Chapter 7: )

In 1894, just as the Art Nouveau was reaching France, ferro-concrete was used for the first time in a structure of some modest architectural pretension by J.-E.-A. de Baudot[396] (1836-1915) for a school in the Rue de Sévigné in Paris. This is overshadowed in interest, however, by the church he began to build in 1897. Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre at 2 Place des Abbesses in Paris has very little connexion with the Art Nouveau except for its drastic novelty. On the contrary, de Baudot employed for his structural skeleton very much simplified Gothic forms. Actually, it is incorrect to call the material used here _béton armé_; it is more properly _ciment armé_ since there is no coarse aggregate as in concrete. Like his master Viollet-le-Duc’s projects, Saint-Jean is curious rather than impressive and not at all to be compared in intrinsic interest with Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. Worth noting, however, is the use of faience mosaic to decorate the concrete structural members, something de Baudot had already tried out on his earlier school. The authorities were dubious of the strength of de Baudot’s structure, as well they might have been considering the iron-like delicacy of the membering, and a hiatus of several years held up the construction after 1899, the church being completed only in 1902-4. As has been mentioned already, the contractor was Contamin working with Soubaux, his partner of the period.

Before Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre was finally finished in 1904, Perret had already demonstrated the architectural possibilities of the new material rather more effectively in the block of flats that he built in 1902-3 at 25 bis Rue Franklin in Paris. Despite the echo of the Art Nouveau already noted in the foliage patterns of faience mosaic filling the wall-panels on the exterior, most of the interest of the building resides in its structure and its planning. Like that of Anatole de Baudot’s church, the structure is visibly a discrete framework, but made up entirely of vertical and horizontal elements with no curved members of either Gothic or Art Nouveau inspiration. However, the concrete is nowhere exposed but always covered with glazed tile sheathing. Within the wall-panels the windows are crisply outlined by plain projecting bands of tile; this provides an early instance of that _encadrement_, or framing, on which Perret came to insist in all his work after the mid twenties.

The skeletal structure of 25 bis Rue Franklin allowed great freedom in planning (Figure 36). Around a small court, sunk into the front of the building, the principal living areas of each flat all open into one another, somewhat as in Wright’s Hickox house of 1900 but with less spatial unification (Figure 31); the result is closer to Horta’s treatment of the main floor of his Aubecq house of 1900 in Brussels (Figure 34).

The next year Perret built another block of flats at 83 Avenue Niel in Paris with an internal skeleton not of concrete but of metal, and façades of stone treated somewhat like those of his Art Nouveau flats of the previous year in the Avenue Wagram (see Chapter 17). He returned, however, at once to the use of ferro-concrete and rarely deserted it again.

The Garage Ponthieu, which was built in 1905-6 in the Rue de Ponthieu in Paris, is a much more striking example of the possibilities of the new material than the earlier blocks of flats; moreover, the concrete is here exposed (Plate 139A). Inside, galleries carried along both sides of the L-shaped space provide a second level for parking motor cars and the whole interior is almost as light and open as if it were built of metal, thus recalling a little de Baudot’s church. The façade, likewise, is as skeletal as if executed with a metal frame. But Perret’s determination, somewhat comparable to Sullivan’s in the Wainwright Building in St Louis of fifteen years before, to organize the expression of a new type of construction along basically Classical lines is as evident as the maximal fenestration. The thin slab which projects at the top provides a sort of cornice and the range of small windows underneath it a sort of frieze, while the arrangement of the elements of the façade below is very formal indeed. The rose-window-like glazing of the big central panel is somewhat rudimentary and rather less Classical in feeling than the rest, but the essentials of Perret’s concrete aesthetic are all adumbrated here as they were not in the more tentative block of flats in the Rue Franklin.

In the solid, marble-sheathed façade of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Perret’s largest and most conspicuous early work, his classicizing intentions are even more evident, but the expression of concrete-skeleton structure is much less complete; these intentions are underlined, moreover, by the large stylized reliefs by Antoine Bourdelle that provide the only external decoration. Originally, in late 1910, the commission for this theatre was given to Van de Velde. He at once proposed that it should be built of ferro-concrete with the Perret firm as contractors. During the course of the following year Perret proposed various changes in the plan to make more practical its construction with a concrete skeleton. When he later offered an alternative design for the façade this was preferred by Van de Velde because it seemed then so expressive of the underlying structure, as it hardly does to posterity. By September Van de Velde made a final report as consulting architect and withdrew completely. Needless to say, there has been controversy ever since as to the degree of Perret’s responsibility for this major monument of twentieth-century Paris; as built, however, there can be little question that it is very largely of his design. How different a theatre by Van de Velde would have been is at least suggested by the one that he erected in 1914 for the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (see Chapter 20).

Figure 36. Auguste Perret: Paris, block of flats, 25 bis Rue Franklin,
1902-3, plan
]

The foyer of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées expresses the possibilities of ferro-concrete in a more architectural way than do the interiors of the earlier block of flats and the garage. The actual structural members of the skeleton are visible in the free-standing columns, as are also the beams that they support; the walls are very evidently only thin panels between the piers. A few simple mouldings are used to assimilate the new expression to the conventions of academic design—too few to satisfy contemporaries, though too many for later taste.

There is less clarity of expression in the great auditorium because of the profusion of murals contributed by various Symbolists and Neo-Impressionists—Maurice Denis and K.-X. Roussel most notably—and by the over-all gilding of the principal structural members, which are also elaborated by semi-Classical detailing. Even so, the fact that the dome is carried on the four pairs of tall slender columns is very evident, and the swinging curves of the successive balconies give early evidence of the ease with which ferro-concrete lends itself to bold cantilevering.

The presumed necessity of achieving monumentality undoubtedly compromised the purity of Perret’s expression of structure throughout the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. During the War, which followed so soon after the inauguration of the theatre in 1913, an important industrial commission of Perret’s produced what would be for the next generation of architects a more exemplary work. The warehouses built at Casablanca in North Africa in 1915-16—there are also others there of 1919—required no representational display; they are almost ‘pure’ engineering in concrete. But the lightness of their walls, pierced with abstract patterns formed by ventilating holes, and the elegance of their thin shell vaults of segmental section displayed the potentialities of a quite new structural aesthetic, at once delicate and precise, with no echoes at all of the massive masonry buildings of the past.

The interior of the Esders Clothing Factory at 78 Avenue Philippe-Auguste in Paris, erected just after the War in 1919, and several smaller industrial buildings for the metal-working firm of Wallut & Grange at Montataire, Oise, of 1919-21 were more readily studied by younger architects and, in the case of the Esders factory, much grander in scale than the North African warehouses. Even more elegant than the warehouses, and equally ‘pure’, was the atelier of the decorator Durand built in Paris in the Rue Olivier-Métra in 1922. This has a shell vault rising from the floor broken, along one side only, by a long skylight over widely spaced ribs that continue the curve of the vault.

By this time, of course, ferro-concrete was in general use for industrial building throughout most of the western world. In France the vast parabolic-vaulted aircraft hangar at Orly, Seine, designed by the engineer Eugène Freyssinet (1879-1962) in 1916, overshadowed in size and boldness anything built by Perret. This very exceptional utilitarian construction, magnificent in form yet quite without architectural pretension, was destroyed during the Second World War. To Tony Garnier’s work in Lyons we shall turn later.

In America Frank Lloyd Wright used ferro-concrete for his modest E.Z. Polish Factory in Chicago in 1905, just as Ernest L. Ransome was completing the first mature example of a large plant of ferro-concrete frame construction, the United Shoe Machinery Plant in Beverly, Mass., begun in 1903.[397] All over the Middle West, moreover, grain elevators[398] were rising in the form of gigantic linked cylinders. In Switzerland the great engineer Robert Maillart (1872-1940) in his factories and bridges was using concrete in several new ways as different from the elevators as from the usual timber-like frames of the French and the Americans or the shell vaults of Perret and Freyssinet. Everywhere the importance of ferro-concrete as the prime building material of the twentieth century was receiving increasing recognition; for it was a material more universally available than structural steel and also so elastic in its potentialities that these have hardly even yet been adequately explored.[399] In the early twenties, when a younger generation of architects all over Europe turned their major attention to ferro-concrete as the most modern of building materials, Perret was the architect who had the most to offer them—how limited had been Wright’s exploitation of concrete up to this time we shall shortly see (see