Chapter 20: ). Only his Pavilion of the Plastic Arts of 1901 at Darmstadt

retained curved elements, and those were structural rather than merely decorative. The general rectangularity and the broad horizontal windows of the Ernst Ludwig Haus, a block of artists’ studios also completed by Olbrich in 1901, suggest comparison with Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art. Whether or not, in fact, Olbrich knew Mackintosh’s building—he may well have seen drawings if not photographs of it—his approach here was certainly very similar.

Mackintosh had a good many further opportunities as a decorator, both at home and abroad, but only too few commissions to design whole buildings. However, his two houses near Glasgow, Windy Hill at Kilmacolm of 1899-1901 and Hill House at Helensburgh of 1902-3, are both very notable. Externally they have a certain generic similarity to Voysey’s, with their moderate pitched roofs of dark slate, roughcast walls, and plain stone trim. His prototypes are not English but Scottish, however—the simple seventeenth-century houses of the minor lairds. As one would expect from his interiors, moreover, the façades of Mackintosh’s houses are much more carefully and abstractly composed than Voysey’s; they even include some simple geometrical features that are not at all reminiscent of the past in their design. Like Voysey’s houses, Mackintosh’s show no real novelties in planning, although the disposition of the rooms is always straightforward and commodious. The interiors are very original and rather less forced than those he was producing for exhibitions on the Continent.

Mackintosh built very little after 1903 except the Scotland Street School of 1904 in Glasgow, the north wing of the Glasgow Art School in 1907-8, and the finest of the various tea-rooms that he remodelled for Miss Cranston. This was the Willow Tea Room in Sauchiehall Street of 1904, for which he remade the façade as well as reorganizing the interior. Internally this tea-room was arranged on several interrelated levels subdivided by ingenious screenwork; the exterior was a flat surface of white stucco cut by broad horizontal openings, one to a storey. The Scotland Street School is equally straightforward in design, the rather plain façade with its ranges of horizontal windows being flanked by rounded stair-towers articulated into continuous stone grids by mullions and transoms, like the bay windows of Voysey’s Broadleys but much taller.

The north wing of the Glasgow Art School is more remarkable, quite worthy of the original front but much more stylized (Plate 135A). Where the front is strongly horizontal the new end façade, like that on the south, is markedly vertical, in part because of the way the ground falls off. But the tall oriels, glazed at the outer plane of the stonework, are striking features, and the whole composition is tense and dramatic. The library inside is a _tour de force_ of spatial subdivision somewhat like the Willow Tea Room. Most notable is the way the rectangular stick-work makes manifest the complex articulation of the total volume. This sort of handling of interior space was unique up to this time as a product of conscious design, although already present inside Paxton’s Crystal Palace in the mid nineteenth century. Certainly there is no evidence here of a decline in Mackintosh’s creative powers; indeed, quite the contrary. Yet this library proved to be his swan song; for want of further commissions Mackintosh’s career all but closed at much the same time that the Art Nouveau was coming to an end on the Continent. Not since Ledoux perhaps had so great a talent been thus thwarted by circumstances, although just what the thwarting circumstances were, other than Mackintosh’s own temperament, is not so evident as in the case of the revolutionary French architect.

The Art Nouveau, so extensively propagated by exhibitions, is often thought to have terminated with an exhibition, that held at Turin in 1902. This is more than a slight exaggeration, as various already mentioned buildings executed as late as 1911 will have made evident. Yet after the early years of the century the decline of the Art Nouveau was almost universal except in provincial places and in outlying countries such as those of Latin America and eastern Europe. At Turin the Belgian section had characteristic Art Nouveau interiors by Horta. Mackintosh, wholly detached by now from the Art Nouveau, contributed a Rose Boudoir, typically light in colour and delicate in line with the predominant verticals and horizontals relieved by little abstract knots, so to say, of curvilinear decoration. Raimondo D’Aronco (1857-1932), the Italian architect responsible for the principal pavilions, wavered between a rather plastic, somewhat Neo-Baroque, version of the Art Nouveau, not unrelated to the seventeenth-century work of the great local architect Guarino Guarini, and a crisper mode much influenced by Mackintosh and the Viennese.

D’Aronco’s finest building, however, was not at Turin but the Pavilion of Fine Arts that he designed for the Udine Exhibition the next year. Moving sharply away from the turgidity of much of his work at the earlier exhibition, he produced for Udine a façade that was unified in design, frankly impermanent in its materials, and at once festive in spirit and dignified in tone. This was a most distinguished piece of exhibition architecture in a period when leading designers gave a great part of their attention to such rather ephemeral things—largely, doubtless, because so few opportunities to build permanent structures came their way. In Istanbul, D’Aronco built a small mosque in 1903, prominently located by the Galata Bridge, and also several blocks of flats that signally fail to maintain the promise of his Italian exhibition buildings. The very awkwardly sited mosque, raised on top of an existing structure, is as Viennese in character as the Udine pavilion.

Other Italian architects, however, remained faithful for a few years to the _stile floreale_, their version of the Art Nouveau. In Milan the Casa Castiglione, a _palazzo_ or mansion-like block of flats at 47 Corso Venezia built by Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867-1917) in 1903, is a very large and ponderous example. The detail is extremely bold, inside and out, the materials rich, and a very large part of the interior is given up to a monumental stair-hall of almost Piranesian spatial complexity. A Milanese hotel at 15 Corso Vittorio Emmanuele of 1904-5 by A. Cattaneo and G. Santamaria is of a comparable extravagance. Finer perhaps, certainly simpler, is the Casa Tosi of 1910 at 28 Via Senato in Milan by Alfredo Campanini (1873-1926).[388]

To judge from the rather _stile floreale_ character of some work of this period in Latin America, Italians as well as Iberians may well have carried the Art Nouveau there. In Cuba and Brazil, especially, memories of Colonial exuberance encouraged a profusion of carved or moulded ornament beyond even the excesses of the French around 1900. The most prominent example, but not the most characteristic, is the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City begun for President Diaz by Adamo Boari after 1903 and completed in 1933 by Federico Mariscal; this is ‘Beaux-Arts’—not inappropriately, perhaps—in all except its detailing; in the latest portions this reflects the Paris of the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925 rather than the Art Nouveau Paris of 1900.

In Spain itself the international current of the Art Nouveau was not very influential outside Barcelona. Gaudí, whose earlier work of the seventies and eighties has already been described (see Chapter 11), continued to be as much apart from the contemporary Spanish architectural scene as he was from the international Art Nouveau. His finest late works, moreover, all but post-date the demise of the Art Nouveau in the major European capitals. Nor is there any such close, if ambivalent, linkage between Gaudí’s career and the general rise and fall of the mode as in the case of Mackintosh. One can only say that his personal style is more closely related to the Art Nouveau than to the new stage of modern architecture that was already succeeding it by the time he produced his final masterpieces. The premonitory character of his early ironwork has been discussed and illustrated already (Plate 96B).

Gaudí’s work on the church of the Sagrada Familia[389] in Barcelona went on more or less continuously from 1884 to 1914 and began again in 1919 after the First World War. The most conspicuous portion that has so far been executed, one of the transept façades, was designed and largely built in the nineties. Dominating Barcelona with its four extraordinary towers—not finally completed until after Gaudí’s death in 1926—this façade, begun in 1891, breaks quite sharply with the Neo-Gothic of Villar’s crypt and his own chevet. The portals with their steep gables have a generically Gothic _ordonnance_; but the extraordinary profusion of sculpture, mostly executed after 1903, gives a highly novel flavour. While conventional enough as regards the figures, this is otherwise either naturalistically floral or else meltingly abstract. It resembles the Art Nouveau in many minor details, but is generally bolder in scale, more fully three-dimensional, and, in places, somewhat nightmarish.

Although only about two-thirds as tall as the cluster of towers intended by Gaudí to rise over the crossing, the four openwork spires above this façade—with the two in the centre taller than those on the sides—reach a wholly disproportionate height in relation to the roof that should ultimately cover the still unbuilt transept. At the top they break out into fantastically plastic finials whose multi-planar surfaces are covered with a mosaic of broken tiling in brilliant colours. The prototypes for these finials are the chimney-pots of the Palau Güell, but here their note of free fantasy is raised to monumental scale. The inspiration of the towers, so remote in character from anything that the Art Nouveau ever produced, came from certain native buildings which Gaudí had seen in Africa: these strange primitive[390] forms he first exploited in a project of 1892-3 for the Spanish Franciscan Mission in Tangier which was never executed.

_In posse_ the Sagrada Familia is perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical monument of the last hundred years; beside it such a suave late example of monumental Neo-Gothic in England as Liverpool Cathedral, begun by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1903, lacks both vitality and originality of expression, if not nobility of scale. However, Gaudí’s church still remains a fragment, and a very incoherent one at that, even though he prepared in 1925, the year before his death, a brilliant new project for the nave. Gaudí really stands or falls by the few secular buildings that he was able to carry to completion, beginning with the Palau Güell of 1886-9 (Plate 96B), and not, as many compatriots assume, by the unrealized—perhaps unrealizable—plans for the Sagrada Familia. (Construction has gone slowly forward, however, on the other transept for a decade now.)

Gaudí’s next Barcelona mansion after the Palau Güell, that built at 48 Carrer de Casp for the heirs of Pedro Mártir Calvet in 1898-1904, is much less impressive. Baroque rather than medieval in its antecedents, this is interesting chiefly for the detailing of the ironwork; but even that is no more remarkable here than that at the Palau Güell of a decade earlier. It is of interest, however, as illustrating the support which Gaudí received all along from his fellow citizens, that the Casa Calvet was awarded a prize in 1901 as the best new façade in Barcelona, quite as Guimard’s Castel Béranger was premiated three years earlier in Paris.

A wholly new spirit, quite comparable in its total originality to the Art Nouveau, first appears in the work that Gaudí did for Don Eusebio Güell at the Park Güell (now the Municipal Park of Barcelona), carried out over the years 1900-14, and in the walls and the gate he built in 1901-2 for the suburban estate of Don Hermenegildo Miralles in Las Corts de Sarriá. In the latter all the forms are curved and no stylistic reminiscence whatsoever remains, but it is a production of minor importance compared to the park. The park is mostly landscaping, but partly architecture in that it includes several small buildings and much subsidiary construction. A sort of Neo-Romantic naturalism, exceeding in fantasy that of the most exotic landscape gardening of the eighteenth century, controls the whole conception. Sinuous and megalomaniac near-Doric colonnades of concrete support a sort of flat vault that is of great interest technically;[391] yet these colonnades also suggest artificial ruins of the eighteenth-century sort raised to giant scale. The other porticoes and grottoes, however, recall no architecture of the past. Their rubble columns seem rather to emulate slanting tree-trunks, but in fact their profiles were worked out statically with the most careful study of the forces involved.

The ranges of curving benches surrounding the great open terrace over the Doric hypostyle, although covered with a mosaic of the most heterogeneous bits and pieces of broken faience, seem like congelations of the waves of the sea; the roofs of the lodges, also tile-covered, toss in the air like cockscombs. A strange biological plasticity, rather like that of the small-scale carved detail of Horta’s or Guimard’s buildings very much enlarged, turns whole structures into malleable masses as in some Gulliverian dream of vegetable or animal elements grown to monumental size. Everything but the ironwork is moulded in three dimensions, and even the ironwork tends towards a heavy scale more comparable to that of the structural members of metal used in Belgian or French work of the day than to the delicacy of Art Nouveau decorative detail.

Gaudí’s major secular works belong to the same years as the execution of the park. It is hard to believe that the Casa Batlló at 43 Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona, a small block of flats, is not a completely new structure but a remodelling carried out in 1905-7. This fact perhaps explains the relative flatness of the façade. Yet Gaudí made the lower storeys extraordinarily plastic and open, using a bony articulation of curvilinear stone members, and the high roof in front that masks the roof terrace is of even more cockscomb-like character than those on his park lodges (Plate 136). The upper storeys of the façade glitter with a fantastic plaquage of broken coloured glass considerably more subtle in tonality than his usual mosaic of faience fragments.[392] But architecturally the façade is handled more like Horta’s, with most of the windows nearly rectangular even though bulging balconettes of metal project at their bases. The effect, as with Horta, is slightly Neo-Rococo. But the sort of Rococo which this façade recalls is not circumspect French eighteenth-century work but the lusher mode that was exploited in Bavaria and Austria—and still more appositely in Portugal and Spain. The entire wall surface seems to be in motion, and all its edges waver and wind in a way that even interior panelling did rarely in eighteenth-century France. This effect of total motion is even more notable in the interiors, which seem to have been hollowed out by the waves of the sea.

The rear façade of the Casa Batlló is remarkable for its openness. The wide window-walls in the paired flats open on to sinuous balconies extending all the way across. Above, there is a simpler plastic cresting than on the front; over this the curious forms of the chimney-pots provide a range of abstract sculptural features covered with polychrome tiling, always a favourite terminal theme of Gaudí’s.

Figure 35. Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Casa Milá, 1905-10, plan of
typical floor
]

Much larger than the Casa Batlló is the edifice built for Roser Segimon de Milá in 1905-7 at 92 Passeig de Gracia, appropriately known in Barcelona as ‘La Pedrera’ (the quarry). Surrounding two more or less circular courts, this large block of flats occupies an obtuse corner site, and the entire plan is worked out in curves as well as all the elements of the exterior (Figure 35). The façade of the Casa Milá is not a thin plane, curling like paper at the edges and pierced with squarish holes like that of the Casa Batlló; instead ranges of balconies heavier than those on the rear of the Casa Batlló sway in and out like the waves of the sea beneath the foamlike crest of the roof, making the whole edifice a very complex plastic entity (Plate 137A). From a distance La Pedrera looks as if it were all freely modelled in clay; in fact, it is executed in cut stone with boldly hammered surfaces that appear to result from natural erosion.

There is no external polychromy of glass or tile here, and the frescoed colour used on the court walls has suffered such serious deterioration that it is difficult to know what it was like originally. On the other hand, Gaudí’s detail was never more carefully studied nor more consistent; there are no straight lines at all, and in the forms of the piers rising from the ground to support the balconies of the first storey he suggested natural formations with real success (Plate 135B). These elements look as if they had been produced by the action of sea and weather rather than by the chisel, quite as does much of the mid-twentieth-century sculpture of Henry Moore.

The marine note is seen at its strongest and most naturalistic in the ironwork however. Strewn over the balcony parapets and across various openings, like seaweed over the rocks and sand of the seashore, the railings and grilles are full of intense organic vitality with none of the graceful droopiness of Guimard’s Métro entrances. Gaudí’s metalwork frequently suggests the work of various mid-twentieth-century sculptors in welded metal, quite as his handling of masonry does later sculpture in stone. Indeed, his iron grilles often exceed such sculptors’ metalwork in richness and variety of form, as also in the fine hand-craftsmanship of the execution.

The detailing on the Casa Milá, whether of the masonry or the ironwork, avoids the nightmarish overscaling of the somewhat similar elements at the Parc Güell, and also the coarseness of the broken faience mosaic surfaces that he used so much there and elsewhere but here restricted to the roof-tops. As regards the masonry, moreover, it is really wrong to speak of detailing, for the very fabric of the structure, not just its edges and its trimmings as on the Casa Batlló, has been completely moulded to the architect’s plastic will. Whether or not it be correct to consider the Casa Milá an example of the Art Nouveau—and technically it is not—La Pedrera remains one of the greatest masterpieces of the curvilinear mode of 1900, rivalled in quality only by the finest of Sullivan’s skyscrapers (Plate 119), which it does not, of course, resemble visually at all.

Despite the esteem in which his work has always been held by his fellow-citizens of Barcelona, Gaudí had few local imitators of consequence. However, such detailing on early twentieth-century buildings there as may appear at first to be conventionally Art Nouveau is often in fact a bit Gaudian. Only his assistants Francisc Berenguer (1866-1914) and J. M. Jujol Gibert (1879-1949) seem to have understood Gaudí’s mature style. At least the house by Jujol at 335 Diagonal in Barcelona, though quite small and simple, and the Bodega Güell at Garraf of 1913 by Berenguer are of a quality worthy of comparison with Gaudí’s own best work.[393] The big Palau de la Musica Catalana, built by Luis Domenech Montaner (1850-1923) in 1908, is a very extravagant example of the architecture of the period, bold and coarse and rich, but with none of Gaudí’s personal flair and integrity.

In Glasgow Mackintosh after 1908 was a prophet with far less honour than ‘Greek’ Thomson had received there in an earlier day. But the countercurrent that he had helped to set going on the Continent was in full swing, particularly in Austria and in Germany (see Chapters 20 and 21). Even in Horta’s own Brussels, Josef Hoffmann had been called from Vienna as early as 1905 to build the suburban Stoclet mansion (Plate 154A) at 373 Avenue de Tervueren (see Chapter 21).

Despite the ephemeral nature of much of its production and the completeness with which it was ultimately rejected everywhere, the Art Nouveau has very great historical importance. The Art Nouveau offered the first international programme for a basic renewal of architecture that the nineteenth century actually set out to realize. Most earlier programmes, moreover, even if not primarily revivalistic, aimed chiefly at the reform of architecture; this was still true of Voysey and his English contemporaries in these very years, though not, of course, of Sullivan and Wright, working in isolation in the American Middle West. Thus the Art Nouveau was actually the first stage of modern architecture in Europe, if modern architecture be understood as implying, before anything else, the total rejection of historicism.

The proto-modernity of earlier stages of nineteenth-century architectural development is almost always ambiguous, since the leaders of the various successive movements rarely intended to break with the past entirely. The characteristic ideal of nineteenth-century architects, as of their late eighteenth-century predecessors, had been to react against what they considered the decadence of the building arts current in their day by returning to the principles of some earlier and supposedly purer or more vital age. The very considerable amount of innovation that many European architects before Horta introduced in their work was not exactly unconscious; but it was rather a matter of achieving personal expression by adapting old forms to new needs, new materials, and new methods of construction than of creating a wholly original modern style.

Well before the nineties a very few men had consciously sought absolute originality and total freedom from the disciplines of the past. But such architects found little or no public support for their programmes of architectural revolution nor even fellow-artists to share in their highly individualistic campaigns. After the relatively universal acceptance of the doctrines of Romantic Classicism there had followed chiefly a succession and a multiplication of divergences; now, in the nineties, a real pattern of convergence appeared. But this convergence was premature. The renewal of ornament and of the accessories of architecture outran the renewal of the more basic elements of the art of building towards which the technical developments of the nineteenth century had been so inevitably leading.

Thus the Art Nouveau stands apart both from the architecture of the preceding hundred years and from the modern architecture of the following sixty which extends down to the present. It did not bring the one to an end, as the profusion of so-called ‘traditional’ buildings of the early twentieth century makes very evident (see Chapter 24), nor did it provide much more than a preface to the major new developments that mark the early decades of the present century (see Chapters 18-21). That the Art Nouveau was completely rejected on principle by ‘traditionalists’ is not surprising: it was the first serious attack on the position they continued to maintain. But the very rapidity with which the Art Nouveau rose to popularity and descended to vulgarization encouraged its denigration in the name of ‘taste’ by almost all other architects soon after it reached its climax around 1900. In recompense, interest in the Art Nouveau began to revive early, by the early thirties, after a much shorter period of neglect than other phases of nineteenth-century architectural development have undergone and are still undergoing.

The place of the Art Nouveau in the story of modern architecture, if only as an episode of youthful wild-oat-sowing, is now well established. Most of its exponents actually lived long enough to receive in their later years embarrassing praise for youthful work they had quite disowned if not forgotten. It is a curious paradox that although most of the leaders of the Art Nouveau survived for decades—and Van de Velde died only in 1957—not one except Gaudí[394] maintained after 1910 the position of relative pre-eminence that had been his in 1900. A wholly new cast of characters, many of them no younger, came to the fore in the first decade of the twentieth century; they constitute the first generation of modern architects, properly speaking.

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