incipal mediators between these ideas and architecture.- e Bund fought not only for the preservation of endangeredz: dscapes, but also for farms that were altogether mod-='Tl yet infarmed by tradition. It worked far the conservation ofonuments as well as of rural structures, plant and animal life,

a: d traditional practices, customs, holidays, and dress.- e architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg - a frequent contri bu-r to Der Kunstwart, a journal founded by Ferdinand Avenarius1887 - was the most effective propagandist for the princi-es of Heimatschutz. After the success of his book Hauslicheunstptlege (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-shed from 1901 to 1917, presented a binary vision of Germanousing, urban landscapes, and gardens, opposing "examples"

and "counterexamples." This editorial device, which the radicaloderns would later put to good use, butlressed his argument

for a thoughtful replication of small, preindustrial cities, which heconsidered the only legitimate answer to the question of rnet--opoütan expansion. It is telling that Schultze-Naumburg wasamong the many members of the Bund deutscher Heimatschutzho went on to found the Deutscher Werkbund: in his eyes andose of his colleagues, there was no contradiction between

he fight for good industrial farm and ataste for harmony. -> 6

The most elegant yet rigorous reading of the traditional Germanarchitecture produced during the period "around 1800" wasprovided by Heinrich Tessenow. In the garden city of Hellerau,which was closely associated with the Werkbund, he built sev-eral sets of houses that achieved an ideal of functionality andsimplicity through a geometric and abstract rendition of tradi-ional house types. He also provided Hellerau with itsculminating achievement and central edifice, the School for

106 Cover 01Das Andere (The Other),Adoll Loos, 1903

Rhythmic Gymnastics (1910-12), 104 which was built tor theSwiss musician Émile Jacques-Dalcroze and the reformerWolf Dohrn. Here, Tessenow successfully melded the arche-types of the classical temple and the bourgeois house. Thanksto his poetic pen-and-ink drawings, Tessenow's architecturallanguage became widely accessible in books such as DerWohnungsbau (Building Houses; 1909) and Hausbau unddergleichen (House Building and the Like; 1916). -> 7 105

Loos and the lure of "Western culture"

Adolf Loos was another architect focused on the early archi-tecture of the nineteenth century, particularly on the Viennesebuildings of Joseph Kornháusel. Praising American technical

objects he had discovered on a three-year stay in the UnitedStates, and combating both the outdated approaches of hiscontemporaries and the arbitrary aestheticism of the Secession,Loos set about introducing "Western culture," especially itsclothing and plumbing, into Vienna. As publisher and author ofthe ephemeral broadsheet Das Andere (The Other; 1903), 106he wrote essays in the spirit of the satirist Karl Kraus. Das Andereoffered a radical critique of the Potemkin city erected aroundVienna's RingstraBe in the 1860s, which Loos considered amonumental lie, and bitingly atlacked the fashionable stylesof Joseph Maria Olbrich and Henry van de Velde.Despite the title of his famous lecture "Ornament and Crime"(delivered in 1908, but first published in 1913 in Paris), -> 8 Looswas not categorically opposed to decoration. On the contrary,he espoused an appropriate, judicious use of ornament in whicheach material was used for what it was, without pretense. In anearlier article, "Das Prinzip der Bekleidung" (The Principie ofCladding; 1898), he used metaphors barrowed from fashion to

092 I 093

107 Garrison Church, TheodorFischer, Ulm, Germany, 1905-10

094 I 095

't . .(. ti. .'

108 Goldmann and Salatsch Department Store, Adolf Loos, Vienna, Austria, 1909-11

Chapter 07 I In search 01 a language: lrom classicism to Cubism

109 Kárntner Bar, Adolf Loos, Vienna, Austria, 1907

ciscuss architecture, and in "Damenmode" (Ladies' Fashion;-898), asserting that women were less attractive when theyrete naked, he praised the anonymous qualities of English~shion, the ideal of which was to make the wearer totally invis-Die in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. -> 9

--DOS'S attachment to certain classical themes was clear in his-1Seof Doric columns at the entry of the Villa Karma in Montreux,witzerland (1903-6), and the Goldmann and Salatsch

Jepartment Store (1909-11) 108 on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna.The latter building provoked a scandal because of the barenessof its lacade on the upper levels, a quality all the more strikingsince it was located across Irom the entrance to the Imperial=>alaceand Saint Michael's Church. Soon nicknamed the"Looshaus," the building has a lacade that is divided into threebands beneath its cornice line: the upper stories, containingapartments, are based on a principie of sobriety and anonyrn-i1y; the two lower levels, easily visible to passersby, are cladin green marble. The Doric columns, also in green marble, donot actually bear the weight of the lacade. This differentiationon the lacade echoes Louis Sullivan's similar treatment at theCarson, Pirie & Scott Department Store, and it also continuesan architectural dialogue with Gottlried Semper.Loos's work consisted primarily of fitting out residential andcommercial interiors. The Karntner Bar (1907) 109 in Viennas a boxlike space just 7 meters deep, 3.5 meters tall, and_5wide (23 by 11 by 11 leet). Loos combined Skyros marble,

~ yx, and wood with mirrors intended to enlarge the sense 01 thespace; the effect was also meant to intensily customers' sense 01.snsion and disorientation. Loos became involved in designinglOuses. Yet he did not consider the house to qualily as "art."11 his essay "Architektur" (1910), he wrote: "Only a very smalloart of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.

110 Steiner House, Adolf Loos, Vienna, Austria, 1910

Everything else, everything which serves a purpose, should beexcluded Irom the realm 01 art." -> 10

Many of Loos's houses, which often consist 01 cubic volumeswith white surfaces and understated openings, appear to havebeen inspired by houses in London. They were embodiments 01the argument in his essay "Heimatkunst" (Homeland Art; 1914):"The building should be dumb on the outside and reveal itswealth only on the inside." -> 11 The exterior, in otherwords,was meant to belong to society and the interior to the individual.Differentiating the height of rooms according to their function andcreating complex interpenetrations of levels and split-Ievels, Loosinvented the Raumplan, or spatial plan, which revolutionized theconventional vertical superimposition of floors. In the SteinerHouse (1910) 110 in Vienna, local regulations limited Loos to onlya single story on the street, so he developed the house towardthe garden, deeming its centrifugal aspect "Japanese." Alsoin Vienna, his house lor Dr. Gustav Scheu (1911-13) seemed toconlirm the analysis 01 his work by another Viennese artist, thecomposer Arnold Schonberq, who saw it as "a non-cornpos-ite, immediate, three-dimensional conception," in which "every-thing is thought out, imagined, composed and molded in spacewithout any expedient, without auxiliary plans, without interrup-tions and breaks; directly, as if all the structures were transpar-ent; as if the eye 01 the spirit were conlronted by space in all itsparts and as a totality simultaneously." -> 12

Berlage and the question of proportions

Trained at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, the Dutch archi-tect Hendrik Petrus Berlage was a reader 01 Viollet-Ie-Ducand Semper, in whom he found the basis for a practical aes-thetic: 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

in opposition to the many styles of the past, In this, Berlagewas quite close to such French architects as Frantz Jourdain.Visiting North America fifteen years after Loos, he returned toEurope full of enthusiasm for Louis Sullivan's and Frank L10ydWright's buildings. Like his Viennese contemporary Loos, herejected the ephemerality of fashion, borrowing an aphorismfrom Thomas Sheraton's 1794 Cabinet Maker: "Time altersfashion ... but what is founded on geometry and real sciencewill remain unalterable." -> 13

After constructing his first buildings in a Neo-Renaissance vein,Berlage began to explore systems of proportions in the HennyHouse in The Hague (1898) - in this case, square propor-tions. His major project at this date, his third project overall, wasthe Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 111,112 designed with a Neo-Gothic plan in 1885 and built in 1896-1903. This enormous143-by-55-meter (469-by-180-foot) edifice was based entirelyon a modular grid and the "Egyptian triangle" system of propor-tions, with a height-to-base ratio of eight to five. He drew on theresearch of his compatriots Jan H. de Groot, J. L. M. Lauweriks,and K. P.C. de Bazel, who had developed this system threedimensionally in competition proposals that Berlage had theopportunity to study. He asserted: "1 have become convincedthat geometry, the mathematical science, is not only of greatusefulness in the creation of artistic form but is also an absolutenecessity." He hazarded a comparison: "Why should architec-ture - the art most frequently compared to music - somethingthat led Schlegel to the well-known expression 'frozen music'- be composed without rhythmic, that is to say, geometricallaws?" -> 14 In keeping with the rationalist credo that the plan

should determine the elevation, the silhouelte and especiallythe fenestration paltern of the Stock Exchange reveal the build-ing's interior organization. While there is a rhythmic quality to

113 Sint Hubertus Hunting Lodge, Hendrik Petrus Berlage and Bart Van der Leck,Hoenderloo, Netherlands, 1914-19

the principal facade on the Damrak, the eastern facade is moresedate and respects the scale of the neighboring blocks. Theprincipal room is the commodity exchange, which features alarge steel structural frame. The grain exchange is topped byhorizontal beams, while the stock exchange, at the rear of thebuilding, has lighter trusses. The difference in the spatial quali-ties of these three rooms expressed Berlage's belief that archi-tecture "resides in the creation of spaces, not in the design offacades." -> 15 The rooms were enclosed by walls whose solid-ity was punctuated by the indispensable structural bracing ele-ments of brackets, keystones, and lintels.The principal quality of the Stock Exchange is its serenity.Berlage said that he aimed to achieve an effect of "repose,"by which he meant both serenity and rest: "In the smaller worksof the ancients [there) is a charming repose. In contrast, ourpresent-day architecture gives a very restless impression.I would almost say that the two words 'style' and 'repose' aresynonymous; that repose is the same as style and style the sameas repose." -> 16 The Italian architect Aldo Rossi stressed thatthe Stock Exchange "does not seem to have the typical appear-ance of the cathedral of capital, of the temple of cash, which itsname calls to mind," and that strangely, in its mysterious rich-ness, it "seems instead like a market, a store, a gymnasium;it is devoid of the glorification of bourgeois wealth." -> 17 Thebuilding had considerable impact throughout Europe, notablyon the young Berlin architect Ludwig Mies, who was in com-petition with Berlage for the commission for the Krbller-MüllerHouse. Though the Dutch architect failed to realize that project,he would design others for this rich family from The Hague: theSint Hubertus Hunting Lodge (1914-19) 113 in Hoenderloo andthe Holland House in London (1914). In the latter he most ciearlyput his observations of Sullivan's work to use.

098 I 099

Cubism and cubistics

Certain opponents to the idea of renewing architecture by meansof its own linguistic codes turned in the direction of new artmovements likeCubism, which for a time seemed to promisethe geometric rationality sought by Berlage and others. Initialattempts at incorporating the devices of early Cubist paint-ing into architecture were rather ineffective, though. In 1912,the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon exhibited the facadeand ground floor of a rather strange "Cubist House" 114 at theSalon d'Automne in Paris. Its floor plan was conventional andits Cubist touches mostly ornamental. -7 18 Yet Duchamp-Villon

had major ambitions, if a 1916 letter is any evidence: "We mustestablish a new decor of architecture, not only in the character-istic lines of our times, which would be but a transposition ofthese lines and forms in other materials, and which is an error.Rather, we must penetrate the relation of these objects amongthemselves, in order to interpret, in lines, planes, and syntheticvolumes, which are balanced, in their place, in rhythms analo-gous to those of the life surrounding us." -719 His ensemble atthe Salon, undertaken on the initiative of the painter André Mare,essentially remained a showcase for his own work and that ofhis brother, Marcel Duchamp, as well as of his friends Rogerde La Fresnaye, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger,and Marie Laurencin. Cubism here was used not to challengethe spatiality of the living room or bedroom, but to create cor-nices and pediments whose polygonal shapes were essentiallyjust an ornamental theme.The most fruitful encounter between architecture and Cubismtook place in Prague. At the time, Czech architectural cul-ture was dominated by atto Wagner, whose message waspropagated by Jan Kotéra, the designer of a pavilion built for

Chapter 07 I In search of a language: from classicism to Cubism

114 "Cubist House" at the Salon d'Automne, Raymond Duchamp-Villon,Paris, France, 1912

the Auguste Rodin exhibition in 1902 - a prime example ofPrague's focus on Paris. As a student of Wagner, Kotéra favoredlinear patterns, as in his designs for the Urbánek Buildinq inPrague (1911-13) and the house of the music publisher JanLaichter (1908-9). He displayed a more dynamic concep-tion of space in the Hradec Králové Museum (1909-12). Hiscolleague Pavel Janák found a different precedent for CzechCubism in the sculptural forms of the Bohemian Baroque,which he updated in his work. In 1910 Janák criticized Wagner:"It is possible to predict the future direction of architecture: cre-ation. Artistic thinking and abstraction will predominate overpracticality, which will recede, and the pursuit of plastic form,of the plastic realization of architectural concepts, will cometo the fore." -720 Janák proposed a complete program for therenewal of architecture and particularly of the facade, pro-pounding the idea that a building should look like the result of aprocess of crystallization.Groups in Prague such as the Association of Visual Artists andthe Mánes Society carried on heated architectural debates overthis idea. Janák's ideas were realized by Josef Goéár, notablyin his orthogonal glass facade for the Wenke Depattment Storein .larornéf (1909-10) and the House ofthe Black Madonna inPrague (1912), 115 whose facade combines the dark solids ofits structural members with the crystalline prisms of its win-dows. The house introduced into Prague's old city the idea thata break with the existing codes of eclecticism and the CzechSezession could lead to a unified aesthetic capable of rivalingthe Gothic or the Bohemian Baroque. Goóár's approach wasradicalized by Josef Chochol with a house in thePrague districtof vvsehrad (1911-12) 116 and a building on Neklanova Streetin the same city (1913). Both were angular structures in whichthe building's entire volume contributed to highly contrasting

115 House of the Black Madonna, Josef Gocár,Prague, Bohemia (Czech Republic), 1912

116 House in Vysehrad, Josef Chochol, Prague, Bohemia (Czech Republic),1911-12

prismatic effects. Chochol displayed almost Futurist leaningsin his declarations regarding an architecture of connectionswith daily life: "We first and always demand and need the freshexcitement of new artistic intensities, springing from the tumul-tuous and glowing mass of contemporary life." -> 21

In 1930 the functionalist critic Karel Teige denounced "thebasic, almost absurd misunderstanding of the fundamental andspecific postulates of architecture" -> 22 exemplified by theseCzech buildings. Nonetheless, they constituted an original andintense effort to replace classical certainties with the search fora new code, using Cubism as a formula in a paradoxical effortto distinguish the individual work.

100 I 101

TheGreatWarand itsside effects

Instead of disrupting the pattern of transformation in whicharchitecture was engaged worldwide, the first industrial warin history had the opposite effect: by accelerating moderniza-tion, World War I revealed and challenged the nationalist lean-ings that had characterized the emerging architectural cultures.Some reformers of the prewar era had indeed expressed acertain admiration for aesthetic aspects of the technology ofwar. Members of the Deutscher Werkbund, whose buildingsin Cologne were promptly converted into barracks in 1914,were attracted to the extraordinary rationality of German impe-rial navy vessels. -> 1 The Italian Futurists, for their part, hoped

Italy would enter the war on the side of the Allies. As early ashis 1909 manifesto Marinetti had declared, "We will glorify war- the only true hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism,the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas whichkill." -> 2 Several members 01 the movement joined the LombardBattalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Automobilists. They wouldpaya heavy price in the war: Umberto Boccioni died in 1916after falling off a horse, and Antonio Sant'Elia was killed thesame year by a bullet to the head.

A triple mobilization

At first, architects were mobilized only for battle. The time theyspent in the trenches would be the determining experience fora generation of young European architects, shaping their viewof the world for decades to come. -> 3 On the Russian front,Erich Mendelsohn filled his sketchbooks 118 with visions ofan architecture that would express the dynamism of industry.Architects and painters on the front lines were enlisted in theearliest efforts to create camouflage. Among those invotved inthis effort were Franz Marc, Fernand Léger, and André Mare,

Chapter 08 I The Great War and its side effects

whose watercolors depicted the operations of their ownFrench team of camoufleurs. -> 4

The second, more indirect mobilization was that of architec-ture itself, which was called upon to give shape to construc-tion programs for a war that had quickly become "total." Thoughthe design of fortifications, which spread across unprecedentedexpanses of territory, remained essentially a military task, pro-grams related to aerial forces, the war's great novelty, weresometimes conceived by architects or civil engineers. AugustePerret designed concrete and steel airplane hangars and sheltersfor dirigibles, while Euqene Freyssinet built airship hangars inAvord and Istres in 1916 and 1917. Continuing on from his warwork after peace came, Freyssinet built gigantic parabolic dirig-ible hangars at Orly Airfield (1921-3, bombed 1944). 119 These300-meter-long and 50-meter-high (985-foot by 364-foot) vaultswere made rigid by the wavelike configuration of their arches,which were built from precast components.The third mobilization was even more diffuse: it had to do withthe industrial nature of a total war, in which human and materialresources are deployed under the direction of state organizationsrun by industrialists - men like Walther Rathenau in Germany andsocialists like Albert Thomas in France. Throughout Europe andthe United States, the creation of major munitions and aviationfactories and shipyards necessitated the hasty construction ofhousing developments to shelter thegrowing workforce. Archi-tects took advantage of such projects to continue their pre-warresearch. Paul Schmitthenner's Staaken Garden City (1914-18) 117

near the munitions factor y in Spandau, west of Berlin, realizedthe village ideal of Heimatschutz by using the architectural lan-guage of the eighteenth-century Dutch quarter in Potsdam.Schmitthenner organized the houses according to five given typesand standardized elements like doors and windows. -> 5

117 Garden City, Paul Schmitthenner, Staaken, Germany, 1914-18

The spread of Taylorism

In all the warring nations, production was transformed bynew concepts related to the scientific organization of labor.Conceived in the United States by the engineer FrederickWinslow Taylor and described in his Principies of ScientificManagement (1911), -> 6 these concepts were known in Europeeven before the war, At the time, socialist critics had denouncedthe "organization of overwork." But the war-driven need tomake do with a reduced workforce and to incorporate womeninto industrial production led to the introduction of a rigid hier-archy orrnanaqernent in"fhe factory and to strict control overworkers' movements. -> 7 Manufactured products, particularlymunitions, had to meet new standards of quality, reliability, con-sistency, and compatibility. Standardization, which had beeninitiated during the American Civil War, became a generalrequirement and soon permeated architecture. In Germanythe engineer Heinrich Schaechterle, head of the KbniglicheFabrikationsbüro (Royal Manufacturing Office), known as Fabo,prompted the founding of the Deutsche Industrie-Normen, orDIN (German Industrial Norms), which eventually regulatedthe entirety of production. The Americans also intensified theirefforts to make manufacturing processes as rational as possi-ble. After the war, French architects studied their approach inorder to make reconstruction more efficient. -> 8

The degree of organization needed to conduct a war thatmobilized millions of combatants and even more workers ledto the widespread dissemination of the concept of "planning."The conduct of military operations and the organization ofindustrial production required a continuous effort to preparethe transformation of the territory. Wartime propaganda pro-moting planning led to the nearly universal adoption of this

-118 Industrial Building, from a sketchbook, Erich Mendelsohn, 1917

119 ~ Dirigible Hangars, Eugéne Freyssinet, Orly, France, 1921-3, demolished

concept after 1918 by politicians and economists, and itsmetaphorical use byarchitects.

Commemoration and reconstruction

The first effect of the war, even before it was over, was an unprec-edented increase in the number and size of military cemeteries.Groups such as the Deutscher Werkbund set to work designingthem, playing a role in shaping a genuine cult of the warrior. -> 9

In Great Britain, the Imperial War Graves Commission, foundedin 1917 by Fabian Ware, developed burial places in France andBelgium for the bodies of soldiers left on the battlefield. To assisthim, Ware hired the writer Rudyard Kipling and the architectsReginald Blomfield and Edwin Lutyens. They designed manycommemorative projects, including the cemetery of Étaples,overlooking the English Channel near Le Touquet (1918-20),and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme(1927-32) 120- a giant brick and stone arch that is supported byseveral similar arches and suggests a type of classical abstrae-tion. -> 10 In contrast to these serene memorial landscapes, theossuary built in Douaumont by Léon Azéma to commemorate thebloody battle of Verdun (1920-32),122 featuring a long concretevault, resembles a military structure grafted onto a neo-Roman-esque steeple. There was no shortage of references to the archi-tectural past in memorials such as Tannenberg (1924-7) 121inHohenstein, Eastern Prussia; its series of towers arranged in acircle, built by Johannes and Walter Krüger, evoke the Casteldel Monte built by the Hohenstaufens in Apulia. One excep-tion to this nostalgic approach was the Monumento ai Caduti(Monument to the Fallen; 1932-3) in Como, built by GiuseppeTerragni, which took an aerodynamic form basedon a Futuristsketch made by Sant'Elia twenty years earlier.

102 I 103

120 Memorial to the Missing 01 the Somme, Edwin Lutyens, Thiepval,France, 1927-32

Even cities lar Irom the lront lines lelt the weight 01a war thatturned them into arsenals and impoverished them. -> 11 Thereconstruction 01destroyed urban areas soon became a high-stakes enterprise. Urban planners and architects rallied to rebuildeven belore the hostilities had come to an end, sometimes work-ing in an international context. In France the American relielelfart was not just military and economic. Beginning in 1917, theAmerican urban planner Gearge Burdett Ford assisted the asso-ciation La Renaissance des Cités (The Renascence of the Cities)in the reconstruction of Rheims, 123 a city considered "martyred"since the German shelling of its cathedral in 1914. Ford's zoning-based plan lar that city would be the first reconstruction planapproved in France after the war. -> 12 While the most advanced

French and Belgian urban planners were involved in projects larre-creating destroyed cities, their realizations were lar more con-servative. In many cases they represented the triumph 01 region-alist ideals. The sale reconstruction effort in Germany - whereinnovative architects were careful to adhere to the principies ofHeimatschutz - was in western Prussia. The showcase of thisreconstruction was the city 01Goldap, rebuilt by Fritz Schopholin 1919-21. -> 13 Prussian urban centers seemed to lollow tothe letter the traditionalist recommendations of Paul Mebes andPaul Schultze-Naumburg, which were codified in the work 01thearchitect Friedrich Ostendarf. -> 14

On the other side of the front, lollowing the exhibition La CitéReconstituée (The Reconstituted City) 124 in 1917 - in whichstudies 01village buildings in the regions ruined by the warwere exhibited alongside Tony Garnier's Cité Industrielle -the torrns 01 traditional rural architecture were widely usedas a basis for reconstructing urban areas. -> 15 But to seethese rebuilt structures as no more than an expression of con-servative taste would be an oversimplification. Though the

Chapter 08 I The Great War and its side effects

121 Tannenberg Memorial, Johannes Krüger and Walter Krüger, Hohenstein,Germany, 1924-7, destroyed

122 Douaumont Ossuary, Léon Azéma, Fleury-devant-Douaumont,France, 1920-32

inhabitants' desire far recognizable torrns was certainly a com-mon concern among the rebuilders, it led them to propaseinterpretations that were lar from literal. These were occasioriallycombined with authentic technological revolutions in construc-tion. Notwithstanding the fact that iconoclastic systems such asLe Corbusier's Dom-ino project had little success, the immedi-ate postwar period saw the triumph of reinforced concrete innortheast France, particularly for industrial structures and civil-ian buildings. At the same time, certain impressive structuralleats, such as the rebuilding 01 the concrete frame 01 RheimsCathedral by Henri Deneux (1924-6), had to be clad in stone topreserve an idealized vision of "reconstitution." This was cer-tainly also the case with the Grand'Place in Arras, which wasre-created from scratch. 125

A careful look at complexes such as the garden cities 01Rheims and the railroad towns 01 Lille-Délivrance, Douai, andTergniers, built for the Compagnie du Nord under the directionof the engineer Raoul Dautry, reveals that regionalism workedhand in hand with standardization and rationalization.In addition to these projects in areas affected by combat,postwar programs included housing for veterans, who soonbecame a considerable lorce on the European political scene.In German cities, housing developments for veterans figuredinto urban expansion plans. In Great Britain, the government'sinterventions during the war years in the sphere of social policycontinued with the British Housing Act of 1919, which had thespecific goal of providing "homes fit far heroes to live in." -> 16

Postwar recomposition

Though the damage caused by World War I was unprecedented,the consequences of war went lar beyond mere destruction.

123 Plan lor the reconstruction 01 Rheims, George Burdett Ford, Rheims,France, 1917

The new political geography that took shape had a directimpact on urban planning and architecture, beginning withthe intense exchanges that developed among the defeatednations and lasted until the early 1930s. The relationshipsbetween Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union and betweenGermany and Turkey were as significant as the initial inroadsof Americanization in Germany. During this same period,forced migrations, such as that of one million Greeks evictedfrom Turkey, had drastic effects on cities, quadrupling thepopulation of Athens in just a few years. After the collapseof the German and Austrian empires, Czarist Russia and theOttoman Empire gave way to new nationalist divisions andemerging nation-states such as Czechoslovakia, Finland,and Turkey, which used architecture to affirm their identities.Territories placed under French and British mandates in theMiddle East - Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq - were transformed bymodern plans and construction.As nations dissolved and re-formed, professional organiza-tions were also transformed and relocated according to newpolitical borders. They were run by men who had been pro-foundly changed by war, and in some cases even displaced.The emigration of thousands of Russian architects and engi-neers as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution recon-figured professional circles in parts of Europe, while othergroups were faced with forced relocation. Above all, theirexperience on the front lines made young architects eager tocontribute to building a different society. Shortly after returningto civilian life, architects in Germany and Russia establishedutopian work collectives and devoted themselves to translatingthe need for social change into new experimental forms.

Chapter 08 I The Great War and its side effects

124 Farm buildings shown at the La Cité Reconstituée exhibition, Epieds,France, 1917

New architects between scienceand propaganda

After being "under fire" and experiencing the "storm of steel"- to borrow the titles of firsthand accounts of the front lines byHenri Barbusse (1916) and Ernst Jünger (1920) ~ 17 - the ris-

ing generation was faced with contradictory aspirations. Theaspiration to a classical "return to order," as announced in JeanCocteau's pamphlet Le coq et /'arlequín (Cock and Harlequin;1918), reflected an anxiety stemming from the loss of culturalreference points. This anxiety was the basis of Oswald Spengler'sreactionary diatribe Oer Untergang des Abendlandes (TheDecline of the West; 1917-22), which became compulsoryreading for many architects. ~ 18 For many intellectuals andarchitects such disquietude coexisted with the desire for anuncompromised modernity, to be achieved through a radicalbreak with the outdated world that had led to the war. Faith inthe potential of science to enable humanity to transcend con-flict led to the notion of experimental, scientific, or "Iaboratory"architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. In this work the authorityaccorded to the natural sciences was evident.During the decade between the armistice of 1918 and the stockmarket crash of 1929, a postwar economy boosted by the spreadof Fordism seemed to promise both affordable, durable con-sumer goods and high wages. The rise of newly foundedorganizations like the League of Nations and the InternationalLabour Organization promised to ensure a peaceful world. Thedevelopment of the illustrated press, the motion picture indus-try, and the grand spectacles of the world's fairs provided fertileground for the activities of the professional elites. Like politicalgroups - but also in imitation of the strategies of public relationsand advertising firms, whose growth accompanied the spread

125 Grand'Place, Arras, France, rebuilt 1919-34 126 Portrait 01 an Architect, WilhelmSchnarrenberger, 1923

01 Fordism and consumerism - architects succumbed to theseduction 01 using slogans to sum up their working methodsand, more often, their aesthetic positions. -> 19

Le Corbusier thus identilied his "Cinq points d'une architecturemoderne" (Five Points 01a Modern Architecture; 1927), whileHenry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson enumerated the"three principies" 01the International Style (1932). In Athens theConqres internationaux d'architecture moderne (InternationalCongresses 01 Modern Architecture), or CIAM, boiled downurban planning to "Iour lunctions" (1933). The predilection lorsuch quantiliable lormulations and the prolileration 01archi-tectural periodicals revealed to what extent architecture hadbecome a mass medium in its own right, particularly now thatphotographic reproduction had become easier to achieve anddisseminate. -> 20

Architects became the heroes 01 modern times in paintings byWilhelm Schnarrenberger 126 and Mario Sironi. 127 The strug-gles and passions 01the interwar architect later inspired AynRand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead, whose protagonist wasplayed by Gary Cooper in King Vidor's lilm adaptation. In 1924the Dada artist Hans Richter described the "new architect" asoperating in an "internationally organized" space. According toRichter he had to possess both a "new sensuousness" and theability to respond to a society that was "more practical and lesssentimental" in a world 01 "rapid mobility" and "precise calcu-lations." -> 21 The architect attuned to his era soon became, asthe Russian Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg noted twoyears later with respect to Le Corbusier, "the very ligure 01 thenew man, lull 01 energy and perseverance in the propagandawhich he deploys in delense 01 his ideas." -> 22

127 The Architect, Maria Sironi, 1922

108 I 109

Expressionismin WeimarGermanyandthe Netherlands

No nation was more deeply affected by the trauma of World War Ithan Germany. The caste-bound society of the HohenzollernEmpire was replaced by the democratic Weimar Republic andits highly decentralized political structure. Architectural poli-cies began to be shaped principally by municipal adminis-trations, though some national organizations contributed tofinancing them. After the assassination of the leftist leadersKarl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 and the repres-sion of the Spartacist League, their revolutionary party, the newSocial Democratic-dominated government abandoned anyserious or radicalattempt to transform the modes of produc-tion. This left on the agenda only the utopia of a progressive"socialization," notably in the field of construction, where themodel of the Bauhütte - or medieval guild - proved seductive.For a few years the unions considered having the Bauhüttenparticipate directly in the reconstruction of the war-damagednorth of France as part of reparations. These political and eco-nomic strateqiestound a cultural and architectural response inExpressionism, an aesthetic orientation born in poetry and inpainting, which favored dynamic forms that embodied the psy-chological torment of wartime Germany.

The Arbeitsrat für Kunst

Following the empire's collapse, demobilized architectsorganized events intended to reveal new conceptions ofarchitectural space. In late 1918, with a growing number ofworkers' and soldiers' councils being organized, the Arbeitsratfür Kunst (Work Council for the Arts) was established in Berlinunder the direction of Walter Gropius, Cesar Klein, and AdolfBehne. Though the council was composed of a minority ofarchitects - including Otto Bartning, and Bruno and Max Taut

Chapter 09 I Expressionism in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

- and a majority of artists - including Georg Kolbe, LudwigMeidner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmitt-Rottluff - the for-mer were clearly in control. In its "Architektur-Program," theArbeitsrat put forward the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk -total work of art - "under the wing of a great architecture."Written by Bruno Taut, this programmatic statement featuredslogans such as "Art and people must form a unity" and "Artshall no longer be the enjoyment of the few but the life andhappiness of the masses." ..,1

The Arbeitsrat program laid out the new republic's strategiesby insisting on the "public character of all building activity,"the "unitary supervision of whole urban districts, streets, andresidential estates," and the creation of "permanent experi-mental sites for testing and perfecting new architecturaleffects." It demanded the dissolution of all academies andof all monuments, including war memorials, that required anexcessive quantity of materials, as well as the creation of a"national center to ensure the fostering of the arts within theframework of future law-making." ..,2

In April 1919 members of the Arbeitsrat organized the Auss-tellung für unbekannte Architekten (Exhibition for UnknownArchitects). In the catalog Gropius wrote that archltecturewas "the crystalline expression of man's noblest thoughts,his ardor, his humanity, his faith, his religion! ... There are noarchitects today, we are all of us merely preparing the way forhim who will once again deserve the name of architect, forthat means, lord of art, who will build gardens out of desertsand pile up wonders to the sky. [italics in original]" ..,3 Tautaffirmed in the same leaflet that the desire for the future wasarchitecture in the making: "One day there will be a Weltan-schauung [world-view], and then there will also be its sign, itscrystal - architecture." ..,4

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128 Illustration from Die Auflósung der Stiidte, oderdie Erde eine gute Wohnung (The Dissolution of Cities,or the Earth as a Good Dwelling), Bruno Taut, 1920

_ h a crystalline architecture had been prophesied by-",ul 8cheerbart, to whom the Arbeitsrat's manilesto Ruf zum=-a.uen (Call to Build; 1920) was dedicated. In 1919 Taut pub-shed his book Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown), 131 an urbanion lull 01 relerences to pagodas and temples, pro pos-

~ to place at the center 01the luture city a soaring tower thatuld embody its spiritual aspirations. The stunning plates

-" his Alpine Architektur, 130 published the same year, pro-ed the most systematic expression 01the new architecture

- which the Arbeitsrat aspired, while expressing the ideal 01::;otherhood among the peoples 01 Europe. Indeed, his depic-;;ons of the multicolored glass cupolas 01this architecturesuspended above the Alps seemed a response to the paci-;; t texts by the French writer Romain Rolland and an anticipa-

n 01 his German compatriot Thomas Mann's 1924 novel Derzauberberg (The Magic Mountain). The origins of these images'8 both in 8cheerbart's writings and in the plates publishedy Ernst Haeckel in his Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms inature) and Kristallseelen (Crystal Souls) ...• 5

=rom late 1919 to late 1920, in another exaltation 01crystal-ine transparency, the utopian correspondence known as theGléseme Kette (Glass chain) brought together the Taut broth-ers, Wenzel Hablik, Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, and HansScharoun. The pseudonyms adopted by the authors 01 thisseries of chain letters - among them Anlang (beginning), Mass,Stellarius, Prometh, and Angkor - allude to the reconciliation01 man and the cosmos, an aspiration typical 01 the immediatepostwar periodo Bruno Taut rounded out this series 01 utopianpronouncements with Die Auflosung der Steote, oder die Erdeeine gute Wohnung (The Dissolution of Cities, or the Earth as aGood Dwelling; 1920),128 in which he imagined a great migra-tion lrom the corrupted cities to the redemptive countryside,

129 IIlustration from Architekturentwürfe (Architectural Projects), Hermann

Finsterlin, 1919-20

130 ~ Plate from Alpine Architektur (Alpine Architecture), Bruno Taut, 1919

adopting as his own the anti-urban arguments 01 Piotr Kropotkinand other anarchist and socialist theorists. Taut also loundedthe periodical Frühlicht (Dawn) and from 1921 to 1923 devotedhis services to the city 01 Magdeburg in an effort to bring aboutthe social program prescribed by the Arbeitsral.Sorne 01 the participants in the Gláserne Kette exchanges pru-dently avoided putting their words into action on the build-ing site. This was the case with Hablik and with HermannFinsterlin, whose projects, despite their apparently realisticprograms, were mainly situated in an imaginary world. Hablik'sAusstellungsbauten (Exhibition Constructions; 1921) consistedof pyramidal superimpositions 01 prisms, while Finsterlin'sArchitekturentwürfe (Architectural Projects; 1919-20) 129

were unmistakably zoomorphic, evoking snails, seashells,and sea urchins.

II}

I

Dynamism in architecture

The fluid and indeed elusive Expressionist movement inarchitecture that was embodied in these projects shared withcontemporary pictorial experiments a world of fractured butdynamic lorms. It also attracted older architects like PeterBehrens, who designed several new structures that trans-lormed his lormer architectural language ...• 6 His headquar-

ters for Hbchst in Franklurt am Main (1920-4) was a moreIyrical version 01 his classic prewar buildings. By rellectingthe vertical light coming through glass rools onto multicoloredenameled-brick walls, he created one 01 the most strikinginteriors associated with Expressionism.Hans Poelzig's new projects responded to Taut's call tor trans-parency by playing with sol id masses. In his contribution tothe competition tor the Haus der Freundschaft (House 01

110 I 111

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132 Great Playhouse, HansPoelzig, Berlin, Germany, 1918-19

131 Illustration from Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown), Bruno Taut, 1919

Friendship; 1916) in Constantinople; the magical grotto hedevised within the GroBe Schauspielhaus (Great Playhouse;1918-19) 132 in Berlin, where Max Reinhardt staged his musicalperformances; and the successive variants 01 his Festspielhaus(Festival Hall; 1920-1) in Salzburg, he introduced a new world01 imposing and mysterious lorms. In 1919, apropos 01 the post-war resurrection 01 the German Werkbund, Poelzig declared:"True understanding 01 architecture is so unspeakably importantbecause it determines the appearance 01 our homeland, whichhas been so disligured by the hall-hearted architecture 01 recentdecades .... But it is not possible to reinstate architecture as amajor art overnight. This will be possible only when a coherent

major revolution 01 souls has taken place, when the convictionthat we must create things tor eternity has gained general rec-ognition." -> 7 As an architect with close ties to film and theater,Poelzig designed the set representing medieval Prague in PaulWegener's The Golem (1923), creating an atmosphere as dis-turbing as that in lilms like Robert Wiene's Cabinet of DoctorCaligari (1920) and Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). Poelzigcontinued to use his Expressionist language 01 stalactites andstalagmites throughout the 1920s, including in his studies 01permanent buildings íor the Berlin Fair 01 1928.The Expressionist aesthetic 01 the immediate postwar period alsoaffected young architects whose initial works had been 01 a morerationalist bent. Gropius, for instance, echoed the engravings 01Max Pechstein and Lyonel Feininger in his Márzqefállenen-Denkmal (Monument to the March Dead; 1920-1) in Weimar,with its jagged thrust to the sky. Gropius designed AdollSommerleld's wooden house in Berlin-Steglitz (1920-1), inthe same realm 01 angles and interrupted lines, but with acalmer symmetry. The house's construction was expedited bySommerfeld's business as a commercial dealer in lumber.

Chapter 09 I Expressionism in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

In 1919 Erich Mendelsohn exhibited his wartime sketches trornthe tront lines at the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin. These con-sisted 01 very small India-ink perspectives 01 tactories, ware-houses, and hangars. He associated the dynamism 01 theirstrikingly sculptural torrns, which appeared to be lrozen in motion,with the "elastic qualities" 01 new materials: "The living qual-ity 01 architecture depends upon sensuous seizure by means01 touch and sight: upon the terrestrial cohesion 01 mass, uponthe super-terrestrial liberty 01 light. ... Out 01 its own laws,architecture lays down the conditions that govern its activemasses." -> 8 Mendelsohn's social connections in Berlin's bour-geois Jewish establishment allowed him to put his ideas intoaction more quickly than other architects, and his projects hadan impact in the United States as early as 1921. -> 9 For thenewspaper publisher Rudoll Mosse, Mendelsohn, assisted bythe young Viennese architect Richard Neutra, built a super-structure on top 01 the Berliner Tageblatt Building (1921-3)translorming the corner 01 the block into a kind 01 ship's prow,with torceful horizontal lines that overpowered the originallacade. His Hat Factory complex in Luckenwalde, Germany,(1923) leatured concrete buildings with oblique roots thatresembled tolds 01 paper, creating a spectacular sculpturallandscape.Mendelsohn's most powerlul building was the laboratory erectedtor Albert Einstein within the compound 01 the PotsdamObservatory (1919-21). 133 Intended lor experiments with thesolar spectrum, the lab combined two distinct elements:a tower topped by a cupola, and a horizontal volume intowhich light beams trorn above were guided and collected toranalysis. The two elements were integrated in a plastic sculp-tural mass whose continuous surtace made it look as if it weremade 01 concrete rather than stuccoed brick. Though the name

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Einstein Tower, Erich Mendelsohn, Potsdam, Germany, 1919-21

=- steinturm (Einstein Tower) is an unmistakable reference to-~ series of Bismarcktürme (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 by Henri.::'" gson in his L'évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution; 1907),-'ch was translated into German in 1912. In any case, it sug-

;38tS a completely different approach to organic form than the+ollusklike shapes Finsterlin was drawing at the time.- 1924 Mendelsohn crossed the ocean with the filmmaker Fritz3Ilg and discovered the United States. The experience revo-_ ionized his way of thinking. He visited Frank l.loyd Wright

z: d, most importantly, absorbed a new visual culture that heould report on in Amerika, das Bilderbuch eines Architekten

erica, an Architect's Picture Book; 1926). -> 10 After con-="onting the spectacle of the streets and skyscrapers of Nework and Chicago, Mendelsohn transformed his own archi-

~ture: the Schocken department sto res he built in Chemnitz'926-8) 134 and Stuttgart (1929) took on almost aerodynamic

z 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-;;;'ams into a single aesthetic entity, reflecting an aspiration to-armonious urban design, the absence of which Mendelsohn-ad deplored in the United States. -> 11

Hanseatic Expressionism

"he young Expressionists alternated between theorizing and,ore episodically, building. Hans Scharoun, a contributor to

GUT GAP.I'\AU

-.:;.':;:t.

135 Garkau Farm, Hugo Hiiring, Scharbeutz-Klingberg,Germany, 1922-6

the Glaserne Kette, took part in the reconstruction of west-ern Prussia until 1925. Hugo Hárinq, a member of theNovembergruppe - founded in 1918 by Bruno Beye, CesarKlein, Moritz Meltzer, Max Pechstein, and Heinrich Richter -built the Garkau Farm in Scharbeutz-Klingberg, near Lübeck(1922-6).135 The barn and cowshed leatur~d both angu-lar and curved shapes, adhering to the Expressionist ideal01 dynamic formo They were covered in exposed brick andboards, concealing their concrete structure and latticelike woodIraming, which bore a striking modernity little visible lrom theoutside. The larm's plan was determined by its utilitarian pur-pose - to house and feed cattle - and laithfully respected thelunctional requirements that its Iyrical exterior seemed to deny.The Hanseatic cities of northern Germany were particularlyfertile ground for architectural research; their Gothic brickstructures seemed to anticipate the vertical massing 01 theshipping company offices built in the 1920s. In Hamburg,Fritz Hóger designed the Chilehaus (1922-3), 138 a largeblock with curved, surging facades clad in dark brick andornamented 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 Line sailed.Reflecting Hamburg's dominion over the Baltic, the Estonianarchitect Robert Natus replicated the Chilehaus in miniaturein Tallinn in 1936. -> 12 The brothers Hans and Oskar Gerson,associated with Hóger in the construction of the Sprinkenhol(1926-9), built the Ballinhaus Office Building (1926-9) using amore conventionally orthogonal geometry. Bernhard Hoetger'sdesigns broke loose lrom the constraints of the office build-ing. His houses (1922) and calé (1924-5) in Worpswede, a col-ony lor radical artists, revisited the vocabulary of the north'srural architecture. Perhaps most notable were his buildings

116 I 117

136 Plan lar Amsterdam-Sauth, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, 1914-17

on BóttcherstraBe in Bremen, which resembled sculpturalcollages. These, particularly the house lor the painter PaulaModersohn-Becker (1923-7) 141 where a rough exterior accorn-panied an oneiric layout 01 oddly convoluted rooms, lullyexploited the resources 01 brick.

De Klerk and the Amsterdam School

The obvious parallels between these buildings in Hamburg andBremen and those erected in Amsterdam by Michel de Klerkbeginning in 1915 were not coincidental. Though partly attribut-able to a shared culture 01 brick construction, the correspond-ences went deeper. To some extent, Weimar policies were acontinuation 01 Dutch housing legislation, notably the Woningwet011901, which had guaranteed public linancing lor working-class housing. Regulated by a system 01controls and standards,Dutch housing was built through municipal or cooperative pro-grams. The neutrality 01 the Netherlands during the war allowedthe country to launch programs more advanced than those 01the combatant nations. While German cities were struggling toreactivate their construction industry, Amsterdam was alreadyIlush with building sites ..• 13

But the German and Dutch projects also originated in a sharedarchitectural matrix that incorporated the Theosophical theo-ries 01J. L. M. Lauweriks and the teaching 01 Hendrik PetrusBerlage, which had widely circulated in Germany. Meetings 01Architectura et amicitia (Architecture and Friendship), a soci-ety 01Amsterdam prolessionals established in 1855, hosted anintense debate on the question 01 Gemeenschapkunst, or socialart. .• 14 Johan Melchior van der Mey's Scheepvaarthuis (House

01Shipping Companies; 1911-16) in Amsterdam, which decon-structed and recomposed elements 01traditional architectural

Chapter 09 I Expressianism in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

137 De Dageraad Hausing, Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer, Amsterdam,Netherlands, 1918-23

138 Chilehaus, Fritz Hoqer, Hamburg, Germany, 1922-3

language, also seems to anticipate Hoetger's buildings 01the1920s. Among the assistants on the Scheepvaarthuis wasthe young de Klerk, who designed many competition projectsbelore building the Hillehuis (1912), an apartment house echo-ing the complex vertical organization 01Van der Mey's building.Most signilicantly, de Klerk's three projects Ior the Eigen Haard(Own Hearth) cooperative in Amsterdam, built Irom 1922to 1926, created a neighborhood in which urban lorm wasabsorbed into a continuum 01 interrelated sculptural effects. Theplay 01the bricks' colors, which range írom crimson to orange;the way they are laid both horizontally and vertically; and theirdiverse shapes, which vary Irom rectilinear to convex to con-cave, combine to create a rich world in which the modest size01the housing units is partly compensated lor by the build-ings' sensuous opulence. The lacade is an undulating spec-tacle with unusual-shaped openings that call to mind wovenand embroidered textiles. For the third building, nicknamed"The Ship," (1917-21) 140 de Klerk combined a village themewith a mechanical motil. The housing wraps around a courtyardin which the meeting hall plays the role 01 rural church while thepost office serves as a locomotive pulling the entire complex,which in lact stood alongside the city's main railroad tracks.Next de Klerk collaborated with Piet Kramer on the housingscheme 01 De Dageraad (The Dawn; 1918-23), 137 a cooper-ative built as a component 01 Berlage's plan tor Amsterdam-South (1914-17). 136 Here de Klerk presented a clear, openimage 01 low-income housing. He aligned the houses alongthe street in a continuous wave in which each unit appears tobe woven together with its neighbor. Once again he createdthe illusion 01 a village community by grouping the units twoby two on a central square to lorm large houses separated bytall chimneys ..• 15

142 ~ Secand Goetheanum, Rudol! Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland, 1924-8

139 Caver of Wendingen (Turning Points), Issue 2,cover designed by Michel de Klerk, 1918

140 "The Ship,' Eigen Haard Housing Cooperative, Michel de Klerk, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1917-21

141 Paula Modersohn-Becker House, Bernard Hoetger, Bremen, Germany, 1923-7

De Klerk was the most brilliant member of a group that includedDirk Greiner, Margaret Kropholler, and Jan Frederik Staal, all ofwhom were committed to the genuinely collective effort requiredto realize the different stages of Berlage's plan. The main activistbehind what would soon come to be known as the AmsterdamSchool, Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld, was responsible for itspublicity organ, Wendingen (Turning Points), 139 a large-formatarchitecture magazine. He edited the magazine from 1918 to1931, opening it to both experiments that had taken place inRussia since 1917 and new directions in Frank Lloyd Wright'swork. In combination with the Expressionist accents latent in deKlerk's work, Wright's forms were sometimes detectable in thenew buildings in Amsterdam.Like many of the Dutch architects, the Austrian Rudolf Steinerhad a background in the Theosophical movement. In 1912 hefounded the Anthroposophical Society, formulating a seculardoctrine inspired by Nietzsche and Goethe. For the communityhe established in Dornach, near Basel, he erected the Goethe-anum (1913-20), a building with two wood domes surroundedby houses in the shape of rocks. This edifice burned downand was replaced by the second Goetheanum (1924-8),142

a sculptural concrete volume that held an auditorium, a library,and meeting rooms. The large faceted volume inserted into thepastoral Swiss landscape majestically conveyed the aspirationto the total work of art that was one of the founding preceptsof Expressionism.

Chapter 09 I Expressionism in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands

Return toorder in Paris

In 1924, seven years alter his permanent move to Paris, LeCorbusier diagnosed a case 01 "acute neurasthenia" and thesymptoms 01 a "breakdown" in the drawings that Bruno Tauthad published tour years earlier in his book Die Auflosung derStiidte ..• 1 Well inlormed about the art and architecture 01 impe-rial Germany, Le Corbusier had turned his back on his youthlulexperiences there in the lirst months 01 World War 1. French art-ists, though strongly in support 01 the war effort against Germany,had generally resisted the condemnations 01 Cubism voicedin more chauvinist circles in Paris, where the style had becomeassociated with certain important German-owned collections andgalleries and branded a boche ("kraut") art lorm. Yet they alsosought during these years to rediscover the threads 01 a nationaltradition olten identilied with classicism, whether rendered liter-ally or as a guiding principie open to multiple interpretations. -> 2

Purist forms and urban compositions

In 1913, in his book Les peintres cubistes, Guillaume Apollinairechallenged architects to reclaim the torch 01 innovation lrom art-ists and to "construct with sublime intentions." .•3 In 1917 a lellowpoet, Pierre Reverdy, published an essay by yet another poet PaulDermée in the lirst issue 01 his periodical Nord-Sud (North-South).In it Dermée wrote, "Alter a period 01 exuberance and toree mustlollow a period 01 organization, 01 arrangement, 01 science - thatis to say, a classic age." -> 4 Such calls to order were heard all the

way to the Netherlands and Russia, and they were also pickedup by Le Corbusier (still known at this time as Charles-ÉdouardJeanneret) and the painter Amédée Ozenlant. In 1920, togetherwith Dermée, Jeanneret and Ozenlant lounded L'Esprit nouveau(The New Spirit), a multidisciplinary journal that served as themajor platform lor their theories and critiques until 1925.

Chapter 10 I Return to arder in Paris

In 1918 Jeanneret and Ozenlant published their Purist manilestoApres le cubisme (Alter Cubism). It rellected their equal interest inGreek temples and in the machines introduced into everyday lileby the war. The new term "purism" was intended to "express in anintelligible word the character 01 the modern spirit." In stressinq the"invariable," Jeanneret and Ozenlant were not "unmoved by theintelligence that governs certain machines." .• 5 L'Esprit nouveaulikewise displayed a keen sense 01 history and an acute attentionto the products 01 technology. It described itselt as an "illustratedinternational review 01 contemporary activity," open to experimen-tal psychology, psychoanalysis, and economics. Politically, it sup-ported Bolshevik Russia and Franco-German reconciliation ..• 6

In a series 01 controversial essays Le Corbusier reminded"Messrs. les architectes" to "open eyes that do not see" toships, cars, and airplanes. These provocative articles becamethe chapters 01 the book Vers une architecture (Toward anArchitecture; 1923) 143, a manilesto that celebrated mechaniza-tion, affirmed the necessity 01 using "regulating lines" to propor-tion buildings, and advised the study 01 ancient and Baroquearchitecture in order to absorb the "Iesson 01 Rome." .• 7 Theimpact 01 Le Corbusier's writings was reinlorced by the power 01his theoretical projects. His Contemporary City lor Three MillionInhabitants, exhibited at the Salon d'Automne (1922), and his PlanVoisin lor Paris 144, shown at the Exposition Internationale desArts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition01 Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, 1925), described a newmetropolitan organism crisscrossed by highways and dominatedby the glass towers 01 a "city 01 business" - a capitalist version 01Taut's Stadtkrone. Le Corbusier surrounded the city with redenthousing inspired by Euqene Hénard and with immeuble-villas(villa apartments) consisting 01 double-height dwellings withindividual gardens, creating a radically new urban landscape.

DES YEUX QUI ~E VOIENT PAS",

11

LES AVIONS

143 Page from Vers une architecture (Towardsan Architecture), Le Corbusier, 1923

144 Plan Voisin, project, Le Corbusier, Paris, France, 1925

145 La Roche House, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Paris, France, 1923-4

124 I 125

s

N

E

POLYCHROMIE DES MURS EXTÉRIEURS

LE CORBUSIER ET P. JEANNERET

OUARTIERS MODERNES FRUGES. A PESSAC-BORDEAUX • 1927

15

146 Workers' HousesOuartiers modernes Frugés),

--S Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,Jessac, France, 1924-6

skeletal system and the Maison Citrohan three-story layout;the double-height living room 01the lalter was inspired by Parisartists' studios, For the Parisian elite he designed large houses,the most complex 01which was built in the suburb of Garcheslar Michael Stein (brother 01the writer Gertrude Stein), his wifeSarah Stein, and Gabrielle de Monzie (1926-7) 147, -79 Thehouse's interplay 01 planar elements and cylindrical stairwellsseems to transpose the geometry 01 Purist paintings into space,while the "regulating lines" 01the lacade draw on the ancientproportions of the golden section. Twenty years later, thearchitect-critic Colin Rowe found another precedent, detectinga sirnilarity between the proportions 01the villa's plan and those01 Palladio's villas, which Le Carbusier knew well, -710

The weekend house that Le Corbusier built in 1929-31 far PierreSavoye, a client in the insurance business, in Poissy, near Paris,is one 01 the canonical buildings of the twentieth century, Thevilla sits in the middle 01a meadow like a Ilying machine thathas just barely touched down, The boxlike structure leatures threelevels interconnected by a ramp that guides the promenadeerctiitecturete. Wedged between the ground-Iloor pilotis (stilts),through which automobiles could slip in and out, and the top-floor solarium is the main level, an L-shaped Iloor built around apatio and illuminated by a horizontal strip 01windows overlook-ing the landscape, The vast living room is basically doubled insurface by the patio, while the bedrooms and bathroom echothe Iloor plans 01eighteenth-century Paris apartments.These houses demonstrated the "Five Points" with which LeCorbusier summed up his contribution to a new architecture in1927, alluding transparently to Vignola's live classical orders:pilotis, freeing up the ground plane; rool terrace, affordingsunlight and commLinion with the skyline; Iree plan, replac-ing the "paralyzed plan" 01 load-bearing structures; ribbon

147 Stein/de Monzie House, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Garches, France, 1926-7

Le Corbusier and the modern house

During this period Le Corbusier injected the latest develop-ments in painting into two domestic projects: a studio lorOzenlant (1922-3) and, particularly, a house lor the Basel-born banker Raoul La Roche (1923-4) 145. In the lalter heradically modified his design alter seeing an exhibition 01archi-lecture by the De Stijl group at a Paris gallery, which causedim to reconfigure the conventional arrangement of windows

on the facade as a composition 01opaque planes and glasswalls. -78 Inside, he conceived the house's circulation as apromenade architecturale, inspired by the descriptions ofprocessions on tfie Acropolis in ancient Greece that AugusteChoisy had recounted in his 1899 Histoire de I'architecture. LeCarbusier's promenade governs the entire interior 01 the housefrom the entrance hall to the painting gallery, which he hungwith Cubist canvases that he purchased lor La Roche at sales01 the Kahnweiler and Uhde collections. Around the same time,he built a home tor.his parents in the Swiss village 01 Corseauxon the shore 01 Lake Geneva (1923-6), A single horizontal win-dow provides this modest dwelling with a view 01the moun-ains and access to the light 01 the lake. The unshadowedluminosity inside the residence differs Irom the chiaroscuro 01typical interiors just as the brightness of lactories differs lromthe hall-light 01churches.Despite his tireless courting 01automobile and aviation industri-alists, Le Corbusier, who established a prolessional partnershipwith his cousin Pierre Jeanneret in 1922, succeeded in build-ing only a single workers' housing complex. 146 This was real-ized in 1924-6 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, lor the industrialistHenri Fruqes. Here he brought together the theoretical modelshe had been working on lor ten years, inciuding the Dom-ino

126 I 127

148 League 01 Nations competition project, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,Geneva, Switzerland, 1927

window, offering horizontal vistas; and Iree lacade, whoseopenings were no longer dependent on traditional structuralmechanics. AII these points were made possible by the use 01reinlorced concrete. -> 11

Grand vessels in Paris and Geneva

But domestic programs did not satisly Le Corbusier's ambitions;he aimed for more important commissions. His lailure to win the1927 competition tor the headquarters 01the League 01Nationsin Geneva 148 was a personal trauma. His project elevated theprincipie 01pilotis and terraces to the scale 01a grand pub-lic edilice, making the site seem to Ilow beneath the buildingand merge with the Alpine landscape. -> 12 Despite the public-ity campaign mounted by his Iriends throughout Europe to pro-test the rejection 01 his project, the conservative jury remainedunswayed. Le Corbusier was also thwarted in his efforts to erecta Mundanéum, or World City, in Geneva; a cultural complex inthe spirit 01 Hendrik Christian Andersen's World City, the projectwas designed lor the philanthropist Paul Otlet using a plan basedon the golden section. Le Corbusier's invocation 01 classicalproportions and his ziggurat-shaped museum - to be the cen-terpiece 01the project - spurred attacks Irom radical architectslike the Russian El Lissitzky. Lissitzky's criticism 01Le Corbusier'sexcessive historicism and monumentality was echoed by thePrague critic Karel Teige, who scorned the "puzzling, archaicimpression" made by this "metaphysical architecture." -> 13

Nonetheless, it was in Moscow that Le Corbusier won his lirstmajor commission, tor the Centrosoyuz (1928-36) 149, theheadquarters 01the Central Union 01Consumer Cooperatives.Here he greatly amplilied the principie 01the promenadearchitecturale, designing ramps that rose six stories above a

Chapter 10 I Return to arder in Paris

149 Centrosoyuz (Central Union 01Consumer Cooperatives), .~Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1928-36

ground floor punctuated by pilotis. As in his League 01Nationsproject, the building combined a curvilinear auditorium volumewith orthogonal office wings. But the innovative project - whichincluded a lorerunner 01central air conditioning based on asystem 01 "neutralizing walls" and "exact respiration" - was tootechnically advanced tor the Soviet Union at this date. Materialshortages caused the building's construction to drag on tormany years. -> t4

In the meantime, the Salvation Army commissioned Le Corbusierto design its City 01Reluge in Paris. Realized in 1929-31, thebuilding is a large concrete vessel whose purpose is to housethe homeless. With this project, Le Corbusier was linally ableto incorporate his lascination with ships into his architec-ture: he placed the apartment 01the project's American patron,Winaretta Singer-Polignac, at the top 01the building andarranged the communal spaces on the ground Iloor like thelirst-class lounges of a transatlantic liner. Though his "exact res-piration" system ter circulating air was rendered. totally ineffec-tual by the lack of any device to extract the used air Irom thebuilding, the Salvation Army hostel remained a didactic exam-pie 01 Le Corbusier's precepts 01 large-scale construction. Sodid another important realization in Paris 01 this period, theSwiss Pavilion at the Cité Universitaire (1929-33).

Perret and the "sovereign shelter"

No other architect on the Paris scene was able to scandal-ize people with innovations as much as Le Corbusier, althoughothers tried. In a city where architects Irequently lormulatedand implemented their modern ideals in direct competitionwith one another, there was no such thing as a united front.Le Corbusier's mentor, Auguste Perret, opposed the younger

Pavilion 01L'Esprit nouveau, Le Corbusier and::;ere Jeanneret, Paris, Franee, 1924-5

151 Study lor a Freneh Embassy, projeet, PierreChareau, Paris, Franee, 1925

architect's use of the ribbon window, insisting that only "theertical window Irames man [and] agrees with his silhou-

-' S." -> 15 In Le Raincy, east of Paris, Perret built Notre-Dame

::e la Consolation (1922) 153, a church commemorating Worldar I fighters. Its vaulted nave of reinforced concrete heId upslender columns is illuminated by walls of concrete-Iramed

staíned glass. Perret's application of methods developed lor"actories and other secular structures to a religious edificecaused critics to describe it as "the holy chapel of reinforced:::oncrete" and scorn it as a vulgar "prayer hangar." At the time,::lerret's thinking was close to that of the poet Paul Valéry, whoseSocratic dialogue Eupalinos, ou I'architecte (Eupalinos, or theArchitect; 1921), suggested a revived classicism with national-. t accents. -> 16 Using the concrete skeleton to emulate Greek

monumentality in his public commissions, Perret tirelesslysought to implement his delinition 01the large building as "aressel, a framework, a sovereign shelter capable of housing inits unity the variety 01organs necessary to fulfill its lunction." -> 17

In 1924 Perret opened an off-site studio 01the École des Beaux-rts near the Bois de Boulogne. It was known as the Palais de

Bois (Wood Palace). Contradicting the school's official stance,e encouraged his followers - including Paul Nelson, Ernb

Goldlinger, Oscar Nitzchké, and Denis Honegger - to practicean architecture leaturing exposed structural elements madeexpressive by the interplay of light and shadow and the dif-lerentiation of finishes. In 1925 he designed the theater athe Exposition Internationale des Arts Oécoratifs et Industriels

Modernes; its three-part stage recalled the one built by Henryvan de Velde in Cologne eleven years before. Next he built thestunning Cortot Hall (1928-9) 152, a dizzyingly steep concert hallthat, by using concrete cantilevers, he was able to squeeze intothe middle of a tight Paris block.

Paris Art Deco

152 Cortot Hall, École Normale de Musique,Auguste Perret, Paris, Franee, 1928-9

The 1925 exposition gave Le Corbusier the opportun ity tobuild his Pavilion 01 L'Esprit nouveau. 150 In it he displayed dio-ramas 01 his Ville Contemporaine and Plan Voisin and, mostsignilicantly, a unit of his immeuble-villas outfitted with typicalfurniture bought Irom manufacturers' catalogs and a prototypeof his standard cabinets. The pavilion was an implicit critiqueof the program 01 the exposition, whose directors, CharlesPlumet and Louis Bonnier, sought to reassert French suprem-acy in the applied arts in the face of prewar competition fromGermany. The latter's belated invitation to participate was a detacto exclusion .Organized by the Union centrale des arts décoratils and theSociété des artistes décorateurs, or SAD, the 1925 expositiongave pride of place to the successful interior decorators whodesigned the "ensembles" 01 furniture associated with depart-ment stores as well as to theinterior designers who merged artand commerce. They included Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann andthe team 01Louis Süe and André Mare. -> 18 Two designers stood

out Irom the crowd for work that was as elegant as it wascautiously modern: Francis Jourdain, who carefully createdunadorned interiors that were in the spirit 01Adolf Loos butallordable to all 154; and Pierre Chareau, whose convertible fur-niture pieces - notably his cylindrical desk-bookshelf for theSAD pavilion's exhibit "A French Embassy" 151 - contrasted withthe static nature of the main contributions. In the same pavilionRobert (Rob) Mallet-Stevens designed a lobby with a linear,abstract geometry that was similar in spirit to his TourismPavilion, also at the exposition. Four years later, he, Jourdain,and Chareau were among the founders of the Union desartistes 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--.: ~ -', -- ~ - \ .

IJl.

154 Smoking Room lar a French Embassy, project, Francis Jourdain, Paris,France, 1925

radical modern aesthetic lavored by the elite to the needs 01alarger populace; it held its first exhibition in 1930. -> 19

One 01the most prolific architects involved in the 1925 exhi-bition was Henri Sauvage, who created several pavilions fordepartment stores. Sauvage had worked on the development ofsetback terraced buildings in Paris since before the war. Afterthe war he built both a popular version - a low-income resi-dence on Rue des Amiraux (1922), with a swimming pool atits center - and a bourgeois version called the Studio Building(1926), inspired by ocean liners. He also designed a megaloma-niac version for a hotel on the bank of the Seine (1928) 155. InNantes, Sauvage built the imposing glass structure of the DecréDepartment Sto re (1931, bombed 1944). He also worked onthe extension of the Samaritaine Department Store (1928, withFrantz Jourdain) in Paris, where he took a less radical approachsince he had to comply with urban-planning regulations.

Mallet-Stevens, or elegant modernism

In 1927 Robert Mallet-Stevens received a unique honor for a liv-ing architect: he had a Paris street named after him. -> 20 He wouldbuild six houses on the new Rue Mallet-Stevens (1926-7) 158.

His own, featuring a double-height reception room, stands at theentry to the street. Next to it is the studio and residence 01sculp-tors Jan and Joel Martel, whose quarters are clustered aroundthe vertical cylinder of a staircase that leads to a belvedere toppedby a circular "lid." Also on the street is a town house with a 150-seat screening room, built lor the lilm director Eric Allatini, and ahouse tor Madame Reilenberg, a pianist, featuring open livingspaces extended by terraces, which offer a lull panorama of theother cubistic houses on the block. Many artists and craftsmen,including the glass artist Louis Barillet and the young ironsmith

Chapter 10 I Return to order in Paris

155 Grand Hotel Métropole, project, Henri Sauvage, Paris, France, 1928

Jean Prouvé, were involved in building rue Mallet-Stevens. Theconstruction site was headed by Gabriel Guevrekian, an Iranianarchitect 01Armenian descent trained in Vienna.In 1923 Mallet-Stevens began working on a large villa in Hyereslor the art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles 156, whoin 1930 would linance Jean Cocteau's lilm Blood of a Poet andLuis Buñuel's L'age d'or. For this house, devoted to pleasureand entertainment, he designed a cubic structure hovering abovethe city and extended by terraces. He wrote: "It is no longer justsome moldings that catch the light, it is the entire lacade. Thearchitect sculpts an enormous block, the house." -> 21 Erectedin sections between 1924 and 1928, the house included a roomdevoted to flowers, the design 01which was entrusted to Theovan Doesburg, and it overlooked a Cubist-inspired triangular gar-den by Guevrekian. In 1929 the American artist Man Ray declaredthat the "cubic lorms" 01the cháteau "brought to mind the title 01a poem by Mallarmé." -> 22 He used it as the setting tor his dis-turbing film Les mystéres du chateau du Dé (TheMysteries 01theCháteau of Dice), a tableau vivant pertormed by masked guests.Having designed the sets for Marcel L'Herbier's L'inhumaine (TheInhuman Woman; 1923-4) 157, a lilm intended to promoteFrench lashion abroad, Mallet-Stevens began building a cas-tle in Mézy for the couturier Paul Poiret (1921-3), but the projectwas never completed. In Paris he built the Alfa Romeo Garageon Rue Marbeul (1927), which has a structure supported byconcrete arches reminiscent 01those in Perret's Théátre desChamps-Élysées, and an apartment building on Rue Méchain(1928-9), which is a kind of vertical extrusion of the Rue Mallet-Stevens massing system. His largest project was a casino inSaint-Jean de Luz on the Basque coast (1927-8), a large rein-forced-concrete building with interiors that make use of motifsfirst seen at the 1925 exposition.

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 ~ Hotel Nord-Sud, André l.urcat, Calvi, France, 1929-30

Houses on Rue Mallet-Stevens, Robert M'allet-Stevens, Paris, France, 1926-7

132 I 133

160 E 1027, Eileen Gray, Roquebrune Cap-Martin, France, 1929

The extent of French modernism

Having made his reputation as a member 01 Mallet-Stevens'scircle, Gabriel Guevrekian received a commission through thepainter Sonia Delaunay to design a town house lor the couturierJacques Heim in Neuilly (1927), reinlorcing the signilicant linkbetween architecture and lashion. No less close to Mallet-Stevenswas the engineer and architect Georges-Henri Pingusson, whoremodelled the lacade and neon marquee 01 the Théátre desMenus-Plaisirs (1926-9) and built the Paul Arrighi power plant inVitry-sur-Seine (1926-32), a rare French example 01 modern aes-thetics intersecting with a lull-Iledged industrial programoAt the initiative 01 his brother Jean, at that time a painter with ties toSurrealism, André Lurcat built the Villa Seurat (1925-7), an alley 01artist studios in Paris begun two years belore Rue Mallet-Stevens.The scheme consists 01 a sequence 01 six buildings made 01 cubicvolumes with corner window openings. There are clear Loosianaccents and above all a play with the continuity 01 the street wall.Across lrom Parc Montsouris, l.urcat built a house lor the painterWalter Guggenbühl (1927). A cube set on a trapezoidal baseextended by a bow window and a pergola, its simplilied geometryand the repetitive conliguration 01 openings on its planar surlaceshad nothing to do with the underlying structural skeleton. This ledthe critic Marie Dormoy justly to contrast turcat's "Iake concrete" toPerret's use 01 the material. ..,23 The purest expression 01 l.urcat's

approach may be seen in the linear and prismatic architecture 01the small Hotel Nord-Sud (1929-30) 159, near the Corsican city 01Calvi, which resembles a ship run aground on a reef.While the most radical laction 01 French architecture managed toconsolidate its positions during the 1920s, it occupied a small lield.Large public and private projects continued to be awarded to moreconservative lirms. One notable exception was Tony Garnier's work

Chapter 10 [ Return lO order in Paris

161 Apartment Building, MichelRoux-Spilz, Paris, France, 1925-8

lor the Radical-Socialist mayor 01 Lyons, Édouard Herriot. ..,24 Alter

completing the La Mouche Cattle Market and Slaughterhouse(1906-14), which leatured a great market hall constructed 01 steeltrusses and inspired by the Galerie des Machines, Garnier contin-ued his work in Lyons with the États-Unis low-income housingdevelopment (1921-34), a suburban complex 01 airy concreteblocks, and the Grange-Blanche hospital (1910-34), a series 01pavilions connected by a network 01 underground passages. Thestructural clarity 01 Garnier's work was increasingly inllected bycla,ssical nostalgia, however. A more monumental aspect 01 hiswork was visible in his many designs lor memorials, while Mediter-ranean accents surlaced in his more intimate patio houses.Trained in Lyons as part 01 Garnier's circle, Michel Roux-Spitz com-bined the smooth geometry 01 the moderns with more staticmodes 01 composition in his Paris apartment buildings, such asthe ones on Rue Guynemer (1925-8) 161 and Avenue Henri Martin(1930-1). In the latter he incorporated leatures borrowed Irom

. naval architecture, with a certain heaviness. Poi Abraham andCharles Siclis provided their own interpretations, whether more tec-tonic or more spectacular, 01 the passion lor structural expressionthat had spread in the 1920s. Eileen Gray, an Irish designer activein Paris, was the only woman to see her contribution acknowl-edged, with E 1027 (1929), 160a villa she built on the Riviera torand with Jean Badovici, the editor 01 L'Architecture vivante. Whilethe end 01 the decade saw an international alliance 01 radicalarchitects throughout Europe, French architecture seemed to havetwo laces. The lirst was embodied in the experimental, sometimesprovocative work that came out 01 the circle around Le Corbusier.Also innovative but more commercial, the second lace, initiallyrevealed in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Oécoratits etIndustriels Modernes, produced reverberations that would be lelt inNorth America and Britain as well as in colonial settings.

Dada, De Stijl,and Mies: fromsubversivenessto elementarism

By the final months of World War I there were already con-flicting attempts to overthrow the dominant forces in art andarchitecture. Among the new movements, Expressionism hadroots in prewar Europe, but other contenders, which appearedeven before the German surrender, lacked such antecedents,instead emerging from the deep crisis provoked by battlesamong intellectuals and artists.

The Dada blast

Dada, the most destructive of these movements, had its momentbetween 1915 and 1923. It was characterized by the subversion01traditional representation, a prelerence tor the new technique01montage, and a bluntly asserted nihilism. A nomadic phenom-enon that changed aceording to its setting, it was lounded inZurich, then gravitated to New York and Germany, and linallysettled in Paris ..• 1 The evenings organized at Zurieh's Cabaret

Voltaire by the Germans Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, and RichardHuelsenbeck; the Alsatian Hans (Jean) Arp; and the RomaniansTristan Tzara and Mareel Janco were the opening act of a eollee-tive revolt against the very concept 01art. The arrival 01FrancisPicabia and Marcel Duchamp in New York marked another dis-tinctive Dada phase, particularly alter they met Man Ray. Picabia'scollages 01mechanical parts and Duehamp's Fountain, a uri-nal that served as a "ready-made" art objeet, exhibited in 1917,signaled the Dadaists' interest in anonymous production andmaehines, which they derisively parodied and destroyed.Leaving Zurieh for Berlin, Ball and Huelsenbeck expanded theiraetivities alter meeting George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann 162,

and John Heartfield, combining an ironic play on the icons 01American eivilization with an exploration 01 photomontage tech-niques. The Dadaists' involvement with architeeture was not

Chapter 11 I Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness to elementarism

well developed, although they had a longstanding interest in the"machine art" announced by Vladimir Tatlin's first eonstructions inRussia. From Berlin, Dada seattered to Cologne with Arp and MaxErnst, and to Hanover with Kurt Schwitters, until Pieabia and Tzaralinally shifted the movement's eenter 01gravity to Paris, where itled to the birth 01Surrealism in 1924. The legaey 01these intenseyears was a vigorous impulse to challenge the·traditional eatego-ries 01art and architecture. It would have widespread and lastingeffeets, espeeially in Weimar Germany. The network connect-ing the members of the Dada galaxy to architectural movementsbranched out across the map; artists and architects at the edges01the movement went on to play important roles in less radicalgroups like the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and the German Werkbund.

The new forms of De Stijl

In the Netherlands, the Expressionism 01 the AmsterdamSchool was still the dominant force. But beginning in 1916a radical movement took shape under the name De Stijl, aterm that may be traced back to both Gottfried Semper's trea-tise Der Stil (Style) and Viollet-Ie-Duc's call to architects todefine "the" style for modern architecture and eonstruction (asopposed to choosing among a range 01 competing historicalstyles). Hendrik Petrus Berlage advanced both these ideas inthe Dutch context. De Stijl never became a structured move-ment; its unstable and dynamic sphere 01 inlluenee was een-tered around a monthly journal and a slogan. This irregularityseemed to contradict its main objective: for the artist to con-nect visual experience to metaphysical ideas, thereby creatingharmonic works 01 art and reclaiming a central place in soci-ety. The search for a nieuwe beelding or neue Gestaltung - aNeo-Plasticism oía highly metaphysical order - was at odds

164 ~ Les Architectes du GroupeDe Stij/, Theo van Doesburg andComelis van Eesteren exhibition,Galerie de I'effort moderne, Paris,France, 1923

162 Tatlin at Home, Raoul Hausmann, 1920

Germany Pavilion (Barcelona Pavilion), Lúdwig Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain, 1929, rebuilt 1983-6

138 I 139

-·1.-. 1,

I

11..-II I

In purely architectural terms, the lounders 01 De Stijl lolloweddistinct palhs, with their production taking very different shapes.Van Doesburg was more theoretical and experimental, whileOud, Wils, and Gerrit Rietveld, an associate 01the group begin-ning in 1919, were more prolessionally oriented. Mondrian alsoexperimented in three dimensions, notably on the interior 01 hisstudio on Rue du Départ in Paris (1921-36) 166 and on his pro-ject lar the Salan de Madame B. in Dresden (1926).Van Doesburg's involvement in architectural projects began in1917 and developed with the interior 01the De Ligt House inKatwijk (1919), lurnished by Rietveld. Van Doesburg told Oud thatthe house was Hapainting in three dimensions." .• 4 In 1923 he

collaborated with the young architect Cornelis van Eesteren,whom he had met in Weimar, on the design 01a concourselar the University 01Amsterdam (1923). The stained-glass ceil-ing and the Ilat planes 01 colors painted on the walls conllictedwith the orthogonal geometry 01the plan, as il the chromaticand the spatial aspects 01 the project were totally unconnected.He also realized in collaboration with Van Eesteren three mod-els shown in October and November 1923 at the exhibitionLes Architectes du Groupe De Stijl at the Galerie de I'efforlmoderne in Paris 164. This exhibilion marked a crucial turningpoint in postwar architecture. The models were genuine three-dimensional objects in their own right, but their vertical andhorizontal planes 01 color entirely dispensed with conventionalnotions 01the window. The least radical 01the three was a townhouse project supposedly intended lar Léonce Rosenberg, thegallery's owner, which had a realistic-Iooking setting. The sec-ond model, a project lar an artist's house, had welded-Ieadtrames and planar color surlaces and recalled Mondrian'spainted compositions with black lines. The third, a project lara private house 169, was the most complex, and provided the

165 Factory, project, J. J. P.Oud, Pomerand, Netherlands, 1919

with Dada's biting irony. The members 01 the De Stijl circleultimately aspired to positive creation, even if they tirst had togo through a phase 01 deslroying conventions.The initial issues 01the journal De Stijl appeared in mid-1917 inLeiden under the editorship 01the painter Theo van Doesburg.Contributors included the painters Piel Mondrian, Barl van derLeck, and Gino Severini; the architecl J. J. P.Oud; and VilmosHuszár, who designed Ihe journal's lago. The group Ihat assem-bled around De Stijl had already shared several experiences.Van der Leck had collaborated with Berlage in building the SintHuberlus Hunling Lodge in Hondersloo lar Ihe Krbller-Müllerlamily (19J9). Van Doesburg and Oud had collaborated on Ihecreation 01a colorful, rhylhmic interior lar the De Vonk VacationHouse in Noordwijkerhout (1917) and on the Allegonda Villain Katwijk aan Zee (1917). Oud and Van Doesburg later wenttheir separale ways lollowing disputes over a project lar theSpangen Low-Income Housing Development in Rotterdam,where the architect insisted on respecting economic limitationsthat the painter could not tolerate. -> 2

Van Doesburg and Jan Wils together built the De Lange Housein Alkmaar (1916-17), and Huszár and P.J. C. Klaarhamer, aIriend 01 Berlage, joined efforts on the De Arendshoeve Housein Voorburg (1916-19). During this initial phase, each member01 De Stijl sought to establish his place in a collective endeavor.But starting in 1921, each participant began trying to achieve hisown synthesis 01 painting, sculpture, and architecture. -> 3 In thisnew phase, Van Doesburg became so domineering that by thetime Mondrian and Oud left the group, he had totally isolatedhimsell. Nonetheless, he was able to establish a European net-work by associating with El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, andhe lived lar a period in Weimar, where he was unsuccesslul insecuring a teaching position at the Bauhaus.

Chapter 11 I Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness to elementarism

166 Mondrian Studio, Piet Mondrian, Paris, France, 1921-36

basis for Van Doesburg's subsequent "counter-constructions," inwhich "plane, line, and mass [were] freely arranged in a three-dimensional relationship." .• 5 The models offered as synthetic arepresentation of three-dimensional space as the axonometricsdrawn by Auguste Choisy in his 1899 Histoire de /'architecture.They had a strong impact on architects in Paris like RobertMallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier. In turn, De.Stijl annexed theFrench architects' work in the issue of its journal published in1927 commemorating the group's tenth anniversary.On the occasion of the 1923 exhibition, Van Doesburg attemptedto provide a theoretical context for his work with a manifestoentitled "Vers une construction collective" (Toward a CollectiveConstruction). Published the following year, it declared: "The ideathat art is an illusion divorced from real life must be abandoned.The word 'Art' means nothing to usoWe demand that it bereplaced by the construction of our environment according tocreative 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

Van Doesburg builds

The only large-scale project realized by Van Doesburg wasthe Aubette 167, a dance hall, cinema, and restaurant on PlaceKléber in Strasbourg (1926-8, resto red 2008). The diagonalcomposition of his addition totally upturned the orthogonality ofJacques-Francois Blondel's existing building of 1778. The dis-connection intensified by the use of color in the University ofAmsterdam concourse characterized the project in Strasbourgas well. As Van Doesburg asserted, the principie of diago-nal "counter-construction" called into question the horizontalityand verticality of the architectural box: "Since the architectonic

167 The Aubette Cinema and Dance Hall, Theo van Doesburg, Strasbourg,France, 1926-8. recontruction 1990-4 and 2006-8

168 ~ Schróder House, Gerrit Rietveld, Utrecht, Netherlands, 1924

elements were based upon orthogonal relationships, this roomhad to accommodate itself to a diagonal arrangement of colors,to a counter-composition which, by its nature, was to resist allthe tensions of architecture .... If I were asked what I had inmind when I constructed this room, I should be able to reply: tooppose to the material room in three dimensions a superma-terial and pictorial, diagonal space." ..•7 The originality of VanDoesburg's design, which was executed by Oscar Nitzchké andDenis Honegger, two students of Perret, was reinforced by com-parisons with the undulating forms of Jean Arp's dance hall inthe Aubette's cellar and Sophie Taueber-Arp's two-dimensionalwork in its tearoom. Van Doesburg ventured into the realm ofurban planning with his City of Circulation project (1924-9), acomplex of square eleven-story towers supported at their cor-ners by sturdy piers that opened the ground level to automobiles.Finally, with the help of the young Dutch architect AbrahamElzas, he built his own house-studio in Meudon Val-Fleury, southof Paris (1927-30). Both in its details and in the use of pilotisto accommodate a small car, it was closer to Le Corbusier'svillas than to his own more geometric work of 1923. A hyper-active figure, Van Doesburg used numerous pseudonyms tocloak his identity, which allowed him both to put forward quasi-Constructivist ideas and to indulge in Dadaist games. He foundedthe Concrete Art movement and later participated in estab-lishing the Abstraction-Création group, and he continued to pur-sue a central role on the European scene until he died in 1931.

Oud and Rietveld, from furniture tohouse design

At the Paris exhibition of 1923, Oud showed his PurmerendFactory (1919) 165, a project that dated from the early, more

142 I 143

170 Housing Development, J. J. P. Oud, Hoek vanHolland, Nelherlands, 1924-7

169 Private House, project, Theo van Doesburg andCornelis van Eesteren, 1923

collective phase of De Stijl and contained echoes of Frank LloydWright. In his essay "Kunst en machine" (Art and Machine;1917), Oud denounced "romantic" approaches, describing styleas the result of two different trends: "the one, the technicallyindustrial, which one might call the positive trend, aims at theaesthetic representation of products of a technical ingenuity.The second, which one might, in comparison, call the negativetrend (although it is equally positive in its expression!) - i.e., art -aims to arrive at objectivity by reduction (abstraction). The unityof these two trends forms the essence of the new style." -> 8

After a series of visually powerful theoretical projects, such as hisseaside apartments of 1917, Oud built several significant hous-ing developments. In the design of the Oud-Mathenesse GardenSuburb in Rotterdam (1922-3) he had to tollow existing designguidelines, and his contribution was limited to selecting colorschemes for the doors. Only in the superintendent's house, withits vivid colors and orthogonal shapes, was he able to implementthe ideal of formal balance prescribed by De Stijl. Two years laterOud's facade for the Café De Unie (1925, bombed 1940) broughtthe new aesthetic to the very heart of Rotterdam.With his next housing developments, Oud introduced new ele-ments - for instance, the treatment of his buildings' exterior wallssimply as skin rather than as load-bearing structures. His Hoekvan Holland Housing Development (1924-7) 170 is the mostIyrical. Built near the estuary of the Maas River, the develop-ment has rounded end-units, and the uniform line of balconiesreflects Oud's interpretation of Le Corbusier's "reminder" aboutocean liners. Though the Kiefhoek Development (1925-9) 171

in Rotterdam was lar larger, Oud treated it in a more elemen-tal manner. He abandoned the symmetry still in use in Hoek vanHolland, instead aligning the parallel rectangular blocks 01thetwo-story houses as if they formed part of a fabric that could be

Chapter 11 I Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: lrom subversiveness to elementarism

171 Kielhoek Housing Development, J. J. P. Oud,Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1925-9

172 Schrbder House, Gerrit Rietveld, Utrecht,Netherlands, 1924, axonometic 01 the second Iloor

inlinitely expanded on all sides. Tellingly, the church builtin 1929tor the development was a rigidly rectangular, factory-like box.Other architects explored ideas similar to those ol-De Stijl.Robert van't Hoff was the most literal of the many Dutch archi-tects who used a vocabulary derived from Frank Lloyd Wright'shouses, notably in his Henny House in Huis ter Heide (1915-19),where he emulated a Prairie House exterior. Wright's hold onthe imagination 01 Dutch architects was equally evident in Wils'sdesign for the De Dubbele Sleutel (The Double Key) Restaurant(1918), where the exterior of the building clearly expressed itsinterior volumes. The sculptural aspects 01Wils's PapaverhofResidential Development (1919-22) in The Hague contrastedwith the more industrial leanings of Oud's developments.The cabinetmaker Gerrit Rietveld, who had briefly made cop-ies of Frank Lloyd Wright's furniture for Robert van't Hoff, wasinvolved with De Stijl's activities lrom the beginning. He con-ceived lurniture prototypes composed of basic shapes - woodplanes and standard proliles - sliced in ways that visuallyextended the volume 01the objects. His most provocative piecefrorn this period was the Red and Blue Armchair 011918, whichhe later explairíed "was made to the end of showing that a thing01 beauty, e.g., a spatial object, could be made 01 nothing butstraight, machined materials." -> 9

Rietveld, who rejected the inhibiting patronage 01Van Doesburg,gave the most convincing interpretation of De Stijl's longing tora synthesis of the arts with his Schrbder House (1924) 168,172

in Utrecht. Located at the end 01 a row 01 banal brick buildings,the house plays with vertical and horizontal planes in threedimensions. Individually, the rooms are very small but llow intoeach other. Sliding partitions make it possible to modily the floorplans of the two main levels, which are partly lit by a small sky-light. The intersection of planes and linear elements and the

.c r-I T~1_' --L.~

173 Brick Country House, project, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin, Germany, 1923

articulation 01 joints and railings make the house's interiorspaces as difficult to grasp from the inside as they are trorn theoutside. Walls are no longer the single determining factor 01space. Actually very compact, the house was not intended to bea manilesto tor an aesthetic reinterpretation 01 domestic lunc-tions but rather, according to Rietveld, to create lormal clarity andintensily the experience 01 space. -> 10 Projects by the Vienna-based artist and architect Friederich Kiesler, invited in 1923 tojoin De Stijl, seem to echo Rietveld's lurniture and to translormit into broader, more inclusive spatial systems: the Leger- undTragersystem, a flexible and independent hanging system lorgallery displays, and the Raumbühne, or space stage, were con-structed at the Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (Exhibition 01New Theater Technology) in Vienna in 1924; while the "City inSpace" appeared at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des ArtsOécoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. -> 11

Mies van der Rohe's theoretical projects

Van Doesburg lorged a close connection between the Nether-lands and Germany not only through his presence on the door-step 01 the Bauhaus but also through his participation in theCongress 01 Revolutionary Artists held in Düsseldorl in 1922.There he lounded a short-lived "Constructivist International"together with Hans Richter and El Lissitzky. -> 12 In July 1923Richter, Lissitzky, and Werner Gráff who had attended VanDoesburg's lectures at the Bauhaus, published the lirst issue01 the journal G, subtitled Material zur elementare Gestaltung(Materials tor Elemental Form-Creation). Its program was to dis-seminate images 01 the technological world and to pro pose anarchitecture based on the Sachlichkeit, or objectivity, 01 con-struction systems. Van Doesburg published his own manilesto

Chapter 11 , Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness to elementarism

174 Concrete Office Building, project, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,Berlin, Germany, 1923

175 Otfice Building, FriedrichstraBe competition project, Ludwig Mies van der

Rohe, Berlin, Germany, 1921

"Zur elementaren Gestaltung" (On Elemental Farm-Creatian) in G.One 01 the principal supporters 01 and contributors to G wasLudwig Mies van der Rohe, who published his theoretical pro-ject tor a Concrete Office Building 174 in the same issue thatcarried Van Doesburg's manilesto. Itwas accompanied by hisown manilesto "Bürohaus" (Office Block), a lirst expression 01his theoretical positions, in which he declared that "Architectureis the spatially apprehended will 01 the epoch," drawing an theideas 01 Berlage, the precursor he most admired, and Behrens,who had considered architecture the "rhythmic incorporation01 the spirit 01 the time." -> 13 A lew months later, Van Doesburg

invited Mies to participate in the De Stijl exhibiHon at the Galeriede l'Effort moderne.Beginning in 1921, Mies conceived several iconoclasticprojects. In a competition entry lar a glass affice building 175

on the FriedrichstraBe in Berlin, he submitted a design lor aglass prism with a triangular plan. The angular volume con-sisted entirely 01 a curtain wall, without base or cornice, whichappeared to extend the glazing 01 the nearby train stationover the entirety 01 its 80-meter (260-loot) structure. A radi-cal response to New York's Flatiron Building - which theBerlin Dadaists had illustrated in their journal - M.ies's projectseemed to materialize Allred Stieglitz's phatos 01 Manhattanconstructian sites. Access to the upper Iloors was pravided bya central elevatar care, while narrow canyons lined with glassallowed light to penetrate to the interior 01 the site. The trans-parent lacades revealing stacks 01 offices called to mind abeehive - a metapharical term Mies used toidentify the build-ing in the competition. -> 14 In 1922 he elabarated a secandversion 01 the project in which the angular lacades gave wayto a more Iluid and sinuous outline, praised by critics lar its"Gothic power." -> 15

176 Monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Ludwig Mies van derRohe, Berlin, Germany, 1926, demolished 1935

Alter his Concrete Office project, which was an abstract inter-pretation of the palazzo block that Peter Behrens had built ear-lier for Mannesmann, Mies conceived a concrete "CountryHouse" (1923), about which he would declare, "We know noforms, only problems of construction." .• 16 The house extendedhorizontally across the site and reflected Mies's awareness ofWright's houses. His Brick Country House 173, designed thesame year, was more provocative. An assemblage of brick ele-ments, the house consisted of orthogonal volumes joined in afree-flowing continuum. For Mies, this "series of spatial effects"was the result of "the wall [Iosing) its enclosing character and[serving) only to articulate the house organism." .• 17

Up to this point, Mies's only real commissions were for bour-geois houses, for which he employed a traditionalist language.He was able to impose more radical views upon his clientsonly alter 1925. Initially, he used brick in an aesthetic, expres-sive way, as in the Wolf House in Guben and especially in the

" Monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926) 176

in Berlin, a sculptural interpretation of a wall evoking the execu-tion of the two Spartacist leaders. Beginning with his houses forthe textile industrialists Hermann Lange (1928-9) 177 and JosefEsters (1928) in Krefeld, his use of brick ceased to be loadbearing. These two opulent hornes, whose facades brought tomind the factories of the neighboring Ruhr region, had steelstructures, which made it possible to superimpose very differentfloor plans on two different levels: large rooms to display theowners' collections on the ground floor, bedrooms above.Mies soon applied himself to a more radical annihilationof traditional domestic space. The first building to undergosuch treatment, the Germany Pavilion at the 1929 BarcelonaInternational Exposition 163, did not have much of a programbeyond its ceremonial purpose. The latent fluidity of his Brick

Chapter 11 I Dada, De Stijl, and Mies: from subversiveness to elementarism

177 Hermann Lange House, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Krefeld, Germany, 1928-9

Country House began to be palpable in this sequence of openrooms resting on a podium and evoking the garden structuresof Karl Friedrich Schinkel, which Mies admired. Its stone andglass partitions defined a free-flowing space and were clearlydistinct from the load-bearing steel frame - despite a few invis-ible compromises. The dominant element was a wall of goldenonyx, intended as a backdrop for the king of Spain's receptionby German officials. In this space - unregulated by any axialsystem, open to diagonal views, and designed to accommodatevisitors' movements - the only perceptible symmetry was thehorizontal one between floor and ceiling, making the verticalspace of the pavilion practically reversible ..• 18

The promise of a new type of domestic space first glimpsed inBarcelona was brought to fruition in the house of Fritz and GreteTugendhat (1928-30) 178,179 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Perchedon a hill overlooking the city, the house reproduced the fluid floorplan of the Barcelona Pavilion, but this time areas had well-defined purposes, as if the partitions between rooms had beenerased once the plan was completed. According to the critic PaulWestheim, Mies conceived the house as "a circulation route lead-ing from room to room according to [the owners') style of living."Westheim continued: "[T)he home must be considered entirely asa kind of business that, like any other business, is based on theprincipie of an articulation of various functions. No room shouldbe isolated and cut off from the others. Even more, continuitybetween the rooms is to be pursued. The entire space is to bearranged organically, according to its envisaged uses." .• 19 As atBarcelona, the living room, which overlooked the city, was backedwith an onyx wall. The dining room was defined by a cylindricalpartition of rosewood. In 1930, thanks to his very public successin Barcelona, Mies was named director of the Bauhaus in Dessau,where he would radically change the pedagogy of architecture.

·'e

TL" eeco {SCHOS S,

178,179 Tugendhat House, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), 1928-30

150 I 151

Architecturaleducation inturmoil

World War I had contradictory effects on architectural schools.A number of innovations shook them to their very core duringthe 1920s, yet in most countries education remained staunchlyconservative and the established centers did not relinquish theirprivileged position. At the same time, students in the postwarera moved more easily between schools, gravitating to the newpolarities represented by pedagogical programs in Germany,Russia, and America, in search of learning that conveyed boththe excitement of modern technologies and the energy of theradical movements that had appeared in the wake of the war.

The Beaux-Arts and the alternatives

At the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the memorial to hun-dreds of students who had died in the war served as a power-fui reminder of the recent bloodbath. After the Allied victory, theschool fell back on established routines, 180 and attempts atrenewal that had emerged before the war were shelved ..• 1

Nonetheless, the school retained its worldwide prestige for awhile, and, despite weaker enrollment by students from theUnited States, it continued to attract Latin Americans, includingthe Venezuelan Carlos Raúl Villanueva, and East Europeans likethe Romanian Horia Creanqá, A reversal of sorts took placewhen French graduates, including Marcel Chappey, RobertCamelot, and Raymond Lopez, received the Delano grantscreated after the war by the American Institute of Architects todraw the most brilliant young professionals to North America,thus inaugurating a modern grand tour in which Chicago andNew York replaced Athens and Rome ..• 2

In Paris, all alternatives to the official mode of architecturaltraining failed. The atelier opened by Robert Mallet-Stevens in1925 at the École Spéciale d'Architecture 181 closed after a few

Chapter 12 I Architectural education in turmoil

months. Even though Auguste Perret's atelier at the Palais deBois was officially associated with the École des Beaux-Arts,his students consistently received failing grades in the École'sproject reviews and sornetirnes even had to disguise their affil-iation with the atelier to have any chance of passing. In 1934André Lurcat set up an autonomous atelier, where the Marxistart historian Max Raphaél gave a few lectures, but this effortwas also short lived ..• 3

In the United States, where the teaching of architecture wasuniversally based on the Beaux-Arts model, teachers who hadbeen trained in Paris but were aware of new trends initiatedattempts at modernization in the early 1920s. Paul Philippe Cret,who had been a student in Jean-Louis Pascal's atelier at theBeaux-Arts, became a professor at the University of Pennsylvaniain 1903, adjustinq .Julien-Azals Guadet's doctrine of composi-tion to modern programs. In 1927 Jean Labatut, one of VictorLaloux's former students, began teaching at the American surn-mer school in Fontainebleau, France, which had been foundedby his master in 1923. The following year Labatut was hired toteach at Princeton University, where he would remain until the1960s ..• 4 Another former student of Laloux and an instruc-tor at Fontainebleau, Jacques Carlu, started teaching at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 1924 and remainedthere as head professor of architecture until 1933. Jean-Jacques Haffner, who had been at Harvard since 1922, was

appointed to Carlu's position in 1938.Yet by the mid-1920s, the French were beginning to lose theirpreeminence in American universities. The 1922 Chicago TribuneTower competition brought new design concepts to the atten-tia n of academic institutions. Eliel Saarinen, winner of the com-petition's second prize, was recruited by Emil Lorch to teachat the University of Michigan Architecture School in Ann Arbor.

180 Grand Prix de Rome project, École des Beaux-Arts, Bernard Zehrfuss, 1939

There he implemented a new curriculum with his Danishcolleague, Knud Lonberg-Holm, who had designed, but notsubmitted, a radically modernist entry to the Tribune Towercontest. In 1925 Saarinen designed the campus 01the Cran-brook Kingswood School (Iater the Cranbrook Academyof Art), and he became director there in 1932.

The Weimar Bauhaus

The most intense search lar new educational methods took placein Germany, often picking up where prewar efforts had left off.Didactic proqrarns were developed in accord with the concep-tion 01architecture as an experimental discipline tor whichknowledge 01 modern art, psychology, and industry was nec-essary. Apart Irom art schools like the Kunstschule Debschitzin Munich, the Franklurter Kunstschule, the Akademie tür Kunstund Kunstgewerbe in Breslau, and the Reimann-Schule in Berlin,by lar the most innovative program was launched in Weimarin 1919. -> 5 Five years earlier, the B.elgian Henry van de Velde,who had lounded a school there, had resigned under pres-sure from nationalist attacks. He recommended that it beentrusted to Walter Gropius, August Endell, or Hermann Obrist.Though the youngest of the three, Gropius was chosen, and itwas through his initiative that the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts andCrafts School) and the Hochschule tür Bildende Kunst (HigherSchool 01 Fine Arts) were united in April 1919 under the name 01the Staatliches Bauhaus (State Bauhaus). -> 6

In his lounding program, Gropius described the goal 01 thenew school: "to bring together all creative efforts into onewhole, to reunily all the disciplines 01 practical art - sculp-ture, painting, handicrafts, and the crafts - which are insepa-rable components 01 a new architecture." He continued, "The

181 Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Auguste Perret at theÉcole Spéciale d'Architecture, Paris, France, c. 1939

ultimate, if distant aim 01 the Bauhaus is the unilied work01 art - the great building - in which there is no distinctionbetween monumental and decorative art." -> 7 Initially thisprogram was steeped in a mystical, Expressionist mood. Theoriginal faculty consisted primarily of artists: Lyonel Feininger,Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and OskarSchlemmer. Within a few years László Moholy-Nagy replacedIlIen. The Bauhaus curriculum began with a Vorkurs, an intro-ductory course developed by Itten dedicated to the explora-tion 01 drawing, color, and materials. It continued in workshopsgeared to producing designs tor actual clients. Architecture,although not taught as such until 1927, was the ultimate goal01 the curriculum, which aimed ter "mutual planning of exten-sive, utopian structural designs - public buildings and build-ings íor warship - aimed at the luture." -> 8

Europe discovered Gropius's ambitious program at an exhibitionheld in Weimar in 1923. 183 Its aim was to maintain an ongoingrelationship between the school and the public, an objec-tive specilically set out in the 1919 manilesto. An integral part01 the exhibition, the Haus am Horn, 185 designed by GeorgMuche, provided an idea 01the Bauhaus's architectural orien-tation. Built on a square plan, this experimental house with acentral room suggested a family life without any servants; thekitchen was treated as a workstation and, with its panopticview, a site 01visual control over the household. Bauhaus stu-dents, including Marcel Breuer, lurnished the Haus am Horn'sinteriors. The exhibit at the Bauhaus, entitled Kunst und Technik- eine neue Einheit (Art and Technology: A New Unity), madeclear the school's new orientation toward industrial produc-tion, while the projects gathered under the title "InternationaleArchitektur" clearly positioned its experiments at the lorelrontof the European avant-garde. -> 9

152 I 153

183 Bauhaus exhibition, Walter Gropius, Weimar, Germany, 1923

182 Staatliches Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, Dessau, Germany, 1925-6

154 I 155

184 Torten Housing Estate, Walter Gropius, Dessau, Germany, 1926-8

The Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin

In 1924 the local government in Saxony rejected Gropius'sprogram, lorcing him to move the school to a new building inDessau, 182 a manulacturing center closer to Berlin. Opened in1926, the new lacility, which Gropius designed, exemplilied theprincipies 01 lunctional clarity and modularity now taught inits studios. Each element 01 the pinwheel-plan structure wasconceived to supply the space and light needed lor its spe-cilic lunctions. The workshops, lor example, had glass rools,while the students' living quarters had vertical windows and bal-conies. Gropius also built houses lor the laculty nearby, pro-viding his staft 188 with ample dwellings designed lor artisticwork and lor entertaining. -> 10 With the experimental TbrtenHousing Estate (1926-8), 184 commissioned by the municipality01 Dessau, the school was able to address architectural ques-tions at an urban scale. In conceiving these modest moduleslor working-class tenants in buildings made 01precast concretecomponents, Gropius emulated the automobile assembly line,down to his linear organization 01 the construction site. Alsobuilt in Tbrten was a prelabricated Steel House by Muche andRichard Paulick, another example 01 the Bauhaus's eftort toemulate lactory production. -> 11

In 1928 Gropius stepped down as director and was succeededby Hannes Meyer. Under the left-wing Swiss architect the teach-ing 01architecture became more structured. Meyer's lunctionalistagenda was encapsulated in a manilesto entitled "bauen" ("to

LlI"" IUIIIIUld. \IUlIlAIUII LIIII""::; ""GUIIUllly! ... UUIIUIII\J 1::; IIULIIIII\J UUL

organization: social, technical, economic, psychological organi-zation." -> 12 Ludwig Hilberseimer began oftering courses in urbanplanning, and preliminary research on lunctional data and the

Chapter 12 I Architectural education in turmoil

185 Haus am Horn, Georg Muche, Weimar, Germany, 1923

siting 01 buildings became an important component 01the cur-riculum. The students built an apartment house in Dessau (1930)during Meyer's tenure, while the school became increasinqlyreceptive to its director's communist ideas.Meyer's political activism and his conllict-ridden relationshipswith many 01 the other Bauhaus Meister (masters) led to hisbeing lired and replaced by Mies van der Rohe in 1930. Withthe support 01 his Iriend Lilly Reich, an interiors architect, Miesaccentuated the shift 01 the Bauhaus toward architecture thathad begun under Meyer and strove to make the school moreprolessional. Exercises ceased to be utopian, and studentslocused instead on designing courtyard houses and studyingthe extended urban labrics that interested Hilberseimer. -> 13

In 1932 the municipality 01 Dessau, which had been taken overby the Nazis, evicted the Bauhaus. Mies reconstituted the schoolas a private institution based in an abandoned lactory in Berlin-Steglitz until pressure lrom the Nazis lorced him to close it downin the summer 01 1933. This triggered a diaspora that would

c.

have lasting effects on schools around the world.

The Vkhutemas in Moscow

Though its reverberations were lelt less on an internationalscale, an equally signilicant experiment took place in Moscowduring the same years. Like the Bauhaus, it was based on animpulse to synthesize art and architecture, and therelore oninteraction - at least during the initial phase 01the curriculum

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nl\JII""1 MI L dllU I ""GI 11IIGdl OLUUIU::;, 'u16 resulted lrom a mergerin 1920 between the School 01 Painting and Sculpture and theStroganov School 01Applied Arts. The most original 01 the ini-tial two departments was the Rablak, or Workers' Faculty,

_ - ------ ------ - -- ------ ------

186 Studio work at Vkhutemas, Moseow, USSR (Russia), 1928

188 ~ 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(Russia), 1923

190 Lenin Institute, project, Ivan Leonidov, Moscow,USSR (Russia), 1927

which offered accelerated remedial classes to workers with-out a high school education. At lirst glance the school's toun-dation course appears similar to the Bauhaus's Vorkurs. Itsstudents carried out exercises in lour basic disciplines taughtby olten ideologically opposed instructors: "graphics," withneoclassicist Vladimir Favorsky and Constructivist AlexanderRodchenko; "surface/color," with Alexander Vesnin and LyubovPopova, both also active Constructivists; "volurne," which grad-ually became little more than an introduction to sculpture;and "space:' which was devoted to the study and assembly 01basic volumes, under the direction 01 Nikolai Ladovsky, NikolaiDokuchaev, and Vladimir Krinsky, the luture lounders 01 therationalist group ASNOVA ...• 14

Alter one or two years at the school, students were dividedamong faculties specializing in painting, typography, sculp-tu re, textiles, ceramics, wood, metal, and architecture. In 1923departments devoted to music and theater were introduced; in1924 a department devoted to literature opened. The verticalintegration 01 individual disciplines was thus more pronouncedthan at the Bauhaus, where specialization took place later.Studio work remained central in laculties such as the Metfak,which specialized in metalwork. Inspired by Vladimir Tatlin andheaded by Rodchenko, it emphasized projects 01 a collectiveand lunctional nature. The school's more politicized, highlyproduction-oriented students Irequently came into head-onconlrontation with colleagues they considered to be either"pure" or decorative artists. Students 01 the Arkhlak, or archi-tecture studio, were divided into olear-cut camps: the conserva-tives, under prolessors Ivan Zholtovsky and Alexei Shchusev; the"New Academy," under Ilya Golosov and Konstantin Melnikov;and the remainder split between two directly competing move-ments: the "Rationalists," gathered around the trio 01 Ladovsky,

Chapter 12 I Architectural education in turmoil

191 Student project, Jean de Maisonseul, Algiers,Algeria, 1931

Dokuchaev, and Krinsky, and the Constructivists, around Vesnin.Ladovsky was the most active in developing an experimentalmethod 01 teaching through his "psychotechnical laboratory,"in which he perfected a battery 01 tests and techniques derivedlrom Hugo Münsterberg's research in applied psychology atHarvard University; his aim was to measure the "psychotech-nic qualities 01 architects" and their ability to perceive lormsin space. In 1922-3 students also began to participate in theconstantly increasing number 01 architecture competitions tak-ing place in Moscow. 189 In 1924-5 all 01 the school's thesisprojects were included in the "New Moscow" plan designedby Shchusev. Students next turned their attention to new pro-grams lor stadiums, workers' palaces, and communal housing.Specialization by individual workshops - in residential archi-tecture, public buildings, urban planning, and so on - beganto take shape in 1925. During this phase, the school developedprojects lor aviation lactories, industrial lacilities, lilm studios,and apartment and office buildings.The projects for skyscrapers that were common belore 1925were no longer the order 01 the day. Nonetheless, certain thesisprojects still explored radical hypotheses lor public buildings.Ivan Leonidov designed a Lenin Institute (1927) 190 with aprophetic structure made 01 cables and luturistic electronictechnology; Georgei Krutikov designed a Flying City (1928).After visiting the Vkhutemas in 1928, Le Corbusier describedthe school in his journal as an "extraordinary demonstration 01the modern credo:' adding: "Here a new world is being rebuilt"out 01 a "mystique which gives rise to apure technique." ..•15During the 1930s, methods developed in the school's Ioun-dation course continued to be used, but traditional methodsderived lrom the Beaux-Arts were gradually reinstated and theschool's utopian passions died out.

192 New Bauhaus, Chicago, lllinois, USA, c. 1938

Innovative schools in the new and old worlds

The new schools in Europe at times lavo red conllictingapproaches. In 1927 Henry van de Velde lounded the InstitutSupérieur des Arts Décoratils at the Abbaye de la Cambrein Brussels, 187 which he would head until 1936, recruitingthe modern architects Huib Hoste and Victor Bourgeois andthe urban planner Louis Van der Swaelmen. In Italy a nationalrelorm led to the creation in 1924 01 independent architecturelaculties in the academies 01 line art, but these remained solidlyunder the control 01 conservative architects. In Turkey, BrunoTaut, whe resettled there alter an initial exile in Japan, taughtlrom 1936 until his death in 1938 at the Istanbul Academy 01Fine Arts, where he pursued the relorm 01 the school's curricu-lum begun by the Austrian Ernst Egli.The 1930s were characterized by the establishment 01 a grow-ing number 01 architecture schools outside Europe. Modestateliers were opened in connection with the School 01 FineArts in Algiers by Léon Claro, 191 and in Casablanca by MariusBoyer. The Beaux-Arts model, diffracted through the prism01 Paul Philippe Cret's teaching, served as the loundation forChinese schools. The lirst 01 these, largely inspired by theJapanese, was lounded in Suzhou in 1923, then taken over bythe Central University in Nanjing 193 tour years later and staffedwith professors who had studied with Cret at the Universityof Pennsylvania. The lollowing year a school was opened inMukden (Shenyang) 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 thecurriculum 01 a school that had been lounded by the Frenchin the early nineteenth century.

193 School 01 Architecture,Liang Ssu Ch'eng, Nanjing, China, c. 1930

The most consequential migration was the one that drovemany of the Bauhaus teachers to the United States. A lewAmerican students had attended the Bauhaus in Berlin, .• 17

but the German experience did not bear fruit in Americanschools until the wave 01 emigration provoked by Nazism inthe 1930s. Seven years alter a lirst exhibition organized atthe Chicago Art Club, an exhibition at the Museum 01 ModernArt in 1938, Bauhaus 1918-1928, lirmly established the ver-sion 01 the school's history propagated by its founder ..• 18

Gropius had been recruited by Harvard as chair 01 the archi-tecture department two years earlier and tasked by the school'sdean, Joseph Hudnut, with the revision 01 the design curricu-lum. Under Gropius the school de-emphasized the teaching 01architectural history and locused on analytical and collectiveapproaches to design as well as on the modernization 01 studioprograms. In 1938 Mies van der Rohe was hired to head thearchitecture program at the Armour Institute 01 Chicago, whichtwo years later merged with the Lewis Institute to become theIIlinois Institute 01 Technology ..• 19 Other Bauhaus Meisteralso took up places in new institutions. Josel Albers headedthe program at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, whileLászló Moholy-Nagy lounded the New Bauhaus, later renamedthe Institute of Design, in Chicago. 192 In 1933 Richard Paulick,who had been an assistant to Gropius in Dessau, landed inShanghai, where he worked as an urban planner and taughtat the university from 1940 to 1949 ..• 20 In a single decade the

scattering 01 Beaux-Arts alumni around the world had beenlargely superseded by the diaspora 01 the Bauhaus.

160 I 161

Architectureand revolutionin Russia

During the lifteen years between the 1917 Bolshevik Revolutionand Joseph Stalin's 1932 campaign to consolidate intellectualand artistic organizations under strict party rule, Russia was alaboratary lar an astonishing range 01 urban and architecturalinvention. Priar to 1914 the Czarist empire had kept up to datewith translormations in European architectural culture, and cer-tain 01 the empire's territories, such as Finland and the Balticstates, had developed their own innovative architecture. Westerntheories were studied with great attention: John Ruskin's workswere popular, and Russian readers had access to translations 01books by Auguste Choisy and Heinrich Wblfflin. But develop-ments in Russia's own architecture had been glimpsed outsideits borders only at world's fairs such as the 1900 Paris expo-sition and, especially, the 1901 fair in Glasgow, where FyodorShekhtel's Russia Pavilion made a strong impression.Belore 1914, the experiments 01 architects like Shekhtel operatingunder the "modern" banner had developed contemporaneouslywith research on tensile-steel structures undertaken by the civilengineer Vladimir Shukhov and the tirst use 01 reinlorced con-crete by Russian builders. -> 1 But the social relorms that hadcome to the lore in Western Europe had been only marginallyimplemented lollowing the revolution 01 1905, and the compre-hensive plans that had stimulated the creation 01 new buildingtypes in Germany and larther west were lacking, largely owingto the weakness 01 municipal governments.

The shock of revolution

The effects 01 the October 1917 revolution were as immediateas they were manilold. The civil war and then the Bolshevikrepression sent thousands 01 prolessionals into exile, whilethe nationalization 01 land and the rise to power 01 new local

Chapter 13 1 Architecture and revolution in Russia

councils known as "soviets" changed the circumstances torthose who remained - including architects graduating trorn thenew schools. The launch 01 a monumental propaganda planin 1918 stimulated designs lor the ephemeral translormation01 streets and squares as part 01 the celebration 01 the revolu-tion and May Day. Initially limited to a display 01 banners andthe erection 01 isolated sculptures, these spectacles eventu-ally transligured vast public spaces such as Palace Square inPetrograd and provided a glimpse 01 how an "emancipated"workers' city might look. The most ambitious 01 these projectswas artist Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International(1919), 194 which explicitly competed with the Eiffel Towerthrough its projecled height 01 400 meters (1,312 leet) and steelskeleton. Built 01 "steel, glass, and revolution," in the words 01the critic Nikolai Punin, the tower was designed to hold withinits spiraling Iramework a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder, and ahall-sphere whose rotation was intended to represent the Ire-quency 01 meetings 01 Ihe Communisl lnternational's varioussleering committees. -> 2

Until 1920, conllicts between the Red and White armies led towidespread destruction, which was intensilied by Bolshevikcampaigns against the Russian Orthodox Church. Duringthese uncertain years belore the Reds' power was consoli-dated, Sinskulptarkh, a group dedicated to the synthesis 01sculpture and architecture (which became the Zhivskulptarkhonce painters joined its ranks), tried to promote cooperationbetween various disciplines. They warked logether on theoreti-cal schemes lor "people's houses" like those built in WeslernEurope belore 1914, lar communal houses, 196 and lar "temples01 Iriendship" that paralleled the utopian programs 01 GermanExpressionism. Nikolai Ladovsky and Vladimir Krinsky, whodesigned Ihe most evocative 01 these projects, also helped

194 Monument to the Third International, project, Vladimir Tatlin, Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), Russia, 1919

162 I 163

197 Obmokhu (Society 01Young Artists) exhibition, Moscow, Russia, 1921

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196 Communal House, project, Nikolai Ladovski, 1920

195 Komintern Radio Tower, Vladimir Shukhov, Moscow, Russia, 1922

transform pre-revolutionary art schools into the Vkhutemas.Concurrent discussions within the state-supported Inkhuk(Institute of Artistic Culture), where creative methods groundedin construction and inspired by engineering were opposed tothose based on artistic "composition" and anchored in aca-demic tradition, clearly revealed the differences separatingladovsky and Krinsky from the supporters of Constructivism.The former aspired to create dynamic forms but were uninter-ested in their relationship with materials, while the latter insistedon adapting the model of engineering design to the sphere ofart and architecture. The Constructivists exhibited sculpturesmade out of metal and inspired by engineering structures at theObmokhu (Society of Young Artists) exhibition 197 in 1921.Already a teacher at the Vkhutemas, the artist AlexanderRodchenko played a crucial role in these formative stages. -> 3

In 1920 the Bolsheviks launched the GOELRO plan (namedfor the State Comission for the Electrilication of Russia) tobuild a network of power plants, and embarked on their NewEconomic Policy (NEP), which loosened restrictions on com-merce. New types of architectural commissions - including Iac-tories, workers' housing, and electric power plants such as IvanZholtovsky's MOGES - were generated by needs related to thisnational electrification plan. There was also demand for moreoffice buildings in connection with revived business activity andnew trading cornpánies such as Arcos and Mosselprom. Localsoviets and social-action groups created within various compa-nies initiated projects to build housing and create workers' clubs.

A profession renewed

Architecture in the USSR was shaped by constant competi-tions in which members of different professional associations

and a few mavericks regularly participated. Several architectswho had had successful careers before 1914 - such as IvanFomin, a Saint Petersburg neoclassicist; Zholtovsky, a Moscowneo-Palladian; and Alexei Shchusev, an opportunist who in1923 reconstituted the MAO (Society 01 Moscow Architects) -continued to receive significant commissions. Two groups werelormed in reaction to this old guardo The ASNOVA (Associationof New Architects) 198 included Ladovsky, Krinsky, Dokuchaev,and, for a time, El Lissitzky. 200 This group was very influentialamong young pea pie. It stood lar strong tectonic expression01 the building's structure and visual exaltation of its tunc-tion. The second group, whose members were Constructivists,was lormally launched with the creation 01 the OSA (Un ion 01Contemporary Architects) in 1925. It was no coincidence thatneither group's name included the term "modern," which hadbeen discredited by its association with the Russian versionof Art Nouveau. Chaired by Alexander Vesnin, the OSA waslargely run by Moisei Ginzburg, whose book-manifesto Sti/ iEpokha (Style and Epoch; 1924) echoed Le Corbusier's theo-ries by suggesting that a new design method should be basedon the study 01 machines and the application of their systemsto architecture. -> 4 The periodical Sovremennaia Arkhitektura(Contemporary [i.e., Modern] Architecture), or SA, publishedunder Ginzburg's direction lrom 1926 to 1930, presented OSA'snew projects, as well as numerous Western examples, in a radi-cally new graphic formo -> 5

Independent architects such as Ilya Golosov, a proponent 01 acolorlul, lormally striking architecture, and especially KonstantinMelnikov rase to prominence through competitions. Melnikovcreated a sensation with his Makhorka Tobacco Pavilion at theAgricultural Exhibition held in Moscow in 1923 and, two yearslater, with the pavilion he designed to represent the USSR at

164 I 165

198 Izvestia ASNO VA (News 01 theAssociation 01 New Architects), layoutby El Lissitzky, 1926

199 USSR Pavilion, KonstantinMelnikov, Paris, France, 1925

the Exposition Internationale des Arts Oécoratits et Industrie/sModernes. 199 Composed of two glazed triangular volumesbisected diagonally by a staircase, it was the most conspicu-ous structure at the Paris exhibition ...• 6 It revealed to the West

the existence of a new Russian architecture, which was furtherconfirmed by the presentation elsewhere at the fair of over onehundred projects conceived in the USSR since 1920.The commissions emanating from the new regime's institutionsbegan to generate buildings. Among them was Grigory Barkhin'sdesign for new headquarters for Izvestia, the Moscow daily news-paper, which reached back to classical architecture for its largemetope-like oculi. Alexander Vesnin and his brothers Leonidand Victor failed to realize their 1924 project for the Moscowoffice of Pravda , a cage inspired by the metal chassis of thenewspaper's printing presses, which was to have functionedas a base for billboards, megaphones, and projectors inscrib-ing slogans on the clouds. But the three brothers did succeedin building the Mostorg Department Store (1927-9), which waswrapped in a glass facade, as was Boris Velikovsky's GostorgOffice Building (1926). In addition to newly built traditionalapartment buildings, many new types of complexes sprang up,including Shchusev and Nikolai Markovnikov's Sokol GardenSuburb, inspired by the planning of Raymond Unwin. Therewere also workers' housing blocks on Usacheva Street andin the Shabolovka area, which Nikolai Travin erected near theKomintern Radio Tower (1922). 195 The latter, a lattice of stacked-up hyperboloids designed by Shukhov, seemed to be the realmaterialization of Tatlin's tower. Shukhov was also responsiblefor the roof structure of two bus depots built by Melnikov.Workers, the "victors" of the revolution, were at the heart ofthe new urban policies. Prosperous companies such as theIvanovo textile milis, Sverdlovsk steelworks, and Baku oil firms

Chapter 13 I Architecture and revolution in Russia

200 Skyhook, project, El Lissitzky, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1925

201 Zuev Workers' Club, lIya Golosov, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1928

202 ~ Rusakov Workers' Club, Konstantin Melnikov, Moscow,USSR (Russia), 1927-9

used their income to provide social services and housingfor their labor forces, as in the Armenikend neighborhood by .Alexander Ivanitsky in Baku (1925-8). A fully equipped modeldistrict of collective housing was established in Leningradnear the Putilov Factory; the schools, communal kitchens, andworkers' clubs around Alexander Gegello's housing on TractorStreet (1925-7) formed something like a small autonomous citycentered on the collective workforce ...• 7

The "social condensers"

In the second half of the 1920s, neighborhoods multipliedaccording to the model of collectivized life - in strong distinc-tion to their counterparts in Germany and Austria. Each Sovietbuilding type was subjected to elaborate and specific research.In order to transform the population's daily habits as quickly aspossible, buildings became what the Constructivists referredto as "social condensers,' which were meant to acceleratechanges in the everyday life of the working class. An unacknowl-edged successor to the pre-1914 "people's houses,' the work-ers' club became the principal place of acculturation and thesite where the confrontation between different architectural ideasproved most fruitful. The clubs retained the auditoriums, res-taurants, and sometimes the athletic equipment of the people'shouses, but libraries were given more prominence, with a strongemphasis on literacy campaigns. Above all, the buildings them-selves were meant to serve as a new and more enduring formof monumental propaganda. The Zuev Workers' Club, 201 builtby Golosov in Moscow, pivots expressively on a glass cylin-der that houses a staircase connecting the different parts of thebuilding. Located at the intersection of two streets, it appears asthe hinge of the whole block.

203 Burevestnik Workers' Club, Konstantin Melnikov, Moscow,USSR (Russia), 1927-9

The five clubs in Moscow that Melnikov built practically simul-taneously in 1927-9 were a testament both to this architect'sinexhaustible imagination and to the potential of a buildingtype that was in a perpetual state of experimentation. The threebalconies of the theater of the Rusakov Workers' Club 202 canti-lever over the street, while inside the seats face a stage wedgedinto a triangular plan. The Burevestnik Workers' Club 203

was remarkable for its large convertible theater and flankingtower, with a floor plan in the shape of a flower. Between theKauchuk Workers' Club, a rather static vertical cylinder, andthe Svoboda Workers' Club, a horizontal cylinder with mobilewalls, Melnikov's forms evolved from an almost conventionalmonumentality to a search for kineticism, an approach he hadpursued in his proposal for the Pravda Building competitionin 1924 and would further develop in his project for a theaterwith a rotating stage in 1931.The second type of "social condenser" was the "communalhouse," a residential complex with integrated services that wasa direct descendant of the phalanstery, a utopian communityinspired by the early socialist Charles Fourier in nineteenth-century France. Like the "garden city," the "communal house"was more a slogan than a well-defined concept. The term wasused to describe a wide variety of installations, from the barelyequipped dormitory recalling the dreariest workers' residencesof the pre-1914 period to Moscow apartment buildings withstandards that seem almost luxurious given the difficult condi-tions during the NEP. In the second half of the 1920s, full-scaleexperiments were carried out in an attempt to "reconstruct"everyday life through the collectivization of food services andreduction in the size of apartments; the provision of new, sharedfacilities was intended to offset the small living unit. The mostproductive of these experiments, the Narkomfin Communal

Chapter 13 I Architecture and revolution in Russia

204 Narkomfin Communal House, MoiseiGinzburg and Ignati Milinis, Moscow, USSR(Russia), 1928-30

House, 204 was carried out under the aegis of Nikolai Miliutin,head of the People's Commissariat for Finance. A veteranBolshevik who had studied architecture, Miliutin commissionedGinzburg and Ignati Milinis to design a project to house hisemployees in the heart of Moscow. Using a vocabulary explic-itly taken from Le Corbusier - pilotis, ribbon windows, and roofterraces - the project combined a glazed unit for communalservices with a long housing block. Most of the living quarterswere two- or three-Ievel "cells" whose spatial complexity com-pensated somewhat for their cramped dimensions. Describedas a "transition" between traditional apartments, which had nowall become "domestic communes" shared by several tenants,and a new, still undefined form of totally collectivized dwelling,the building was remarkable for its precise design and care-fui execution. -> 8 Ginzburg followed it with another such build-ing in Sverdlovsk, 206 while Mikhail Barshch and AlexanderPasternak built a more compact communal house in Moscow.AII these buildings were based on the model dwelling schemesdeveloped by Stroikom, or the State Building Committee of theRussian Republic, which carried out studies on how to reducethe size of rooms and integrate services based on Germanand American examples. But radical projects such as IvanNikolaev's dormitory for students at the Moscow Textile Instituteand the extremist ideas of young Constructivists such as SergeiKuzmin, who insisted that life be regulated down to the minute,quickly discredited the very idea of the communal house.Moscow also became the site of residential buildings with lessambitious ideological programs but powerful monumental pres-ence. These included the Dynamo Building by Fomin (1928-9),which explored the potential of a "proletarian Doric," and theHouse on the Embankment by Boris lofan (1930), a huge apart-ment block built on the Moskva River across from the Kremlin.

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=ees he earned Irom his workers' clubs commissions remainsnique, as individual residences were unauthorized: it consists

01two interlocking cylindrical towers with stuccoed brick wallsand lozenge-shaped windows that are reminiscent 01 peasantouses and the towers of Russian fortresses.

Polemics and rivalries

Nith the launch 01 the USSR's lirst Five Year Plan in 1927, theforced march toward industrialization spurred the construc-ion 01 thousands ollactories and hundreds 01 new cities. The

assistance 01 Western architects was solicited. Thus Erichendelsohn builtthe Krasnoe Znamia (Red Banner) Textile

Factory in Leningrad in 1926-8, and in the period leading up01932 Albert Kahn's lirm built several hundred lactories withcomponents shipped Irom the United States. The brutal indus-rialization and collectivization 01 rural areas raised the ques-ion 01what lorm the country's urban planning should take. In1929 and 1930 those who supported the creation 01 a densenetwork 01 medium-sized cities - the "urbanists" - laced 011against the "disurbanists," who sprang Irom the OSA and wereproponents 01 a radical decentralization leading to the totaleradication 01 cities. Formulated on the occasion 01 compe-titions held in 1929 lor a "green city" near Moscow and in1930 lor the plan 01 the industrial city 01 Magnitogorsk, thedis-urbanist position - as theorized by the sociologist MikhailOkhitovich - may be understood as a sell-critical reactionto the communal house projects they had previously sup-ported ..• 9 Miliutin proposed a third option: the "linear city," 208

based on the late nineteenth-century concept 01 the Spanishplanner Soria y Mata.

The disurbanist model 01 a territory dol1ed with individualhouses reached by automobiles was impracticable in the USSR01the time. In 1931 the Communist Party called to accountthe "irresponsible" architects who had proposed such plans,decreeing the "socialist reconstruction" 01existing cities. Thispolicy would be carried out with the participation of hundreds01architects and engineers lrom Germany, who had been ledto emigrate either by the economic crisis in Germany, as wasthe case with Ernst May, or by an al1raction to the USSR's rev-olutionary ideals, as with Hannes Meyer. From 1930 to 1935these loreigners designed most 01 the new neighborhoods anddelined the standards that would be applied to Soviet planningand housing lor decades to come.The 1931 decision in favor 01 socialist urban planning wasmade at a time when disagreements between ASNOVA andOSA - which had steadily escalated through the 1920s - hadbecome particularly bitter, with young architects who delinedthemselves as "proletarians" politicizing the architectural dis-course. The competing lactions radicalized their positions, andcampaigns targeted several architects. Leonidov, lor one, washarshly 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, whoseboundless visual imagination took shape in unbuildable "archi-tectural lantasies" 207 based on machine torrns, lurther contrib-uted to the characterization 01the Constructivists as completeutopians ..• 10

The Palace of the Soviets competition

The project ter a Palace 01the Soviets, intended to symbolizethe return 01the Russian capital to Moscow alter two centuries

170 I 171

The competition coincided with a 1932 decision by theCommunist Party regarding the "reorganization 01 literary andartistic unions." AII existing groups were dissolved - to thereliel 01 some - and architects were invited to join a central-ized union. Projects already underway were carried throughin aclimate that remained pluralistic lor a lew more years. Butthe decision in the Palace 01 the Soviets competition set a newdirection ter public architecture, which soon became the onlyoption available, moving it in the direction 01 historicist mon-umentality. While the Vesnin brothers were still able to real-ize their Palace 01 Culture lor the ZIL Automobile Factory inMoscow 209 unhampered - without doubt the largest work-ers' club ever built - Le Corbusier was able to linish hisCentrosoyuz Building in 1936 only in the lace 01 violent attackson its radical modernity. The trends 01 the 1920s, beginningwith Constructivism, were now rejected and their most radicalproponents marginalized, as was the case with Leonidov, orkilled, as with Okhitovich, who died in a Gulag camp in 1937.Stigmatized lor his impenitent idiosyncratic gestures, Melnikovwas lorced into retirement at the age 01 lilty. -> 12

207 Architectural Fantasy, lakov Chernikhov, 1931

and the establishment 01 a new proletarian state, served as apretext tor the Communist Party - which up till then had cau-tiously avoided taking sides in the rival currents 01 revolution-ary fervor - to lormulate an oflicial position on architecture.An initial competition lor a Palace 01 Labor had been held in1923. Though the Vesnin brothers' proposal lor a composition01 volumes leaturing allusions to Auguste Perret made the big-gest impact, Noa Trotsky won that competition with a neo-Byzantine project that was soon abandoned.In 1931 an ambitious international competition, launched asil in emulation 01 those tor the Tribune Building in Chicagoand the League 01 Nations in Geneva, called ter a projectto be built on a site along the Moskva River across Irom theKremlin. Alter a lirst round restricted to Soviet teams, notableWestern architects, including Gropius, Poelzig, Perret, and LeCorbusier, were invited to submit proposals so as to give theproceedings a veneer 01 impartiality and openness. "Workers'collectives" were also asked to contribute their own naivedesigns. In early 1932, three 01 the 272 projects received wereselected: those by Zholtovsky, lolan, 210 and an unknownyoung American named Hector Hamilton. Alter another round,lolan was awarded the commission, with Vladimir Shchukoand Vladimir Gellreikh named as his collaborators. lolan's ini-tial project combined the requested 15,000- and 5,000-seatauditoriums with a statue 01 Vladimir Lenin standing on a tallbase. Directly intervening in the design process, Stalin mademany architectural "suggestions." -> 11 One 01 them resulted inthe statue being placed atop one 01 the auditoriums, therebymaking the project virtually unbuildable, as was inevitablyrecognized in the late 1940s.

Chapter 13 [ Architecture and revolution in Russia

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210 ~ Palace 01 Soviets, project, Boris lolan, 1931-4

209 Palace 01 Culture lar the ZIL Automobile Factory, Alexander Vesnin, Leonid Vesnin and Viktor Vesnin, Moscow, USSR (Russia), 1931-6

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