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unpublished, see _Perspecta_, 6 (1961), 28-33.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.

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