Chapter 14 for Oriel Chambers of 1864-5.

Footnote 452:

See Note [454], below.

Footnote 453:

See Popp, J., _Bruno Paul_, Munich.

Footnote 454:

To those historians of modern architecture who find its relevant prehistory largely in the technical developments of the previous century and a half, the Fagus Factory is the more important; to those who accept that the architecture of the mid twentieth century had aesthetic as well as technical roots, the special ‘classicism’ of Mies’s project, like Wright’s contact with the American ‘Academic Tradition’ of the nineties, seems perhaps at least as important. The thesis of the late Emil Kaufmann, adumbrated in a series of books from his _Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier_ of 1931 to his posthumous _Architecture in the Age of Reason_ of 1955, stresses—indeed overstresses—the relevance of the theories and projects of the revolutionary architects of the late eighteenth century to the new architecture of the twentieth century. If it ever becomes possible to subsume historically under a single rubric the ‘traditional’ and the ‘advanced’ architecture of the first quarter of the twentieth century, the ‘classicism’ and ‘academicism’ of Wright, Wagner, Mies, and Le Corbusier as well as of Perret and Behrens will prove as significant as the technical feats of those architects who erected the last great railway stations in these years and the tallest skyscrapers. Lest the issue seem a simple dichotomy, Mies’s respect for Berlage’s structuralism should also be remembered at this point; as also the Expressionism which influenced both Gropius and Mies after the First World War, not to speak of Wright’s ‘Baroque’ phase of 1914-24.

Footnote 455:

Le Corbusier’s first publication was an _Étude sur le mouvement d’art décoratif en Allemagne_, La Chaux de Fond, 1912, giving evidence of his closer _rapport_ with Central European than with Parisian currents at this point in his life.

Footnote 456:

For the early work of Le Corbusier, hitherto almost entirely unpublished, see _Perspecta_, 6 (1961), 28-33.

Footnote 457:

Le Corbusier’s relations with Loos were very close for a year or two after Loos settled in Paris in 1923. But he undoubtedly knew of Loos’s work well before the First World War, having been for a short stay in Vienna in 1908, at which time he had already begun to react against the dominant decorative emphasis in the work of Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte.

Footnote 458:

As has been noted, Garnier’s book on the ‘Cité Industrielle’ did not appear until 1918, but his projects had long been generally known in Paris. His work attracted more attention in the early twenties, thanks to his own publication _Les Grands Travaux de la ville de Lyon_, Paris, 1919, and an article by Jean Badovici, ‘L’Œuvre de Tony Gamier’, in _L’Architecture vivante_, Autumn-Winter 1924.

Footnote 459:

See Note [455], _supra_.

Footnote 460:

See Note [445], _supra_. Also relevant is my book _Painting towards Architecture_, New York, 1948.

Footnote 461:

Several years earlier, possibly even before he actually joined _De Stijl_, Rietveld had designed and executed a remarkable ‘Red-Blue’ chair in which many aspects of the three-dimensional aesthetic of the group were already realized.

Footnote 462:

The first number is not dated and may have appeared in 1919.

Footnote 463:

See Bayer, H., and others, _Bauhaus 1919-28_, New York, 1938.

Footnote 464:

The mixed character of Bauhaus theory and production in the early years is well illustrated in Gropius, W., _Staatliches Bauhaus, 1919-1923_, Munich [1923].

Footnote 465:

The effect of van Doesburg’s visit to Germany remains controversial. Although Gropius denies, or at any rate minimizes, its importance to the Bauhaus group—and, indeed, personally disliked van Doesburg—critics and historians mostly believe the influence of Neoplasticism to have been at least as significant at this point as that of the Russian Constructivists. See Zevi, B., ‘L’Insegnamento critico di Theo van Doesburg’, _Metron_, VII (1951), 21-37.

It is not without significance that Gropius included in 1926 Oud’s _Holländische Architektur_ in the series of Bauhausbücher which he edited. That certainly proves a special respect for the _De Stijl_-nurtured modern architecture of Holland at the time.

Footnote 466:

Like Le Corbusier’s window-walls, these horizontal strip-windows, usually called ‘ribbon-windows’ in English, can be traced back at least as far as Shaw’s work of the sixties, though all the intervening links are not yet clearly identified. Their analogy with ‘Chicago windows’ is closest and, indeed, Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott façades, with their wide windows crisply cut in the smooth terracotta wall-plane, are amazingly premonitory of the characteristic new window-banded façades of the twenties. Before this time window-strips were always subdivided by relatively heavy mullions in the plane of the wall, as in Voysey’s houses, or set behind ranges of colonnettes or other supports, as they were still in the clerestory of Wright’s Unity Church.

Footnote 467:

This special vision of America is well illustrated in books of the twenties by European architectural visitors; see Mendelsohn, E., _Amerika. Bilderbuch eines Architekten_, Berlin, 1926, and Neutra, R., _Wie baut Amerika?_ Stuttgart, 1927.

Footnote 468:

The preoccupation with the shapes of things that move—which architecture does not—reflects doubtless the motion-aesthetic of the Futurists. How well Le Corbusier knew the pre-war projects of the brilliant Italian Antonio Sant’Elia is not clear. But his own aesthetic is less related to the particular forms found in Sant’Elia’s designs for buildings than to generalized Futurist dreams of speed and technical modernity. See also Note [495] to Chapter 23.

Footnote 469:

However, Le Corbusier’s sketch books make evident that he had used his eyes to advantage on a very wide range of buildings in the Mediterranean world on his early travels, from peasant huts to the Parthenon, the Campidoglio, and Versailles. His attitude towards the past was very different, evidently, from that of the Futurists, of which a somewhat closer reflection is to be found in the doctrines of Gropius.

Footnote 470:

Throughout this period, and indeed down to 1943, Le Corbusier practised in partnership with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (b. 1896); technically most of his work should therefore be attributed to ‘Le Corbusier & Jeanneret’. No attempt has yet been made by critics or historians to determine to what extent Jeanneret deserves credit for the work of the firm, nor to evaluate the work he has since done independently.

Footnote 471:

See Roth, A., _Zwei Wohnhäuser von Le Corbusier und Pierre Jeanneret_, Stuttgart, 1927.

Footnote 472:

The open plan of the Vaucresson house was more significant than the treatment of the exterior; that was ‘scraped’ of all features in a Loos-like way, yet still quite symmetrical, at least on the garden side.

The studio-house for Ozenfant, built on a very restricted corner site, was too special in its vertical organization to be very influential. Although today in good general condition, the very ‘industrial’ saw-toothed skylights on the roof have been removed and the terrace surrounded with a crude railing.

Footnote 473:

Confused by Le Corbusier’s description of his houses as _machines à habiter_ and the general ‘machinolatry’ of much of his early writing, many have mistakenly supposed that his was a machine-aesthetic. Just how to define his aesthetic other than by begging the question and merely calling it ‘Corbusian’ is, however, far from clear. For an analysis stressing Le Corbusier’s ‘formalism’, but not in the pejorative sense of Stalinist criticism, see Rowe, C., ‘Mannerism and Modern Architecture’, _Architectural Review_, CVII (1950), 289-300.

Footnote 474:

Le Corbusier’s personal system of proportion, first used for the 1916 house, gradually crystallized into a very detailed mathematical scheme which has been made generally available in his books _Le Modular_, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1950; English ed., London, 1954; and _Modular II_, London, 1958.

Footnote 475:

See Moussinac, L., _Robert Mallet-Stevens_, Paris, 1931.

Footnote 476:

See _André Lurçat, projets et réalisations_, Paris, 1929.

Footnote 477:

In this connexion Schumacher’s school-building programme for Hamburg, initiated considerably earlier, is also significant.

Footnote 478:

See Le Corbusier, _Une maison—un palais_, Paris, 1928.

Footnote 479:

As building activity increased in Russia in the late twenties there was considerable experimentation, mostly along Constructivist lines, and a growing acceptance of the new architecture of the western world. This continued into the early thirties. But the competition for the Palace of the Soviets of 1931, to which Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as Poelzig and Mendelsohn were among the over two hundred architects who contributed projects, represented a major turning point. This was won by the Soviet architect B. M. Iofan (b. 1891) with a very monumental scheme designed in a variant of that megalomaniac mode of scraped classicism which had been popular for large-scale architecture in Germany under the Second Reich and which returned to favour in 1933 under the Third Reich, just after Iofan’s scheme triumphed. By 1937 this relatively severe project had been elaborated by Iofan and his collaborators W. G. Helfreich and V. A. Schouko until it rose—and to the same tremendous height as the Empire State Building in New York—like a telescopic wedding-cake, terminating in a statue of Stalin a third as tall as the whole structure below.

Henceforth the ‘scraping’ of Classical forms ceased and Stalinist architecture in general aimed at an elaboration that was at once Baroque and Victorian in its coarse exuberance and in its illiterate use of academic clichés all but forgotten in the western world. During the later Stalinist period official Soviet criticism decried the modern architecture of the western world as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois formalism’.

Since the end of that period the denunciation of its characteristic architecture by Soviet leaders implies some return towards the contact with advanced western ideas which was evident in the twenties and early thirties. For the production of the Stalinist period, which would rate anywhere else as very low-grade ‘traditional’ architecture, see _Dreissig Jahre sowjetische Architektur in der RSFSR_, Leipzig, 1950.

Footnote 480:

More than rivalling Gropius’s housing in its extent was that carried out by Ernst May (b. 1887) for the city of Frankfort at this same time.

Footnote 481:

Gropius and Meyer first used a smooth rendered surfacing on a theatre at Jena that they remodelled in 1922; this was not otherwise very significant, except that no trace of Expressionist influence, still strong in work of the year before, remained. As will appear shortly, Mies van der Rohe proposed to use brick in a design for a country house in 1922; and all the private houses he built in the twenties are of that material, though his housing blocks at Berlin and Stuttgart were rendered.

Footnote 482:

Although Mies is not, as his second name van der Rohe might suggest, Dutch, he has always been an admirer of Berlage, and his very high standards for brickwork derive from his knowledge of Dutch building, both old and new, acquired during the year spent in The Hague designing the Kröller house.

Footnote 483:

Much of Le Corbusier’s prolific writing of the twenties has already been mentioned in the text and earlier notes; for Gropius’s, see Cook, R. V., _A Bibliography: Walter Gropius, 1919-1950_, Chicago [1951].

Footnote 484:

For example, the German translation of _Vers une architecture_ appeared in 1926; the English translation in 1927 in both English and American editions. Of _Urbanisme_, the American edition is of 1927, the English of 1929, and the German of 1929 also. Mies wrote, in effect, nothing at all.

Footnote 485:

As has been noted, Oud, at the invitation of Gropius, wrote _Holländische Architektur_ (No. 10 in the series of Bauhausbücher) and also published many articles in Dutch, German, English, and French magazines.