Modern Architecture PDF

Modern Architecture
Oxford History of Art
Alan Colquhoun was born in 1921 and

studied architecture in Edinburgh and
London. He was in partnership with
J. H. Miller from 1961 until 1988. He is
currently Professor Emeritus in the
School of Architecture at Princeton
University. His other publications

include Essays in Architecture: Modern
Architecture and Historical Change and
Modernity and the Classical Tradition:
Architectural Essays 19801987.

Titles in the Oxford History of Art series are up-to-date, fully illustrated introductions to
a wide variety of subjects written by leading experts in their eld. They will appear
regularly, building into an interlocking and comprehensive series. In the list below,
published titles appear in bold.
WESTERN ART
Archaic and Classical
Greek Art
Robin Osborne
Classical Art
From Greece to Rome
Mary Beard &
John Henderson
Imperial Rome and
Christian Triumph
Jas Elsner
Early Medieval Art
Lawrence Nees
Medieval Art
Veronica Sekules
Art in Renaissance Italy
Evelyn Welch
Northern European Art
Susie Nash
Early Modern Art
Nigel Llewellyn
Art in Europe 17001830
Matthew Craske
Modern Art 18511929
Richard Brettell
After Modern Art
19452000
David Hopkins
Contemporary Art
WESTERN
ARCHITECTURE
Greek Architecture
David Small
Roman Architecture
Janet Delaine
Early Medieval
Architecture
Roger Stalley
Medieval Architecture
Nicola Coldstream
Renaissance Architecture
Christy Anderson
Baroque and Rococo
Architecture
Hilary Ballon
European Architecture
17501890
Barry Bergdoll
Modern Architecture
Alan Colquhoun
Contemporary
Architecture
Anthony Vidler
Architecture in the United
States
Dell Upton
WORLD ART
Aegean Art and
Architecture
Donald Preziosi &
Louise Hitchcock
Early Art and Architecture
of Africa
Peter Garlake
African Art
John Picton
Contemporary African Art
Olu Oguibe
African-American Art
Sharon F. Patton
Nineteenth-Century
American Art
Barbara Groseclose
Twentieth-Century
American Art
Erika Doss
Australian Art
Andrew Sayers
Byzantine Art
Robin Cormack
Art in China
Craig Clunas
East European Art
Jeremy Howard
Ancient Egyptian Art
Marianne Eaton-Krauss
Indian Art
Partha Mitter
Islamic Art
Irene Bierman
Japanese Art
Karen Brock
Melanesian Art
Michael OHanlon
Mesoamerican Art
Cecelia Klein
Native North American

Art
Janet Berlo & Ruth Phillips
Polynesian and
Micronesian Art
Adrienne Kaeppler
South-East Asian Art
John Guy
Latin American Art
WESTERN DESIGN
Twentieth-Century Design
Jonathan Woodham
American Design
Jeffrey Meikle
Nineteenth-Century
Design
Gillian Naylor
Fashion
Christopher Breward
PHOTOGRAPHY
The Photograph
Graham Clarke
American Photography
Miles Orvell
Contemporary
Photography
WESTERN SCULPTURE
Sculpture 19001945
Penelope Curtis
Sculpture Since 1945
Andrew Causey
THEMES AND GENRES
Landscape and Western
Art
Malcolm Andrews
Portraiture
Shearer West
Eroticism and Art
Alyce Mahon
Beauty and Art
Elizabeth Prettejohn
Women in Art
REFERENCE BOOKS
The Art of Art History:
A Critical Anthology
Donald Preziosi (ed.)
Modern
Architecture
Alan Colquhoun
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Alan Colquhoun 2002
First published 2002 by Oxford University Press
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1
Art Nouveau 18901910
13
Chapter 2
Organicism versus Classicism: Chicago 18901910
35
Chapter 3
Culture and Industry: Germany 190714
57
Chapter 4
The Urn and the Chamberpot: Adolf Loos 190030
73
Chapter 5
Expressionism and Futurism
87
Chapter 6
The Avant-gardes in Holland and Russia
Chapter 7
Return to Order: Le Corbusier and Modern Architecture
109
in France 192035
137
Chapter 8
Weimar Germany: the Dialectic of the Modern 192033
159
Chapter 9
From Rationalism to Revisionism: Architecture in

Italy 192065
Chapter 10
183
Neoclassicism, Organicism, and the Welfare State:

Architecture in Scandinavia 191065
193
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
From Le Corbusier to Megastructures:

Urban Visions 193065
209
Pax Americana: Architecture in America 194565
231
Notes
255
Further Reading
264
Timeline
270
List of Illustrations
277
Index
282
Acknowledgements
Many people haveknowingly or unknowinglycontributed to the

making of this book. But, for reading and commenting upon various
chapters I am particularly indebted to Jean-Louis Cohen, Esther Da
Costa Meyer, Hubert Damisch, Hal Foster, Jacques Gubler, Robert
Gutman, Michael J. Lewis, Sarah Linford, Steven A. Mansbach,
Arno Mayer, Guy Nordensen, Antoine Picon, and Mark Wigley. I
owe a special debt of gratitude to Mary McLeod, who read and offered
valuable advice on the entire manuscript, and to John Farnham and
Can Bilsel for their help, both practical and intellectual, at crucial
moments in its preparation. I would also like to thank my editors at
Oxford University Press, Simon Mason and Katherine Reeve, for their
advice and encouragement. Last but not least, I would like to thank
Frances Chen and her staff in the library of the Princeton University
School of Architecture, for their unfailing kindness and help.
During the preparation of the book I received a generous scholarship from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a Senior Samuel
H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts,
the National Gallery, Washington, DC, both of which I gratefully
acknowledge.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
The term modern architecture is ambiguous. It can be understood to

refer to all buildings of the modern period regardless of their ideological basis, or it can be understood more specically as an architecture
conscious of its own modernity and striving for change. It is in the
latter sense that it has generally been dened in histories of contemporary architecture, and the present book follows this tradition.
Already in the early nineteenth century, there was wide dissatisfaction
with eclecticism among architects, historians, and critics. This welldocumented attitude justies a history of modern architecture
concerned primarily with reformist, avant-garde tendencies, rather
than one that attempts to deal with the whole of architectural production as if it operated within a non-ideological, neutral eld.
It is in the space between the idealist utopias of the historical avantgardes and the resistances, complexities, and pluralities of capitalist
culture that this book seeks to situate itself. Though not attempting to
be in any way encyclopedic, the narrative follows an overall chronological sequence, and tries to be, perhaps, less certain in its outcome and
less triumphalist than those of most previous histories of modernism.
The book consists of a number of essays that can be read either as selfcontained narratives or as part of a larger whole, each dealing with a
cluster of related themes reecting an important moment in the confrontation of architecture with the external conditions of modernity. If
it is still largely a history of the masters, that is because that was the
nature of modernism itself, despite its many claims to anonymity.
A word on terminology: I usemore or less interchangeablythe
terms modern architecture, Modernism, the avant-garde, to mean
the progressive movements of the 1910s and 1920s as a whole. I also
occasionally use the term historical avant-garde, which has the effect
of historicizing the movement and distinguishing it from contemporary practice. I do not follow Peter Brger (Theory of the Avant-Garde,
1984), who, in the context of Dada photomontage, distinguishes
between an avant-garde that sought to change the status of art within
the relations of production and a Modernism that sought only to
change its forms. That these two polar positions can be applied to
architecture is undeniable. But the line between them is hard to dene,
9
and even the work of the Left Constructivists and Marxists like Hannes
Meyer does not, in my opinion, escape aestheticism. This is hardly surprising, since, before it could be separated from the classicalacademic
theory of the arts, aesthetics had rst to become an autonomous category. Apart from the general terms mentioned abovewhich are useful
precisely because of their semantic vaguenessother terms are used,
either to dene well-attested sub-movements, such as Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl, LEsprit Nouveau, and the Neue Sachlichkeit
(New Objectivity), or migratory tendencies within the overall phenomenon of modernism, such as organicism, neoclassicism,
Expressionism, functionalism, and rationalism. I have tried to explain
what I mean by these slippery terms in the appropriate chapters.
From a certain perspective, general terms such as modernism can
also be applied to Art Nouveauas, indeed, the temporal span of this
book implies. To try to avoid such ambiguities would be to make
unsustainable claims for logic. Art Nouveau was both the end and the
beginning of an era, and its achievements as well as its limitations were
the result of this Janus-like perspective.
Many aspects of Modernist theory still seem valid today. But much
in it belongs to the realm of myth, and is impossible to accept at face
value. The myth itself has now become history, and demands critical
interpretation. One of the main ideas motivating the protagonists of
the Modern Movement was the Hegelian notion that the study of
history made it possible to predict its future course. But it is scarcely
possible any longer to believeas the Modernist architects appear to
have believedthat the architect is a kind of seer, uniquely gifted with
the power of discerning the spirit of the age and its symbolic forms.
Such a belief was predicated on the possibility of projecting the conditions of the past onto the present. For progressive-minded architects of
the nineteenth century and their twentieth-century successors, it
seemed essential to create a unied architectural style that would reect
its age, just as previous styles had reected theirs. This meant the rejection of an academic tradition that had degenerated into eclecticism,
imprisoned in a history that had come to an end and whose forms could
only be endlessly recycled. It did not imply a rejection of tradition as
such. The architecture of the future would return to the true tradition,
in which, it was believed, a harmonious and organic unity had existed
between all the cultural phenomena of each age. In the great historical
periods artists had not been free to choose the style in which they
worked. Their mental and creative horizons had been circumscribed by
a range of forms that constituted their entire universe. The artist came
into a world already formed. The study of history seemed to reveal that
these periods constituted indivisible totalities. On the one hand, there
were elements unique to each period; on the other, the organic unity
that bound these elements together was itself a universal. The new age
10 introduction
must exhibit the cultural totality characteristic of all historical periods.

The question was never asked how a cultural totality, which by denition had depended on an involuntary collective will, could now be
achieved voluntarily by a number of individuals. Nor did it ever seem to
have occurred to those who held this view that what separated the past
from the present might be precisely the absence of this inferred organic
unity. According to the model of the organic unity of culture, the task of
the architect was rst to uncover and then create the unique forms of
the age. But the possibility of such an architecture depended on a denition of modernity that ltered out the very factors that differentiated it
most strongly from earlier traditions: capitalism and industrialization.
William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, had
rejected both capitalism and machine production, a position that was at
least consistent. But the theorists of the German Werkbund, while they
rejected capitalism, wanted to retain industrialization. They condemned what they saw as the materialistic values of both Marxism and
Western liberal democracy, but sought an alternative that would
combine the benets of modern technology with a return to the preindustrial community values that capitalism was in the process of
destroying. The Modern Movement was both an act of resistance to
social modernity and an enthusiastic acceptance of an open technological future. It longed for a world of territorial and social xity, while at
the same time embracing, incompatibly, an economy and technology in
ux. It shared this belief in a mythical third way between capitalism
and communism with the Fascist movements of the 1930s, and though
it would be completely wrong to brand it with the crimes of Fascism, it
is surely no accident that the period of its greatest intensity coincided
with the anti-democratic, totalitarian political movements that were
such a dominant feature of the rst half of the twentieth century.
The conclusion would seem inescapable that the cultural unity and
shared artistic standardswhether deriving from folk or from aristocratic traditionsdemanded by the modern movement from its
inception were increasingly out of step with the political and economic
realities of the twentieth century. Based on an idealist and teleological
conception of history, modernist theory seems radically to have misread the very Zeitgeist it had itself invoked, ignoring the complex and
indeterminate nature of modern capitalism, with its dispersal of power
and its constant state of movement.
The revolution of modernismpartly voluntary, partly involuntaryhas irrevocably changed the course of architecture. But in the
process it has itself become transformed. Its totalizing ambitions can
no longer be sustained. Yet, the adventure of the Modern Movement is
still capable of acting as an inspiration for a present whose ideals are so
much less clearly dened. It is the aim of this book to sharpen our
image of that adventure.
introduction 11
Art Nouveau
1890-1910
1 Victor Horta
View within the octagonal
stair hall, Hotel Van Eetvelde,
1895, Brussels
The real structure is masked
by a thin membrane of iron
and coloured glass. The
space is lit from the roof.
In 1892 the short-lived but vigorous Art Nouveau movement was

launched in Belgium and quickly spread, first to France and then to the
rest of Europe. Its inspiration came from the English Arts and Crafts
movement and developments in wrought iron technology, particularly as
interpreted by the French architect and theorist, Eugene-Emmanuel Violletle-Duc (181479). The movement was closely associated with the rise of a
new industrial bourgeoisie on the one hand and, on the other, with the
many movements for political independence mfin-de-siecle Europe. It
spread rapidly by means of journals such as The Studio, which included
high-quality, mass-produced images, made possible by the new printing techniques of offset lithography and photolithography which came
into commercial use in the i88os and 18908.
Art Nouveau was the first systematic attempt to replace the classical
system of architecture and the decorative arts that had been handed
down from the seventeenth century and was enshrined in the teaching
of the Beaux-Arts academies. The new movement abandoned the
post-Renaissance convention of realism, drawing inspiration from
styles outside the classical canonfrom Japan, from the Middle Ages,
and even from Rococo. Though it lasted barely 15 years, many of its precepts were incorporated into the avant-garde movements that
followed.
Like all progressive movements of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Art Nouveau was caught in an inherent
dilemmahow to preserve the historical values of art under conditions of industrial capitalism. The Industrial Revolution had radically
altered both the individual and the collective conditions of artistic
production. In the face of this situation Art Nouveau artists and
architects reacted in a way that would become typical of later avantgardes: they leapt over recent history to a remote and idealized past in
order to find an art that could be historically justified and yet be
absolutely new.
Although Art Nouveau was preceded and profoundly influenced
by the Arts and Crafts movement, the two continued in parallel, each
modifying the other. In Austria, and to some extent in England, there
was a fusion of the two movements. In Germany the influence of the
13
Arts and Crafts proved the stronger of the two, leading to the
Deutscher Werkbund and the alliance between industry and the
decorative arts.
Antecedents
The reform of the industrial arts

Art Nouveau was the outcome of a transformation in the industrial, or
decorative, arts that had been initiated in England and France earlier
in the nineteenth century. As early as 1835 a parliamentary commission
had been set up in England to study the problem of the decline in artistic quality of machine-made objects and the consequent damage to the
export market. In 1851 a Great Exhibition of Industry of all Nations
was organized in London, following a similar but abortive project in
France. (France had led the way in industrial exhibitions but these had
been exclusively national.) The Great Exhibition was a huge commercial and political success, but it conrmed the low quality of decorative
products not only in England but in all the industrial countries, compared to those of the East. This realization prompted a succession of
initiatives both in England and France . In England, the Victoria and
Albert Museum and the Department of Practical Art were founded in
1852, and a spate of books on the decorative arts appeared, including
the inuential Grammar of Ornament (1856) by Owen Jones (180974).
In France, the Comit central des beaux-arts appliqus lindustrie
was founded (also in 1852), followed by the Union centrale des beauxarts appliqus lndustrie (1864), which later became the Union
centrale des arts dcoratifs.
Though originating from the same concerns, these institutional
reforms resulted in a different development in each country. In
England, after the government initiatives of the 1830s, the reform of
the arts became a private affair, dominated by a single individual, the
artist and poet William Morris (183496). For Morris, as for the
philosopher-critic John Ruskin (18191900), the reform of the industrial arts was impossible under the present conditions of industrial
capitalism by which the artist was alienated from the product of his
labour. In 1861, he set up the rm of Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner to
create a context for artists to relearn the various crafts under conditions
as near as possible to those of the medieval guilds. Morriss initiative
was followed up by others, creating what was to become known as the
Arts and Crafts movement.
The situation in France was different. First there was a politically
inuential art establishment, based on the Academy, fundamentally
conservative, but aware of the need for reform and eager to promote it.1
Secondly, the abolition of the guilds during the French Revolution had
14 art nouveau 18901910
not destroyed artisanal traditions in France as thoroughly as the

Industrial Revolution had those of England. When they began experimenting with new techniques and forms in the 1870s, artists and
craftsmen working in the decorative arts such as Eugne Rousseau
(182791), Felix Bracquemond (18331914), and Emile Gall (18461904)
were able to build upon existing craft traditions. The ultimate model for
both English and French artists was the medieval guild, but in France
this model was combined with the more recent domestic tradition of
Rococo.
Viollet-le-Duc and structural rationalism

The Arts and Crafts movement and its off-shoot, the English freestyle house were to have a considerable inuence on the development
of Art Nouveau. But there was another inuence at work as wellthe
use of iron as an expressive architectural medium. The role of iron in
architecture had been central to the debates between traditionalist and
progressivepositivist architects in France throughout the nineteenth
century. The debate was stimulated by the projects of the SaintSimonian engineers and entrepreneurs who were largely responsible
for laying down the French technical infrastructure in the 1840s and
1850s, and by discussions in the progressive magazine Revue de
lArchitecture under the editorship of Csar-Denis Daly (181193). But
it was chiey through the theories and designs of Viollet-le-Duc that
iron became associated with the reform of the decorative arts, and that
an idealist decorative movement became grafted onto the positivist
structural tradition.
The career of Viollet-le-Duc had been devoted to the distillation of
the rational and vitalistic core of Gothic architecture, which he saw as
the only true basis for a modern architecture. The main precepts
Viollet bequeathed to the Art Nouveau movement were: the exposure
of the armature of a building as a visually logical system; the spatial
organization of its parts according to function rather than to rules of
symmetry and proportion; the importance of materials and their
properties as generators of form; the concept of organic form, deriving
from the Romantic movement; and the study of vernacular domestic
architecture.
Through two of his many books, Entretiens sur lArchitecture
(Lectures on Architecture) and the Dictionnaire Raisonn de lArchitecture
Franaise (Dictionary of French Architecture), Viollet-le-Duc became
the rallying point for all those opposed to the Beaux-Arts. This was
true not only in France, where alternative ateliers were set up (though
these were soon reabsorbed into the Beaux-Arts system),2 but also
elsewhere in Europe and in North America. His inuence on the Art
Nouveau movement came from both his theory and his designs.
art nouveau 18901910 15
Symbolism
Most historians3 agree that important changes took place in the intellectual climate of Western Europe in the last two decades of the
nineteenth century. The century had been dominated by a belief in
progress made possible by science and technology, a belief that found
its philosophical formulation in the movement known as Positivism
founded by Auguste Comte (17981857). In literature and art it was
Naturalism that corresponded most closely to the prevailing Positivist
frame of mind. But by the 1880s belief in Positivism had begun to
erode, together with the faith in liberal politics that had supported
it. Several political events no doubt contributed to this phenomenon,
including the terrible European economic depression that began
in 1873.
In France, the home of Positivism, the change of intellectual
climate was especially noticeable, and it was accompanied by a signicant increase in the inuence of German philosophy. In literature, the
Symbolist movement led the attack. The Symbolists held that art
should not imitate appearances but should reveal an essential underlying reality. This idea had been anticipated by Baudelaire, whose poem
Correspondences (which incorporated Emanuel Swedenborgs theory of
synaesthesia, though probably unknowingly), gives voice to the idea
that the arts are intimately related to each other at a profound level:
like long echoes which from afar become confused . . . Perfumes,
colours, and sounds respond to each other. In describing the movement, the Belgian Symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren compared German
to French thought, to the detriment of the latter: In Naturalism [is
found] the French philosophy of the Comtes and the Littrs; in
[Symbolism] the German philosophy of Kant and Fichte . . . In the
latter, the fact and the world become a mere pretext for the idea; they
are treated as appearance, condemned to incessant variability, appearing ultimately as dreams in our mind.4 The Symbolists did not reject
the natural sciences, but looked on science as the verication of subjective states of mind. As one contributor (probably Verhaeren) to the
Symbolist journal LArt Moderne said: Since the methods that were
formerly instinctive have become scientic . . . a change has been produced in the personality of artists.5
Art Nouveau in Belgium and France
Underlying formal principles

The characteristic motif of Art Nouveau is a owing plant-like form of
the kind rst found in English book illustration and French ceramic
2 Eugne Rousseau
Jardinire, 1887
The ornament seems to grow
out of the body, rather than
being added to it.
Naturalistic representation is
sacriced to an overall formal
concept.
work of the 1870s and 1880s [2].6 Common to these proto-Art

Nouveau works was the principle that in ornament the imitation of
nature should be subordinated to the organization of the plane surface.
In his book Du dessin et de la couleur (Drawing and Colour), published in
1885, the ceramicist Felix Bracquemond dened the new concept in the
following terms: Ornament does not necessarily copy nature even
when it borrows from her . . . Its indelity to her . . . [is] due to the fact
that it is solely concerned with embellishing surfaces, that it depends
on the materials it has to adorn, on the forms it has to follow without
altering them.7
In Art Nouveau, this functional dependency of ornament led to a
paradoxical reversal. Instead of merely obeying the form of the object,
ornament began to merge with the object, animating it with new life.
This had two effects: rst, the object became thought of as a single
organic entity rather than as an aggregation of separate parts, as in the
classical tradition; second, ornament was no longer thought of as space
lling, and a dialogue was set up between two positive valuesornament and empty space. The discovery of what might be called spatial
silenceprobably mainly derived from Japanese printswas one of
Art Nouveaus chief contributions to modern Western aesthetics.
In this redenition, the accepted boundary between ornament and
form became blurred. The classical attitude had been that ornament
was a supplementary form of beauty. It was the German archaeologist
Karl Btticher (180689) who rst suggested that ornament (Kunstform) was organically related to the underlying substance of the object,
giving the inert mechanical structure (Kernform) the semblance of
organic lifean idea later used by Gottfried Semper (180379) in his
book Der Stil.8 Though Art Nouveau was obviously not the direct result
3 Henry van de Velde

Chair, 1896
This chair demonstrates Van
de Veldes theory of the
integration of ornament and
structure. Taut curves and
diagonals predominate,
suggesting a structure in
dynamic balance. The
different parts of the chair
ow into each other.
of this theory, which was developed in the context of Greek antiquity, it

seems to be derived from the same nexus of ideas. The ornament on a
chair by Henry van de Velde (18631957) not only completes the structure, the two become indistinguishable, the product of an artistic will
striving for total symbolic expression [3]. In his book Formules de la
Beaut Architectonique Moderne (Principles of Modern Architectonic
Beauty) of 1917, Van de Velde described this fusion of subjective and
objective, of ornament and structure, in the following terms:
Ornament completes form, of which it is the extension, and we recognize the
meaning and justication of ornament in its function. This function consists
in structuring the form and not in adorning it . . . The relations between the
structural and dynamographic ornament and the form or surfaces must be so
intimate that the ornament will seem to have determined the form.9
In their desire to extend these principles beyond the isolated object,

Art Nouveau designers became preoccupied with the design of whole
interiors. In many rooms and ensembles individual pieces of furniture
tended to lose their identity and become absorbed into a larger spatial
and plastic unity [4].
Brussels
Art Nouveau rst emerged in Belgium, within the ambience of a
politicized and anarchist Symbolist movement in close touch with the
Parti Ouvrier Belge (POB, founded 1885). The leaders of the POB
4 Henry van de Velde

Havana Cigar Shop, 1899,
Berlin
Though this room, with its
heavy, bulging forms and its
indifference to practical
functionality, could only be
by Van de Velde, it does
illustrate a characteristic
feature of the Art Nouveau
interiorthe absorption of
individual objects into a
dominant plastic unity.
for example, the lawyers Emile Vandervelde and Jules Destrehad

intimate ties with the literary and artistic avant-garde. An educational
programme of cultural events was organized by the Section dArt of
the POBs Maison du Peuple (for example, Emile Verhaerens play Les
Aubes received its rst performance there in 1897). Inuenced by
William Morris, the Belgian Symbolist journal LArt Moderne,
founded in 1885 by Octave Maus and Edmund Picard, increasingly
advocated the application of art to daily life.
In 1892, Willy Finch (18541936) and Henry van de Velde, members
of the painters group Les XX, inaugurated a decorative art movement
based on the English Arts and Crafts Society. A year later the salon of
Les XX devoted two rooms to the decorative arts, which were thereby
associated with the ne arts rather than the industrial arts. Les XX was
superseded by Libre Esthtique in 1894. At the groups rst salon, Van
de Velde delivered a series of lectures which were published under the
title Dblaiement dArt (The Purication of Art) and established him as
the ideologue of the movement. In these lectures Van de Velde followed Morris in dening art as the expression of joy in work, but unlike
Morris he recognized the necessity of machine productiona contradiction that he was never able to resolve.
Inuential as these lectures were in spreading the movement and
providing it with a theoretical apparatus, two other gures were of
greater importance in establishing its formal language. The rst of
these, the Lige-based architect and furniture designer Gustave Serrurier-Bovy (18581910), had been the rst to introduce the work of the
Arts and Crafts movement into Belgium. He exhibited two rooms in
the 1894 and 1895 Libre Esthtique salons, a Cabinet de Travail and a
Chambre dArtisan, both characterized by a simplicity and sobriety

similar to the Arts and Crafts movement. Serrurier-Bovys work represents a distinct thread in Belgian Art Nouveau which idealized
vernacular building and advocated a simple rural lifestyle.10
The second gure was Victor Horta (18611947) whose background
differed from that of both Van de Velde and Serrurier. After receiving a
Beaux-Arts architectural training, Horta spent over ten years working
in a neoclassical style, slightly modied by Viollet-le-Ducs constructional rationalism. But in 1893already in his thirtieshe designed a
private house of startling originality for Emile Tassel, professor of
descriptive geometry at the Universit Libre of Brussels and a fellow
freemason. This was the rst in a series of houses that he built for
members of the Belgian professional elite, in which he combined
Viollet-le-Ducs principle of exposed metal structure with ornamental
motifs derived from the French and English decorative arts.
The htels Tassel, Solvay, and Van Eetvelde [1 (see page 12), 5], all
Drawing by David Dernie
5 Victor Horta
First-oor plan, Htel Van
Eetvelde, 1895, Brussels
This oor is dominated by the
octagonal stair hall, through
which the occupants must
pass when moving from one
reception room to another.
designed between 1892 and 1895, present an ingenious range of

solutions to typical narrow Brussels sites. In each, the plan was divided
from front to back into three sections, the central section containing a
top-lit staircase which became the visual and social hub of the house. In
each, the piano nobile consisted of a suite of reception rooms and conservatories with a spatial uidity that was accentuated by extensive use
of glass and mirror, somewhat recalling the theatre foyers built in Brussels in the 1880s by Alban Chambon (18471928).11 The houses were
intended for social display. In his memoirs Horta described the Htel
Solvay as a dwelling like any other . . . but with an interior characterized by an exposed metal structure and a series of glass screens giving an
extended perspective . . . for evening receptions.12 But this description
gives no idea of the sensuous and intimate language in which this social
function was embodied, spreading a veil over the architectural-real,
dissolving structure into ornament. An imaginary worldhalf
mineral, half vegetalis created, with an air of unreality enhanced by
the timeless, subaqueous light ltering down from the roof.
Hortas most important public building was the new Maison du
Peuple in Brussels of 18969 (demolished 1965). He received this commission through his domestic clients, whose social milieu and socialist
ideals he shared. As in the houses, the Beaux-Arts symmetry of the
plan is carefully undermined by asymmetrical programmatic elements.
The faade, though it appears to be a smooth undulating skin following an irregular site boundary, is in fact a classical composition
arranged round a shallow exhedra. Nonetheless, because of its continuous glazing (and in spite of its allusion to the heavily glazed Flemish
Renaissance buildings to be found in Brussels) it must have had a
shocking effect when it was built.
If architecture was a passion for Horta, for Van de Velde (who was
trained as a painter) it was more the logical culmination of the household of the arts (the phrase is Rumohrs).13 Starting from 1896, he
exhibited a number of interiors at the Libre Esthtique salon, inuenced by Serruriers rooms. In 1895 he built a house called
Bloemenwerf for his family, in Uccle, a suburb of Brussels, in which
he set out to create a domestic environment where daily life could be
infused with arthe even designed his wifes clothes. This house was
a prototype for the villas built in the Utopian artists colonies that
sprang up, mostly in the German-speaking countries, around 1900. It
represents a sort of suburban Bohemianism very different from the
elegant urban lifestyle catered for by Horta.
Paris and Nancy

The Art Nouveau movement in France was closely related to that
of Belgium, though it lacked the Belgian movements socialist
connotations. The term Art Nouveau had been in circulation in

Belgium since the 1870s, but it took on a new lease of life when, in 1895,
the German connoisseur and art dealer Siegfried (Samuel) Bing
opened a gallery in Paris called LArt Nouveau, for which Van de Velde
designed three rooms.
In France it was Hctor Guimard (18671942), just as in Belgium it
had been Horta, who integrated the new decorative principles into a
coherent architectural style. Guimard was not closely associated either
with Bing or with the decorative arts institutions in Paris, but his allegiance to Viollet-le-Duc was even stronger than that of Horta. Two
early works, the School of Sacr Cur in Paris (1895) and the Maison
Photo Filipe Ferr, Paris
6 Hctor Guimard
Maison Coilliot, 1897, Lille
This house appears to be a
paraphrase of one of the
illustrations in Viollet-leDucs Dictionnaire Raisonn.
7 Lucien Weissenburger
24 Rue Lionnais, 1903,
Nancy
The Gothic references here
are unusually explicit, even
for a style which owed so
much to the Middle Ages.
Coilliot in Lille (1897) [6], were based on illustrations in Viollets

Entretiens and the Dictionnaire. After seeing Hortas houses in
Brussels, Guimard was so impressed that he revised the drawings for
his rst large-scale work, the apartment building Castel Branger in
Paris (189498), reworking the stone mouldings and metal details with
curvilinear and plastic forms. In the interior of the Humbert de
Romans concert hall (1898, demolished 1905), and in the well-known
entrances to the Paris Mtro, Guimard carried the analogy between
metal structure and plant form further than anything found in Hortas
work.
The leading gure in the School of Nancy was the glass-worker and
ceramicist Emile Gall. His work was based on a craft tradition with
its roots in French Rococohis father, a ceramicist, having rediscovered the ceramic moulds used by the Lorraine craftsmen of the
eighteenth century. It was, however, highly innovative, deliberately
playing on the neurasthenic and decadent aspects of the Symbolist
tradition.
The architecture of the Nancy School has a distinctly literary
avour. Two houses built in 1903, one by Emile Andr (18711933) and
the other by Lucien Weissenburger (1860-1928) [7], are suggestive of
castles in a medieval romance. The slightly earlier house for the ceramicist Louis Marjorelle by Henri Sauvage (18731932), is less dependent
on literary associations, more abstract and formal, with solid stone
walls gradually dissolving into a light, transparent superstructure.
Dutch Art Nouveau and the work of H. P. Berlage

The Dutch Art Nouveau movement was split between two opposed
groups, the first inspired by the curvilinear Belgian movement,the
second associated with the more rationalist circle of Petrus Josephus
Hubertus Cuijpers (1827^1921) and the Amsterdam group Architectura
et Amicitia. This group's members included H. P. Berlage (1856-1934),
K. P. C. Bazel (1896-1923), W. Kromhaut (1864-1940), and J. L. M.
Lauweriks (1864-1932), and their affinities lay more with Viollet-le-Duc
and the Arts and Crafts movement than with Belgian and French Art
Nouveau, of which they were critical.14
After 1890, structural and rationalist tendencies became pronounced in the work of Hendrick Petrus Berlage. In both the
Diamond Workers' Building in Amsterdam (1899-1900) and the
Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1897^-1903), Berlage reduced his earlier
eclecticism to an astylar neo-Romanesque in which basic volumes are
articulated and structural materials exposed, with Art Nouveau ornament used sparingly to emphasize structural junctions. Compared to
Horta's Maison du Peuplealso a significant public buildingthe
Exchange, with its calm, expansive brick surfaces, reinforces rather
than subverts the traditional fabric of the Amsterdam with its solid
burgher-like values.
In Berlage s private houses we find the same qualities. The plan of
the Villa Henny in the Hague (1898), like many Arts and Crafts and Art
Nouveau houses, is organized round a central top-lit hall. But, unlike
the evanescent metal structure surrounding the central hall of Hortas
Hotel Van Eetvelde, Berlage s hall is defined by a brick arcade [8], with
groin vaults in the spirit of Viollet-le-Duc. The furniture, with its
structural rigour, anticipates that of De Stijl and the Constructivists.
Modernisme in Barcelona
The first signs of Modernismeas Art Nouveau was called in
Catalanseem to pre-date the Belgian movement by several years and
the Catalan movement appears to have been inspired independently by
the publications of Viollet-le-Duc and the Arts and Crafts movement.
Modernisme was more closely related to the nineteenth-century eclectic tradition than was the Art Nouveau of France and Belgium. In 1888
Lluis Domenech i Montaner (1850-1923), the most important architect
of early Modernisme, published an article entitled 'En busca de una
arquitectura nacional* ('In Search of a National Architecture'), which
shows the movement's eclectic intentions: 'Let us apply openly the
forms which recent experience and needs impose on us, enriching
them and giving them expressive form through the inspiration of
24 ART NOUVEAU 1890-1910
8 Hendrick Petrus Berlage
The ground floor of the top-l it

stair hall, Villa Henny, 1898,
the Hague
The solid, exposed-brick
structure makes a striking
contrast with the lightness
and transparency of the
equivalent stair hall in
Horta's Hotel Van Eetvelde.
nature and by the ornamental riches offered us by the buildings of

every period/15
Barcelona had grown at an even faster rate than Brussels in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The new industrial bourgeoisie
of Cataloniamen like Eusebio Giiell and the Marques de Comillassaw Modernisme as an urban symbol of national progress, as did
Art Nouveau's patrons in Belgium. But, while in Belgium the movement was associated with an anti-Catholic international socialism, in
Catalonia its affiliations were Catholic, nationalist, and politically
conservative.
In the early works of the movement, Moorish ('Mudejar') motifs
were used to suggest regional identity. This can be seen in the Casa
Vicens (187885) by Antoni Gaudi i Cornet (18521926), and the
Bodegas Giiell (1888) by Francesc Berenguer (1866-1914). Both mix
historicist 'inventions' with new structural ideas, such as the use of
exposed iron beams and catenary vaults (which Gaudi was also to use
in the Sagrada Familia).16
Catalan Modernisme was dominated by the figure of Gaudi, whose
ART NOUVEAU 1890-1910 25
9 Antoni Gaud
Chapel of the Colonia Gell,
18981914, Barcelona
The cryptthe only part of
the chapel to be built. This is
one of the most mysterious
and surreal of Gauds
buildings. Gothic structure is
reinterpreted in terms of a
biological structure that has
grown incrementally in
response to its environment.
work, however protean, seems to have been based on two simple

premises: the rst, derived from Viollet-le-Duc, was that the study of
architecture must start from the mechanical conditions of building; the
second was that the imagination of the architect should be free of all
stylistic conventions. Gauds work is often characterized by a kind of
free association in which forms suggestive of animal, vegetal or geological formations appear. In the crypt of the Chapel of the Colonia Gell
in Barcelona (18981914) [9], the structure imitates the irregular forms
of trees or spiders webs, as if, like them, it has arrived at rational ends
unconsciously. In the unnished church of the Sagrada Familia, also in
Barcelona (begun 1883), the faades look as if they have been eroded
through millennia or dipped in acid, leaving only the incomprehensible
traces of some forgotten language. The deep cultural and personal anxieties that seem to lie behind Gauds architecture were to fascinate the
Surrealists in the 1930s. At no other time could such an intimate, subjective architecture have become a popular symbol of national identity.
Austria and Germany: from Jugendstil to classicism
Vienna
The concepts that lay behind Symbolism and Art Nouveau were, as
we have seen, strongly inuenced by German Romanticism and
philosophical Idealism. One of the strongest expressions of this tendency is found in the writings of the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl
(18581905).17 According to Riegl, the decorative arts were at the origin
of all artistic expression. Art was rooted in indigenous culture, not
derived from a universal natural law. This idea meshed closely with the
ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris as well as with the aesthetic
theories of Felix Bracquemond and Van de Velde, and it stood in stark
contrast to the idea (derived from the Enlightenment) that architecture should align itself with progress, science, and the Cartesian
spirit.
In the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the conict
between these diametrically opposed concepts was exacerbated by the
political struggle between the metropolis, with its liberal and rationalist programme, and ethnic minorities seeking to assert their own
identity. For the Slav and Finno-Ugrian-speaking provinces of the
empire, the free and unattached style of Art Nouveau became an
10 Otto Wagner
Post Ofce Savings Bank,
19046, Vienna
Detail of main banking hall,
showing the use of industrial
motifs as metaphors for the
abstraction of money in
modern capitalism. In the
public faade of the same
building Wagner used
conventional allegorical
gures conforming to idealist
codes.
11 Otto Wagner
Post Office Savings Bank,

1904-6. Vienna
This detail of a light fitting
shows its industrial
metaphors.
emblem of political and cultural freedom,18 as in Catalonia, Finland,

and the Baltic states.
In Austria, the liberal, rationalist spirit was epitomized by the work
of Otto Wagner (1841-1918), the most celebrated architect of the time.
Wagner stood on the other side of the ideological divide from the
urbanist Camillo Sitte (1843-1903), whose internationally influential
book, Der Stadtebau nach seinen Kunstlerischen Grundstatzen (City
Building According to its Artistic Principles) of 1889, had promoted an
urban model of irregular, closed spaces, based on the medieval city. For
Wagner, on the contrary, the modern city should consist of a regular,
open-ended street grid containing new building types such as apartment blocks and department stores.19 In his buildings, Wagner's
rationalism reaches its peak in the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna
(1904-6). It is a rationalism, however, that does not abandon the allegorical language of classicism but extends it. In the bank we find
allegorical figurative ornament: but there are also more abstract
metaphors, such as the redundant bolt-heads on the fa9ade (the thin
marble cladding was in fact mortared to a brick wall). These, like the
functional glass and metal banking hall, are both symbols and manifestations of modernity [10,11],
In 1893 Wagner was appointed director of the School of Architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts where he came into close
contact with the younger generation of designers. His two most brilliant students were Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867-1908) and Josef
Hoffmann (1870-1956). Wagner employed Olbrich as the chief draftsman on his Stadtbahn (City Railway) project from 1894 to 1898. Due
to Olbrich s influence, decorative motifs derived from Jugendstil (as
the German Art Nouveau movement was called) began to replace
traditional ornament in Wagner's work, though without affecting its
underlying rational structureas shown in the Majolica House apartment building in Vienna (1898).
The early careers of Olbrich and Hoffman had almost identical
trajectories. They both belonged to the Wiener Secession (Vienna
Secession)a group that split from the academy in 1897an<^ both
worked with equal facility in architecture and the decorative arts.
Olbrich received the commission for the Secessions headquarters in
Vienna, and in 1899 the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse appointed
him as architect for the artists' colony at Darmstadt. In 1903 Hoffmannwith designer Kolo Moser (1868-1918)founded the Wiener
Werkstatte, a furniture workshop modelled on Charles R. Ashbee's
Guild of Handicraft in London, and conceived as a cottage industry.
The Secession marked the introduction of Jugendstil into Austria.
But after working in the curvilinear style of high Art Nouveau for
about three years, Olbrich and Hoffmann abandoned Van de Velde's
dynamic integration of ornament with structure and reverted to a more
12 Joseph Maria Olbrich

A decorated casket, 1901
The neoclassical body of this
casket, in the form of a
truncated pyramid, is
delicately incised and inlaid
with stylized ornament.
Empty space plays a positive
role.
rectilinear organization of planar surfaces and geometrical ornament

[12]. In this they showed an afnity with both Otto Wagners classicism and the work of the later Arts and Crafts designers, particularly
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (18681928), M. H. Baillie Scott
(18651945), Charles Annesley Voysey (18571941), and Charles Robert
Ashbee (18631942). The artists houses that Olbrich built at Darmstadt [13, 14] are free variations on the theme of the English free-style
house, reminiscent of Scotts work. Hoffmanns Palais Stoclet in
Brussels (190511) [15, 16], a true Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of
arta concept originating in Richard Wagners aesthetic theory) with
murals by Gustav Klimt and furniture and ttings by the architect, is
close to Mackintoshs Hill House (19023) and his House for an Art
Lover (1900) [17].
Over the next ve years, the work of both architects took another
turn, this time in the direction of classical eclecticism. Olbrichs last
house (he died of leukaemia in 1908, aged 41) is in the then newly
popular Biedermeier revival stylewith a Doric colonnade and a
vernacular roof. Hoffmanns brand of Biedermeier is lighter, and is
13 and 14 Joseph Maria

Olbrich
Two postcards, issued on the
occasion of an exhibition at
the Darmstadt artists colony
in 1904, showing a group of
Olbrichs houses in the
colony dating from between
1901 and 1904suburban
eclecticism raised to the level
of artistic frenzy.
15 Josef Hoffmann (right)

Palais Stoclet, 190511,
Brussels
The plan of this house
Hoffmanns chef-duvreis
clearly derived from that of
Mackintoshs House for an
Art Lover, but Hoffmann has
reorganized the hall so that it
bisects the house at midpoint, giving it a Beaux-Arts
symmetry. The cut-out
quality of the wall planes and
the metal trim along their
edges make the walls seem
paper thin. (This must have
been the reason why Le
Corbusier reputedly admired
this house).
16 Josef Hoffmann (right)

Palais Stoclet, 190511,
Brussels
This double-height hall is
characteristic of free-style,
Art Nouveau, and
neoclassical houses of the
period. The screen of thin,
closely spaced columns
simultaneously divides and
unites the space.
17 Charles Rennie
Mackintosh
House for an Art Lover, 1900
This design for a German
competition, dating from the
period of Mackintosh's
maximum popularity in
Austria and Germany, was
very influential. The house is
more plastic than the Palais
Stoclet. The austerity of the
Scottish vernacular (as
opposed to the softness of
Voysey's or Bail lie Scott's)
suggests an emerging
Modernist abstraction.
connected with a general trait in his workthe tendency to use a

common plastic language for architecture and the decorative arts and
to minimize the tectonic effect of gravity. According to a critic of the
time, Max Eisler, Hoffmann's later buildings were 'furniture conceived
on an architectural scale'.20
Munich and Berlin

The centre of the German Jugendstil movement was Munich, where it
was launched by the magazine Jugend in 1896. The group of designers
and architects originally associated with the movement included
Hermann Obrist (1863-1927), August Endell (1871-1925), Peter
Behrens (1868-1940), Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957), and Bruno
18 Richard Riemerschmid
Chest, 1905
This chest is typical of the
sem i-mass-prod uced
furniture designed by
Riemerschmid in the first
decade of the twentieth
century and exhibited in his
room ensembles. It is close to
some of Adolf Loos's designs,
and has the same
unpretentious elegance,
reflecting both British and
Japanese influence.
Paul (18741968). In 1897, like the Viennese Secessionists, the Munich

group soon abandoned Van de Veldes curvilinear style and began to
give closer attention to the Arts and Crafts movement. Under the leadership of Riemerschmid and Paul, the Vereinigten Werksttten fr
Kunst und Handwerk, founded in 1897, developed a range of semimass-produced furniture which was exhibited in the 1899 salon of
Libre Esthtique in Brussels. From 1902, Riemerschmid exhibited
rooms in which the furniture was simple and robust, with Arts and
Crafts and Japanese features [18]. After about 1905, the ensembles of
Riemerschmid and Bruno Paulespecially the latterbecame more
classical. The rooms they exhibited at the Munich exhibition of 1908
astonished French interior designers, who admired their elegance and
unityqualities hitherto considered peculiarly French.21
The Art Nouveau movement was overtaken by economic and cultural
developments. Although it aspired to be a popular movement, its
hand-crafted products were only affordable by a wealthy minority
and it disintegrated with the decline of a certain set of bourgeois and
nationalist fantasies, and with the inexorable rise of machine production and mass society. In the work of the Vienna Secession and in that
of Riemerschmid and Paul in Germany, we witness the Art Nouveau
movement, with its stress on individuality and originality, being transformed into repeatable forms based on vernacular and classical models.
But the high Art Nouveau movement left a permanent, if submerged, legacythe concept of an uncoded, dynamic, and instinctual
art, based on empathy with nature, for which it was possible to prescribe certain principles but not to lay down any unchanging and
normative rules. This concept of an art without codes can beand
often has beenchallenged, but its power of survival in the modern
world can hardly be questioned.
Organicism versus
Classicism: Chicago
18901910
19 Dankmar Adler and Louis

Sullivan
The Auditorium Building,
18869, Chicago
By combining Richardsons
vertical hierarchy with
Burnham and Roots
elimination of the wall, Adler
and Sullivan were able to
achieve in this building some
measure of balance between
classical monumentality and
the expression of modern
structure.
In a lecture entitled Modern Architecture, delivered in Schenectady

on 9 March 1884, the New York journalist and architectural critic
Montgomery Schuyler set out what he saw to be the problem facing
American architecture. Schuyler presented his argument in the form
of thesis and antithesis. He asserted the need for a universal culture of
architecture such as existed in Europe but was lacking in America due
to the absence of good models. The Beaux-Arts system, he said,
might provide the basis for such a culture, one that would inculcate
the qualities of sobriety, measure, and discretion, were it not for the
fact that it failed to produce an architecture appropriate to modern
life. Architecture, he says, is the most reactionary of the arts:
Whereas in literature the classical rules are used, in architecture they
are copied . . . in architecture alone does an archaeological study pass
for a work of art . . . It is not the training that I am depreciating, but
the resting in the training as not a preparation but an attainment. He
went on to describe a confusion between language and architecture: A
word is a conventional symbol, whereas a true architectural form is a
direct expression of a mechanical fact.
Schuyler praised American architects, particularly those of
Chicago, for attempting to adapt architecture to such technical problems as the elevator and the steel frame, unhampered by too many
scruples about stylistic purity. Yet he felt that the problem had not been
fully solved. The real structure of these towering buildingsthe
Chicago constructionis a structure of steel and baked clay, and
when we look for the architectural expression of it, we look in vain.
Such an articulated structure, being the ultimate expression of a structural arrangement, cannot be foreseen, and the form . . . comes as a
surprise to the author. Schuyler thus came out in favour of a direct and
expressive modern architecture. Yet he never explicitly rejected the
Beaux-Arts tradition. Does he think that sobriety, measure, and discretion should be sacriced on the altar of verisimilitude? That Europe
should be rejected? We are not told, and, in spite of his preference for
the second alternative, one has the impression that the rst has not
been completely abandoned.
Schuylers writings drew attention to a conict between the
35
architect as manipulator of a visual 'language' (classicist) and as exponent of a changing technology (organicist). This can be broken down
into a series of further oppositions: collectivism versus individualism;
identity (nation) versus difference (region); the normative versus the
unique; representation versus expression; the recognizable versus
the unexpected.
These oppositions constantly reappeared in the architectural
debates of the early twentieth century. But in America, more transparently than in Europe, they tended to be connected with problems of
high national policy. It is in Chicago that this tendency manifested
itself most dramatically.
The Chicago School

After the fire of 1871 and the subsequent economic depression, Chicago
experienced an extraordinary boom in commercial real estate. The
architects who flocked to the city to profit from this situation brought
with them a strong professional sense of mission. They saw their task
as the creation of a new architectural culture, believing that architecture should express regional character and be based on modern
techniques. The situation in Chicago seemed to offer the possibility of
a new synthesis of technology and aesthetics and of the creation of an
architecture that symbolized the energy of the Mid-west.
The term 'Chicago School' was first used in 1908 by Thomas
Tallmadge to refer to the group of domestic architects, active between
1893 and I 9 I 7> to which both he and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
belonged. It was not until 1929 that it was also used for the commercial
architects of the i88os and 18908 by the architectural critic Henry
Russell Hitchcock (1903-87) in his book Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration. Hitchcock associated both groups of
architects with 'pre-modern' Symbolists such as Victor Horta. In the
19408 he made a new distinction between a commercial and a domestic
phase of the school. But in contemporary usage, a complete reversal
has taken place and 'Chicago School' now generally refers to the commercial architecture of the i88os and 18908, while the work of Frank
Lloyd Wright and his colleagues is referred to as the Trairie School'.
This is the terminology that will be adopted here.
The importance of the Chicago School was recognized during the
19208 and 19303, as the writings of Hitchcock, Fiske Kimball (American
Architecture, 1928) and Lewis Mumford (The Brown Decades, 1931)
testify. But it was given a quite new claim to modernity by the Swiss art
historian Sigfried Giedion (18881968) in Space, Time and Architecture
(1941), where he presented the Chicago School in Hegelian terms as a
stage in the progressive march of history.
In rejecting the Beaux-Arts eclecticism of the East Coast, the
36 ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM! CHICAGO 1890-1910
Chicago architects were not rejecting tradition as such. But the tradition they endorsed was vague, pliable, and adaptable to modern
conditions. These conditions were both economic and technical. On
the one hand, building plots were large and regular, unencumbered
with hereditary freehold patterns. On the other, the recently invented
electrical elevator and metal skeleton made it possible to build to
unprecedented heights, multiplying the nancial yield of a given plot.
The last restrictions in height were removed when it became possible,
due to developments in reproong techniques, to support the external walls, as well as the oors, on the steel frame, thus reducing the
mass of the wall to that of a thin cladding.1
Ever since the mid-eighteenth century French rationalists such as
the Jesuit monk and theoretician Abb Marc-Antoine Laugier had
argued for the reduction of mass in buildings and for the expression of
a skeleton structure. Armed with this theory, which they had absorbed
20 Daniel Burnham and John
Wellborn Root
The Rookery Building,
18856, Chicago
In this early example of a
Chicago School ofce
building the hidden skeleton
frame is expressed by the
windows extending from
column to column, but the
projecting central feature is a
hangover from classical
conventions.
organicism versus classicism: chicago 18901910 37
from the writings of Viollet-le-Duc, the Chicago architects started

from the assumption that window openings should be increased so that
they spanned from column to column and provided maximum daylight. But they still felt the need to retain the hierarchies of the classical
faade characteristic of the palaces of the Italian quattrocento. This
resulted in a compromise in which the masonry cladding took one of
two forms: classical pilasters carrying at architraves; and piers with
round archesthe so-called Rundbogenstil which had originated in
Germany in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and been
brought to America by immigrant German architects.2 In the earliest
solutions, groups of three storeys were superimposed on each other, as
can be seen in the Rookery Building (18856) [20] by Daniel H.
Burnham (18451912) and John Wellborn Root (185091) and in
William Le Baron Jenneys Fair Store (1890). Henry Hobson
Richardson (183886) in the Marshall Field Wholesale Store [21] with
its external walls of solid masonry, overcame the stacking effect of
these solutions by diminishing the width of the openings in successive
tiers, and Dankmar Adler (18441900) and Louis Sullivan (18561924)
adapted this idea to a steel-frame structure in their Auditorium
Building (18869) [19, see page 34].
While these experiments and borrowings were taking place, an alternative, more pragmatic approach was also being explored. In the
Tacoma Building (18879) by William Holabird (18541923) and Martin
21 Henry Hobson Richardson
The Marshall Field Wholesale
Store, 18857, Chicago
(demolished)
Here the unpleasant
stacking effect of the
Rookery Building is overcome
by diminishing the width of
the openings in the
successive layers. But since
this building had external
walls of solid masonry, the
Chicago problem of
expressing the frame did not
arise.
38 organicism versus classicism: chicago 18901910
22 Burnham and Co.

The Reliance Building,
18914, Chicago
Designed by Charles Atwood,
this building has always been
seen as proto-Modernist in its
lightness and lack of
hierarchy. Without striving for
the monumental, Atwood
achieved a different kind of
harmony through the use of
materialsit is faced entirely
with terracotta tilesand the
subtle handling of the
simplest tectonic elements,
such as the proportion of the
windows and the dimensions
of glazing mullions.
Roche (18531927), in the Monadnock Building (188491, a severe

masonry structure, completely without ornament) by Burnham and
Root, and in the Reliance Building (18914) by Burnham and Co., the
oors were not grouped in a hierarchy but expressed as a uniform series,
the loss of vertical thrust being compensated for by projecting stacks of
bay windows. In the Reliance Building the cladding was of terracotta
rather than stone and achieved an effect of extraordinary lightness [22].
It was Louis Sullivans achievement to have synthesized these two
antithetical types. If the palace type, as represented by the Auditorium
Building, can be said to have had a weakness, it was that it did not
reect the programme, since, in fact, every oor had exactly the same
function. The type represented by the Tacoma Building suffered from
the opposite fault: the similarity of functions was expressed, but the
building, being a mere succession of oors, was lacking in monumental
expression. In the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (18902) [23]
Sullivan subsumed the oors under a giant order rising between a
strongly emphasized base and attic. At the same time he ignored the
column spacing of the real structure, reducing the spacing of the
pilasters to the width of a single window. In doing this, he produced a
phalanx of verticals that could be read simultaneously as columns and as
mullions, as structure and as ornament, one of the effects of which was
that the intercolumnation no longer aroused expectations of classical
23 Dankmar Adler and Louis

Sullivan
The Wainwright Building,
18902, St. Louis
The problem that Sullivan
solved so brilliantly in the
elevations of this building
was that of reconciling the
monumental classical faade
with the democratic
repetition inherent in an
ofce building.
proportion. This system was independent of the exact number of oors,

though it would certainly not have worked visually in a building of radically different proportions from those of the Wainwright Building.3
In his essay entitled The Tall Ofce Building Artistically Considered (1896), Sullivan claimed that the organization of the
Wainwright type of building into three clearly stated layers, with their
corresponding functions, was an application of organic principles. In
order to judge the validity of this claim, it will be necessary briey to
consider Sullivans architectural theory, as found in his two books,
Kindergarten Chats and The Autobiography of an Idea. More than any of
the other Chicago architects, Sullivan had been inuenced by the New
England philosophical school of Transcendentalism. This philosophy,
whose chief spokesman had been Ralph Waldo Emerson, was largely
derived from German Idealism, into which Sullivan had been initiated
by his anarchist friend John H. Edelman. The organic idea can be
traced back to the Romantic movement of around 1800particularly to
such writers as Schelling and the Schlegel brothers, who believed that
the external form of the work of art should, as in plants and animals, be
the product of an inner force or essence, rather than being mechanically
imposed from without, as they judged to be the case with classicism.4
Those architectural theorists who, in their different ways, were
heirs to this idea and to the concomitant notion of tectonic expressionsuch as Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Horatio Greenough, and
Viollet-le-Duchad acknowledged that, when applied to human
artefacts, the concept of a natural aesthetic had to be extended to
include socially derived normative values.5 Sullivan ignored this cultural factor and based his argument purely on the analogy between
architecture and nature. But in practice he tacitly accepted customary
norms. The Wainwright faade was derived from the tradition he so
vehemently condemnedthe classicalBaroque aesthetic enshrined
in Beaux-Arts teaching. In correcting the Chicago architects mistaken interpretation of this tradition, he was, in fact, returning to the
classical principle they had discarded: the need for the faade to have a
tripartite hierarchy corresponding to the functional distribution of the
interior.
The Wainwright Building can certainly be called a solution to the
problem of the Chicago ofce faade. But its very brilliance brought
with it certain problems. The impure solutions of the Chicago
School, including Sullivans own Auditorium Building, had the merit
of presenting to the street a complex, contrapuntal texture capable of
being read as part of a continuous urban fabric. The Wainwright
Building, with its vertical emphasis and strongly marked corner
pilasters, isolated itself from its context and became a self-sufcient
entity, emphasizing the individuality of the business it both housed
and represented. In this, it anticipated later developments in
24 Louis Sullivan
The High Building
Question, 1891
In this drawing, Sullivan
attempted another
reconciliation, this time
between the demands of real
estate and those of urban
aesthetics. Human scale and
a sense of order were
maintained by establishing a
datum at about eight to ten
storeys and allowing random
development above it.
skyscraper design. However, Sullivan showed that he was aware of the

danger to urban unity that this kind of solution implied when, in 1891,
in the journal The Graphic, he sketched a hypothetical street of variegated skyscrapers united by a common cornice line [24].
All Sullivans buildings depend to a greater or lesser extent on ornament, and in his theoretical writings he refers to ornament as an
extension of structure. In a body of delicate drawings he developed an
ornamental system of arabesques analogous to that of Horta, though
denser and less uid and more independent of the structure. This
ornamentation is applied in large bands of terracotta, and contrasted
with at, unornamented surfaces, suggesting the inuence of Islamic
architecture, and also relating his work to the European Art Nouveau
movement.
Sullivan was originally offered a partnership by Adler on the
strength of his skill as an ornamentalist and designer of faades.
Sullivan believed that the visible expression of a building spiritualized
an otherwise inarticulate structure. Adler, on the other hand, thought
that the faade merely gave the nishing touches to an organizational
and structural concept. This difference of view, whether it shows Adler
to have been the better organicist or merely more practical, seems to
have given rise to a simmering conict between the two men, and this
is indirectly revealed in a statement made by Adler after the partnership had broken up (due to lack of commissions): The architect is not
allowed to wait until, seized by an irresistible impulse from within, he
gives the world the result of his studies and musings. He is of the world
as well as in it.6
Sullivans catastrophic professional failure a few years after the
dissolution of the partnership was no doubt due to a complicated

mixture of psychological, ideological, and economic factors. But already
in the 18908 the climate of opinion in Chicago was changing. Architects
no longer listened to the Transcendental message they had found so
compelling a short time before, nor were they so interested in Sullivan s
doctrine of the redemption of a materialistic society through inspired
individual creativity. As was soon to be the case in Europe, individualism was giving way to a more nationalistic and collectivist spirit.
The World's Columbian Exposition

The turn towards classicism inaugurated by the Chicago World s
Exposition of 1893 was related to a number of contemporary political
and economic events in America. The most important of these were
the change from laissez-faire to monopoly capitalism, the inauguration of the 'open-door' trade policy for a country now ready to take its
place on the world stage, and the rise of a collectivist politics both
mirroring and challenging the emerging corporatism of industry and
finance. In The Autobiography of an Idea, Louis Sullivan was to recall
these developments: 'During this period [the 18908] there was well
under way the formation of mergers, corporations, and trusts in the
industrial world . . . speculation became rampant, credit was leaving
terra firma . . . monopoly was in the air/ According to Sullivan,
Daniel Burnham was the only architect in Chicago to catch this
movement, because, 'in its tendency towards bigness, organization,
delegation, and intense commercialism, he sensed the reciprocal
workings of his own mind'. These developments were responsible for
sounding the death knell of the philosophy of individualism that had
inspired the Chicago School and been the basis of Sullivan's theory.
Despite his own generalizing and typological propensities, Sullivan
resisted the emerging tendency towards collectivism, standardization,
and massification that Burnham welcomed so avidly.
Although Chicago was chosen as the site for the World's Fair
because it was seen to represent the dynamism of the Mid-west, the
fair's promoters were more interested in the creation of a national
mythology than a regional one. They were looking for a ready-formed
architectural language that could allegorically represent the United
States as a unified, culturally mature, imperial power. According to
Henry Adams, 'Chicago was the first expression of America thought
of as a unity: one must start from there.'7
Planning for the World's Fair started in 1890, under the joint direction of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) (landscape) and Daniel
Burnham (buildings). The site chosen was that of Olmsted's unbuilt
project for the South Park System. It consisted of two parksJackson
Park on the lake shore and Washington Park to the westlinked by a
ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910 43
25 Daniel Burnham and

Frederick Law Olmsted
World's Columbian
Exposition, 1893, Chicago,
plan showing Jackson Park
and Midway Plaisance
Note the contrast between
the classical regularity of the
Court of Honor to the south
and the picturesque
irregularity of the lake
development to the north.
long narrow strip called Midway Plaisance [25]. The core of the fair
was Jackson Park, where all the American pavilions were sited.
Midway Pleasance contained the foreign pavilions and amusements,
while Washington Park was laid out as a landscape.
Jackson Park was conceived on Beaux-Arts principles. The BeauxArts system had already made inroads on the East coast by the
mid-i88os. By ensuring that at least half the architects selected to design
the pavilions came from the East the promoters signalled their support
for classicism as the style of the fair's architecture.8 This choice reversed
the Chicago Schools practice in two ways: it proposed first that groups
of buildings should be subjected to total visual control, and second that
architecture was a ready-made language rather than the product of individual invention in a world ruled by contingency and change.
Daniel Burnham had no difficulty in adjusting to these ideas.
44 ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910

Frederick Law Olmsted
The Court of Honor
(demolished)
Apart from the style of the
faades, what was new for
Chicago about the Court of
Honor was its embodiment of
the Baroque concept of a
visually unied group of
buildings. In his plan for
Chicago, Burnham was to
combine this idea with the
additive city grid.
Unlike Sullivan, he was able to see functionalism as valid for a commercial architecture ruled by cost, and classicism as valid for an
architecture representing national power and cosmopolitan culture.
This theory of character was shared by the brilliant young Harvardtrained architect Charles B. Atwood (184995), who had been hired to
take the place of John Root, after Roots sudden death. Atwood was
capable of designing the spare Gothic Reliance and Fisher buildings,
with their light terracotta facing, at the same time as the orid Baroque
triumphal arch for the fair.
The plan of the Jackson Park site was a collaborative exercise in
landscape and urban design. The visitor, arriving by boat or train, was
immediately presented with the scenic splendour of the Court of
Honora huge monumental basin surrounded by the most important
pavilions [26]. A second group of pavilions, with its axis at right angles
to that of the Court of Honor, was more informally disposed round a
picturesque lake. The pavilions themselves were huge two-storey sheds
faced with classicalBaroque faades, built in lathe and plaster and
painted white (hence the name White City often given to the fair).
The contrast between a strictly functional factory space and a representative faade followed the international tradition of railway station
27 Burnham and Co.

The Conway Building, 1912,
Chicago
This was one of the many
ofces built in American
cities after about 1910 that
conformed to the new
classical fashion of the City
Beautiful movement.
design, and was to be revived in the 1960s by Louis Kahn at the Salk
Institute in La Jolla within a Modernist idiom (see pages 24854). Until
the Paris Exposition of 1889, international exhibitions in Europe had
favoured the display of new technologies in their buildings, but the
Paris Exposition of 1900 marked a change to something more decorative and popular. The Chicago Worlds Fair, though it lacked the Art
Nouveau aspects of the Paris Exposition and maintained an unremitting pompier style, anticipated this approach, differing only in its
display of uninhibited kitsch (according to the original plan, authentic
gondoliers were to be hired to navigate the basin).
The City Beautiful movement

The Worlds Fair initiated a wave of classical architecture in America.
As the historian Fiske Kimball was to write in 1928: The issue whether
function should determine form or whether an ideal form might be
imposed from without, had been decided for a generation by a sweeping victory for the formal idea.9 One of the consequences of the fair
was that, after the turn of the century, tall commercial buildings in
America began to show increased Beaux-Arts inuence. This can be
seen in the evolution of Burnhams work. In his Conway Building in
Chicago (1912) [27], and in many other examples, he followed
Sullivans clear tripartite division, but ornamented it with a classical
syntax, often treating the attic as a classical colonnade, reducing the
size of the windows in the middle section of the faade and playing
down the expression of structure.
The Worlds Fair had a great effect on the City Beautiful movement. The movement was triggered by the Senate Park Commission
plan for Washington (the Macmillan Plan), which was exhibited in
1902. Both Burnham and Charles McKim (18471909) were on the
commission, and they were responsible for the design, which envisaged the completion and extension of Pierre Charles LEnfants plan of
the 1790s. After this Burnham was asked to prepare many city plans,
only a few of whichthe plan for the centre of Cleveland, for
examplewere executed. The most spectacular of these was his plan
for Chicago, prepared in collaboration with E. H. Bennett (18741945)
[28].10 The plan was nanced and managed by a group of private citizens, and was the subject of an elaborate public relations campaign. Its
most characteristic feature was a network of wide, diagonal avenues
superimposed on the existing road grid in the manner of Washington
and of Haussmanns Paris. At the centre of this network, there was to
be a new city hall of gigantic proportions. Though never executed, the
plan was to some extent used as a guide for the future development of
the city. One enthusiastic critic, Charles Eliot, called it a representation of democratic, enlightened collectivism coming in to repair the

Edward Bennett
City plan for Chicago, 1909
This beautiful drawing by
Jules Guerm gives a clear
idea of the unprecedented
scale of the architects'
conception. The existence of
technical innovations such as
the underpass at the street
crossing should also be
noted.
damage caused by democratic individualism'.11 Others criticized the

plan because it neglected the problem of mass housing, leaving most of
the city in the hands of the speculators.
But in spite of this apparent conflict between two incompatible
concepts of city planning, one aesthetic and symbolic and the other
social and practical, many social reformers, including the sociologist
Charles Zueblin, supported the City Beautiful movement, claiming
that the World's Fair had instituted 'scientific planning', stimulated
efficient municipal government, and curbed the power of the bosses. It
is clear that 'enlightened collectivism', with its rejection of laissez-faire
and its stress on normative standards, was able to carry both conservative and progressive connotations. In Europe, where there was a
simultaneous burst of planning activity, a reconciliation between the
aesthetic and the social was consciously attempted. At the London
Town Planning conference of 1910, the German planner Joseph
Stiibben claimed that planners in his own country had been able to
combine the 'rational' French with the 'medieval' British traditions.
Whether justified or not, this claim was only plausible within the
context of the traditional European city. In America, the conceptual
and physical split between living and work, the suburb and the city,
made such a reconciliation impossible.
Social reform and the home
The reaction of intellectuals against the excesses of uncontrolled capitalism in i88os America is represented by two Utopian texts: Henry
George's Progress and Poverty (1880), which proposed the confiscation
of all yield from increased land value, and Edward Bellamy's novel
Looking Backward (1888), which described a future society based on a
perfected industrial system, in which there was no longer any space
between freedom and total political control (see pages 220-2: 'Systems
theory'). A third textThorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899)is of particular interest, not only because Veblen taught at the
University of Chicago in the 18905, but also because his book advanced
the theory that there was a conflict in capitalism between the production of money and the production of goods.12
Chicago was the centre of a vigorous social reform movement
which reflected this anti-laissez-faire mood. Whereas the Transcendentalists had rejected the city as a corrupting influence, the Chicago
reformists saw it as an essential instrument of industrialization, but
one that needed to be domesticated. The Department of Social
Sciences and Anthropology, which opened in 1892 in the University of
Chicago under the leadership of Albion Small, became an important
centre of urban sociology, its wide influence continuing into the 19205.
ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM! CHICAGO 1890-1910 49
The department and the institutions connected with it, such as the
Department of Household Science at the University of Illinois,
focused their attention on the nuclear family and the individual home
in the belief that the reform of the domestic environment was the necessary first step in the reform of society as a whole. Thus, the design
and equipment of the home became one of the key elements in a
radical and wide-ranging social and political agenda.13
The problem of the home was addressed at two levels. Hull House,
founded by Jane Addams in 1897, and the numerous settlement houses
that it helped to set up, worked at the grass-roots level, providing
domestic education to immigrant workers living in slum conditions.
One of the essential ingredients of this education was training in the
crafts, which was organized by the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society,
also based at Hull House. Classes and exhibitions in cabinet-making,
bookmaking, weaving, and pottery were set up. Some small workshops
were founded, but much of the furniture was made by commercial
manufacturers, sometimes, but not always, under the supervision of
outside designers. The work was promoted by mass-circulation magazines like the Ladies'Home Journal'and The House Beautiful'and sold by
mail order. Low income groups were targeted, and the furniture was
mass produced. In design, it was somewhat heavier and simpler than
contemporary Arts and Crafts furniture in England and Germany,
tending towards the geometrical forms in the work of Hoffmann and
Mackintosh, but without their hand-crafted refinement.
At a more theoretical level, the problem of the modern home was
analysed in the department of Social Sciences and the closely affiliated
Home Economics group. This nationwide movement had its epicentre
in Chicago and one of its leading figures, Marion Talbot, taught at the
Department of Social Sciences. The movement was strongly feminist
and sought to revolutionize the position of women, both in the home
and in society. According to the Home Economics group there was an
imperative need to rethink the house in the wake of rapid urbanization
and inventions such as the telephone, electric light, and new means of
transport. The home should be organized according to Frederick
Winslow Taylors principle of scientific management. The more
radical members of the group, like the Marxist Charlotte Perkins
Gillman, argued against the nuclear house and advocated the socialization of eating, cleaning, and entertainment in serviced apartment
buildings, but generally the group accepted the nuclear house.
In matters of design the Home Economics group followed William
Morris in his belief that the house should contain nothing but useful
and beautiful objects. But they also believed in mass production and
the use of new, smooth materials, invoking the railroad-car buffet and
the laboratory as models for the design of kitchens, and stressing the
50 ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910
importance of sunlight, ventilation, and cleanliness. They coined the

word 'Euthenics' to describe the science of the controlled environment, a word evidently intended to rhyme with Eugenics. They called
for standardization at all levels of design, attaching great importance at
the urban level to the design of groups of identical housesorder and
repetition being thought to make a harmonious and egalitarian community.14 In this, their views were not unlike those of the City
Beautiful movement, with its preference for classical anonymity in the
planning of unified groups.
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School

The Prairie School was a closely knit group of young Chicago architects continuing to design houses in the organicist tradition under the
spiritual leadership of Louis Sullivan, and active between 1896 and
1917. The group included, among others, Robert C. Spencer, Dwight
H. Perkins, and Myron Hunt. The group was closely associated with
Hull House and the Arts and Crafts Society. Some of the original
group later reverted to eclecticismnotably Howard Van Doren Shaw
(1869-1926), whose work resembles that of the English architect
Edwin Lutyens in its simultaneous allegiance to the Arts and Crafts
and to eclectic classicism.15
The most brilliant member of the group was Frank Lloyd Wright.
He, more than any of the others, was able to forge a personal style that
embodied the group's common ambitions. Wright's natural talent was
stimulated and guided by the theory of 'pure design', which was the
subject of lectures and discussions at the Chicago branch of the Architectural League of America around 1901.16 This concept was promoted
by the architect and teacher Emil Lorch, who had transferred to
architecture the geometrical principles of painting and design taught
by Arthur Wesley Dow at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
According to this theory, there were fundamental ahistorical principles
of composition, and these principles should be taught in schools of
architecture.17 This idea was a commonplace of late-nineteenthcentury and early-twentieth-century art and architectural theory in
Europe in academic as well as avant-garde circles.18 Although it was
antagonistic to eclecticism, its promotion of systematic design theory
in architectural schools was probably due to the example of the
Beaux-Arts.
Wright's houses show the influence of this theory [29, 30]. Their
plans are geometrically more rigorous than anything being built in
Europe at the time. They also share with the work of Mackintosh,
Olbrich, and Hoffmann (see pages 28-9) a geometrical stylization of
ornament, but go further in the abstraction of the elements of wall and
ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910 51
29 Frank Lloyd Wright

Ward Willits House, 1902,
Highland Park, Illinois
This external view shows
Wrights transformation of
roofs into abstract hovering
planes.

Ward Willits House, 1902,
Highland Park, Illinois,
ground-oor plan
The Willits House was one of
the earliest examples of
Wrights revolutionary system
of composition. This was
inuenced by the theory of
pure design which was
being discussed at the
Chicago branch of the
Architectural League in
1901, by means of which
Wright hoped to create a pure
Mid-western architecture.
roof, which lose their conventional associations and are reduced to a

system of intersecting and overlapping planes. The plans of Wrights
houses consist of an additive system of simple volumes interlocking
with or relating freely to each other in a way that resembles the Arts
and Crafts tradition. However, not only is there greater continuity
between one space and another than can be found in the English
movement, in which the traditional room remains dominant, but the
plans exhibit a geometrical order which stems from Beaux-Arts rather
than English sources. At the macro scale, the plans tend to develop
along the two orthogonal axes, crossing at a central hearth and reaching out into the surrounding landscape, while at the micro scale there
are carefully controlled local symmetries and sub-axes, showing the
inuence of the Beaux-Arts-trained H. H. Richardson. Internally, as
in the houses of Voysey, Mackintosh, and Hoffmann, the rooms are
unied by low cornices at door-head level. But in Wrights work these
have the effect of compressing the vertical dimension, producing a
primitive, cave-like sensation [31].
The system of ornament consists of dark-stained wood trim, recalling that of Mackintosh and Hoffmann. Electric light and ventilation
ttings are absorbed into the general ornamental unity. Art still dominates, but it is now produced by the machine, not by the craftsman,
and is totally controlled by the architect working at his drawing-board
[32]: The machine . . . has placed in artist hands the means of
idealizing the true nature of wood . . . without waste, within reach of
all.19
In fact, Wright came early on to the conclusion that mass production was necessary if good design was to be democratically enjoyed. In
1901 he gave a lecture at Hull House entitled The Art and Craft of the
Machine in which he argued that the alienation of the craftsman due
to machine production would be outweighed by the artists ability to
create beauty with the machinean anti-Ruskinian argument that
would soon be taken up within the Deutscher Werkbund in its support
of machine work as opposed to handwork. This philosophy was completely consistent with Wrights search for universal laws of design,
with its privileging of the artist over the craftsman.
Yet Wrights position on industrialization was ultimately ambivalent. It was poised between an endorsement of that greatest of
machines, as he called the industrial city, and a nostalgic image of the
American suburb as a new Arcadia uncontaminated by industrialism.
This conict was reected in his daily life, divided between his radical
friends at Hull House and the suburb of Oak Park where he practised
and lived with his young family, and where his neighbours were the
practical-minded businessmen who commissioned his houses.20 This
enormously creative and inuential phase of Wrights life came to an
abrupt end when in 1909, at the age of 42, he abandoned Oak Park,

Coonley House, 1908,
Riverside, Illinois
In his interiors, Wright uses
all the main elements of the
Arts and Crafts tradition but
exaggerates the horizontality
of the space and gives the
replace a new symbolic
status. The effect in the
Coonley House is one of
spatial generosity
paradoxically combined with
cave-like protection.
his family and his architectural practice, having concluded that the
unity between art and life that he craved was not possible in the
suburb.
Montgomery Schuyler, in his anticipation of an American architecture, had been concerned with public and urban buildings, whether
they took the form of cultural representation or organic expression.
Frank Lloyd Wright, working within the tradition of the Arts and
Crafts movement, turned away from such problems to concentrate
mostly on the private house, the nuclear family, and the small community. Reviving dreams of the frontier, he sought, more passionately
than any of his colleagues, to create a regional Mid-western domestic
architecture of rural innocence.
It was the formal skill with which Wright deployed an abstract and
astylar architecture that impressed the European avant-garde architects when his work was published in Germany by Wasmuth in 1910, at
the moment when they were searching for a formula that would free
them from traditional forms. But with this abstraction came an architecture that was primitivist, regionalist, and anti-metropolitan.
Through the inuence of Frank Lloyd Wright, international Modernism had at least one of its roots in the regional and democratic
concerns of the American Mid-west and in the organicist theories of
its architects.

The Robie House, 190810,
South Woodlawn, Chicago
The rhyming of the tectonic
ornament and xed furniture
in the Robie House, shown
here in the dining room, is
almost obsessional. Even the
free-standing furniture has
become monumentalized.
The aesthetic control is total
and somewhat oppressivea
Gesamtkunstwerk of the
T-square.
Culture and
Industry: Germany
190714
33 Peter Behrens
AEG Turbine Factory,
19089, Berlin
The literal use of steel
structure in the interior is a
complete contrast with the
monumental expression of
the exterior.
The international reform movement in architecture and the industrial

arts was accompanied in Germany by special historical circumstances.
In the German-speaking world, a self-image had begun to take shape
in the second half of the eighteenth century in opposition to French
cultural hegemony and Enlightenment universalism. The consciousness of a specically German Kultur, as distinct from French-derived
Zivilisation, was reinforced during the Napoleonic wars. The effect of
this was to intensify the search for cultural identity, but at the same
time to act as a powerful incentive to modernization. Romanticism and
Rationalism coexisted, sometimes in mutual reinforcement, sometimes in opposition. Modernization increased its pace after the
unication of Germanys many states into the German Empire in 1871.
But by the 1890s there was already widespread disappointment with its
cultural results, and the beginning of an anti-liberal, anti-positivist
backlash. This tendency mirrored similar tendencies in Europe as a
whole, but in Germany it brought to the surface a latent ideology of the
Volk.1 According to the writer Julius Langbehn (18511907) modern
civilization, especially that of America, was without roots. In his bestselling book Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator, Leipzig,
1903), he argued for a return to the rooted culture of the German Volk,
the spirit of which he saw as embodied in the paintings of Rembrandt.
The social philosopher Ferdinand Tnnies (18561936), in his book
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (roughly: Community and Society,
Leipzig, 1887), drew attention to the ancient German forms of association, which were being replaced by modern industrial forms of
association or companies.
In fact, the movement for artistic reform in Germany was, from the
start, deeply involved in the question of national identity. Those participating in the movement were caught between a desire to return to
their pre-industrial roots and an equally strong impulse towards
modernization as the necessary condition of competing commercially
with the Western nations.
57
The Deutscher Werkbund

At the beginning of the twentieth century in Germany, the chief agent
of artistic and cultural reform was the Deutscher Werkbund, which
grew out of the German Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbe) movement.
Many local reform groups had emerged since the onset of the Arts and
Crafts movement in the late 1890s, including Alfred Lichtwarks Art
Education Movement (1897), Ferdinand Avenariuss Drerbund
(1902), and the Bund Heimatschutz (1904).2 In addition, a number of
workshops modelled on the English guilds had been founded, the
most successful of which were the Munich-based Vereinigten Werksttte (see page 62) and the Dresdner Werksttte, both of which, unlike
their English counterparts, were making semi-mass-produced furniture from their inception.
The Deutscher Werkbund was founded in Munich in 1907 to consolidate these separate initiatives and accelerate the integration of art
and industry at a national level. The chief moving spirits behind its
foundation were the Christian Socialist politician Friedrich Naumann
(18601919), the director of the Dresdner Werksttte Karl Schmidt,
and the architectbureaucrat Hermann Muthesius (18611927).
Initially 12 architects and 12 companies were invited to join. The architects included Peter Behrens (18681940), Theodor Fischer
(18621938), Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Paul SchultzeNaumburg (18691949), and Fritz Schumacher (18691947). Most of
the companies were manufacturers of domestic furniture and equipment, but two printers, a type founder, and a publisher were also
included. All these rms withdrew from the existing conservative and
commercially motivated Alliance for German Applied Arts to join the
new organization and in so doing committed themselves to working
with named architects.
The Werkbunds orientation towards high-quality goods for mass
consumption is clear from a speech given by Naumann in 1906: Many
people do not have the money to hire artists, and, consequently, many
products are going to be mass produced; for this great problem, the
only solution is to infuse mass-production with meaning and spirit by
artistic means.3 Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Werkbund in
Munich, Fritz Schumacher, professor of architecture at the Dresden
Technische Hochschule and director of a highly successful Arts and
Crafts exhibition in Dresden in 1906, stressed the need to bridge the
gap between artists and producers that had developed with machine
production:
The time has come when Germany should cease to look on the artist as a man
who . . . follows his inclination, and rather see him as one of the important
powers for the ennobling of work and therefore for the ennobling of the entire
58 culture and industry: germany 190714
life of the nation, and to make it victorious in the competition among peoples
. . . there is in aesthetic power a higher economic value.4
Despite this well-dened programme, the membership of the

Werkbund represented a wide range of opinion. The organizations
main areas of activity were: general propaganda (publishing, exhibitions, congresses); the education of the consumer (lectures, window
dressing competitions, and so on); and the reform of product design
(for example, persuading industrialists to employ artists).5
Form or Gestalt
The need to assimilate the machine to the artistic principles of the Arts
and Crafts movement entailed a reconceptualization of the role of the
artist. Morriss conception of the artistcraftsman as someone physically involved with materials and functions gave way to that of the artist
as form giver. The new concept was put forward at the Werkbund
congress of 1908 by the sculptor Rudolf Bosselt, and reafrmed by
Muthesius in 1911.6 Both asserted that, in the design of machine products, form or Gestalt7 should take precedence over function, material,
and technique, which had been stressed by the Arts and Crafts and
Jugendstil movements. Curiously enough, this idea did not originate in
the context of the debate on art and industry, but in the eld of aesthetics. It was the product of a century-long history of aesthetic thought,
beginning with Immanuel Kants isolation of art as an autonomous
system, and culminating in the theory of pure visibility (Sichtbarkeit)
propounded by the philosopher of aesthetics Conrad Fiedler.8
Muthesius and the notion of type
Closely connected with the idea of Gestalt was Muthesiuss concept of
Typisierung (typication)a word he coined to denote the establishment of standard or typical forms.9 His argument was the apparently
trivial one that mass production entails standardization. But, relying
on the ambiguity inherent in the word type, Muthesius conated a
pragmatic notion of standardization with the idea of the type as a
Platonic universal. Only through typication, he said, can architecture
recover that universal signicance which was characteristic of it in
times of harmonious culture.10
Muthesiuss concept of a unied culture was an attack on laissezfaire capitalism, though not on monopoly capitalism. For him, and for
many within the Werkbund who shared his views, the degeneration of
modern taste was due not, as Ruskin had thought, to the machine as
such, but to the cultural disorder caused by the operation of the
market, and the destabilizing effect of fashion. If the middle-man who
manipulated the market could be eliminated it would be possible to
culture and industry: germany 190714 59
recover the direct relationship between producer and consumer and

between technique and culture, that had existed in pre-capitalist societies. Muthesius foresaw the emergence of large factories for the
production of consumer goods similar to the trusts and cartels that
were becoming increasingly characteristic of German heavy industry.
These rms, producing goods of standardized artistic quality, would be
able to dominate the market and act as the sole arbiters of taste, operating as the modern equivalent of the medieval guilds.11
When Muthesius presented his notion of Typisierung at the
Werkbund congress of 1914 at Cologne it was strongly criticized by a
group of artists, architects, and critics which included Van de Velde,
Bruno Taut (18801938) and Walter Gropius (18831969). Van de
Velde, though a passionate disciple of William Morris, did not question the need for machine production, nor did he disagree with the
notion of a unied culture. But he disagreed with the bureaucratic
methods proposed by Muthesius. For him and his supporters, culture
could not be created by the imposition of typical forms. High artistic
quality depended on the freedom of the individual artist. Fixed types
did indeed emerge in all artistic cultures, but they were the end-products of an evolutionary process of artistic development, not its initial
condition. Muthesius had simply reversed the order of cause and
effect. This celebrated conict has usually been interpreted as a battle
between the avant-garde supporters of a new machine culture and the
regressive supporters of an outdated handicraft tradition. The truth is
more complex, and to understand the situation it is necessary to disentangle the confusion that reigned at the time as to the status of the
artist in the modern industrial arts.
The debate between Van de Velde and Muthesius cannot be seen
merely as the conict between handicraft and the machine (though it
was this as well) since the ambiguous gure of the artist appears as
chief protagonist on both sides. Both groups believed that, under conditions of machine production, division of labour had separated
technique from art and that it was necessary to reintroduce the artist
into the production process. They differed, however, in their interpretation of role that the artist would now play. Insofar as he saw the artist as
a specialist in pure form, divorced from the mechanics of craft (now the
domain of the machine), Muthesiuss position seems progressive,
seeking to adapt the artist to the abstract processes of capitalism. But
Van de Veldes concept of the evolutionary process of style formation
was more compatible with the conditions of market capitalism, and in
that sense more modern than Muthesiuss bureaucratic model. To what
extent Van de Velde, with his strongly held socialist views, grasped the
connection between the artistic freedom he was proposing and the marketplace is an intriguing question, but the connection is clearly reected
in the writings of his patron and supporter, Karl Ernst Osthaus.12
Originally Muthesius had also held to this concept of the individualistic artist. For example, he had been in favour of the law of 1907
which gave the applied artist the copyright protection that was already
enjoyed by the ne artist.13 But some time between 1907 and 1910 he
seems to have moved towards the idea that the artist should not seek
originality, but should be the conduit for universal aesthetic laws, a view
that was in line with the prevalent neo-Kantian aesthetic philosophy.
Muthesius now argued that there was a kinship between the law-like
stability and anonymity of the classical and vernacular traditions on the
one hand, and the repetitiveness, regularity, and simplicity of machined
forms on the other. Machined forms were the modern, historical
instance of a universal law. Though this idea did not exclude the artist,
it did demand that the personality of the artist should be controlled.14
Muthesius sought to implement these ideas by creating an organizational framework within which future artists would have to work,
thus reverting to archaic processes similar to those that Karl Friedrich
Schinkel had adopted when commissioned to normalize the rural
architecture of Prussia a century earlier. In Muthesius, therefore, we
see the fusion of two ideologies, the one bureaucratic and nationalistic,
the other classicizing and normative. Though it is difcult to say at
what level these ideologies are, in fact, connected, they appear to have
been inseparable within the context of architectural discourse in the
years leading up to the First World War in Germany. It was a combination that took a particularly explosive form in Germany, but it was also
present, in differing regional forms, in America, England, and France.
Style and ideology

Another aspect of the battle between Muthesiuss concept of type and
the spontaneity demanded by Van de Velde must now be addressed.
The standardization required by machine production was seen to reconcile modernity with classical humanism. But the demand for the
freedom of the artist was also associated with a Nietzschian, Dionysian,
anarchistic urge not to try to tame the disorder of modernity but to
plunge into its terrifying and nihilistic stream. These different attitudes
correspond to two groups of architects. Among the classicizing group,
two will be discussed hereHeinrich Tessenow (18761950) and Peter
Behrensand their work will be compared to that of the young Walter
Gropius, who was poised between the two groups. Discussion of the
opposite camp, the Expressionists, belongs to a later chapter.
Heinrich Tessenow
One of Heinrich Tessenows major concerns was mass housing and the
problem of repetition. He studied this issue in the context of the
34 Heinrich Tessenow
Houses designed for the
Garden City of Hohensalza,
191114
This courtyard scheme
suggests an idyllic
community. The drawing
technique is reminiscent of
Schinkels drawings for the
Garden House at
Charlottenhof in Potsdam
and, as with Schinkels
design, a pergola gives a
slightly Mediterranean
avour to the project.
English Garden City movement, which had had a great inuence on

the German Arts and Crafts. Most of the leading architects of the day
were similarly involved. Behrens, Riemerschmid, Muthesius, as well as
Tessenow, designed groups of houses for Karl Schmidts workers
settlement of Hellerau, just outside Dresden. These architects were
inuenced by the medieval models advocated by Camillo Sitte (see
page 28) and continued by the Garden City movement. But this inuence was modied by that of Paul Mebes, whose popular book Um
1800, which appeared in 1905, advocated a return to the classical
Biedermeier tradition of the early nineteenth century as the last
instance of a unied German culture. As we have seen, a similar shift
towards the classical occurred in the furniture designed by the Vereinigten Werksttte (see page 58). This tendency was not restricted to
Germany. For example, in the last years of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, there was a similar return to what might be called the
classical vernacular of the eighteenth century (commonly known as
Georgian), which was seen to represent form and proportion as
opposed to detail (though, characteristically, this development was
not theorized to the extent that it was in Germany).15
Tessenows housing projects were supported by a social theory that
romanticized the petite bourgeoisie as the foundation of traditional
German social order, and his fastidious drawings conjure up a lost
world of neat Biedermeier innocence. He visualized small towns of
between 20,000 and 60,000 inhabitants, with a handicraft industry
accommodating a maximum of ten artisans per workshop. Tessenows
rejection of industrial civilization was hardly less extreme than Ruskins,
though his preference for classical forms is very un-Ruskinian [34].
Besides housing, Tessenow built the main cultural building in
HellerauJaques Dalcrozes school of eurhythmics (191112) [35]. The
Dalcroze Institute, 191112,
Hellerau
Front view, showing the
relation between the templelike auditorium and the side
wings. The rather steep
pediment illustrates
Tessenows attempt to fuse
German and Latin
prototypes.
Dalcroze Institute, 191112,
Hellerau
This photograph of a dance
performance taking place on
the stage of the Dalcroze
Institute, shows an abstract,
rather neo-Grec set by
Adolphe Appia. Note the
close relationship between
the architecture of the set
and the formal patterns
created by the dancers.
main space in this building was a rectangular auditorium, providing a

neutral background for the severely neoclassical stage-sets of the Swiss
designer Adolphe Appia [36]. Externally, the building itself was neoclassical, though in the nal design the residential wings were given a
more vernacular, Heimat-like appearance, with steep roofs which sit
rather incongruously with the Greek portico of the central building.
Another aspect of Tessenows work becomes apparent in the Hellerau
school: a quality of abstraction and formal purity that anticipates the
work of Mies van der Rohe and corresponds to the Greek spirit of
Appias stage-sets and Dalcrozes choreography.
Peter Behrens
Behrens began as a painter associated with the Munich Secession of
1893. He was a founding member of the Darmstadt artists colony
where in 1901 he built the only house not designed by Olbrich (see
page 30). His approach to art and architecture was deeply tinged with
the Symbolism that characterized the German secessionist movements. His mystical leanings had already shown themselves when he
collaborated in organizing a highly ritualistic inaugural ceremony at
the Darmstadt colony with Georg Fuchs, one of the leaders of theatrical reform in Germany. One of the crucial turning points in Behrenss
architectural career came during his directorship of the School of Arts
and Crafts at Dsseldorf between 1903 and 1907, where he was inuenced by the Dutch architect J. L. M. Lauweriks and became
interested in the mysticalsymbolic implications of geometry.16 This
marked his rejection of Jugendstil in favour of classicism in a move that
paralleled the emergence of the idea of Gestalt within the Werkbund.
37 Peter Behrens
AEG Pavilion, Shipbuilding
Exposition, 1908, Berlin
This octagonal pavilion was a
fusion of neo-Grecian and
Tuscan proto-Renaissance
stylistic elements. Its
centralized, baptistery-like
plan is often found in German
exhibitions before the First
World War.
38 Peter Behrens
Design for the cover of an
AEG prospectus, 1910
The style is both Jugendstil
and classical, exploiting with
saturated flat colours the
relatively new technique of
offset lithography. Behrens
had been a painter before he
became an architect.
In 1907, outlining the programme of the Dusseldorf School, he wrote:

'The . . . school seeks mediation by going back to the fundamental
principles of form, to take root in the artistically spontaneous, in the
inner laws of perception, rather than in the mechanical aspects of
work/17
From 1905 onwards, Behrens designed a number of buildings in a
geometrical Tuscan Romanesque style. These included a crematorium
at Hagen (1905) and the Allgemeine Elektricitats-Gesellschaft (AEG)
Pavilion for the Shipbuilding Exposition in Berlin (1908) [37], as well
as a series of neoclassical villas such as the Cuno House at HagenEppenhausen (1908-9) and the Wiegand House in Berlin (1911). But
the climax of this classical phase of Behrens's career was his design for
the huge AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (1908-9). Behrens was
appointed design consultant for the electrical giant in 1907 and was
responsible for all AEGs design work, including logos, consumer
products, and buildingsa perfect example of Muthesius's ideal of collaboration between the artist and big industry [38]. The Turbine
Factory [39], designed in collaboration with the engineer Karl Bernhard, was the first and the most symbolically loaded of a series of
industrial buildings that Behrens was to build on AEG's huge BerlinMoabit site between 1908 and 1912. Behrens's buildings for AEG
reflect his faith in the ennobling effect of art on technology. He
claimed that the architecture of the machine age should be based on
classicismthat in an age of speed the only appropriate buildings
would be those with forms as distinct as possible, with quiet, flush
surfaces.18 His critics pointed out that his own buildings reflected
CULTURE AND INDUSTRY! GERMANY 1907-14 65
39 Peter Behrens
19089, Berlin
This building is striking for its
optical effects, including the
use of battered walls and
solid steel columns
diminishing towards their
base. The steel columns
present their maximum
prole when seen in diagonal
perspective.
immobility and mass rather than speed,19 and indeed it seems that
Behrens was suggesting a form of resistance to, rather than an acceptance of, the modern metropolisthat metropolis which for the
philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (18581918) was characterized by the intensication of nervous stimuli resulting from a rapid and
uninterrupted succession of impressions.20
Certainly, another Symbolism than that of the eeting and
ephemeral is at work in the Turbine Factory. Here Behrens set out to
spiritualize the power of modern industry in terms of an eternal classicism. The basic metaphor at work is the factory as Greek temple. The
corner site makes possible a diagonal approach allowing the observer to
view front and side elevations simultaneously, as in the case of the
Parthenon. The metaphor is elaborated with great plastic skill.
Behrens establishes two simultaneous systems, an outer columnar one,
and an inner one of surface. An order of steel stanchions, resting on
giant hinges [40], takes the place of the temple colonnade, in a direct
metonymic displacement. The continuous side glazing, made opaque
by a close pattern of glazing bars [33 (see page 56)], is inclined to the
same slope as the inner face of the stanchions, giving a rather Egyptian
effect. This is continued in the corner buttresses, their mass further
emphasized by deep horizontal striations [41]. These buttresses create
an effect of classical mass and stability but in fact they are only thin
membranes and perform no structural role whatever. Moreover, even
their apparent structural role is undermined by the projecting central
window, which appears to be supporting the pediment. Because of this
40 Peter Behrens
19089, Berlin
Detail of rocker at the foot of
each column.
41 Peter Behrens
19089, Berlin
The corner buttresses with
their rounded edges and
horizontal striations create a
feeling of mass, although in
reality they are thin
membranes supported on a
frame.
and other discrepancies between appearance and reality the two

systems that Behrens tries to synthesizetechnical positivism and
classical humanismremain stubbornly separate. Yet, paradoxically,
the building has a majestic calm, and is a very effective representation
of industrial power.
Walter Gropius and the Fagus Factory

Gropius had worked for Behrens between 1910 and 1911 and had
absorbed many of his ideas, but he was 15 years youngera gap large
enough to explain certain ideological differences. For example he was
more concerned than Behrens with the social implications of machine
production, realizing that it meant the irretrievable separation of artistic conceptualization and the production process, and that the
relationship between the craftsman and his own products would henceforth be that of consumer not producer. In an address entitled 'Kunst
und Industriebau' given at the Volkwang Museum at Hagen in 1911,
Gropius tried to suggest a socially acceptable solution to this problem:
Work must be established in palaces that give the workman, now a slave to
industrial labour, not only light, air, and hygiene, but also an indication of the
great common idea that drives everything. Only then can the individual
submit to the impersonal without losing the joy of working together for that
common good previously unattainable by a single individual.
In exchange for being alienated from the end product of their work,
workers, as consumers, are offered a transcendental collective experience. This idea, which had been aired a few years earlier by Frank
Lloyd Wright (see page 53) was to be given a philosophically more
sophisticated formulation by the architect and critic Adolf Behne in
the 1920s.22 But through the mists of a rather confused rhetoric one
glimpses the troubled social Utopianism that was to throw Gropius
into the camp of the anti-technological Expressionists at the end of the
First World War. For the moment, however, Gropius did not doubt
that the machine could be spiritualized by means of art, and advocated
an architecture of technical rationalism, even presenting to Emil
Rathenau, director of AEG,23 a memorandum on the rationalization
of the housing industry.24
Why, then, was Gropius the most implacable of all Muthesius's
critics at the Cologne congress? The answer must lie in the ambiguous
nature of the concept of'totalization' to which both he and Muthesius
subscribed. Both believed that the artist (or the architect-as-artist) was
now an intellectual charged with the task of inventing the forms of the
machine age, considered as a cultural totality. But for Gropius it was
precisely this totalizing, legislative, quasi-ethical role that demanded
that the artist should remain free of political interference. Only the
best and the most original ideas would be worthy of mechanical
reproduction. In this, Gropius was at one with Van de Velde. He
violently rejected the idea of the control of artistic conceptualization by
the state bureaucracy or its proxy, big business, which was being
promoted by Muthesius. But at the level of theory Gropius's position
68 CULTURE AND INDUSTRY: GERMANY 1907-14
was no different from that of Behrens in its postulation of two realms,

one of whichnaturetechnologywould be transgured by the
otherspirit (Geist).
In Gropiuss architecture, however, there is something new, and we
can get some idea of it if we compare his Fagus Factory (191112) [42,
43] at Alfeld an der Leine, built in collaboration with Adolf Meyer
(18811929), with Behrenss Turbine Factory. Much of the difference
between the two buildings can be attributed to their radically different
programmes. Gropius and Meyers small, provincial shoe-last
factoryor rather its administrative wing, which was the only part of
the factory complex over which the architects had full controlcould
hardly be said to invoke the world-historical themes of Behrenss
factory, built in the nations capital for one of Germanys most important cartels. Yet it was precisely the Fagus Factorys modesty and lack of
symbolic charge that enabled Gropius to follow his more down-toearth agenda and to produce a work which would come to be seen as
prophetic of the objective (Sachlich) Modern Movement of the 1920s.
Not that the building lacks optical tricks. But it no longer makes
any of Behrenss grandiose symbolic claims. Gropius starts with
Behrenss projecting bay window and recessed, tilted masonry as his
main motifs, but transforms them. The tilt is now, it seems, a pragmatic (though probably expensive) solution, by means of which the
brick piers can appear to be recessed without the glazing unit having to
be cantilevered out at its sill. Whereas Behrens rhetoricizes his repeating columns, giving them maximum corporeality to create the effect of
classical monumentality, Gropius tries to make his necessarily massive
brick piers disappear, so that the main faade of his building looks as if
it is made entirely of glass. Whereas Behrens strengthens his corners
with illusionistic buttresses, Gropius voids his with real transparency.
Whereas Behrens impressionistically rounds his corners, Gropius
sharpens his with the precision of a surgeons knife-cut. Finally,
whereas the Turbine Factory abounds in overt classical references, the
classicism of the Fagus Factory is discreet and abstracta matter of
geometry.
But though the Fagus Factory can thus be read off against the
Turbine Factory, it is not simply a mannerist inversion; it has its own
agenda. Its illusionism, though still owing something to Behrens, is a
matter of bringing out the transcendent qualities of materialsparticularly glass with its mystical connotations (see the discussion of glass
symbolism on page 92)rather than working against the nature of
materials as Behrens often did. In this Gropius was truer to the functional tradition of Jugendstil, even though he jettisoned most (if not
all) of its craftsman-like individualism. In the Fagus factory, materiality and form are synthesized in a new waya way that seems to show
the inuence of the American factories that Gropius had illustrated
42 Walter Gropius and Adolf

Meyer
Fagus Factory, 191112,
Alfeld an der Leine
South-east faade,
administration wing. This
building is a kind of
polemical reversal of
Behrenss Turbine Factory.
There the glass surface
slopes back and is recessed
behind the solid structure. In
the Fagus Factory the
structure slopes back and the
glass projects in front of it.
The negative becomes
positive, empty space
becomes palpable.
43 Walter Gropius and Adolf

Meyer
Fagus Factory, 191112,
Alfeld an der Leine
Entrance lobby. Note vestiges
of Jugendstil decoration.
while editing the Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes. In Gropiuss attitude to design, art and pragmatism seem to coexist, and this is reected
in a theoretical position that sees no contradiction between Typisierung
and the continuing role of the individual artistarchitect. In thisand
despite his connections later with Expressionism, which will be discussed in chapter 5Gropiuss work was prophetic of the new
architectural discourse that was to emerge in Germany around 1923.
The Urn and the
Chamberpot:
Adolf Loos 1900-30
44 Adolf Loos
Karntner Bar, 1907, Vienna
The sense of intimacy is
enhanced by the choice of
dark, soft materials, and an
atmosphere of subdued
excitement is created by the
use of mirrors.
Adolf Loos (1870-1933) occupies a unique place in the history of

modern architecture. A maverick who refused to join any 'club', he was
not only a powerful thinker able to expose the contradictions of contemporary theory but an architect whose work, though small in output,
was provocative and highly original. His influence on the succeeding
generation of architects, particularly Le Corbusier, was enormous, and
his ideas have, through successive reinterpretations, maintained their
relevance to the present day.
The son of a stonemason, Loos was born in Brno, Moravia (at the time part
of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now in the Czech Republic) and studied at
the Imperial State Technical College in Vienna, and the Dresden College of
technology. In 1893 he travelled to America, where his uncle had emigrated,
visiting the Columbia World s Fair and eventually starting a small practice in
New York before returning to Austria in 1896. As a result of this experience,
he was to retain a lifelong admiration for Anglo-American culture.
Although he belonged to the same generation as the main figures of
the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements, Loos reacted strongly
against their attempt to replace Beaux-Arts eclecticism with what he
saw as a superficial system of ornament. He was not, of course, alone in
his rejection of Jugendstil and its ideology of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In
Germany by 1902, as we have seen, designers like Richard
Riemerschmid and Bruno Paul had abandoned this style, and in
Austria Josef Hoffmann, the founder of the Wiener Werkstatte, had
drastically simplified the Secessionist vocabulary. But Loos s critique
was more fundamental than theirs; it was based on a rejection of the
very concept of'art' when applied to the design of objects for everyday
use. Whereas Van de Velde and the Jugendstil movement had wanted
to eliminate the distinction between the craftsman and the artist, Loos
saw the split between them as irreversible. Far from believing in a
unified culture in which the craftsman and the artist would be
reunited, he readily accepted the distinction between the objects of
everyday life and imaginative works of art. But for Loos that distinction was not based on the division of hand-work and machine-work or
of mental conception and executionthe issue that was so important
for the ideologues of the Werkbund. What defined the useful object
73
was not its mode of manufacture but its purpose. Perfection of execution should be the aim of hand-work and machine-work alike. In both
cases the maker should not express individuality but should be the
transmitter of impersonal cultural values. Looss enthusiasm for the
English Arts and Crafts movement was based not only on the quality
of its workmanship, but also on the fact that it did not strive for the wilfully new, but respected tradition and custom.
It was as a writer of polemical articles that Loos rst became
known. His aphoristic, witty, and sarcastic pieces, which gained him as
many enemies as friends, resembled the writings of his close friend, the
poet Karl Kraus (18741936), editor and sole writer of the satirical
journal Die Fackel (The Torch), published from 1899 to 1936. In this
journal Kraus pursued a relentless campaign against the Austrian cultural and political establishment and its journalists, whose abuse of
language he saw as betraying unfathomable depths of hypocrisy and
moral degradation.1 Loos himself started a journalDas Andere (The
Other)which, however, appeared in only two numbers in 1903, as
supplements in Peter Altenbergs journal Die Kunst. This publication,
subtitled A Journal for the Introduction of Western Civilization into
Austria, paralleled Die Fackels cultural critique in the sphere of the
useful arts, comparing Austrian culture unfavourably with that of
England and America. Looss articles attacked not only Austrian
middle-class culture, but also the very avant-garde culture that aimed
to supersede it.2
Looss writings shifted the debate on the reform of the applied arts
into a new registerone that was eventually to turn him into the
unwitting father gure of the 1920s Modern Movement. In his essay
Ornament and Crime (1908), he claimed that the elimination of
ornament from useful objects was the result of a cultural evolution
leading to the abolition of waste and superuity from human labour.
This process was not harmful but benecial to culture, reducing the
time spent on manual labour and releasing energy for the life of the
mind.
The essay was not merely an attack on the Viennese Secession and
Jugendstil, it was also an attack on the Werkbund, founded a year
earlier. As we have seen, Muthesiuss aim for the Werkbund was to give
the artist a form-giving role within industry, and thus to establish the
Gestalt of the machine age. To Loos, this was unacceptablenot, as for
Van de Velde and Gropius, because it would destroy the freedom of the
artist but precisely because it envisaged the artist as the primary agent
in the creation of everyday objects. Loos believed that the style of an
epoch was always the result of multiple economic and cultural forces.
It was not something which the producer, aided by the artist, should
try to impose on the consumer: Germany makes, the world takes. At
least it should. But it does not want to. It wants to create its own forms
74 the urn and the chamberpot: adolf loos 190030
for its own life rather than have them imposed by some arbitrary producers association.3
With his aim of involving the artist in industry, Muthesius (Looss
argument implied) was merely substituting form for ornament in an
attempt to add a ctitious spiritual quality to the social economy and
to bind Kultur and Zivilisation together in a new organic synthesis. But
such a synthesis was neither possible nor necessary. An ineradicable
gap had opened up between art-value and use-value. In tearing them
apart, capitalism had liberated them both. Art and the design of useobjects now existed as independent and autonomous practices: We are
grateful to [the nineteenth century] for the magnicent accomplishment of having separated the arts and the crafts once and for all.4 The
search for the style of the time that Muthesiuss types were intended
to express was still based on a nostalgia for the pre-industrial organic
society. In fact, a style of the modern age already existedin industrial
products without any artistic pretensions:
All those trades which have managed to keep this superuous creature [the
artist] out of their workshops are at present at the peak of their ability . . .
[their] products . . . capture the style of our time so well that we do not even
look on them as having style. They have become entwined with our thoughts
and feelings. Our carriage construction, our glasses, our optical instruments,
our umbrellas and canes, our luggage and saddlery, our silver cigarette cases,
our jewellery . . . and clothesthey are all modern.5
The attempt consciously to create the formal types of the new age was
doomed to fail, just as Van de Veldes attempt to create a new ornament
had failed: No one has tried to put his podgy nger into the turning
wheel of time without having his hand torn off.6
According to Loos, art could now survive in only two (absolutely
antithetical) forms: rstly as the free creation of works of art that no
longer had any social responsibility and were therefore able to project
ideas into the future and criticize contemporary society; and secondly
in the design of buildings which embodied the collective memory.
Loos schematized these buildings as Denkmal (the monument) and
Grabmal (the tomb).7 For Loos, the private house belonged to the category of the useful, not to that of the monument, hence the rarity in his
houses of a fully developed classical language, except for a brief period
between 1919 and 1923 (see page 83).
Decorum
Loos identied the surviving realm of the monument with the antique:
The architect, he said, is a stonemason who has learned Latin,8
echoing Vitruviuss statement that knowledge of building grows
equally out of fabrica (material) and ratio (reason).9 His attitude to the
the urn and the chamberpot: adolf loos 190030 75
classical tradition differed from that of Otto Wagner or Behrens, for

whom a synthesis between art (spirit, soul) and rationality was still
possible, and who wanted to adapt classicism to modern conditions.
For Loos, as for Kraus, the antique had preserved in language the
search for a lost image of the primordial.10 Its syntax should either be
imitated to the letter, even if made with modern materials, or not at all:
Modern architects seem more like Esperantists. Drawing instruction
needs to proceed from classical ornament.11 By the same token, both
he and Kraus believed in the importance of the tradition of rhetoric,
particularly its distinction between genres and its concept of decorum,
which divides the continuum of lived experience into discrete units. As
Kraus wrote:
Adolf Loos and I, he in reality, I in words, have done nothing else than show
that there is a difference between an urn and a chamberpot and that this difference is necessary because it guarantees the game of culture. The others, on
the contrary, the defenders of positive values, are divided between those who
mistake the urn for a chamberpot and those who mistake the chamberpot for
an urn.12
For Loos, this sensibility of difference was exacerbated, not eliminated, by the dislocations brought about by industrialization. As
Massimo Cacciari has pointed out, modernity, for Loos, was constituted by different and mutually intransitive language games.13 Loos
thought in terms of art and industry, art and handicraft, music and
drama, never in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk that would synthesize
these different genres in a modern community of the arts.
In his designs for the War Ministry in Vienna (1907) and the monument to the Emperor Franz Josef (1917), Loos adopted a neoclassicism
which, though clearly mediated by the Beaux-Arts, was more literal
than the classicizing work of Wagner or Behrens. These types of building belonged to the category of Denkmal. But what about those
buildings in the public realm which could make, at best, only weak
claims to monumentalitycommercial buildings? In the latter part of
his career Loos designed several large ofce blocks and hotels, none of
which were built.
The only realized project in which Loos addressed the problem of
inserting a large commercial building in a historical urban context was
the Looshaus in Michaelerplatz of 190911 [45]. The ground oor
and mezzanine of this building were to be occupied by the fashionable
gentlemens outtters, Goldman and Salatsch, and the upper oors by
apartments. The problem faced by Loos was that of designing a
modern commercial building in a fashionable shopping street close to
the Imperial Palace. Here, Looss idea of decorum came into full play;
he decorated the lower oors, which belonged to the public realm, with
a Tuscan order faced in marble, and stripped the apartment oors, with
45 Adolf Loos
The Looshaus, 190911,
Michaelerplatz, Vienna
The lack of resolution
between the ornamented
main oor and the stripped
upper oors is intentional
and must be seen in relation
to the architectural debates
of the time, not in terms of a
future Modernist discourse.
their purely private connotations, of all ornament. In creating a hiatus

between two parts of the same structure, Loos turned the building into
a provocationan illustration of his article Potemkin City,14 in which
he had attacked the bourgeois apartment blocks on the Ringstrasse for
using false faades to look like Italian palazzi. Instead of creating a
unied classical palace, Loos treated each part of the building in a way
appropriate to its function, the buildings disjunctive parts reecting
the disjunctions of modern capitalism. Whereas Behrens in his
Turbine Factory carefully masked his distortions of the classical syntax
in order to create an apparently seamless fusion of the classical and the
modern, Loos drew attention to them, presenting them in terms of an
impossible juxtaposition.
The interior
Nearly all of Looss early projects were for interior remodellings, and
he continued to do this kind of work for the rest of his career. His
domestic interiors resemble those of Bruno Paul and Richard
Riemerschmid in their rejection of the total design philosophy of
Jugendstil in favour of separate, matching pieces of furniture (see pages
323). But Looss critique of the Gesamtkunstwerk went further than

theirs. Unlike Bruno Pauls rooms, where the recognizably classical
furnishings were unied by the architects personal style, Looss interiors were made up of found objects. The walls, Loos said, belong to
the architects . . . all mobile items are made by our craftsmen in the
modern idiom (never by architects)everyone may buy these for
himself according to his own taste and inclination. Loos designed very
few pieces of furniture himself [46]. He usually specied eighteenthcentury English furniture, which he had copied by the cabinet-maker
Joseph Veillach. If his interiors had unity, it derived more from a selective taste than from originality of design. In this, Looss work also
differed from that of Josef Hoffmann. Although Hoffmann had abandoned curvilinear Art Nouveau for a severely rectilinear style in 1901 (a
fact that Loos acknowledged, attributing it, with customary modesty,
to his own inuence), his furniture and ttings were still covered with
decorative inventions. Loos only used natural surfaces such as marble
facings or wood panelling.15
In his interior architecture, Loos often combined classical motifs
with a vernacular style directly indebted to M. H. Baillie Scott, whose
interiors for the Grand Ducal Palace in Darmstadt (1897) had acted as
a stimulant to the anti-Jugendstil reaction in Germany.16 The living
rooms in Looss apartments are frequently a central space with lowceilinged alcoves. The room becomes a miniature social space
surrounded by private sub-spaces. As in the work of Scott, considerable use is made of exposed, dark-stained beams (as purely semantic
elements; they are usually false), high timber wainscoting, and brick46 Adolf Loos
Chest of drawers, c.1900
Looss removal of applied
ornament from objects of
everyday use was as much an
attack on Jugendstil and the
Viennese Secession as it was
on ornament in the general
nineteenth-century sense. It
was a return to what he saw as
a mislaid classical tradition.
47 Adolf Loos
Scheu House, 1912, Vienna
Interior view, showing the
low-ceilinged replace
alcove, with the brick
chimney breast
characteristic of the work of
Baillie Scott. The wide
opening between rooms was
probably more indebted to
American houses of the same
period than to English
houses, where the rooms
were generally isolated from
each other.
faced replaces [47]. Loos later adapted this apartment typology to the
demands of the multi-storey house.
Looss commercial interiors have the same anonymous quality as his
apartments. The journal Das Interieur described Looss rst shop for
Goldman and Salatsch (1898) as follows: The Viennese gentlemens
outtters shows unmistakably that the creator was aiming at English
elegance, without reference to any particular model. Smooth reecting
surfaces, narrow shapes, shining metalthese are the main elements
from which this impeccably fashionable interior is composed.17 The
decor included built-in storage units, glazed or mirrored, with close
verticals which recall Wagners work, as well as rened and geometrical
ornament reminiscent of the Wiener Werksttte. In addition to shops,
Loos designed several cafs. For the Museum Caf in Vienna (1899)
which, to Looss delight, acquired the nickname Caf Nihilismus
because of its iconoclasmLoos used specially designed Thonet
chairs and marble tables. By contrast, in the Krntner Bar in Vienna
(1907) Loos exploits the intimacy of a small room at the same time as
he extends the space to innity by the use of uninterrupted mirror on
the upper part of the wall [44 (see page 72)].
The house
In his Entretiens, Viollet-le-Duc had noted a fundamental difference
between the traditional English country house and the French maison
de plaisance.18 The English house was based on the need for privacy. It
consisted of an aggregation of individual rooms, each with its own
48 Adolf Loos
Mller House, 192930,
Prague
This drawing shows the
mechanics of Looss concept
of the Raumplan. Changes of
level between the reception
rooms are negotiated by a
complex arrangement of
short stair ights.
purpose and character. The parts dominated the whole. In the French
house, on the contrary, the ruling principle was the family unit. The
rooms were thinly partitioned subdivisions of a cubic volume, ensuring
constant social contact. It was the English type that became increasingly popular in the late nineteenth century, responding to the
prevailing spirit of bourgeois individualism. What Viollet did not
mention was that, under the influence of neo-medieval ideas of social
harmony, this individualism was modified by the appearance of a large
central hall, based on the traditional English manor house.
Originating with Norman Shaw in the i86os, this double-height space
became a prominent feature of the houses of Baillie Scott (Blackwell,
Bowness, 1898), Van de Velde (Bloemenwerf, 1895), H. P. Berlage
(Villa Henny, 1898), Josef Hoffmann (Palais Stoclet, 1905-11), and
countless other houses of the period.
This evolution culminated in the series of large suburban villas that
Loos built between 1910 and 1930. In these Loos converted the central
hall into an open staircase and compressed a number of highly individualized rooms into a cube, thus synthesizing Viollet-le-Ducs two
models. The greatest differentiation between the rooms occurred on
the piano nobiley where reception rooms at different levels and with different ceiling heights were connected to each other by short flights of
stairs, their increments forming a kind of irregular spiral ascending
through the house [48]. Loos described this spatial organization in
somewhat apocalyptic terms:
This is architecture s great revolutionary momentthe transformation of the
floor plan into volume. Before Immanuel Kant, men could not think in terms
of volume; architects were forced to make the bathroom the same height as the
great hall. The only way of creating lower ceilings . . . was to divide them in
half. But [as] with the invention of three-dimensional chess, future architects
will now be able to expand floor plans into space.19
Loos's Raumplan (as he called it) turned the experience of the house
into a spatio-temporal labyrinth, making it difficult to form a mental
image of the whole. The way the inhabitant moved from one space to
another was highly controlled (though sometimes there were alternative routes), but no a priori system of expectation was established, as it
would be in a classical plan. In the late Moller and Muller houses an
intimate Ladies' Boudoir was added to the set of reception rooms and
placed at the highest point of the sequence, so that it acted simultaneously as a command post and an inner sanctum.20 Often, diagonal
views were opened up through sequences of rooms [49].
In the spatial ordering of these houses, the walls played an essential
role, both phenomenally and structurally. The variability of floor levels
demanded that the walls (or at least their geometrical tracessometimes they are replaced by beams resting on piers) continued vertically
THE URN AND THE CHAMBERPOT: ADOLF LOOS 1900-30 8l
49 Adolf Loos (right)

Moller House, 19278,
Vienna
Plan and section showing the
framed vistas throughout the
house.
50 Adolf Loos (below)
Rufer House, 1922
Diagrammatic elevations,
showing the randomly placed
windows. This is Looss most
literal reference to the house
built by Councillor Krespel in
the story by E. T. A.
Hoffmann. Mies van der
Rohe, in his three brick
houses of the early 1920s
also allowed the plan to
dictate the position and size
of the windows.
through all oors. Spatial continuity between rooms was created not by
omitting walls but by piercing them with wide openings so that views
were always framed and the sensation of the rooms spatial closure was
maintained. Often the connection between rooms was only visual, as
through a proscenium. At their interface, these spaces had a theatrical
quality. Beatriz Colomina has wittily noted that in a Loos interior
someone always seems about to make an entrance.21 The external walls
played a different though equally important role. They were pierced by
relatively small openings which did not allow any sustained visual
contact with the outside world. Looss houses were hermetic cubes,
difcult to penetrate.
When Loos said The walls belong to the architect he did not mean
the contemporary architect, who had reduced building to a graphic
art,22 but the Baumeister who fashions the object he is making directly
in three dimensions. This return to a pre-Renaissance concept connects Loos to the Romantic movement. Whatever the differences
between Loos and the Expressionist architect Bruno Taut (see pages
902), they shared the Romantic idea that architecture should be a
natural and spontaneous language.23 His Baumeister is a descendant of
the eponymous hero of E. T. A. Hoffmanns story Councillor Krespel. In
this story, the Councillor, instead of using plans, traced the outline of
his house on the ground and when the walls reached a certain height
instructed the builder where to cut out the openings.24 The analogy
with Loos seems especially apt in the case of the Rufer House (1922),
with its square plan and its random windows which obey the secret rule
of the interior [50].
Externally, Looss villas were cubes without ornament [51]. In
reducing the outside to the barest expression of technique, Loos was
making a conscious analogy with modern urban man, whose standardized dress conceals his personality and protects him from the stress of
51 Adolf Loos
Scheu House, 1912, Vienna
The stepped prole provides
roof terraces at each oor.
the modern metropolis.25 But, in Looss houses, once he has penetrated

the external wall, this man of nerves is enmeshed in a feminine and
sensuous complexity, full of those residues of cultural memory and
association that have been banished from the buildings exterior. The
disjunction between the inside and the outside echoes Looss concept
of an irrevocable split in modernity between tradition and the modern
techno-scientic worldbetween lived-in place (Ort) and calculated
space (Raum).26
After the First World War, Looss houses underwent certain
changes. Between 1919 and 1923, he designed a series of villas, none of
which were built, with elevations and plans that are neoclassical in
style, though in some, for example the Villa Konstadt of 1919, neoclassical symmetry and Raumplan traits coexist. At the same time,
villas such as the Rufer House combined classicism in its cornices and
cubic shape, with vernacular in its irregular windows. A picturesque
neoclassicism was not uncommon in central Europe at this timewe
nd it, for example, in the work of Peter Behrens, Karl Moser, and Joz` e
Plec`nik. But for Loos it was a complete volte-face. These houses give
back the right of monumental representation to the interior, and use
the same stylistic code for interior and exterior alikesomething that
was assiduously avoided in the pre-war houses.
But this neoclassical interlude was short-lived and Loos picked up
the thread of his earlier Raumplan designs in his three last houses: the
Tzara House (1926) in Paris (where Loos lived from 1923 to 1928), the
Moller House in Vienna (19278), and the Mller House in Prague
52 Adolf Loos
Mller House, 192930,
Prague
View of living room, looking
towards the dining room. The
wall between the two rooms is
perforated, without
destroying their volumetric
integrity. Informality of living
and a dramatic sense of
anticipation are combined
with a certain formal
decorum.
(192930). Though offering the chance of a continued exploration and

renement of the Raumplan, however, these houses were not simply a
return to his pre-war practice. The Arts and Crafts and eclectic references that had persisted in the furnishing of the earlier houses gave way
to more abstracted, rectilinear forms (although Loos continued to
provide a sense of warmth through the use of marble and wood panelling). These showed the inuence of architects who had matured
after the First World War, particularly Le Corbusier, who had in turn
been deeply inuenced by Loos. As in Looss neoclassical houses, interior and exterior draw closer to each other, but in the opposite
directionnow it is the neutrality of the exterior that begins to invade
the interior [52].
The critical reception of Loos

Until the 1970s, architectural historians tended to cast Loos as a protoModernist and to attribute the apparent contradictions in his writings
and work to his position as a transitory historical gure. The chief
problem for these critics lay in what seemed to be Looss ambivalence
towards conicting values of tradition and modernity. On the one
hand, his harsh rejection of ornament and the applied arts and his
belief in the implacable forces of history suggested that he had settled
for a new technical culture, devoid of the aura of the pre-industrial
world but still somehow heir to an anonymous craft tradition. On the

other hand he appeared as the defender of this tradition against the
encroachments of Modernism.
However, certain critics of the 1970s argued that beneath the contradictions of Looss thought lay a more profound consistency and the
possibility of an architecture (and by extension a culture) in which
tradition would continue to coexist in unresolved tension with a dominant technology.27
It is undeniable that in Looss architecture there is a resistance to the
Hegelian idea of history as a process of overcoming (Aufhebung) and a
tendency to create montages of different languages. Yet, Looss
most persistent ideathat the forms of use-objects, including those of
non-monumental architecture, should owe nothing to artistic intentionseems to contradict his own practice. The removal of ornament
from the faades of his houses was a deliberate artistic gesture.
Certainly it was taken as such by the next generation of architects, who
sought by this means to create precisely the resolution between technology and art that Loos said was impossible. For Loos the unadorned
faade concealed individuality, for Le Corbusier it revealed Platonic
beauty.
Expressionism and
Futurism
53 Antonio SantElia
Power Station, 1914
In this set of drawings
recognizable elements make
their appearance: pylons,
chimneys, lattice structures,
and viaducts.
Around 1910, the visual arts reached a new level of abstraction, going
further in the rejection of the concept of art as imitation than ever
before. These new developments originated in French Post-impressionist and Fauve painting and quickly spread to other European
countries, taking the form of Expressionism in Germany and Futurism
in Italy. In France, progressive art movements and conservative art
institutions were to a large extent capable of coexistence, but when the
new formal experiments spread to Germany and Italy, they became
associated with movements that were diametrically opposed to the
academic establishment. As a result the architectural avant-gardes
were increasingly assimilated into the sphere of the visual arts and
detached from a specically tectonic tradition.
Both German Expressionism and Italian Futurism started as movements in the visual arts and literature, though they soon attracted
architects dissatised both with a moribund Jugendstil and its neoclassical alternative. The Expressionists and Futurists were in close
touch with each other: the Futurists various manifestos were published in the Expressionist magazine Der Sturm and in 1912 the
Futurists exhibited their work in Der Sturm gallery. But although their
artistic roots were the same, the two movements differed in at least one
crucial respect: while the Expressionists were torn between a Utopian
view of modern technology and a Romantic nostalgia for the Volk, the
Futurists totally rejected tradition, seeing in technology the basis for a
new culture of the masses.
Expressionism
The word Expressionism was originally coined in France in 1901 to
describe the paintings of the circle of artists around Henri Matisse,
who modied their representations of nature according to their own
subjective vision. But the word did not enter international critical discourse until 1911, when it was adopted by German critics to denote
Modernist art in general and thenalmost immediately afterwards
a specically German variant.1
Expressionism was centred on three secessionist groups: the artists
87
54 Oskar Kokoschka
Murderer, Hope of Women,
1909
This was Kokoschkas poster
for his own one-act play of
this title, rst performed in
Vienna in 1909 and
published by Der Sturm in
1910. Kokoschka, returning
to the themes of the
Romantic movement, based
his play on Heinrich von
Kleists tragedy Penthesilia.
groups Die Brcke (founded in 1905 in Dresden) and Der Blaue Reiter
(founded in 1911 in Munich); and Der Sturm, a magazine and art gallery
founded in Berlin in 1910 which published poetry, drama, and ction as
well as visual art. Expressionist painting was characterized by a tone of
extreme agonism and pathos, quite alien to the French movements
from which it sprang [54]. Independently of its derivation from
French painting, Expressionism was inuenced by late-nineteenthcentury German aesthetic philosophy. Particularly important were
Conrad Fiedler and Adolf Hildebrands theory of pure visibility
(Sichtbarkeit), and Robert Vischers theory of empathy (Einfhlung),
both of which challenged the classical concept of mimesis.
But it was the more popular writings of the art historian Wilhelm
Worringer that exercised the most direct inuence on Expressionist
painters and architects. In an essay published in Der Sturm in 1911,
Worringer attributed all Modernist painting to a primitive, Teutonic
will to expression (Ausdruckswollen).2 In his earlier and extremely
inuential book Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer had foreshadowed a nascent Expressionist movement, describing the Gothic
architecture which would inspire it in the following emotional terms:
No organic harmony surrounds a feeling of reverence toward the world, but an
ever-growing, self-intensifying, restless striving without deliverance, which
88 expressionism and futurism
sweeps the inharmonious psyche away with it in an extravagant ecstasy . . .

The relatively calm proportions between verticals and horizontals which
prevail in Romanesque architecture are conspicuously abandoned.
Basing his argument on Riegls relativistic doctrine of the Kunstwollen

(will to art) Worringer claimed that people failed to appreciate the
Gothic because they were trapped within a classical horizon. He
believed that by escaping from this, we perceive the great beyond . . .
the road that lies behind us suddenly seems small and insignicant in
comparison with the innitude that is now unfolded to our gaze.3
Expressionist architecture
Expressionist architecture is notoriously difcult to dene. As Iain
Boyd Whyte has observed, the movement has usually been dened in
terms of what it is not (rationalism, functionalism, and so on) rather
than what it is,4 and there is some truth in the opinion that
Expressionism is a permanent and recurrent tendency in modern
architecture. Buildings which are commonly classied as Expressionist
include such divergent groups as the early work of Hans Poelzig, the
Jugendstil Amsterdam School, and architects of the 1920s such as
Erich Mendelsohn and Hugo Hring; but these are also often more
fruitfully discussed in other contexts. Here, we will concentrate on
what is generally recognized as the crowning period of Expressionism
as a multi-genre and politically involved movement between 1914 and
1921. The focus will be on the group that formed round the architect
Bruno Taut (18801930) during this period, the most important
members of whichbeside Taut himselfwere Walter Gropius and
the critic and art historian Adolf Behne (18851948).
Although Adolf Behne was the rst to use the term Expressionist
in connection with architecture (in an article in Der Sturm of 1915), it is
probably an article by Taut of February 1914 in the same journalentitled A Necessitywhich has a more legitimate claim to being the rst
manifesto of Expressionist architecture.5 This article repeats several
of Worringers ideas. Taut notes that painting is becoming more
abstract, synthetic, and structural and sees this as heralding a new unity
of the arts. Architecture wants to assist in this aspiration. It should
develop a new structural intensity based on expression, rhythm, and
dynamics, as well as on new materials such as glass, steel, and concrete.
This intensity will go far beyond the classical ideal of harmony. He
proposes that a stupendous structure be built in which architecture
shall once again become the home of the arts as it was in medieval
times. One of the most striking features of this article is the view it presents of architecture as following the lead of painting. In spite of its use
of the Romantic image of the cathedral as a Gesamtkunstwerk, there is
expressionism and futurism 89
no mention of the crafts. And, where Loos had seen architecture as

bound either to the antique or to the vernacular, Taut saw it as belonging to the free, Utopian realm that Loos had reserved exclusively for
painting (see page 75).
Bruno Taut
Bruno Taut was the leading architect associated with the Berlin wing
of the Expressionist movement. After studying with Theodor Fischer
in Munich from 1904 to 1908, Taut opened a practice in Berlin with
Franz Hoffmann. Later his brother Max joined him, but although they
shared the same architectural ideals, they never collaborated on projects. Bruno Taut appears to have conceived of architecture as
operating between two extreme poles: practical individual dwellings
and symbolic public buildings6 binding the individual and the Volk in a
transcendental unity. Throughout the early part of his career Taut
worked simultaneously at both these poles, emphasizing one or the
other according to what he saw to be the objective needs of the
moment.
Much of the early work of his practice consisted of low-cost
housing within a Garden City context. One of the most original features of this work was the use of colour on the external surfaces of
55 Bruno Taut
HausdesHimmels, 1919
This drawing appeared in
Taut's magazine Fruhlicht. It
was one of his many
representations of the
Stadtkrone, which here
appears as a star-shaped
light-emitting crystal.
90 EXPRESSIONISM AND FUTURISM
56 Bruno Taut
Snow, Ice, Glass, from Alpine
Architektur, 1919
In this and other images in
the book the real world of
the Volk, with its little houses
and allotments, is almost
entirely dissolved by an
apocalyptic vision of the
alchemical transformation of
matter into spirit.
buildingsa motif that Taut continued to pursue throughout his

career.7 Simultaneously he was developing the concepts of the Volkhaus
(house of the people) and the Stadtkrone (city crown), rst outlined in
his article A Necessity. In these two closely related concepts he sought
to dene a structure that would capture the essence of the medieval city
in modern terms. He visualized it as a crystal building of coloured
glass that would shine like a sparkling diamond8 over each new
Garden City, a secular version of the medieval cathedral [55]. During
the First World War, in a period of forced inactivity, Taut prepared two
books, Die Stadtkrone and Alpine Architektur, both published in 1919.
The rst was concerned mainly with historical examples of buildings
symbolizing the Volk. The second contained apocalyptic visions of an
imaginary architecture, mixing images and texts rather in the manner
of a Baroque emblem book [56].
Before writing these two books, Taut had already built the Glass
Pavilion at the Werkbund exhibition of 1914 in Cologne. This building
57 Bruno Taut
Glass Pavilion, Werkbund
Exhibition, 1914, Cologne
In Tauts exhibition building,
a 12-sided drum faced with
glass bricks supports a ribbed
dome of coloured glass.
anticipated the Volkhaus in miniature [57]. Financed by a group of glass

manufacturers, it was at once an exhibition of glass products, a house
of art, and a sort of allegory. The visitor was guided through a
sequence of sensuously calibrated spaces in which the effects of
coloured glass and cascading water predominated, experiencing an
ascent from telluric darkness to Apollonian clarity.
Both the Glass Pavilion and the two wartime books owed much to
the ideas of Tauts friend, the novelist Paul Scheerbart (18361915),
described by Herwarth Walden, editor of Der Sturm, as the rst
Expressionist. In a series of proto-science-ction novels, culminating
in Glasarchitektur of 1914, Scheerbart described, sometimes in great
technical detail, a universal architecture of glass and steeltransparent, colourful, and mobilethat would usher in a new age of social
harmony. Scheerbarts Utopia was largely derived from writers of the
Romantic period, particularly Novalis, who had revived the light and
crystal symbolism of Judeo-Christian and Islamic mysticism
(Scheerbart himself had studied Su mysticism).9
Tauts ideas on urbanism should also be seen in another context
that of the contemporary international movement in town planning,
which ourished in both Europe and America. This movement,
which has been briey discussed on page 49, was an outgrowth of both
the Garden City and the City Beautiful movements. Tauts Utopian
city with its central symbolic building has a family resemblance to such
visionary projects as the World City dedicated to world peace, pro92 expressionism and futurism
58 Hans Poelzig
Grosses Schauspielhaus,
1919, Berlin (demolished
c.1980)
This building was notable for
its colour: burgundy red
externally and yellow in the
auditorium. Colour was an
important aspect of
Expressionisms populist
philosophy and Taut was not
its only exponent.
moted by the industrialist and railway developer Paul Otlet, and

designed by Ernst Hbrard and Hendrik Andersen in 1912.10
Several projects in Germany belonging to the period during or
directly after the First World War can be compared to Tauts idea of
the Stadtkrone, if only because they too in some measure were intended
to act as social condensers in a new age of mass culture. The theatre,
because of its close connection with Richard Wagners idea of the
Gesamtkunstwerk, is a particularly important type within this genre.11
One of the most ambitious theatre projects was the Grosses
Schauspielhaus in Berlin of 1919. Popularly known as the The Theatre
of 5000, it was designed by Hans Poelzig and commissioned by the
impresario and director Max Reinhardt [58]. This huge theatre
adapted from an existing market hall that had already been converted
into a circuswas the result of Reinhardts involvement with the
Peoples Theatre movement, which had spread rapidly in Germany in
the late nineteenth century.12 Poelzig designed the interior as a fantastic spectacle. The ceilings were covered with plaster stalactites,
simultaneously recalling a grotto and the Alhambra in Granada.
Externally, the almost windowless walls were faced with close-set
Rundbogenstil pilasters very like those of the thirteenth-century
monastery of Chorin, favourite haunt of the Wandervogel movement,
to which Bruno Taut and Adolf Behne had belonged in their youth.13
59 Wassili Luckhardt
Project for a Peoples
Theatre, 1921, external view,
plan, and section
This building takes the
ziggurat form common in
Expressionist public
buildings. The stage tower,
usually an intractable
problem for architects, is
easily absorbed into its
mountain-like prole.
60 Otto Bartning
Sternkirche, 1922
This project is a
reinterpretation of Gothic
architecture. The structure,
spatial form, and system of
daylighting are all integrated.
Besides the Grosses Schauspielhaus, several other contemporary

projects were inspired by the idea of a public building able to focus the
life of the Volk. Three of these may be mentioned because of their use of
the new Expressionist manner to communicate directly with the public
on an emotional level: a Peoples Theatre project (1921) by Wassili
Luckhardt (18891972) [59], the Sternkirche project (1922) by Otto
Bartning (18831959) [60], and a Goetheanum at Dornach (19248) by
Rudolf Steiner (18611925) [61]. All these structures were intended as
the symbols and instruments of a dawning age of mass culture, serving
commercial, festive, recreational or religious purposes.
Expressionism and politics

Tauts city crown was an attempt to give artistic form to Pyotr
Kropotkins anarchism.14 Based on the idea of dispersed Garden Cities
as the alternatives to the modern metropolis, it represented an antiurban ideology whichfor all their ideological differenceswas
shared by the radical conservatives.15 But, despite his antagonism to
many aspects of Marxism, Taut supported workers councils and, like
many other Expressionists, became involved with the revolution that
swept Germany in 1918. With Gropius and Behne, he founded the
Arbeitsrat fur Kunst (AFK). This was a trade union of artists modelled
on the workers soviets that were a feature of the revolution, and more
particularly on the Proletarian Council of Intellectual Workers, an
outgrowth of Kurt Hillers Activist literary movement. Taking his cue
from the political ambitions of that movement, Taut envisaged a group
of architects within the AFK who would take control of every aspect of
the visual environment. In an open letter of November 1918 addressed
To the Socialist Government, he wrote:
Art and life must form a unity. Art should no longer be the delight of the few,
but the good fortune of the life of the masses. The aim is the fusion of the arts
under the wing of a great architecture . . . From now on, the artist alone will be
the modeller of the sensibilities of the Volk, responsible for the visible fabric of
the new state. He must determine the form-giving process from the statue
right down to coin and the postage stamp.16
61 Rudolf Steiner
Goetheanum, 19248,
Dornach
In this building exposed
reinforced concrete is used
as both structure and skin.
Curved and planar forms
merge to form a continuous
surface.
When the AFK failed to interest the government in these proposals,

Taut conceived the idea of an Exhibition for Unknown Architects
which would appeal directly to the people, but he resigned the chairmanship before it came to fruition, being succeeded by Walter Gropius.
Gropius agreed with Tauts reformist aims but not with his
provocative methods. With his accession to the chairmanship, the
AFK abandoned its revolutionary programme, moving to the right
politically and to the left artistically.17 Gropiuss aim was to turn the
AFK into a small group of radical architects, painters, and sculptors,
concerned only with artistic mattersa conspiratorial brotherhood
working secretly and avoiding a head-on collision with the art
establishment. But even these plans evaporated when, in December
1919, the AFK ran out of money and was absorbed by the
Novembergruppe. Gropius had meanwhile become the director of the
Bauhaus (Spring 1919) and this now became the centre of his longterm plans to unify the arts under the leadership of architecture within
a social-democratic framework. During the following year Taut
himself abandoned revolutionary politics and began to concentrate on
the design of social housing.
The Exhibition for Unknown Architects

The most important event during Gropiuss leadership of the AFK
was the Exhibition for Unknown Architects, mounted in April 1919.
As already mentioned, the exhibition had been proposed by Taut
before his resignation. Entry was not restricted to architects, and
entrants were encouraged to submit visionary schemes unrestricted by
62 Hermann Finsterlin
Traum aus Glas, 1920
Although Finsterlins
drawings were
enthusiastically accepted for
the Exhibition for Unknown
Architects by Gropius and
Behne, Taut was less
enthusiastic, criticizing them
as formalistic, though he
probably disliked the overtly
sexual imagery.
programmatic or aesthetic constraints. Though it was unsuccessful in

its popularizing aims, it turned out to be an event of great signicance
in the history of modern architecture.
The work shown at the exhibition fell into two more or less distinct
categories. The rst comprised drawings depicting possible buildings,
however unconventional, of two formal types: the crystalline
geometrical and the amorphouscurvilinear. The amorphous type was
represented exclusively by the work of Hermann Finsterlin [62], while
the work of most exhibitors belonged to the crystalline type [63]. The
63 Wenzel Hablik
Exhibition Building, 1920
Habliks faceted, pyramidal
constructions were close to
Tauts crystalline ideal.
64 Jem Golyscheff
Little Houses with
Illuminated Roofs, 1920
Golyscheffs drawings, like
those of Raoul Hausmann,
are derived from childrens
drawings. They convert
stereotypical images of
architecture into playful and
fantastic pictorial forms.
second category consisted of pictorial fantasies that made use of architectural subject matter [64]. Whereas the rst category represented
objects naturalistically, the second tended to be anti-naturalistic: even
when implying depth the images were two-dimensional in a way that
suggested primitive or child art, and were often deliberately fantastic,
even absurd.
Images similar to those shown at the exhibition appear in the letters
of the Glserne Kette (Glass Chain)a group of architects and artists
close to Taut, who began a correspondence in 1919 (on Tauts initiative)
for the purpose of exchanging architectural ideas and fantasies. Many
of the drawings originating in the Glass Chain were subsequently published by Taut in his magazine Frhlicht (Dawn) (19202).
Dada and Expressionism

Some of the pictorial fantasies exhibited in the Exhibition for Unknown
Architects were by artists associated with the Berlin Dada movement
for example Jem Golyscheff and Raoul Hausmann. The work of this
group stands somewhat apart from that of the main group of Expressionists, not only in terms of artistic technique but also in terms of
ideology. The Berlin Dada movement had emerged from Expressionist
cabaret, but its rhetoric was often activist in tone and it rejected the
Expressionist belief that ethical and cultural change could be effected by
a spiritual revolution. It is a false notion, wrote Dadaist Richard
Hlsenbeck in 1917, that an improvement in the world can be achieved
via the power of intellectuals.18 Two years later Hausmann, Hlsenbeck, and Golyscheff wrote a satirical manifesto calling for a battle
most brutal against all schools of so-called Geistige Arbeiter [spiritual
worker] . . . against their concealed middle-classness and against

Expressionism and neoclassical culture as represented by Der Sturm.19
The Dadaists belonged to the extreme Left and had supported the
Communist Spartacus League which led a workers' uprising in
January 1919. In contrast to the earnestness of the AFK, they used the
weapons of mockery and ridicule to discredit the Expressionist movement, which in their opinion had betrayed the revolution of 1918 by
siding with the Social Democrats rather than the Communists. In the
style of their rhetoric and in some of their formal techniques, though
not in their ideology, the Dadaists owed a great debt to Marinetti and
the Futurists. It is to this movement that we will now turn.
Futurism
The last quarter of the nineteenth century had seen an unprecedented
development of new technologies, including electric light, the telephone, and the automobile. Futurism was the first artistic movement
to see these developments as necessarily implying a total revolution in
everyday culture. Whereas previous avant-gardes, from Art Nouveau
to Expressionism, had sought to rescue tradition by means of the very
modernity that threatened to destroy it, Futurism advocated the obliteration of all traces of traditional culture and the creation of a totally
new, machine-based culture of the masses.
The movement, based in Milan, was 'founded' when the writer
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) published 'The Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism'20 on the front page of the Parisian daily
newspaper Le Figaro in 1909. The manifesto was a hymn of praise to
the total mechanization of life. Marinetti's ideas were strongly influenced not only by Henri Bergson, with his concept of reality as process,
but also by Georges Sorel who, in his book Reflections on Violence
(1908), had promoted the idea of a spontaneous activism based on
myth, arguing that violence was a necessary and purifying force in the
political life of the proletariat. Combining two apparently contradictory ideas, anarchism and nationalism, Marinetti believed that the
spontaneous vitality of the masses had to be harnessed by an elite to the
interests of the state. As he was to write in the 19208: 'We should aspire
to the creation of a type of man who is not human, from whom will
have been eliminated moral pain, goodness, and love, the passions that
alone can corrode inexhaustible vital energy.'21 Marinetti deliberately
aimed at a mass audience. In attacking humanist values he made use of
a wide range of rhetorical devices, including burlesque, parody, and
hyperbole, as well as of sheer buffoonery. In his use of new grammatical
and typographical forms he transformed the medium of the manifesto
into a literary genre in its own rightone that was to exert a strong
influence on Dada and the Russian avant-garde.22
EXPRESSIONISM AND FUTURISM
99
Between 1909 and 1914 Marinetti and a small group of writers,

painters, and musicians published about 50 manifestos on every conceivable aspect of cultural life, deliberately mixing high and low art
forms. These manifestos contained ideas that have remained important sources for all subsequent avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes.
The chief theoretical statement of the movement was The Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Painting,23 published in April 1910 and signed
by the painters Umberto Boccioni (18821916), Carlo Carr, Luigi
Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini. The manifesto sought to
adapt the mimetic practices of art to epistemological changes implied
by nineteenth-century mathematics and physics, especially in the representation of change and movement. The theory that it presented was
a kind of subjective realism, strongly inuenced, as was Expressionism,
by late-nineteenth-century German aesthetic philosophy, much of
which had been translated into Italian,24 as well as by non-Euclidean
geometry and Einsteinian physics. The painting, it was argued, should
no longer be conceived as the imitation of an external scene but as the
registration of the mental states caused by the scene. Both painter and
object were seen to occupy a unied spatio-temporal eld: The gesture
that we would reproduce will no longer be a xed moment in a universal dynamism, it will be the dynamism itself.25 Later, Boccioni gave
this idea more precision:
This synthesisgiven the tendency to render the concrete in terms of the
abstractcan be expressed only . . . by precisely dimensioned geometrical
forms, instead of by traditional methods (now devalued by the mechanical
media) . . . If we thus make use of mathematical objects, it is the relation
between them that will provide the rhythm and the emotion.26
The Futurists became aware of Cubism in 1911 and quickly assimilated

its techniques. Boccionis susceptibility to Cubism and collage is
shown in his description of his own subsequent practice: The dislocation and dismemberment of objects . . . freed from accepted logic and
independent from each other.27 Yet the contradiction between
Cubisms demand for the autonomy of art and the Futurists desire to
fuse art and life was never fully resolved. This was to remain one of the
main doctrinal conicts in the history of Modernism, as we shall see
when we consider the development of Modernist architecture after the
First World War.
Futurism and architecture

Two manifestos of Futurist architecture were written early in 1914. The
rst was by 20-year-old Enrico Prampolini, who belonged to the
Roman branch of the movement, and the second was by Boccioni
(although it was not published until 1960). Boccionis manifesto bears a
65 Umberto Boccioni
Dynamism of a Speeding
Horse + Houses, 191415
In this sculpture the artist
conformed to the programme
of the Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Sculpture,
published in 1910. The gure
is an assemblage of material
forms which are related
metonymically to the object
they represent. It
corresponds to Marinettis
description of Futurist poetry
as being a spontaneous
current of analogies,
replacing traditional
mimesis.
denite relationship to his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture

(1910).28 In the latter text, Boccioni saw the sculptural gure as no
longer isolated from its surrounding space: We must split open the
gure and place the environment inside it [65]. In his Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,29 he arrives at the same idea. The
modern city can no longer be thought of as a series of static panoramas
as in the past, but as an enveloping environment in a constant state of
ux. He sees the outside of the individual building, analogously, as
broken up in response to the pressures of the interior. In both sculpture
and architecture, therefore, Boccioni proposes to absorb the art work
back into the world, so that it will become an intensication of the
environment, not something idealistically set against it.
Antonio SantElia
The probable reason that Boccionis architectural manifesto remained
unpublished despite its obvious importance was that in July 1914
another such manifesto was written by Antonio SantElia (18881916).
This architects accession to the Futurist movement coincided with an
exhibition of the work of a rival group of artists, the Nuove Tendenze,
in which SantElia showed an extraordinary series of perspective
66 Antonio SantElia
Modern Building, 1913
This drawing still retains the
compositional characteristics
of Wagnerschule and
Baroque drawings,
dramatizing the subject by
the use of oblique and lowviewpoint perspective.
67 Joz` e Plec` nik

Sketch, 1899
An undoubted source for
SantElias power stations.
drawings representing his idea of the architecture of the future. The

relationship between these drawings and the Futurist movement has
long been the subject of controversy.
The ideas expressed in Sant'Elia's 'Manifesto of Futurist Architecture'30 and in the slightly shorter version of it published in the
exhibition catalogue (the 'Messaggio'31), correspond closely with the
ideology of the movement, but the drawings themselves seem to contradict it in important ways. It is likely that Sant'Elia had been in
contact with the Futurists for some time, and that behind the manifesto and the 'Messaggio' there existed an urtext written in part by
Marinetti or Boccioni or both, so as to provide the appropriate stylistic
(if not intellectual) credentials. This may explain the reason for the discrepancies between the drawings and the text, but the discrepancies
themselves need further elucidation.32
Except for three very small structures, Sant'Elia's legacy consists
exclusively of architectural drawings. These are either for actual but
unbuilt projects, mostly fa9ade studies, or perspectives of an imaginary architecture. The fafades are in a highly ornamented
Liberty-Secessionist style and Sant'Elia continued to produce such
work until his death. The perspectives are of three kinds. The first are
totally unornamented, astylar compositions with generic titles such as
'Modern building', 'Monument', and 'Industrial building', dated 1913
[66]. Almost certainly these drawings were influenced by the photographs of North American grain silos illustrated by Gropius in the
Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes of 1913, and quite possibly by the
stage designs of Gordon Craig and Adolfe Appia.33 The second kind is
a set of drawings in which similarly abstract forms are adapted to one
particular industrial building type: the hydroelectric power stationa
type of building almost synonymous with the rapid industrialization
of the Po Valley in the first years of the twentieth century [53 (see
page 86) and 67].
Finally there is a set of drawings entitled La Citta Nuova (The New
City). These are very detailed and their technique is harsher and less
atmospheric [68]. Stepped-back floors of multi-storey apartment
blocks (resembling the powerful sloping walls of the hydroelectric
dams) are contrasted with vertical elevator towers, to which they are
connected by bridges. The ground is completely eroded with a multilevel network of transport viaducts. The drawings depict a city from
which all traces of nature have been removed, a city dominated by a
plethora of horizontal and vertical distribution systems, against which
the fa$ades of the apartment units seem to play a passive and secondary
role. Sant'Elia took elements of his city from various sources, including popular illustrations of the New York City of the future, Henri
Sauvage's Maison a Gradins in Paris (1912), and above all Otto
Wagner's drawings of his new transport infrastructure for Vienna
EXPRESSIONISM AND FUTURISM 103
68 Antonio SantElia
La Citt Nuova, 1914
In the set to which this
drawing belongs, the
elements of the two previous
sets are transformed into a
mechanized urban
landscape. The multi-level
transport viaducts and their
attendant pylons are derived
from Otto Wagners Vienna
Stadtbahn. Although human
beings are absent, the pylons
stand around like calcied
giants.
[69]. Out of such found elements SantElia created a synthesis which

was, from a pictorial point of view, utterly convincing.
But, impressive as SantElias drawings are in their dramatic representation of the city of the future, their forms and technique contradict
many of the ideas put forward in the Futurist manifestos. While the
manifestos stress lightness, permeability, and practicality, the drawings
express mass and monumentality; while the manifestos place the spectator within the work, the drawings imply that the viewer is an external
observer by providing a panoramic and perspectival view of the world;
while the manifestos condemn static, pyramidal forms, the drawings
abound in them.
In fact, SantElias drawings are also derived from the work of
students of the Austrian Academy of Fine Arts (the Wagnerschule) at
69 Otto Wagner
Project for the
Ferdinandsbrucke, 1905,
Vienna
the turn of the twentieth century [70]. The truncated, abstract forms
of these designs, set at an oblique angle and seen from a low level,
reappear in most of Sant'Elia's drawings. Sant'Elia's technique of representation had been developed during his studies at the Brera
Academy under Giuseppe Mentessi, by whom he was introduced to
late Baroque theatre design with its system of oblique perspective
(scena per ango/o).34 Indeed, Sant'Elias drawings are less those of an
architect than of a vedutista in the tradition of Piranesi and the
Bibienas. They offer an objectified spectacle far removed from
Boccioni's conception of the spiritualized and transparent object, and
present a striking contrast with Futurist images such as Boccioni's 'XRay'-like axonometric drawing Table + bottle + houses [71].
Sant'Elia's drawings are not the only contemporary avant-garde
works that betray Jugendstil and Secessionist influences. Most of the
architecture usually characterized as Expressionist is close to the same
source. In fact, in Expressionism and Futurism alike, there exists an
unresolved tension between emotional and analytical approaches
between an attitude towards the modern in which feelings are
projected onto technology (just as the Romantics had projected theirs
onto nature), and an attitude that seeks to engage with technology on
its own termsfrom within, as it were.35 For all his use of scientific and
EXPRESSIONISM AND FUTURISM 105
70 Emil Hoppe
Sketch for a tower, 1902
The sloping walls and low
viewpoint of this drawing
reappear in SantElias
drawings
71 Umberto Boccioni
Table + Bottle + Houses,
1912
In this axonometric drawing,
the solid objects have
become transparent as in an
X-ray. For Boccioni,
axonometric projection was
associated with the fourth
dimension and spacetime
as it would be for van
Doesburg.
mathematical analogies, Boccioni himself resisted in many ways the

onset of the age of mechanical reproduction which he himself had
announced, stressing the act by which the artists hand transforms the
material and rejectingfor examplephotography, with its impersonal and mechanical procedures. In the end, therefore, SantElias
excitable reaction to technology may not be so far removed from that
of Boccioni, whose work seems so much more modern. The fact
remains, however, that SantElias vision of the future was that of a late
Romantic, and that his inuence on the next generation of architects
was limited. By contrast, the inuence of Futurism in the other
genressculpture, graphics, theatre, music, and photographywas
very considerable.
In trying to place Expressionism and Futurism in a historical perspective, a salient fact emerges: both movements, whatever their other
differences, rejected the Enlightenment tradition of reason and
stressed the importance of myth and instinct in the social life of
nations. They denounced a rationalistic civilization which they
believed had sown discord in a previously unied and organic society.
They espoused a set of ideasanti-materialist, anti-liberal-democratic and anti-Marxistwhich became increasingly inuential in the
countries of western Europe in the years leading up to the First World
War and which, in their extreme form, found political expression in the
Fascism and National Socialism of the inter-war years.
The Avant-gardes
in Holland and
Russia
Detail of 77 Theo van

Doesburg
Counter-construction
(Construction de lEspaceTemps II), 1924
As in the case of Expressionism and Futurism, the architectural avantgardes in Holland and Russia were at rst dominated by painting and
sculpture. In both countries formal experiments that were possible in
theoretical or small-scale projects met with considerable resistance
when applied to the constructional and programmatic needs of buildings. After the First World War, as soon as the economic and political
situation allowed building to resume, architectural projects in both
countries began to take on the characteristics of a more sober, international architecture and to lose national traits which had originated
largely from interpretations of Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism.
This chapter will describe these national movementsDe Stijl in
Holland; Suprematism, Rationalism, and Constructivism in Russia
and their transition to a Europe-wide Modern Movement (also
known as Neue Sachlichkeit, Functionalism, Rationalism, or
Neues Bauen).
In both the Dutch and the Russian avant-gardes, the logic of the
machine became the model for art and architecture; the mind was considered to be able to create form independently of traditional craft,
implying a new alliance between painting, architecture, and mathematical reason. Art and architecture were seen as impersonal and
objective and not based on individual taste.
The avant-garde in Holland

Two opposed movements in architecture and the decorative arts ourished in Holland during and immediately after the First World
Warthe Amsterdam School and De Stijl. Both these movements
were related to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement as well
as to German Expressionism; both believed in a unied style reecting
the spirit of the age; both inherited the Morrisian idea that society
could be transformed by art; and both rejected the eclectic use of past
styles, striving for a new, uncoded architecture. But each inherited a
different strand of the earlier movementsthe vitalistic, individualistic strand in the case of the Amsterdam School and the rationalist,
109
impersonal strand in the case of De Stijl. Each movement condemned

the other, ignoring their shared aims and origins.1
The work of the Amsterdam Schoolwhose chief exponent was
Michel de Klerk (18841923)was characterized by the use of traditional
materials, in particular brick, and the free, fantastical but craftsman-like
working of these materials. The forms of traditional architecture were
not so much abandoned as transformed and made strange. Much of
the most important work of the Amsterdam School was built between
1914 and 1923 and is to be found in the many public housing projects
that were part of the vast urban renewal programme being undertaken
in Amsterdam at the time under the direction of Berlage.
De Stijl
The De Stijl movement, though its origins lay, like those of the
Amsterdam School, in the decorative arts, developed an ornamentation that reected the inuence of Cubism and rejected craftsmanship
in favour of a geometrical anti-naturalism. In 1917 the painter Theo van
Doesburg (18831931) published the rst issue of De Stijl, a magazine
promoting modern art. The term De Stijl is normally applied to both
the magazine and the movement to which it gave its name. The original group included the painters Piet Mondrian (18721944), van
Doesburg, Vilmos Huszar (18841960), and Bart van der Leck
(18761958), the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo (18861965), and the
architects Jan Wils (18911927), Robert vant Hoff (18871979), Gerrit
Rietveld (18881964), and J. J. P. Oud (18901963). The groups identity,
however, had less to do with its specic membership, which was highly
volatile, than with its doctrine as dened in the rst De Stijl Manifesto
of 1918 and in later issues of the magazine. De Stijl was edited and dominated by van Doesburg and became an important organ of the
international avant-garde until it ceased publication in 1932.
Theory
The theoretical apparatus of De Stijl was a variant of existing (mostly
Symbolist and Futurist-derived) doctrine, and the movement saw
itself as a crusade in the common cause of Modernism. It maintained
close ties with avant-garde movements in the different arts abroad,
including Dada (van Doesburg himself, under the pseudonym Aldo
Camini, published Dada poetry in De Stijl).
The three main postulates of the movement can be roughly summarized as follows: each art form must realize its own nature based on
its materials and codesonly then can the generative principles
governing all the visual arts (indeed, all art) be revealed; as the spiritual
awareness of society increases, so will art full its historical (Hegelian)
110 the avant-gardes in holland and russia
destiny and become reabsorbed into daily life; art is not opposed to
science and technologyboth art and science are concerned with the
discovery and demonstration of the underlying laws of nature and not
with natures supercial and transient appearance (the theory,
however, did not take into account the possibility art could still be a
form of imitation).
De Stijl belonged to the millennialist tradition of Expressionism
and Futurism. Although it lacked any obvious political dimension, it
was nonetheless Utopian; it imagined a future in which social divisions
would be dissolved and power dispersed. It combined a commitment
to modernity with an idealism that associated scientic and technical
change with spiritual as well as material progress. The metaphysics of
the movement were to a large extent taken from the Theosophist and
Neoplatonist M. J. H. Schoenmaeker, whose book The Principles of
Plastic Mathematics (1916) claimed that plastic mathematics was a positive mysticism in which we translate reality into constructions
controlled by our reason, later to recover these constructions in nature,
thus penetrating matter with plastic vision. Schoenmaeker believed
that the new plastic expression (Neoplasticism), born of light and
sound, would create a heaven on earth.2
The two main theorists of the movement were Mondrian and van
Doesburg, but they by no means agreed on all points of doctrine.
Mondrians concept of Neoplasticism, based partly on Schoenmaeker
and partly on Kandinskys inuential book Uber das Geistige in der
Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) of 1911, was restricted to painting, whereas van Doesburg attempted to apply it to architecture as
well. Although both Huszar and Van der Leck made important contributions to the early development of Neoplasticism, it was Mondrian
who worked out its logical implications. The system that he eventually
arrived at was based on a radical process of reduction in which the
complex, accidental appearance of nature was rened to the variations
of an irregular orthogonal grid, partly lled in with rectangles of
primary colour [72]. According to Yve-Alain Bois, Mondrian organizes the picture surface in such a way that the traditional hierarchy
between gural objects and an illusionistic ground is abolished. In
Mondrian, no element is more important than any other, and none
must escape integration.3 These structural principles of non-redundancy and non-hierarchy are similar to those underlying Schoenbergs
atonal and serial music.4 In traditional painting it is the gural object
that conveys the symbolic or lyrical content (as does melody in music);5
in Mondrians paintings the meaning is transposed from the represented object to the abstract organization of the two-dimensional
surfacean effect analogous to Boccionis idea that it was no longer
objects (reduced to lines, planes, and so on) that provided rhythm and
emotion, but the relations between them (see page 100).
the avant-gardes in holland and russia 111
72 Piet Mondrian
Composition 1 with Red,
Yellow and Blue, 1921
This was one of a group of
paintings begun in 1920 in
which Mondrian rst arrived
at an organization that was
neither a repetitive grid nor
the representation of a gure
upon a ground.
The relation between architecture and painting

In the early phase of the De Stijl movement, there was an emphasis on
the collaboration between architecture and painting. The following
remarks by Van der Leck are typical of this position:
Modern painting has now arrived at the point at which it may enter into collaboration with architecture. It has arrived at this point because its means of
expression have been puried. The description of time and space by means
of perspective has been abandoned; it is the at surface itself that transmits
spatial continuity . . . Painting today is architectural because in itself and by its
own means it serves the same concept as architecture.6
This statement is in many ways unclear. For example, if it is true that

painting and architecture are becoming increasingly indistinguishable,
what sense does it make to say that they should enter into a collaboration? Collaboration can only take place between things that are
differentas in the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
During the 1920s, a split between painters and architects developed, epitomized by a correspondence that took place between J. J. P.
Oud and Mondrian. In this correspondence, Mondrian claimed that
73 Vilmos Huszar
Spatial Colour Composition
for a Stairwell, 1918
While in traditional
architecture decoration was
considered supplementary to
the constructed surfaces of a
building, in De Stijl the
rectangles of primary colour
applied to the walls were
thought of as an integral part
of the architecture itself,
modifying the space dened
by the walls.
painting was able to anticipate the desired merging of art and life precisely because it remained on the level of representation, and was not,
like architecture, compromised by its immersion in reality. Until architecture freed itself from this condition, it could not participate in the
movement towards the unication of art and life. For Oud, on the
other hand, if art was eventually to merge with life, it could only be at
the level of existing reality. Far from being antagonistic to the purication of artistic form, the principles of utility and function were
inseparable from it (in this Ouds position was the same as that of Le
Corbusier). Mondrians extreme idealism and Ouds aesthetic materialism were incapable of nding common ground.7
Van Doesburgs position differed from that of both Oud and
Mondrian. He accepted Mondrians idealist resistance to the pragmatics of architecture, but he believed that architecture, by the very fact
that it existed in real as opposed to virtual three-dimensional space,
would play a privileged role in achieving the union of life and art. The
ideal (which he shared with the Futurists) of an observer no longer separated from that which was observed, was already immanent in
architecture and needed only to be brought out.
The interior
The Decorative Arts movement (Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau)
had sought to unify the visual arts and architecture. But this had only
eetingly been achieved, in the person of the artistcraftsman. One of
the aims of the De Stijl artists was to occupy the void created by the
demise of this artistcraftsman, but to occupy it as painters. In 1918, van
Doesburg decorated the interiors of a house by J. J. P. Oud (The De
Vonk House, 191718) with coloured oor tiles and stained-glass
windows which were simply added to the architectural framework. But
in the same year, both Van der Leck and Huszar took a more holistic
approach, either by designing and colouring all the tectonic elements of
a roomdoors, cupboards, furnitureso as to create a unity of
rhyming rectangular forms, or by applying colour patches to walls and
ceilings, often against the grain of the architectural structure [73]. The
effect of these interventions was to merge structure, ornament, and furniture in a new unity. The difference between ground (architecture)
and gure (ornament, furniture, etc.) was erased, reversing the trend
initiated by the interiors exhibited in Germany around 1910 by, for
example, Bruno Paul, and reverting to the Jugendstil practice of treating the interior as an indivisible, abstract unityas in Van de Velde and
Wright.
74 Jan Wils
De Dubbele Sleutel, 1918
Here the building mass is
broken up into cubic volumes
roughly in the form of a
pyramid. The horizontal and
vertical planes are accentuated by cornices, string
courses, chimneys, in the
manner of Frank Lloyd
Wright.
Van Doesburg and architecture

In external form, the inuence of De Stijl as well as that of Wright
can already be seen in several architectural projects in Holland in the
period immediately after the First World War. In these the geometrical, horizontal, and vertical elements that emphasized the main
forms still looked like ornamental additions to the structurefor
example in the work of Jan Wils and Robert vant Hoff [74]. Van
Doesburg also experimented in external architectural forms, but his
75 Theo van Doesburg and

HansVogel
Studies for Purely
Architectural Sculpture
Resulting from Ground Plan,
1921
In this study the
asymmetrical pyramidal
composition of cubic
volumes is strictly generated
from the plan. All ornamental
accentuation has been
eliminated.
approach was different. In 1917, in collaboration with Jan Wils, he

designed a small, pyramidal public monument made up of prismsa
type of abstraction that can be traced back to Josef Hoffmann's decorations at the i4th Vienna Secession Exhibition of I9O2.8 By 1922,
van Doesburg had begun to 'activate' such purely sculptural forms by
making them coincide with habitable volumes. In work executed by
his pupils from the Weimar Bauhaus, asymmetrical house plans were
projected vertically to create interlocking prismatic volumes [75].
These researches reached a climax in 1923 when, in collaboration with
the young architect Cornells van Eesteren (1897-1988), he exhibited
three 'ideal' houses at Leonce Rosenberg's L'Effort Moderne gallery
in Paris. Two of these housesan 'Hotel Particulier' and a 'Maison
d'une Artiste'were variants of a single type of house, which,
THE AVANT-GARDES IN HOLLAND AND RUSSIA 115
76 Theo van Doesburg and

Cornelis van Eesteren
Axonometric drawing of Htel
Particulier, 1923
A development of van
Doesburgs earlier studies (see
75), the cubic composition is
further broken up by arbitrarily
placed rectangles of colour.
because of its wide-ranging inuence, deserves to be discussed in

some detail [76].
The house consists of an aggregation of interlocking cubic volumes
which appear to grow from a central stem or core in a manner that
recalls Wrights Prairie Houses. In its underlying organization the
house is systematic but in detail it is accidental and variable. This idea
recalls the system-plus-variety of Mondrians paintings, particularly
77 Theo van Doesburg

Counter-construction
(Construction de lEspaceTemps II), 1924
This is one of a series of axonometric drawings giving van
Doesburgs concept of a
Neoplasticist architecture in
which cubic volumes have
been reduced to planes,
making internal and external
space continuous. Colour and
form are now integrated.
the early gural works which show the transformation of a tree into a
binary system of vertical and horizontal dashes. Because of its centrifugal, stem-like structure the house has no front or back and seems to
defy gravity. It is a self-referential and self-generated object with a
form that is not composed from the outside but results from an internal principle of growth. The Maison dune Artiste can be seen as an
allegory of nature, in which an initial, unitary principle exfoliates into
an innity of individuated forms. Primary colours are added to the
planes to differentiate between them. In van Doesburgs Counter-constructions of a year later [77], the whole composition is reduced to
these hovering and intersecting coloured planes, allowing space to ow

between them, in accordance with Futurist principles. Van Doesburg
dened this spatial system as follows:
The subdivision of the functional spaces is strictly determined by rectangular
planes, which possess no individual forms in themselves since, although they
are limited (the one plane by the other), they can be imagined as extended into
innity, thereby forming a system of coordinates, the different points of which
would correspond to an equal number of points in universal, open space.9
In these drawings, axonometry is more than a useful graphic tool. It is

the only method of representation that does not privilege one part of
the building over another (for example, the faade over the interior). In
real life, the only way to recall such a house in its totality would be to
trace and retrace its interior spaces in time, as in the case of Looss
Raumplan houses. Axonometry converts this temporal, semi-conscious process into an experience that is instantaneous and conscious.
For van Doesburg these drawings seem to have symbolized his technomystical vision of an architecture identical with the ow of lived
experience. They were idealized representations of the ineffable.
Axonometry was also fundamental to van Doesburgs attempts to
represent four-dimensional space.10
The only building in which van Doesburgs formal principles were
applied was the Schroeder House in Utrecht (1924) by Gerrit Rietveld.
Externally the house appears as a montage of elementary forms, but its
fragmentation turns out to be a purely surface effect. It is in the interior
that the house comes to life. Rietveld has reinterpreted van Doesburgs
Counter-constructions in terms of the earlier experiments of Van der
Leck and Huszar, and the furniture and equipment of the house is
transformed into a vibrant composition of rectilinear forms and
primary colours.
Architecture beyond De Stijl

But apart from Rietveld, modern architecture in Holland developed in
a different direction from De Stijl, sharing only a certain number of
principles such as formal abstraction, immateriality, and the avoidance
of symmetries. The emerging architecture rejected De Stijls rigorous
reduction and fragmentation and returned to closed forms and frontality. The work of J. J. P. Oud in the 1920s is hardly touched by De Stijl
[78], while that of Johannes Brinkman (190249) and Leendert
Cornelis van der Vlugt (18941936) shows De Stijls inuence in a
rather ad hoc use of interlocking volumes, cantilevered oors, and oating vertical planes. By the early 1930s, in such works as the Van Nelle
Factory (19279) and the Sonneveld House (1928) [79], both in
Rotterdam, De Stijl forms have been totally assimilated into a
78 J. J. P. Oud
Social Housing, 19247,
Hook of Holland
In this project Ouds early De
Stijl-inspired work has given
way to a more conventional
architecture in which the
different rooms are enclosed
in single volumes of Platonic
purity. The surfaces give the
effect of thin, white, smooth
membranes.
79 Johannes Brinkman and

Leendert Cornelis van der
Vlugt
Sonneveld House, 1928,
Rotterdam
More Constructivist than
Ouds work, this house, with
its generous balconies and
glass walls, suggests a world
of heliotropic hygiene.
Constructivist architecture of smooth, machine-like surfaces and

extensive glazing. Van Doesburg himself, in the studio house he built
in Paris in 1931, abandoned his earlier Neoplasticism and built a relatively simple, functional box.
The tension that developed between De Stijl and the new architecture of the 19205 is revealed by J. J. P. Oud in the book Nieuwe
Bouwkunst in Holland en Europe published in 1935:
Remarkable as it may sound the Nieuwe Zakelijheid (New Objectivity)
developed in large part from the initial development of the liberal artsabove
all painting. The origins of its forms lay much more in the aesthetic domain
than in the domain of the objective... Horizontal and vertical intersections of
parts of buildings, suspended floors, corner windows, etc ... were for a time
very much in vogue. Their derivation from painting and sculpture can be
easily demonstrated and they have been continually used with or without any
practical aim.11
Oud s play on the word 'objective' in opposition to 'aesthetic' and his

disapproval of the 'unpractical' influence of painting and sculpture,
clearly indicate the emergence of the new 'functional' parameters.
Despite this, the idealism and formalism of van Doesburg's work made
it a catalyst for Modernist architects seeking a new formal language,
just as Frank Lloyd Wright's work had been a few years earlier. As a
result of van Doesburg's exhibitions in Weimar and Paris in 1922 and
1923 respectively, and his presence 'off-stage' at the Bauhaus in 1921,
Neoplasticism exerted a considerable influence on architects like Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe at critical
moments in their careers.
The Russian avant-garde

The reform movement in the arts followed much the same trajectory in
Russia as in Western Europe. A revival of the vernacular arts and crafts
inspired, as elsewhere, by William Morris, was initiated at two centres:
the estate of the railway magnate Sawa Mamontov near Moscow (in
the 18705) and the estate of Princess Tenisheva at Smolensk (in 1890).
Both were closely associated with the Pan-Slav movement. But in 1906
this movement itself underwent a transformation with the founding of
the Organization for Proletarian Culture ('Proletkult'), by Alexandr
Malinovsky, self-styled 'Bogdanov' (God-gifted). Bogdanov had
abandoned the Social Democrats for the Bolsheviks in 1903, and his
new organization initiated a shift from the concept of the folk to that of
the proletariat, and from handicraft to science and technology.
According to Bogdanov the progress of the proletariat towards socialism would have to take place simultaneously on the political,
economic, and cultural planes. These ideas were in fact closer to those
120 THE AVANT-GARDES IN HOLLAND AND RUSSIA
of Saint-Simon than those of Marx, particularly in their call for a new

religion of positivism.
A common pattern in Russia and the West can be found not only in
the change of emphasis from handicraft to machine-work, but also in
the re-emergence of the ne arts as the most important site of experiment, linked to the concept of Gestalt. The only substantial difference
was that in Russia the industrial art and ne art movements occurred
simultaneously and became locked in a destructive ideological battle,
whereas in the West, though they overlapped, they occurred
sequentially.
The diversity of artistic movements that characterized the pre-revolutionary avant-gardes in Russia, especially those deriving from
Cubism and Futurism, persisted in the post-revolutionary period, presenting the historian with a bewildering array of acronyms. Support for
the revolution came from all artistic factions, including the most conservative, each faction identifying with its aims. For those avant-garde
artists and architects who joined the revolution, the Utopian fantasies
of the period before the First World War seemed about to become a
historical reality.12 The revolution released an explosion of creative
energy, in which the paths opened up by the pre-war European avantgardes were redirected towards the achievement of socialism.
Art institutions
The Ministry of Enlightenment that was set up after the revolution
under Commissar Lunacharski, who had been associated with
Proletkult, was more tolerant of Modernist art than was the party
establishment as a whole. Under the new ministry, there was a general
reform of the art institutions. The Free Workshops, founded in
Moscow in 1918 and renamed the Higher State Artistic and Technical
Workshops (Vkhutemas) in 1920, were the successors of the two main
pre-revolutionary Moscow art schoolsthe Stroganov School of
Industrial Design and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and
Architecture. The fusion of the old school of art with a craft school
which, since 1914, had been training students for industry, created a
fundamental institutional break with the pastsimilar to that which
occurred at the same time in the Weimar Bauhausa change epitomized by the introductory design course or Basic Section, which was
shared by all departments. The progressives in the school were divided
into two ideological camps: the Rationalists, led by the architect
Nikolai Ladovsky (18811941) and his United Workshops of the Left
(Obmas), and the Constructivists, whose members included the architect Alexander Vesnin (18831959) and the artists Varvara Stepanova
(18941958), Alexander Rodchenko (18911956), and Alexei Gan
(18891940). Another important institution was the Moscow Institute
of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk). It was within Inkhuk that the leftist First
Working Group of Constructivists was formed in 1921, and that a signicant debate took place between this group and the Rationalists over
the question of construction versus composition.13
Rationalism versus Constructivism

Though in their forms the Rationalists and Constructivists were often
similar, they were ideologically fundamentally opposed to each other.
According to the Rationalists, the rst task in the renewal of art was its
purication and the discovery of its psychological, formal laws; according to the Constructivists, art, being an intrinsically social phenomenon,
could not be isolated as a purely formal practice.
The Rationalists, starting from the architectural fantasies of
Expressionism, elaborated a system of formal analysis based on
Gestaltpsychologie [80]. Ladovskys course at the Vkhutemas was the
core of the Basic Section until the school was reshaped on more conservative lines in 1930. In 1923 Ladovsky founded the Association of
New Architects (ASNOVA) to counteract the growing inuence of
the utilitarian Constructivists within Inkhuk.
Another essentially formalist group must be mentioned here: the
Suprematists. Founded by the painter Kasimir Malevich (18781935) in
1913, this movement had much in common with Dutch Neoplasticism,
including its geometrical reductivism and its involvement with Theosophyin the case of Malevich, with the writings of P. D. Ouspensky.14
Unlike Mondrians paintings, the Suprematist work of Malevich still
relied on a gure-ground relationship between represented objects and
illusionistic spaceeven if this space was now featureless and Newtonian. Also unlike Mondrian, but like van Doesburg, Malevich extended
his system of ideas to architecture. In a series of prismatic, quasi-architectural sculptures (which he called Arkhitektons) he sought to
demonstrate the timeless laws of architecture underlying the ever80 Nikolai Ladovsky
Design for a Commune, 1920
Such early products of
Ladovskys Rationalism
continued the tradition of
Dada and Expressionism,
which Ladovsky was to supply
with a pseudo-scientic
system of rules.
81 Kasimir Malevich
Arkhitekton, 1924
Malevichs Arkhitektons
resemble early De Stijl
compositions in which
ornament is non-gural and
form and ornament are
differentiated only by scale.
These studies are purely
experimental and the
buildings have no function
and no internal organization.
changing demands of function [81]. The Darmstadt-trained architect

El Lissitzky (18901941) was associated with Malevich at the art school
in Vitebsk in the early 1920s. The paintings which he grouped under
the name Proun (Project for the afrmation of the new) explored the
common ground between architecture, painting, and sculpture. Many
of them consisted of Arkhitekton-like objects oating in a gravity-free
space, represented in spatially ambiguous axonometric projections.
Like van Doesburg, Lissitzky was interested in the possibility of representing four-dimensional space, though he later repudiated this idea.
In contrast to the Rationalists, the Constructivist group held that
what constituted the essence of modern art was not the principle of
form, but that of construction. The First Working Group of
Constructivists (founded by Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Gan) represented the groups most radical wing. The group extended the Futurist
concept of the work of art as a constructiona real object among real
objectsrather than a composition of represented objects, maintaining that this necessarily entailed the total elimination of ne art in
82 Vladimir Tallin
Monument to the Third
International, 1919-20
This structure was to be 400
metres h igh, stradd I i ng the
River Neva in St. Petersburg.
It was to contain three
Platonic volumes which
rotated on their own axis like
planets, symbolizing the
legislature, the executive,
and information services.
favour of applied or industrial art (or 'production art' as they preferred

to call it). They thus converted the Hegelian idea of the sublation of art
into lifealready present in pre-First World War avant-garde theory
(for example, in that of Mondrian)from a vague Utopian fantasy
into an actual political project. This programme was set out in Alexei
Can's manifesto, 'Konstruktivizm', of i<)22.15
The chief paradigm for this 'constructed' object was the threedimensional work of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953)particularly his
'Counter-reliefs' of 1915, based on Boccioni's 1914 reinterpretation of
Picasso's relief collages, and his maquette for a Monument to the
Third International (191920), a fusion of Cubo-Expressionist form
and pseudo-rational structure [82]. The First Working Group saw such
works, which were palpably non-utilitarian, as a halfway house to the
creation of a hitherto non-existent human type: the artistconstructor, who would unite the skills of the artist and the engineer in one
person. The scholastic mystications of much of this debate masked an
attempt on the part of the First Working Group to reconcile artistic
idealism with Marxist materialism. It is clear from Tatlins occasional
writings that for him it was the mimetic and intuitive understanding of
complex mathematical forms that constituted the necessary link
between modern art and political revolution, not the literal production
of these forms. The artists work was not part of technology, but its
counterpart.16
The essential concern of the First Working Group was the artists
role in an industrial economya concern common to all avant-garde
groups since the founding of the Deutscher Werkbund 14 years earlier.
The Constructivist theorist Boris Arvatov suggested that the craft
shops of the Vkhutemas should be used for the invention of the standard forms of material life in the eld of furniture, clothing, and other
types of production.17
Artists like Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Lyubov Popova
(18891924) and their students set about designing the components of
the new socialist micro-environment [83]. Unlike the furniture produced by the Werkbund-inspired German workshops before the First
World War, these objects never entered the production cycle and their
designers did not have the factory experience which might have led to
83 Alexander Rodchenko
Drawing of a chess table,
1925
This was one of the pieces of
furniture for the workers club
section of the USSR Pavilion
at the Exposition des Arts
Dcoratifs in Paris in 1925.
84 Lyubov Popova
Set for Meyerholds Biomechanical Theatre, 1922
This set is a playful
representation of social life
dominated by the machine
a kind of mechanization
without tears.
the evolution of the artistconstructor. However, in remaining the creations of artists they belonged to a new economy of furniture design,
depending on new materials such as plywood, bentwood, and tubular
steel, with forms that depended less on traditional craft skills than on a
certain kind of inventive wit. This type of utilitarian design was to culminate in the designs of the Bauhaus and the furniture of architects
like Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer and would eventually create its own
market for designer furniture. The productivist designers were
therefore the unwitting pioneers of a kind of market production which
was the very opposite of the one they envisaged.
The didactic aim of these designs was also characteristic of the
stage-sets designed by Popova, Alexander Vesnin and others, for
Vsevolod Meyerholds propagandist Bio-mechanical Theatre [84], in
which the inuence of American industrialism was evident. These
were ironic and playful wooden constructions symbolizing the synthesis of man and machine and depicting an environment of mechanistic
efciency, in the spirit of the time-and-motion studies of the
American engineer F. W. Taylor, but with all the threatening aspects
removeda new world in which freedom of action could be integrated with a planned use of the machine.18
Constructivist public architecture

Lenins partial reintroduction of free-market capitalism in the New
Economic Plan (NEP) of 1920 initiated an ambitious programme of
mixed state and privately financed corporate buildings. After 1922

numerous competitions were launched. Though few resulted in built
projects, it was from these competitions that the first permanent, largescale Constructivist architecture emerged. Its chief characteristics were
the elimination of all ornament and the external expression of the
structural frame, showing the influence of American factory design,
and of Walter Gropius's and Ludwig Hilberseimer's separate entries
for the Chicago Tribune competition of 1922. Although the Proletkult
movement had been suspended in 1923, some of these ponderous
monoliths were enlivened with written signs and mechanical or electrical iconography reminiscent of the agitprop kiosks of the early years of
the revolution and connected with Lenin's Plan of Monumental Propaganda of 1918. Vesnin's design for the Moscow headquarters of the
Leningrad Pravda (1924) was little more than an oversized and regularized kiosk, with its transparent frame and pithead imagery, and its
icons of communicationand it had some of the playfulness of his and
Popova's stage-sets [85]. In other cases, such as Vesnin's competition
entry for the Palace of Labour (1922-3) and Ilya Golosov's Workers'
Club in Moscow (1926), the building mass is broken up into huge Platonic volumes containing the main programmatic elements.
OSA
In 1925 a new professional group was formed within the Constructivist
faction under the intellectual leadership of Moisei Ginsburg
(1892-1946) and the patronage of Alexander Vesnin, called The Union
of Contemporary Architects (OSA). This group was opposed to both
the Rationalists and the First Working Group. It sought to steer the
avant-garde away from the Utopian rhetoric of the Proletkult tradition, towards an architecture grounded in scientific method and social
engineering. The group's aims reflected a trend in the Russian avantgarde towards reintegration and synthesis. As Leon Trotsky pointed
out in his book Literature and Revolution (1923): If Futurism was
attracted to the chaotic dynamics of the revolution . . . then neoclassicism expressed the need for peace, for stable forms.' This was
equally true of avant-gardes in the West, whereas we shall see
there was a turn to neoclassical calm and precision as a reaction against
the irrationalism of Expressionism, Futurism, and Dada.
The group published a journalContemporary Architectureand
established close ties with avant-garde architects in Western Europe.
Ginsburg's book Style and Epoque (1924) was closely modelled on Le
Corbusier's Vers une Architecture (though opposed to the idea of
Platonic constants), and was influenced by Riegl's concept of the
Kunsfwol/en. OSA posited an architecture of equilibrium in which aesthetic and technical-material forces would be reconciled. It was
THE AVANT-GARDES IN HOLLAND AND RUSSIA I2/
85 Alexander and Viktor

Vesnin
Competition Design for the
Moscow Headquarters of the
Leningrad Pravda, 1924
This building is a transparent
information machine in
which the structure and
equipment of the building
and its media attachments
become the vehicles of
rhetoric and propaganda. The
building has become a sign of
its own function.
fiercely opposed by Ladovsky s ASNOVA for its positivist attitude and

its emphasis on technology.20
An earlier manifestation of such internationalist ideas had been the
short-lived journal Veshch (Object) published in Berlin in 1922 by El
Lissitzkyspokesman of the Russian avant-garde in Germanyand
the poet Ilya Ehrenburg. The main purpose of this journal, which was
mostly written in Russian, was to acquaint Russian readers with
European developments.21 The journal emphasized the autonomy of

the aesthetic object: We do not wish to see artistic creation restricted
to useful objects alone. Every organized piece of workbe it a house, a
poem or a paintingis a practical object. Basic utilitarianism is far
from our thoughts.22 Though ostensibly promoting the latest Constructivist ideas, the magazine completely ignored the anti-aesthetic
doctrine of the First Working Group.
OSA architects concentrated on housing and urbanism as the main
instruments of socialist development. Ginsburg was not an advocate of
communal living in its more doctrinaire form, according to which a
strict Taylorism should be applied to both work and leisure time and
family life should be virtually abolished. But despite the importance
Ginsburg attached to the opinions of ordinary people, the types of
apartment that he provided in his Narkomn Housing in Moscow
(19289) were unpopular because, with their minimal surface area, they
did not allow for the kind of untidy extended family life to which
people were accustomed.23 The building reects the inuence of Le
Corbusier in its plastic and sectional organization and its combination
of family dwellings and communal facilities [86].24
In the eld of urbanism, OSA was caught up in the controversy
between the urbanists and the disurbanists. In this debate, the urbanists proposed the moderate decentralization of existing cities,
preserving them in their substance, and the creation of Garden
Suburbs along the lines of Raymond Unwins Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb in Britain. The disurbanists, on the contrary,
called for the progressive demolition of existing cities, except for their
historical cores, and the dispersal of the population over the whole
countryside. Ginsburgs disurbanist views are evident from his competition projects for the Green City (a leisure city to be built near
Moscow), and for the steel city of Magnitogorsk in the Urals, one of
the new cities planned as part of the rst Five Year Plan of 1928. For
Magnitogorsk, Ginsburg designed light, wooden houses on pilotis,
suitable for a new kind of nomadic life. These plans were based on the
theories of the sociologist Mikhail Okhitovitch (18961937),25 who
proposed the dispersal of industry and a balanced relationship between
urban and rural life, predicated on the Fordist model of universal automobile ownership.26 In their projects OSA adopted the concept of the
linear city as proposed by the Spanish urbanist Soria y Mata
(18441920) and his Russian disciple Nikolai Milyutin (18891942),
who was also the client for Ginsburgs Narkomn Housing.
Two visionary architects

Among the many architects of talent who emerged in the 1920s in
Russia, two gures stand out: Konstantin Melnikov (18901974) and
86 Moisei Ginsburg
Narkomn Housing, 19289,
Moscow
This was not typical of
Russian mass housing
projects in the 1920s, being
based on avant-garde and
Utopian principles of
communal living that were
not generally accepted by the
Stalinist government.
Predicated on an
internationalist view of
modern architecture, the
scheme, at a formal level, is
highly indebted to the work of
Le Corbusier.
Ivan Leonidov (190259). Melnikov had a pre-revolutionary background, whereas Leonidov was formed within the culture of the
post-revolutionary avant-garde. Both, however, were committed
equally to socialism and Modernism and sought to give symbolic form
to the ideals of the revolution while at the same time exploring architectural ideas for their own sake.
Melnikov was old enough to have been inuenced by the Romantic
classicism fashionable when he was a student, after which he came
under the spell of Expressionism and the Proletkult movement. His
approach was in many ways similar to the formalism of Ladovsky; but
he believed Ladovskys ideas to be too theoretical and schematic and,
with Ilya Golosov, he set up a separate Vkhutemas studioThe New
Academythat taught a more individual and spontaneous approach
to design. In Melnikovs projects the forms and spaces were based on a
close study of the programme, which he interpreted in terms of clashing and distorted geometries, as in the USSR Pavilion at the
Exposition des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris in 1925 [87]. His buildings gave
rise to associations and ideas beyond architecture and acted as signs
within the existing urban context, as, for example, in the Rusakov
Workers Club of 1927. Their similarity, in this respect, to the architecture parlante of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (17361806), who was popular
among architects in Russia at the time, has often been noted.
Melnikov rejected a purist denition of modern architecture either
in a formal or a technical sense and his buildings exhibit an eclectic
mixture of structural expressionism, formal abstraction, and the allegorical use of the human gure. Such kitsch elements, as found in the
87 Konstantin Melnikov
The USSR Pavilion,
Exposition des Arts
Dcoratifs, 1925, Paris
A hybrid structure that was
simultaneously a building
and a sign, the pavilion is
penetrated diagonally by a
public footpathan idea that
Le Corbusier was to recall
when he designed the
Carpenter Center at Harvard
in the 1960s.
Commissariat for Heavy Industry of 1934, appear in his work with

increasing frequency in the 1930s and probably reect the ofcial
demand for a Social Realist architecture. But since Melnikov used
them as additional weapons in his armoury of shock tacticsbringing
to mind the critic Viktor Shklovskys theory of the making strange of
traditional practices27rather than aiming at a reconciliation with tradition, his work suffered the same ofcial neglect in the 1930s as that of
the Constructivists and Rationalists.
Ivan Leonidov, 12 years younger than Melnikov, was a product of
OSA and Ginsburgs formalistfunctionalist wing of Constructivism.
In complete contrast to the physicality and drama of Melnikovs work,
Leonidovs designs seem to exist in a disembodied Neoplatonic world
in which technology has been converted into pure Idea. His reputation
rests largely on a series of Utopian projects designed between 1927 and
1930. The rst and most signicant of these was a project for the Lenin
Institute of Librarianship [88], which was shown at the rst
Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture at Moscow in 1927. This
project resembles a Suprematist composition. It is dominated by a
slender glazed tower and a translucent sphere (the auditorium), the
latter apparently prevented by tension cables from oating off into
space. A second project, for a Palace of Culture (1930), was a transformation of the typical workers club into an institution for proletarian
education on a national scale. Unlike that of the Lenin Monument,
which expands dynamically from a central point, the plan of the Palace
88 Ivan Leonidov
The Lenin Institute of
Librarianship, 1927
The metaphor of
transparency and
weightlessness is here
combined with Platonic
forms, synthesizing
Suprematism and
Constructivism and
symbolizing a socialism in
which the ideal and real, the
spiritual and the material,
have become fused.
of Culture consists of a static rectangular eld, subdivided by a square

grid on which the different Platonic elementsglazed hemispheres,
cones, and pyramidsare deployed like pieces on a chessboard. These
and other projects by Leonidov are remarkable for the apparent effortlessness with which they summarize and integrate the Suprematist and
Constructivist traditions.
The end of the Russian avant-garde

Throughout the 1920s Russian avant-garde architects struggled to
hold onto their freedom of action, which usually meant the freedom to
put forward ideas that were more radical, both socially and artistically,
than those of the Communist Party. But towards the end of the 1920s
the gap between the avant-garde and the political establishment
increased. As the Stalin government became increasingly authoritarian
and culturally conservative, so the architects became more Utopian
as the work of Leonidov demonstrates. The same was true at the level
of urbanism. While the architects of OSA condemned the traditional
city, the Communist Party saw it as a cultural heritage that was understood by the masses and should therefore be preserved, extended, and
improved. The plan for Moscow of 1935 (architect: V. N. Semenov),
though based on the citys unique medieval structure, followed the
general principles of such nineteenth and early-twentieth-century city
plans as Haussmanns Paris, the Ringstrasse in Vienna, and Burnhams
Chicago. The ofcial view was summed up in the slogan: The people
have a right to columns.
With Stalins rst Five Year Plan of 1928, the government embarked
on a ruthless programme of industrial development and agricultural
collectivization. This programme included the construction of a
number of new industrial cities sited near sources of raw material. The
solutions that Ginsburg and Milyutin proposed for Magnitogorsk
were ignored in favour of conventional centralized cities. Showing
little faith in Russian architects with their lack of practical experience
and preoccupation with long-term, Utopian ideas, the new city managers hired foreign architects with experience in the techniques and
management of new settlements. These included the German architect Ernst May and the Swiss Hannes Meyer (who moved to Russia in
1930 after losing hope that socialism might be established in western
Europe). Such architects, however, completely misjudging the true situation in Russia, were disappointed when they discovered that their
clients were more interested in their technical skills than their
Modernist aestheticswhich in any case could hardly be realized
under the primitive conditions of the Russian building industry.
Two events symbolize the nal death of the avant-garde in Soviet
Russia. The rst was the dissolution in 1932 of all autonomous
89 Boris Iofan
Palace of the Soviets,
19313
This project represents the
Stalinist concept of a
bourgeois architecture
inherited by the masses. It
marked the death knell of
modern architecture in the
USSR. The project was never
executed.
architectural professional groups except the Stalinist-dominated All

Union Society of Proletarian Architects (VOPRA),28 which resulted
in increased government control over the profession. The second event
was the result of the prestigious Palace of the Soviets competition, held
between 1931 and 1933. After a long drawn-out procedure a young centrist architectBoris Iofanwas awarded rst prize from a list of
entrants that included many of the stars of European Modernism,
among them Gropius, Mendelsohn, and Poelzig from Germany,
Brasini from Italy, Lamb and Urban from America, and Auguste
Perret and Le Corbusier from France [89].
Henceforth the state maintained a rm grip on architectural policy.
The architects of the avant-garde either vainly attempted to adapt
their style to the approved monumentalism or became bureaucrats (for
example, Ginsburg), working for technical improvement within a cultural policy of Socialist Realism that contradicted all that they had
lived for in the 1920s.
Return to Order:
Le Corbusier and
Modern Architecture
in France 1920-35
After the war of 1914-18 there was a strong reaction in artistic circles in
France against the anarchy and uncontrolled experimentalism of the
pre-war avant-gardes. A 'return to order' was seen to be necessary. But
while for some this meant a return to conservative values and a rejection
of modernity, for others it meant embracing the imperatives of modern
technology. What further complicated the situation was that both cultural pessimists like the poet Paul Valery and technological Utopians
like Le Corbusier invoked the spirit of classicism and geometry.
In the aftermath of the war, there was little architectural activity in
France until 1923, and architects were largely restricted to the design of
private dwellings. This chapter will discuss the development of the
French avant-garde as it emerged from this situation, with Le
Corbusier as its most creative and energetic representative.
Le Corbusier before the First World War
Detail of 96 Le Corbusier
Housing, 1928, Pessac
Charles Eduard Jeanneret (1887-1965), later known as Le Corbusier,

received his training in the school of arts and crafts at La Chaux-deFonds in French Switzerland, where he learned a tradewatch
engravingbefore taking the Cours Superieur with Charles L'Eplattenier, who persuaded him to become an architect. He worked for a few
months with Auguste Ferret in Paris in 1908 and from 1910 to 1911 he
spent several months in Germany preparing a report on German
applied art commissioned by UEplattenier.
While in Germany he met Theodor Fischer, Heinrich Tessenow,
and Bruno Paul, worked briefly in the office of Peter Behrens, and
attended an important Deutscher Werkbund conference sponsored by
the cement industry at which most of the luminaries of the German
avant-garde were present. He then travelled to the Balkans, Istanbul,
and Athens. The journal and letters that Jeanneret wrote during this
37
voyage show that he was caught between his love of the feminine vernacular arts of Eastern Europe and Istanbul, and his admiration for the
masculine classicism of ancient Greece, which he identied with the
spirit of modern rationalism. The effect of the Parthenon, combined
with the teaching of Perret and Behrens, converted him to classicism,
and he renounced the medievalizing Jugendstil tradition in which he
had been trained.
In his report on German applied art, which was entitled Etude sur le
Mouvement de lArt Dcoratif en Allemagne (Study on the Decorative Art Movement in Germany), Jeanneret eulogized the tradition of
the French decorative arts, which he saw to be threatened by German
commercial competition. He was full of praise for the organizational
skill of the Germans, but denigrated their artistic taste. Somewhat
inconsistently, however, he admitted his admiration for the new
German neoclassical movement, claiming that Empire was the progressive style of the day, being at once aristocratic, sober, and serious.
Jeannerets early work already shows the desire to reconcile architectural tradition with modern technology that was to characterize his
entire career. While practising in La Chaux-de-Fonds between 1911
and 1917 he was engaged in three types of project: research into the
application of industrial techniques to mass housing within a Sitteesque Garden Suburb framework; bourgeois interiors in the Empire
and Directoire styles; and the design of neoclassical villas. Of the three
villas that he built in the vicinity of La Chaux-de-Fondsthe Villa
Jeanneret (1912), the Villa Favre-Jacot (1912), and the Villa Schwob
(1916)the rst two were strongly inuenced by Behrenss neoclassical
houses and the third by Perrets use of the reinforced-concrete frame.
During this period, frequent visits to Paris kept him in touch with both
Perret and French decorative art circles, in which his Etude had
enjoyed something of a succs destime.1
In 1917 Jeanneret moved permanently to Paris, where he was able to
set up an ofce within the business ramications of an old friend, the
engineer and entrepreneur Max Dubois. He also began to paint in oils
under the guidance of the artist Amde Ozenfant, whom he met in
1918. Calling themselves Purists, the two immediately collaborated on
a book, Aprs le Cubisme, and with the poet Paul Derme founded the
magazine LEsprit Nouveau in 1920.
LEsprit Nouveau
The review (from which Derme was soon ejected on account of his
Dada tendencies) was published between October 1920 and January
1925 in 28 editions. Its original subtitle, Revue Internationale dEsthtique, was soon changed to Revue Internationale Illustre de lActivit
Contemporaine, and the following list of subjects was announced:
138 le corbusier and modern architecture in france 192035
literature, architecture, painting, sculpture, music, pure and applied

science, experimental aesthetics, the aesthetic of the engineer, urbanism, philosophy, sociology, economics, politics, modern life, theatre,
spectacles, and sports. Most of the articles were written by Ozenfant
and Jeanneret themselves under various pseudonyms.2 (At this point,
Jeanneret adopted the name of Le Corbusier, though he continued to
sign his paintings with his family name until 1928.)
The principal theme of LEsprit Nouveau, already developed in
Aprs le Cubisme, was the problematic relation between art and industrial society. The review shared with De Stijl the idea that the modern
industrialized world implied a change from individualism to collectivism. Both also agreed that art and science were not opposed to each
other, even if they used different means, and that their union would
result in a new aesthetic. What differentiated LEsprit Nouveau from
De Stijl was the belief that this new aesthetic would be classical in
spirit. This idea was underlined by the constant juxtaposition of old
and new: monographs on such French classical masters as Poussin and
Ingres were interleaved with articles by Charles Henry on the science
of aesthetics;3 the Parthenon was compared to a modern automobile,
and so on. The afnity between art and science was seen to be based on
their common approximation to a condition of stasis, harmony, and
invariability. Science and technology had reached a state of perfection
of which the Greeks had only dreamed. Reason could now create
machines of extreme precision; feeling, allied to reason, could create
works of art of an equally precise plastic beauty: No one today denies
the aesthetic that emanates from the constructions of modern industry
. . . machines display such proportions, plays of volume and materiality
that many are true works of art, because they embody number, which is
to say order.4 There was nothing new in the identication of modern
technology with classicismit had been an essential part of
Muthesiuss post-Arts and Crafts aesthetic doctrine (see page 58). But
Cubism had opened the way to a more abstract, Platonic idea of classicism, and it was in this form that the equation technologyclassicism
reappeared in LEsprit Nouveau.
The connection between science and Platonic forms depended on a
highly selective view of modern science. It tended to ignore such nineteenth-century developments as the life sciences and non-Euclidean
geometries with their counterintuitive, often destabilizing, models of
reality. Even more problematic was the fact that in the new world of
objectivity and collectivism anticipated by LEsprit Nouveau the position of the artist remained untouched. De Stijl and the Constructivists,
arguing from similar principles to LEsprit Nouveau, had foreseen a
time when the artist would become redundant. But for LEsprit
Nouveau, the artist played an essential role within a modern society
dominated by science and technologythat of making visible the
le corbusier and modern architecture in france 192035 139
unity of the age. Franoise Will-Levaillants judgement is difcult to

dispute: The positivism applied by LEsprit Nouveau founders on the
contradiction between materialism, to which it leans a priori, and idealism, which completely overdetermines all reasoning and choice.5 An
unresolved dualism was, indeed, at the very core of Le Corbusiers
system of ideas. The rst goal of architecture, he wrote, is to create
organisms that are perfectly viable. The second, where modern architecture really begins, is to move our senses with harmonized forms and
our minds by the perception of the mathematical relationships which
unify them.6 In such statements the connection between technical viability and aesthetic form is merely asserted, never argued. Although
forms became lawful only through technique, they were nonetheless
somehow self-validating. This unresolved contradiction between
materialism and idealism was not, however, restricted to the pages of
LEsprit Nouveau; to one degree or another it characterized the
Modern Movement of the 1920s as a whole.
The objet-type
It was in formulating an ideology of modern painting that Ozenfant
and Jeanneret developed many of the architectural ideas that later
appeared in LEsprit Nouveau. In Aprs le Cubisme (1918) and in the
essay Le Purisme7 an idea that was to play an important part in Le
Corbusiers architectural theory was introduced: that of the objet-type.
In these texts, the authors praise Cubism for its abolition of narrative,
its simplication of forms, its compression of pictorial depth, and its
method of selecting certain objects as emblems of modern life. But
they condemn it for its decorative deformation and fragmentation of
the object and demand the objects reinstatement. Of all the recent
schools of painting, only Cubism foresaw the advantages of choosing
selected objects . . . But by a paradoxical error, instead of sifting out the
general laws of these objects, Cubism showed their accidental
aspects.8 By virtue of these general laws, the object would become an
objet-type, its Platonic forms resulting from a process analogous to
natural selection, becoming banal, susceptible to innite duplication,
the stuff of everyday life [90].9
The Pavillon de LEsprit Nouveau

Although he had continued to design neoclassical interiors and furniture until his move to Paris in 1917, Jeanneret had been having doubts
about his use of this style since 1913. In 1914 he wrote a report in which
he said that, to be in tune with the spirit of the age, designers would
have to look at domains abandoned by the artist and left to their
natural evolution,10 an idea patently derived from Adolf Loos. (Looss
90 Jeanneret/Le Corbusier
Still Life, 1919
This typical Purist work takes
from Cubism its attening of
pictorial depth and
overlapping of planes, but the
object has now been
reinstated in its integrity,
acquiring solidity and weight.
It has become an objet-type,
representing unchanging
values and resisting the
relativistic fragmentation of
reality that had been the
hallmark of Cubism.
essays Ornament and Crime and Architecture had been translated

into French two years earlier in the anarchist journal Les Cahiers
dAujourdhui). The year before, Jeanneret had written to the architect
Francis Jourdain (a follower of Loos) expressing his admiration for a
room Jourdain had exhibited in the Salon dAutomne.11 This room
contained solid, astylar, rather peasant-like furniturea far cry from
the Empire style with its high-bourgeois overtones.12
Le Corbusier resolved these years of doubt in a series of articles in
LEsprit Nouveau, published in 1925 as LArt Dcoratif dAujourdhui,
and his new ideas received their rst practical demonstration in the
Pavillon de LEsprit Nouveau that he and his cousin and new partner,
Pierre Jeanneret, built at the Exposition des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris in
1925. The aim of the exposition, which had been planned before the
First World War, was to reassert French dominance in the decorative
arts, and most of the work was a modernized form of the French artisanal tradition.13 In his pavilion Le Corbusier designed an interior that
fundamentally challenged this tradition, ying in the face of the
French art establishment to which he had so eagerly sought an entre
only a few years before. The pavilion proposed nothing less than the
abolition of the decorative arts as such. Far from being a tastefully
91 Le Corbusier and Pierre

Jeanneret
Pavillon de LEsprit Nouveau
at the Exposition des Arts
Dcoratifs, 1925, Paris
The pavilion is the adaptation
of the typical Parisian artists
studio to a family dwelling.
The furnishing is a montage
of anonymous, off-the-peg
objets-type but at the same
time a carefully contrived, if
austere, Gesamtkunstwerk.
designed middle-class home, it was an apartment for a kind of generic

man without qualities living in a post-war economy dominated by
mass consumption and mass production.
Arthur Regg has called the pavilion a curious mixture of Spartan
simplicity and the heterogeneous deployment of objects.14 The furniture was of two kinds: xed and mobile. The xed elementsmodular
storage units or cassiers standardwere integrated into the architectural background, while the free-standing furniture was chosen from
products available in the marketfor example, leather chairs from
Maples and bentwood dining chairs by Thonet. While the other
exhibitors presented rooms which were artistic wholes, the Pavillon
de LEsprit Nouveau was a montage of found objets-type lacking any
xed formal relation to each other [91]. Of the objects that laconically
littered this carefully arranged space, Le Corbusier later wrote: [They]
were instantaneously readable, recognizable, avoiding the dispersal of
attention brought about by particular things not well understood.15 Le
Corbusiers ideas of xed and mobile furniture came directly from
Loos. What was quite un-Loosian, however, was the return of the
Gesamtkunstwerk in a new formthe aesthetically unied expression
of the industrial age.
The aesthetics of the reinforced-concrete frame

The modern architecture of the 1920s was born under the sign of reinforced concrete, even though much of the work made limited use of
this material.16 To the naive observer, concrete architecture meant
architecture that looked monolithic and cubic. It was from Auguste
Perret that Le Corbusier learned to regard reinforced concrete as the

modern structural material par excellence, but his view of it became
very different from that of his teacher. Perret adhered to the academically enshrined principles of French structural rationalism,
according to which the structure of a building should be legible on the
faade. For Perret, the advent of reinforced concrete modied but did
not invalidate this tradition; he looked on concrete as a new kind of
stone [92].
Unlike Perret, Le Corbusier saw reinforced concrete as a means
towards the industrialization of the building process.17 His rst
embodiment of this idea was the Dom-ino frame (1914), designed with
the help of Max Dubois, in which the columns and the oorplate
constituted a prefabricated system independent of walls and partitions
[93]. In the earliest projects for which this system was proposed, the
external walls, though structurally redundant, still looked as if they
were of masonry construction.18 But starting with the Citrohan House
92 Auguste Perret
Muse des Travaux Publics,
193646, Paris
Perret reinterpreted the
French neoclassical
rationalist masonry tradition
in terms of reinforced
concrete. In this case there is
both a detached peristyle and
a structural wall with
revetment. The structure,
whether free-standing or
embedded in the wall, is
perfectly legible.
93LeCorbusier
Dom-ino Frame, 1914
In this building the concrete
frame is conceived as being
independent of the spatial
planning, and as a means
towards the industrialization
of the build ing process, not
as a linguistic element as it
was for his teacher Perret. Its
logical independence frees
artistic form from its
traditional dependence on
tectonics. The building is
now presented as an
industrial product.
project of 1920, such features disappear and the building becomes an

abstract prism. In all Le Corbusier s mature work, even where the
external wall is an infill between columns, the columns are suppressed,
and the entire surface is covered with a uniform coat of white or
coloured plaster. In becoming homogenized and dematerialized the
walls of the building lose, as it were, their tectonic memory, just as in
Cubism the painting, becoming fragmented, loses its narrative
memory. As in Cubist painting, architecture no longer reiterates
history: it becomes reflexive.
Although the structure of the proposed Citrohan House is
suppressed, its presence is indicated by a number of devices. In this
subtle revealing of a hidden frame structure, the work of Le Corbusier
differs from that of his Modernist colleagues in France such as Robert
Mallet-Stevens (1886-1945), Andre Lur$at (1894-1970), and Gabriel
Guevrekian (1900-70), who like him exhibited at the Salons d'Automne of 1922 and 1924, in which the new 'cubic' style became known
to the public. If we compare, for example, Le Corbusier's Citrohan
House of 1925-7 [94] with Mallet-Stevens's 'Project for a Villa' of 1924
[95] the difference is particularly striking.
The Citrohan House is a single cubic volume. Its window openings
extend to the corner reinforced-concrete column, leaving only the
144 LE CORBUSIER AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE 1920-35
94 Le Corbusier
Citrohan House, 19257,
Weissenhofsiedlung,
Stuttgart
This was the last in the series
of Citrohan-type houses
begun in 1920. The house is
a pure prism, an expression
of volume rather than mass,
the walls reading as thin
membranes, the frame
invisible though palpable.
95 Rob Mallet-Stevens
Project for a Villa, 1924
In contrast to the Citrohan
House, the building appears
to have thick walls,
suggesting masonry
construction. It is a
pyramidal composition of
cubes owing much to van
Doesburg.
96 Le Corbusier
Housing, 1928, Pessac
The use of colour probably
indicates the inuence of van
Doesburg, but Le Corbusier
applies a single colour to
whole faades or buildings,
resisting van Doesburgs
isolation of the plane, just as
he had rejected Cubist
fragmentation. In the 1920s,
unlike van Doesburg, Le
Corbusier preferred earth and
pastel colours but in the
1950sfor example at the
Unit dHabitation at
Marseilleshe was to adopt
the De Stijl palette of primary
colours.
thickness of this column separating the window opening from the

circumambient air, destroying the buildings apparent mass. This effect
is accentuated by the bringing forward of the windows almost to the
wall planes so that the walls appear as a thin diaphragm. Furthermore,
because the entire weight of the building is carried on widely spaced
columns, the window openings can be of any size or shape and their
relationship to the wall is no longer that of gure to ground. In contrast, Mallet-Stevenss villa consists of a pyramidal aggregation of
cubes, their thick walls pierced with windows surrounded by substantial areas of wall. Whatever the structure was intended to be, it gives
the impression of having been carved out of a solid block. Indeed,
Mallet-Stevens himself, in an article of 1922, claimed that, in modern
architecture, the concepts of the architect and the sculptor are identical: It is the house itself that becomes the decorative motif, like a
beautiful piece of sculpture . . . thousands of forms are possible and
unexpected silhouettes are created.19 The villa, in fact, seems to be
derived from van Doesburgs studies in Weimar in 1922, which were
equally ambiguous structurally. In both cases an irregular set of rooms
dances round a vertical stair shaft, generating an asymmetrical, pyramidal composition of cubes. Ornament has been replaced by
picturesque sculptural form.
The Citrohan House was the antithesis of this type of fragmented
object which exhibited on its exterior the volumes out of which it was
made. Such a building was a hirsute agglomeration of cubes; an
uncontrolled phenomenon.20 We have got used, Le Corbusier wrote
to a client, to compositions which are so complicated that they give the
impression of men carrying their intestines outside their bodies. We
claim that these should remain inside . . . and that the outside of the
house should appear in all its limpidity.21 These remarks reveal Le
Corbusiers conception of the relation between modern technology
and the laws of architecture. Technology, continuously changing,
makes the building functionally efcient, satisfying, and giving rise to
needs. But like the machinery of a car, the technology of the house
should be invisible. Both house and car are objets-typecomplex sets
of functions sheathed in Platonic membranes.
Although Le Corbusier rejected van Doesburgs literal fragmentation of the envelope of the building, his interiors show the inuence of
van Doesburgs composition by planes,22 and he sometimes adopts the
Dutch architects external use of polychromy [96].
The Five Points of a New Architecture

The Citrohan House referred to above was one of a pair of houses Le
Corbusier built for the Deutscher Werkbund-sponsored exhibition at
the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart of 1927. It was in the context of
this building that he published his Five Points for a New Architecture, in which he prescribed the rules of a new architectural system.
These were: pilotis; the roof garden; the free plan; the horizontal
window; and the free faade. Each point, inverting a specic element
of the academic tradition, is presented as a freedom achieved by means
of modern technology, a decoding of the conventions of a supposedly
natural architecture. But this declaration of freedom can also be read
as a series of displacements within a broader set of architectural rules. It
does not accept the absolute licence of Expressionism or the mystical
Utopia of van Doesburg. It is the purication of the architectural tradition, not its abandonment.
Implicit in the Five Points is an opposition between the rectangular
enclosure and the free plan, each of which presupposes the other [97].
Le Corbusier underlined this opposition when, describing the Villa
Stein, he wrote: On the exterior an architectural will is afrmed, in the
interior all the functional needs are satised.23 But he went beyond the
functionalism implied by this statement, exploiting the aesthetic possibilities inherent in the free plan. The interior becomes a eld of
plastic improvisation triggered by the contingencies of domestic life
and giving rise to a new kind of promenade architecturale. Le Corbusier
compares this disorderly order to the chaos of a dining table after a
convivial dinner, which becomes an allegory of the occasion of which it
is the trace.24 According to Francesco Passanti, Le Corbusier owed this
concept of life art to the poet Pierre Reverdy.25
The tension between the free interior and the limpid exterior in Le
Corbusiers work of the 1920s reaches a climax with the Villa Savoye at
97 Le Corbusier
Four House Types, 1929
Le Corbusiers brilliant
typological analysis of his
own houses clearly reveals
his concept of the dialectical
relationship between a
Platonic exterior and a
functional interiortwo
incommensurate forms of
order existing side by side.
Poissy (1929-31). The house is raised on pilotis and appears as a pure

white prism hovering above the convex surface of the field in which it is
sited [98]. The arriving car drives under the house and a ramp takes the
visitor from the entrance lobby to the main floora walled enclosure
occupied partly by the accommodation and partly by a terrace garden.
Within the geometrical purity of the enclosing cube, the interior is free
and asymmetrical, obeying its own dynamic logic [99]. Yet the wall
separating the two worlds of inside and outside is only a thin membrane, cut by a continuous horizontal window. The inhabitant having
first been separated from the Virgilian landscape is re-presented with
its framed image. The cube is first established and then burst open
[100].
Writing of Le Corbusier s houses of the 19208, Sigfried Giedion
said: 'Like no one before him, Corbusier had the ability to make
resonate the ferro-concrete skeleton that had been presented by
science... the solid volume is opened up whenever possible by cubes of
air, strip windows, immediate transitions to the sky . . . Corbusier s
houses are neither spatial nor plastic... air flows through them/26
Urbanism
As we have seen, Le Corbusier's earliest urban projects in Chaux-deFonds were related to the Garden City movement. But in 1920, he
turned his attention to the problem of the modern metropolis, addressing issues of circulation and hygiene with which the urbanists in Paris
had been concerned for some time.27 The first such projectthe Ville
Contemporaine, shown at the Salon d'Automne of 1922was a
schematic proposal for a city of 3 million people on an ideal site [101].
The project is based on the belief that the metropolis is valuable a
priori. Its efficiency as a node of culture depends on its historical association with a particular location. But to be preserved it has first to be
destroyed. To counter the city s increasing congestion and the consequent flight of its inhabitants to the suburbs, it will be necessary both to
increase its density and to decrease the area covered by buildings. Using
American skyscraper technology, the project proposes widely spaced
office towers 200 metres high, and continuous residential superblocks
of 12 storeys, the rest of the space being turned into parkland traversed
by a rectilinear network of high-speed roads. Modern technology
makes it possible to combine the advantages of the Garden City with
those of the traditional city. Instead of the population moving to the
suburbs, the suburbs move into the city.
The linear superblocks in the Ville Contemporaine are arranged in
a pattern of 'setbacks''a redents. This idea had two sources: the
boulevards a redans proposed by Eugene Henard in I9O3,28 and Le
Corbusier's own studies of Dom-ino housing around I9i4-29 In the
LE CORBUSIER AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE 1920-35 149
98 Le Corbusier (above)
Villa Savoye, 192931,
Poissy
Though classically
proportioned, the Villa
Savoye seems to have
alighted from outer space, so
lightly does it rest on the
ground. This was one of Le
Corbusiers most surreal
buildings and the occasion of
his most lyrical use of pilotis.
99 Le Corbusier (right, top)

Villa Savoye, 192931,
Poissy
The main rooms are on the
rst oor, together with a roof
terrace. This is a variation on
the medieval theme of the
hortus conclusus, a closed
garden of contemplation set
apart from the surrounding
landscape, which is,
however, visible through a
continuous horizontal
window in the terrace wall.
100 Le Corbusier (below)

Villa Savoye, 192931, Poissy, plans of ground, rst, and
roof oors
The ramp is a vestige of an earlier sketch in which the car is
shown driving up to the rst oor.
101 Le Corbusier
Ville Contemporaine, 1922
In this drawing the shining
and unforgiving technology of
the ofce towers hardly
impinges on nature or on the
untroubled lives of the haute
bourgeoisie sipping their
coffee on a roof terrace.
Ville Contemporaine, as in these studies, the housing blocks do not

align with the road system but are arranged in counterpoint to it. In
the later Ville Radieuse (1933) the blocks are raised on pilotis, and
pedestrian movement at ground level is unobstructed. The urban
space becomes isotropic; there are no fronts and backs and the
spatial distinction between public and private is abolished. Although
Le Corbusier modied these rst urban models in various ways, their
basic form remained unaltered, even after he had developed completely different systems of urbanism for Rio de Janeiro, Algiers, and
Chandigarh (see page 210).
In the Ville Contemporaine and the Ville Radieuse, two absolute
values are juxtaposed: nature and technology. Work and domestic life
take place in high-rise structures; cultivation of the spirit and the body
takes place in parkland. As a result of this disjunction, the element of
chance is eliminated from urban experience. The social problems connected with this separation of living from the spontaneous and random
aspects of city life have become increasingly obvious in the intervening
years. Despite its faults, however, the Corbusian city drew attention to
the division of labour inherent in industrialized society by creating an
urban image in which technology and nature become separated. We
may quarrel with Le Corbusiers Cartesian interpretation of this separation, but hardly with its underlying truth.
Public buildings
In the late 19208 and early 19308 Le Corbusier designed a number of
major public buildings, including two unbuilt competition designs
the League of Nations Building for Geneva (1927) and the Palace of the
Soviets for Moscow (1931)and two completed buildingsthe
Centrosoyus building in Moscow (1929-35) and the Cite de Refuge in
Paris (1929-33) [102]. In these buildings he adopted a strategy very different from that of his houses. Instead of containing the functional
irregularities within a Platonic exterior, the building is broken up into
its component parts. These consist mainly of linear bars (containing
repeating modules such as offices) and centralized volumes (containing spaces of public assembly). These elements are then freely
recomposed in such a way that they tend to fly apart and multiply
102 Le Corbusier
Cite de Refuge, 1929-33,
Paris
In a brilliant solution to a
difficult site, the building is
approached through a set of
initiatory volumes, seen as
figures against the wall plane
of the main dormitory block.
LE CORBUSIER AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE 1920-35 153
103 Le Corbusier
Cit de Refuge, 192933,
Paris
Proposed extension.
The building becomes a
small city, its parts
apparently absorbed into its
urban context.
[103], forming small cities on their own. In the Corbusian ideal city,
public buildings lead a rather shadowy and insecure existence.30
Regional Syndicalism
In the late 1920s Le Corbusier became a militant member of the NeoSyndicalist group led by Hubert Lagardelle (18741958) and Philippe
Lamour (19031992). The group was anti-liberal and anti-Marxist and
ideologically aligned with contemporary Fascist movements in France
and Italy. Le Corbusier became an editor and major contributor to the
groups journal Plans and its successor Prlude. Inuenced by PierreJoseph Proudhon and Georges Sorel, the group called for the abolition
of parliamentary democracy, and for the creation of a government of
technical elites, on the Saint-Simonian principle of the administration
of things, not the government of people, dedicated to a planned
economy. It believed that the alienation of modern social life could be
alleviated not by socialism, with its concept of abstract man, but by a
return to lhomme rel and to the spirit of community characteristic of
pre-industrial societies.31 This anti-Enlightenment, anti-materialist
position was the equivalent of the Volkisch movement in Germany, and
had the same tolerance for a technological Modernism on condition
that it was not dominated by nance capital.32
Le Corbusiers new journalistic activities coincided with a revival of
his earlier interest in vernacular architecturean interest which had
been submerged but never destroyed by his concern for new systems of
architectural production. In his book Une Maison, un Palais he wrote in
lyrical if somewhat patronizing terms of the shermens cottages at Le
Piquey near La Rochelle where he spent his summer vacations
104 Le Corbusier
Villa de Mandrot, 1931,
Pradet
This was the rst in a series of
rural houses using traditional
materials and marking a
phase in Le Corbusiers
career in which he began to
stress vernacular building
traditions.
between 1928 and 1932.33 In building their huts, he says, the shermen
are very attentive to what they do. When deciding where to place
something, they turn round and round like a cat deciding where to lie
down; they weigh up the situation, unconsciously calculating the point
of equilibrium . . . intuition proposes, reason reasons.34
Between 1930 and 1935, vernacular forms make their appearance in
several small rural houses by Le Corbusier and Jeanneret in which the
pitched roof and the masonry wall, outlawed in the 1920s, reappear
[104]. Yet these houses are no mere return to vernacular models;
natural materials are reinterpreted in terms of Modernist aesthetics.
Vernacular references are less evident in the Radiant Farm and a
Village Coopratif (193438) [105]two linked (unrealized) projects
in which modern building technologies and Modernist aesthetics were
applied to agriculture.35 These projects originated in an issue of Prlude
devoted to regional reform, edited by a radical peasant-farmer, Norbert
Bzard, who commissioned Le Corbusier to design a model farming
community. The grass-covered Catalan vaults of these projects have
rural overtones, but with their montage sec (dry) construction and
their clean, white, geometrical forms, they were clearly intended to
make the greatest possible contrast with existing rural conditions. The
rather surprising six-storey block of apartments in the cooperative
village was justied by Le Corbusier in semiological rather than functional or social termsit was, he said, a new architectural sign
105 Le Corbusier
Radiant Village Coopratif,
19348
This project was linked to Le
Corbusiers involvement with
the Regional Syndicalists and
their journal Prlude, and
was conceived as part of their
national plan for agrarian
reform.
standing above the meadows, the stubble elds, and the pastures36
an emblem of the new modern spirit.
If we compare Le Corbusiers Neo-Syndicalist ideas with those he
had expressed in LEsprit Nouveau 15 years earlier, we nd a considerable shift of emphasis. The main problem for LEsprit Nouveau was the
conict between eternal cultural values and modern technology, which
it tried to resolve by conating technology with Platonic invariables.
In the late 1920s Le Corbusier modied this static model, acknowledging the existence of uncertainty and change. Elements that had been
recessive in the LEsprit Nouveau philosophydisorder, organic forms,
immediate experience, intuitioncome to the forefront. If geometry
and balance are still seen as the ultimate measures of value, they are
now thought to be as much the result of instinct as of an abstract rationality. The task of modern architecture is seen as the fusion of universal
technology with age-old wisdom:
Architecture is the result of the state of the spirit of the epoch. We are in the
face of an international event . . . techniques, problems posed, like scientic
means, are universal. However, the regions are distinct from each other,
because climatic conditions, racial currents . . . always guide the solution
towards forms which they condition.37
Le Corbusiers earliest contact with regional ideas had been in 1910,

under the inuence of Alexandre Cingria-Vaneyre, an advocate of a
classical, Mediterraneanized Suisse-Romande. With the Neo156 le corbusier and modern architecture in france 192035
Syndicalists he now encountered similar ideas on a global scale. The

Neo-Syndicalists believed that Europe should be divided into three
natural zones: the Germans in the north-west, the Slavs in the east,
and the Latin races in the south (including North Africa). Under the
sway of such racial theorieswhich were quite common in Europe in
the 1930sLe Corbusier began to think in terms of a global modern
architecture in which technology would come into direct confrontation with the natural geographical forces of different macro-regions.
His extensive travels in South America and Algeria in the 1930s generated a series of urban projects in the developing world, culminating in
his work in Chandigarh, India, in the 1950s. These and other later projects will be discussed in chapter 11.
WeimarGermany:
the Dialectic of the
Modern 1920-33
106 Mies van der Rohe

German Pavilion,
International Exposition,
1929, Barcelona
(demolished, rebuilt 1986)
View from the pavilion into
the closed court The interior
is characterized by strong
contrasts of light and shade
with a rich variety of
surfacesmarbles, clear and
translucent glass, stainless
steel (originally chromiumplated), red curtains, and black
carpet.
In Germany, as in France, there was a 'return to order* after the First

World War, though it was delayed by political and economic crisis.
When it came it rejected not just Expressionism but the values of the
Wilhelmine culture that Expressionism had attacked. Whereas in
France the return to order, even its progressive form, could be seen as
re-affirming an established and triumphant national tradition, in
Germany, defeated in the war, it implied a radical break with the
national past and a search for alternative principles.
The architecture that began to emerge in Germany around 1922
reflected a dramatic change of orientation in the visual arts as a whole.
The movement known as 'Neue Sachlichkeit' ('New Objectivity' or
more accurately4 Fact-like-ness'),1 was indicative of a new realism. The
term was first used in 1923 in the context of painting by museum director Gustav Hartlaub, who defined it as 'realism with a socialist flavour'.
The movement was sometimes interpreted as a form of cynicisma
reaction to the horrors of a disastrous warand sometimes as a 'magic
realism'. The art critic Franz Roh expressed the situation thus: 'The
Expressionist generation had rightly opposed Impressionism with the
man of ethical principles . . . The most recent artist corresponds to a
third type, one who shares Expressionisms far-sighted aims, but is
more down-to-earth and knows how to enjoy the present.'2
In architecture, the change was registered by Adolf Behne. As chief
spokesman of Expressionism and a key figure in the Arbeitsrat fur
Kunst (AFK), Behne had held strongly anti-technological views, as is
clear from his essay 'Die Wiederkehr der Kunst' ('The Restoration of
Art') of 1919. But by 1922 he had completely reversed his position. In
his essay of that year, 'Kunst, Handwerk, Technik' (Art, Craft, and
Technology')3 he renounced his earlier views, claiming that the division of labour inaugurated by the machine was an improvement on the
old 'organic' relation between the individual craftsman and his
products, since it brought into play a 'higher awareness'. After a transitional period, the worker would come to understand his role within
the totality of industrialized society. Zivilisation and Gesellschaft were
now embraced at the expense of the old paradigms of Kultur and
Gemeinschaft. Behne's new concept of the relation between the worker
159
and his work was similar to the view that Gropius had already
expressed in his 'Kunst und Industriebau' speech of 1911 in an earlier
'return to order' (see page 68).
The Bauhaus: from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit

When Gropius was appointed to succeed Henry van de Velde as director of the Academy of Fine Art at Weimar in 1919, he was given the
task of creating a new School of Architecture and Applied Art which
would unify the Hochshule fur Bildende Kunst with the recently disbanded Kunstgewerbeshule. The integration of fine arts with crafts was
standard policy in German art schools at the time.4 But as we have seen
Gropius had grander ambitions: he wanted the academy (which he now)
renamed the Bauhaus) to become the spearhead of the AFKs programme for the transformation of German artistic culture under the
wing of architecture (see page 96). This programme was predicated on
the belief that artistic culture was threatened by the materialism of
industrial capitalism and could only be saved by a spiritual revolution.
In the 'Bauhaus Manifesto* of 1919, Gropius wrote, in Expressionist
vein, 'Let us conceive a new building of the future . . . architecture,
painting, and sculpture rising to Heaven out of the hands of a million
craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new in the future' [107].5
Between 1919 and 1923, however, the Bauhaus abandoned its
Expressionist ideology and began to absorb the ideas of Neue
Sachlichkeit, De Stijl, and UEsprit Nouveau. The initial impulse for
this change came in 1921 when van Doesburg set himself up in Weimar
in opposition to the Bauhaus, giving a series of lectures attended by
many Bauhaus students in which he advocated an approach to design
diametrically opposed to the ideology of craftsmanship and artistic
'intuition' that still dominated the Bauhaus curriculum.
A second influx of ideas came from Russian Constructivism.
During the early 19205 there was considerable cultural interchange
between Germany and Soviet Russia. In 1922 the first Exhibition of
Soviet Art was shown at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. This
coincided with the publication of El Lissitzky's journal Veshch (see page
128). In 1921 the Constructivist-based Congress of International
Progressive Artists was held in Diisseldorf, and this was followed by a
Constructivist Congress in Weimar in 1922, organized by a splinter
group from the Diisseldorf congress, including van Doesburg, the
Hungarian artist and photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El
Lissitzky, and the Dada artists Hans Richter, Hans Arp, and Tristan
Tzara. These events greatly affected the climate of opinion within the
Bauhaus.
The first institutional change within the school took place in 1922,
when the Swiss painter Johannes Itten was replaced by Moholy-Nagy
160 WEIMAR GERMANY: THE DIALECTIC OF THE MODERN 1920-33
107 Lyonel Feininger

Cover of the Bauhaus
Manifesto, 1919
In this Expressionist
representation of the
Cathedral of Socialism the
future is projected in terms of
the pre-industrial past.
as head of the Vorkurs (Preliminary Course). In contrast to Itten, whose

mystical approach to art teaching was based on psychological
formalist principles,6 Moholy-Nagy (18951946) introduced into the
school an objective Constructivist approach involving the manipulation of industrial materials such as steel and glass and mechanical
techniques of assembly. The difference between Ittens and MoholyNagys ideas roughly corresponded to that between the Rationalists
and the Constructivists within the Russian avant-garde (see page 122).
The change in the Vorkurs was later described rather laconically by
Moholy-Nagys fellow teacher Josef Albers: [The course] aimed at the
development of a new, contemporary visual idiom . . . and thisover
timeled from an emphasis on personal expression . . . to a more
rational, economic, and structural use of material itself . . . in pictorial
terms, from collage to montage.7 As Reyner Banham pointed out,
however, the move from subjectivity to machine rationalism did not
eliminate the concept of ideal beauty. Moholy-Nagy, no less than Le
Corbusier, believed in the connection between machines and Platonic
forms.8
The real turning point came in 1923, when the Bauhaus organized
its rst exhibition. In line with the new technical emphasis, the stated
weimar germany: the dialectic of the modern 192033 161
theme of the exhibition was to be Art and Technology: a New Unity'.

But Gropius also had a more purely architectural agendaone which
would present, as he said, 'international architecture from a completely
pre-determined point of view, namely the development of modern
architecture in the dynamic functional direction, without ornament or
mouldings/9 A model housethe 'Haus am Horn'was built, containing furniture designed and produced by the Bauhaus workshops as
prototypes for mass production. Elementarist wooden furniture, based
on that of Gerrit Rietveld, was designed by Bauhaus student Marcel
Breuer (1902-81), who three years laterafter he had joined the
Bauhaus staffwas to design the tubular-steel, Constructivist
* Wassily' chair.
In 1925, the Thuringian State government withdrew its financial
support and the Bauhaus moved to the town of Dessau, where the
municipality funded a new school building, incorporating an existing
trade school and new staff houses. With the move, several of the existing staff resigned and their places were taken by a new generation of
Bauhaus-trained teachersincluding Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers,
and Herbert Bayerwho had acquired from the Bauhaus a new aesthetic theory and a new set of technical skills. That same year, Gropius
wrote, 'The Bauhaus workshops are essentially laboratories in which
prototypes of products suitable for mass production and typical of our
time are carefully developed and improved/ triumphantly celebrating
the union of art and technology. Writing in the Bauhaus journal in
1926, however, Bauhaus teacher Georg Muche struck a discordant
note, advancing the rather Loosian view that the laws of fine art and
those of technical design were fundamentally different. While Muche
clearly underestimated the importance of the new relation between art
and technology, his critique does suggest that the change to more
machine-oriented design might be better explained as a 'paradigm
shift' on the part of the artist, than as the fusion of artist and technician
that Gropius implied. The designs that became commercially successful after the move to Dessau were in fact the result of the collaboration
between industry and Bauhaus artists such as Marianne Brandt and
Christian Dell [108].10
The school building and the masters' houses at Dessau were the first
major structures realized by Gropius in the new 'dynamic functional'
manner. The body of the school building was broken down into programmatic elements and reassembled to form an open, centrifugal
form that was possibly inspired by Mies van der Rohe s project for a
Concrete Country House [117]. The school building [109, 110], with
its bridge to the new trade school, and the masters' houses with their
interlocking prisms, show the influence of both Constructivism and
De Stijl. The pure cubes which form these buildings reflect the work of
Oud in Holland and Le Corbusier and Lur$at in France. The school
162 WEIMAR GERMANY: THE DIALECTIC OF THE MODERN 1920-33
108 Wilhelm Wagenfeld and

Marianne Brandt
Ceiling Lights, 1927
These ttings were among
the most commercially
successful Bauhaus designs
of the Dessau period,
resulting from a collaboration
between artists and industry.
building also has certain features from Gropiuss earlier work, such as
the projection of the glazing slightly in front of the wall plane, so that it
is not interrupted by the columns.
Social housing
With the Dawes Plan of 1924 and the consequent inux of American
capital, the building industry in Germany began to recover. Cities were
now able to take advantage of 1919 legislation giving them limited
control over the use of land, and to activate programmes to alleviate the
109 and 110 Walter Gropius

Bauhaus Building, 1926,
Dessau
The swastika form of the plan
exemplies the
FuturistConstructivist
centrifugal free-standing
building with the different
programmatic elements
articulated, as opposed to the
traditional courtyard type.
Compare with public
buildings by Le Corbusier,
Hannes Meyer, and the
Vesnin brothers for different
interpretations of the same
idea.
housing shortage caused by several years without building activity and

considerable wartime migration to the cities.11
During the second half of the nineteenth century there had been
increasing concern among reformist groups in all the industrial
countries over the lack of affordable housing for unskilled and semiskilled workers. By 1914 the housing reform movement in Germany
had gathered considerable momentum and non-prot building
societies were widespreadeven if the results so far were meagre. In
1924, therefore, when the Social Democratic Party municipal authorities put in place their housing programmes, they were able to benet
from institutions and powers already in place.12 A remarkable characteristic of this housing campaign was the extent to which it was
164 weimar germany: the dialectic of the modern 192033
dominated by the avant-garde, though a precedent for this had been

set in Holland, where both Berlage and Oud had also received official
city appointments.13
After the First World War Germany was rich in technically competent, ideologically progressive architects, and many of these were put in
charge of city housing programmes between 1924 and 1931, including
Otto Haesler (1880-1962) in Celle, Max Berg (1870-1947) in Breslau,
Fritz Schumacher (1869-1947) in Hamburg, Ernst May (1886-1970) in
Frankfurt-am-Main, and Martin Wagner (1885-1957) in Berlin.
Like the Garden Suburbs before the First World War, the post-war
Siedlungen consisted of enclaves of new housing on the outskirts of
existing cities. But they differed from the Garden Suburb model in
several respects. They were, for example, built to higher densities and
consisted mostly (though not exclusively) of apartment blocks of up to
five storeys (considered the maximum walk-up height). These were
generally laid out on the Zeilenbau principle of parallel blocks aligned
north-south at right angles to the access street (a system that had
already been proposed before the war).14 This gave to each apartment
the fresh air and sunlight that had been conspicuously absent in the
late-nineteenth-century tenementsthe so-called Mietkasernen
('rental barracks')with their dark courtyards. At the aesthetic and
symbolic level, they followed the rules of Neue Sachlichkeitthat is to
say they were stripped of all ornament and had flat roofs. Ornament
was replaced by the fairly extensive use of coloured surfaces. Some of
the larger Siedlungen included public buildings such as schools and
hospitals, and the housing was generally provided with public facilities
such as central heating and laundries.
The design of the individual apartments reflected the influence of
new concepts of domestic management, strongly promoted by the
women's movement, which drew their inspiration largely from
America where, as we have seen, they had been discussed since the
18908 (see page 50). Erna Meyers highly successful DerNeueHaushalt
(The New Household, 1926) and Crete Schutte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt
Kitchen design were based on Christine Frederick's Scientific
Management in the Home of 1915. The new minimum dwelling affected
the middle classes even more than the workers.15
Except for the use of reinforced concrete for floors, roofs, and occasionally columns, and for some experiments in prefabricated concrete
wall panels, the materials and techniques used in the Siedlungen were
traditional. Walls were of plastered brick or clinker block. The
windows had wooden frames and tended to be small. These small
windows, large, smooth wall surfaces, and heavy attic floors often gave
an almost cosy, vernacular effect to the blocks.16
The ruthlessly 'rational', Zei/enbau-type layouts, like that of
Gropius and Haesler for Dammerstock Estate at Karlsruhe (19278)
WEIMAR GERMANY: THE DIALECTIC OF THE MODERN 1920-33 165
111 Otto Haesler and Walter

Gropius
Dammerstock Estate,
19278, Karlsruhe, plan
One of the most rigorous
examples of the Zeilenbau
type of layout, in which all the
blocks have the same
orientation, in mechanical
repetition.
[111], were not always popular. The critic Adolf Behne, although he
supported the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in principle, attacked this
project, accusing it of being both formalist and scientistic, and of treating the inhabitant as an abstract dweller. In this approach, he said, the
architect becomes more hygienic than the hygienist: Medical research
has shown that the inhabitants of those houses that are considered to
be unhygienic are healthier than the inhabitants of hygienic houses.17
Other projects were given some degree of formal differentiation. At
the company town of Siemensstadt in Berlin, where Walter Gropius,
Fred Forbat (18971972), Otto Bartning, and Hugo Hring (18821958)
designed buildings within an overall plan by Hans Scharoun
(18931972), a number of short parallel blocks were subordinated to and
unied by a long, curved building following the road alignment [112].
At the Britz-Siedlung (1928) in Berlin, Bruno Taut, working for the
building society GEHAG, focused his layout on a large, horseshoeshaped open space and used every opportunity to introduce variety
into the project by means of colour, contrasting materials, curved
streets, and broken lines of housing. In his Berlin housing projects
Taut, despite his new Sachlich credentials, carried on a sort of private
guerrilla war against the more Sachlich Modernists.18
The most comprehensive housing programme was that at
Frankfurt-am-Main, where Ernst May, appointed city architect in
1925, set about implementing an unbuilt satellite project that he had
designed for Breslau in 1921. The whole design, which was developed
between 1925 and 1931, consisted of a number of small Siedlungen, most
of which were set slightly apart from the city in unspoilt meadowland.
Of all the Siedlungen, those of Frankfurt, with their semi-rural setting
and high proportion of single family houses, were perhaps the closest
to the Garden Suburb ideals of Raymond Unwin, for whom May had
worked before the war. Most of the satellites were designed in Mays
ofce, but some were farmed out, including that of Hellerhof by the
112 Walter Gropius
Apartment Block, 1928,
Siemensstadt, Berlin
This is one of the short
parallel blocks at
Siemensstadt. Note the
use of brick to give the
impression of longer spans in
windows and balconies.
These kinds of trompe-loeil
effects are typical of Gropius,
a man of compromise, both
aesthetic and political.
Dutch architect Mart Stam (18991986). The public response to the

New Frankfurt was generally favourable.
The Weimar Republics social housing programme seems in retrospect to have been an extraordinary act of collective architectural will.
Yet it was barely able to scratch the surface of the housing problem.
In spite of government subsidies and the use of non-prot building
societies, the price of the dwellings remained too high for unskilled
workers. Nonetheless, the programmes achievements, both on a practical and on a symbolic level, were considerable. In a series of projects
that acted as architectural manifestos, it created the image of an
orderly, healthy, and harmonious society, contrasting with the squalid
tenements of the nineteenth century.
Despite the predominance of Neue Sachlichkeit architects in the
Weimar housing programme, there were many architects in Germany
who believed that domestic architecture should follow vernacular
models [113]. Many of these had belonged to the Arts and Crafts and
113
Housing, 19257, Dsseldorf
The Heimat style became
increasingly associated with
National Socialism and the
extreme Right, in opposition
to the Modernism favoured by
the Social Democratic Party.
Garden City movements and had been avant-garde in their day. The
most vocal and inuential of these was Paul Schultze-Naumburg
(18691949), who carried on a relentless campaign against Neue
Sachlichkeit in support of the Heimatschutz (Protection of the Home)
movement. Between 1926 and 1928 Schultze-Naumburg published a
series of books that became progressively more nationalist and racist in
tone.19 These helped to polarize the public debate between Modernists
and traditionalists, identifying the latter with the ideas of National
Socialism, although their opinions were more or less those of conservative people everywhere (in other words, the majority).
Functionalists versus rationalists

One of the main conicts within the German avant-garde of the 1920s
was that between the functionalists and rationalists. In one of the
rst attempts to dene the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, Der Moderne
Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building, written in 1923 but not
published until 1926), Adolf Behne drew attention to this conict and
analysed the ideological differences which underlay it. According to
Behne, the functionalists (whom he might more accurately have called
organicists) created unique, non-repeatable buildings whose forms
were shaped round their functions, whereas the rationalists looked for
typical and repeatable forms that were able to full generalized needs.
Behne equated the functionalists with the ex-Expressionist architects,
who, under the guise of being true to the laws of nature, in fact created
singular buildings that were unable to become parts of a greater whole:
As the functionalist looks for the greatest possible adaptation to the
most specialized purpose, the rationalist looks for the most appropriate
solution for many cases.20 The functionalists are individualists, while
the rationalists accept a responsibility to society.
Theo van Doesburg, in one of his articles in the journal Het
Bouwbedrijf,21 made the same distinction as Behne, though he put
greater stress than Behne on problems of aesthetics. For van Doesburg
the functionalists, in their search for a close t between forms and
functions, ignored the psychological need for spare space in buildings,
and he cited Henri Poincars concept of tactile space to support this
idea.22
Looking at the problem today, it seems clear that these critics were
putting forward two ideal types, and that actual buildings seldom
conformed completely to one or the other: the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency was, by denition, concerned with generic rather than individual
problems; and even the most extreme Expressionists had, by 1924,
accepted rationalist principles. However, although the work of the
Luckhardt brothers, Hans (18901954) and Wassili (18891972), and of
Erich Mendelsohn (18871953) after the Einstein Tower of 19204, can
114 and 115 Hans Scharoun

Schminke House, 1933,
Lbau
An example of
functionalism or
organicism in which a uid
spatial conguration
responds to both internal and
external pressures. In this
case the balconies are
rotated relative to the main
body of the house,
responding to the view across
the garden.
easily be assimilated to Neue Sachlichkeit, that of Hring and

Scharoun is often characterized by curvilinear, functionally expressive
forms which reject the rectilinearity typical of the movement as a whole
[114, 115].
Mies van der Rohe and the spiritualization of technique

Although no one architect in the Germany of the 1920s dominated the
professional scene as Le Corbusier did in France, the reputation of
Mies van der Rohe (18861969) in the sphere of aesthetics seems to
have been equal to that of Gropius in the sphere of organization. A
man of few, if weighty, words, Mies was not only an astute selfpublicist, but an architect with the ability to reduce every problem to a
kind of essential simplicitya simplicity that continues to give rise to
conicting interpretations of his work to this day.
In Miess work, two opposing tendencies struggled for dominance.
One could be described as the enclosure of function in a generalized

cubic container not committed to any particular set of concrete functionsa tendency partly derived from his early allegiance to
neoclassicism. The other was the articulation of the building in
response to the uidity of life. This second tendency, however, seldom
involved him in gural shaping, as it did the Expressionists, nor did it
align Mies with what Behne called functionalism. Following a

Riehl House, 1907, Berlin
(Neubabelsberg, Potsdam)
The interest of this building
lies chiey in the frontalized
gable end, which seems to
grow out of the retaining wall.
Several of Miess projects
have this intimate, dam-like
relation to sloping sites.

Plans, (a) Concrete Country
House, 1923, (b) Lessing
House, 1923, and (c) Brick
Country House, 1924
Unlike Miess early
neoclassical houses, these
rst Constructivist houses
have one storey and become
progressively more
fragmented. In the Brick
Country House, closed
volumes have disappeared
and the space is dened only
by free-standing planes, as in
van Doesburgs Counterconstructions.
Constructivist or Neoplasticist logic, neutral forms could create

systems exible enough to respond to any imaginable life situation,
every building taking on a unique conguration while being made
from similar elements. It was such a process that Mies adopted when
he abandoned the house as a single pavilion and broke it up into its
basic elements. I will discuss here the houses Mies produced between
the wars, in which he attempted to reconcile these conicting ideas
neoclassical objectication on the one hand and Neoplasticist
fragmentation on the other.23
Miess architectural formation was remarkably similar to Le
Corbusiers, though their response to the conditions of modernity that
they both recognized could hardly have been more different. Both had
been trained in craft schools and had climbed into the professionally
and socially higher sphere of architecture and the ne arts; both
changed their names;24 both worked their way through a formative
period of neoclassicism (in the design of furniture as well as that of
houses) based on the example of the same two mastersBruno Paul
and Peter Behrens; in both cases, their Modernist work followed on
without interruption from their neoclassical work and was strongly
inuenced by it. But, whereas Le Corbusier designed only two neoclassical houses before moving on to other explorations (though he
continued to design Empire style interiors for several years), Miess
Biedermeier period lasted from 1907 to 1926 and was the basis of a
successful architectural practice. He was over 40 when he completed
his rst ModernistConstructivist building, the Wolf House in Guben
(19257).
All Miess neoclassical houses are symmetrical two-storey prisms,
sometimes with minor appendages. These houses, especially the Riehl
House (1907) [116], borrowed heavily from the illustrations of eighteenth-century vernacularclassical houses in Paul Mebess book Um
1800 of 1905. The Riehl House differs from the others in its siting. Like
Le Corbusiers Maison Jeanneret and Favre-Jacot at La Chaux-deFonds (and like Giulio Romanos Villa Lante on the Giannicolo in
Rome which might have inuenced both Le Corbusier and Mies) it is
sited on a steep incline. One of its gable ends is frontalized by means of
a loggia and plunges unexpectedly down to connect with a long retaining wall. This might be called the building-as-dam type, and is a
variant of the Stadtkrone, tending to be shown towering above the
viewer, in the Wagnerschule manner. It is also found in other projects
by Mies: the competition scheme for the Bismarck Monument of 1910
(which probably had its origin in Schinkels Schloss Orianda project of
1838), the Wolf House, the Tugendhat House (192830), and the
Mountain House project of 1934.
When he resumed his practice in Berlin after the First World War,
Mies met the experimental lmmaker and Dadaist Hans Richter and
joined his circle of artists and writers, which included van Doesburg
and El Lissitzky.25 Miess conversion from mimetic eclecticism to
Constructivist abstraction dates from this rst encounter with the
Berlin avant-garde. In 1922, Richter, El Lissitzky, and the artist and
lmmaker Werner Grf founded the journal G: Material zur
Elementaren Gestaltung (G: From Material to Form). It was here that
Mies published his earliest Constructivist projects together with brief

Wolf House, 19257, Guben
(demolished)
This photograph shows
Miess attachment to
conventional ideas of
picturesque composition in
his drawings. He seldom used
axonometric projection, and
made much use of diagonal
perspective views, presenting
buildings from the most
favourable angle.
polemical articles in which he took a strongly anti-formalist position:

We know no forms, only building problems. Form is not the goal but
the result of our work.26
These early Constructivist projects in which Mies explored some of
the fundamental problems posed by new techniques and materials,
comprise two Scheerbartian glass skyscrapers (19212), an eight-storey
ofce block in reinforced concrete (1922), and two single-storey
housesa Concrete Country House (1923) and a Brick Country
House (1924). The houses in this group, together with the little-known
Lessing House project (1923), summarize the dialectic in Miess work
[117]. In the Concrete Country House the cube is dissolved into a
spread-eagled, swastika-like form; in the Lessing House the cube is
broken up into smaller cubes, interlocking with each other in echelon;
in the Brick Country House the cubes are replaced by a system of
planes. This progressive fragmentation and articulation, in which the
external form of the house reects its internal subdivision, betrays the
indirect inuence of the English free-style house, Berlage, and
Wright, but its immediate ancestor is De Stijl.27
The Wolf House [118], and the Lange and Esters houses, both built
in Krefeld in 1927, explore the Lessing type. Built of the local building
material, brick, they are broken up into interlocking cubes to form
roughly pyramidal compositions of two and three storeys. The principal rooms on the ground oor are opened up to each other to form
119 Mies van derRohe

Tugendhat House, 1928-30,
Brno, Czech Republic
The building is wedged into
the sloping site like the Riehl
House. The living room with
its continuous floor-to-ceiling
window is one floor below
street level.
sequences in echelon. The bedroom floors are set back to provide roof
terraces.
The Tugendhat House at Brno in the Czech Republic marks a new
stage in Mies's development [119, 120, 121]. No longer in brick, it is
rendered and painted white. Its organization results from a site condition that recalls that of the Riehl House. Built against a steep slope, the
house consists of a monolithic cubic mass with a set-back, fragmented
upper floor, through which one enters from the street to descend to the
living room on the floor below. The living room is an enormous space
divided by fixed but free-standing screens. The monolithic volume of
the house is wedged solidly into the sloping ground. The south and
east sides of the living area are fully glazed with floor-to-ceiling,
120 Mies van derRohe

Tugendhat House, 1928-30,
Interior view, showing the
panorama of the garden to
the south and west through
retractable glass walls.
Sumptuous materials
polished marble screens and
chrome columnstake the
place of conventional
detailing and ornament.

Upper and lower-oor plans,
Tugendhat House, 192830,
The entrance oor has two
bedroom pavilions set back
from the face of the main
volume as viewed from the
garden. A third pavilion on
the right creates a semienclosed courtyard.
mechanically retractable, plate-glass windows, opening to a panoramic

view. Thus, the inected space, which in the Brick Country House
extends out to innity, is here contained within a cubic volume. But at
the same time, this volume is made totally transparent. Classical
closure and the innite sublime are combined by means of modern
technology.
Contemporaneous with the Tugendhat House is the German
Pavilion for the Barcelona International Exposition of 1929, known as
the Barcelona Pavilion [106 (see page 158), 122]. Here, the enclosing
cube is dispensed with and the entire space is dened in terms of independent horizontal and vertical planes. But instead of disappearing
into innity, the wall planes turn back on themselves to form open
courts which clamp the building to the two ends of the site. Sited
astride one of the exhibition routes, the pavilion was not so much a
dam as a lter.
In both the Tugendhat House and the Barcelona Pavilion, in
contrast to the Brick Country House, the roof is supported by an inde176 weimar germany: the dialectic of the modern 192033
Site and floor plan, German

Pavilion, International
Exposition, 1929, Barcelona
(demolished, rebuilt 1986)
Wall planes at right angles to
the flow of movement acted
as a filter for visitors passing
through the building from
one part of the exposition to
another.
pendent grid of columns. At first sight this looks like an oddly belated
discovery of the principle of the free plan. But at second glance the
columns seem too slender to carry the roof without some help from the
wall planes (their slenderness is enhanced by their reflective finish).
Rather than columns they seem more like signs marking the modular
grid.
Between 1931 and 1935, Mies designed a series of houses which
adapted the Barcelona Pavilion plan-type to domestic use. The first
was a model house in the 1931 Berlin Building Exposition. This was
followed by a series of unbuilt projects, including the Ulrich Lange
House (1935), for single-storey houses within closed courts. These
designs become more and more introverted. In one sense they can be
seen to be following the same Mediterranean prototypes as other
avant-garde architects of the 19305in this respect Le Corbusier's
enclosed garden at Poissy makes an interesting comparison. But they
also suggest that Mies (or his clients) might have been withdrawing
into a private world, unconsciously reacting to a threatening political
situation. In spite of this tendency towards enclosure, however, the
more elaborate projects of this period, such as the Hubbe House, were
left partially open to give framed views of nature [123, 124]. Indeed,
the natural landscape is omnipresent in Mies's sketches at this time,
suggesting that the main function of the house had become that of
framing a view in which nature is idealized. Mies later acknowledged
this distancing effect:' When you see nature through the glass walls of
the Farnsworth House it gets a deeper meaning than from outside.
More is asked from nature because it becomes part of a greater whole/28

Hubbe House, 1935,
Magdeburg, perspective of
living room and terrace with
Elbe River
The external wall has become
transparent, allowing an
unobstructed view of nature.

Hubbe House, 1935,
Magdeburg, plan with
furniture placement
Neoclassical enclosure has
migrated from the house
proper to the garden court,
but here the court is prised
open to allow for entry and a
framed view of nature. The
plan shows a fusion of the
Lessing and De Stijl types.
According to a common misconception, Miess minimalist distillation of architecture was the result of a deep engagement with the craft
of building. Certainly, Mies was obsessed by certain craft-like aspects
of architecture, but he was more concerned with idealizing and mediating techniques of graphic representation than with construction. As
is clear from his writings, Mies realized that the traditional relationship between the craftsman and his product had been destroyed by the
machine. His criteria were ideal and visual, not constructionalnot
even visualconstructional. It is true that unlike, for instance, Le
Corbusier, Mies displays the materiality of his building elements, but
he assembles these elements like montages; their connections are never
visible. Even more than that of the other Modernists, Miess work runs
counter to the tectonic tradition.
Recently, in a justied reaction against the myth of Mies-theconstructor, critics have invented a Post-Modern Miesone who
primarily operated with surfaces and effects, within the endless play of
the signier.29 But this interpretation errs in the opposite direction. It
ignores Miess fear of post-Nietzschean chaos and it also assumes that
an aesthetic of materials and their ephemeral appearance (as signied
by the German word Schein) is incompatible with a belief in foundational values. Miess conception of architecture followed the dialectical
tendency of German Idealism to think in terms of opposites.
According to the Neoplatonic aesthetics that inuenced his thinking,
the transcendental world is reected in the world of the senses (Mies
was fond of quoting St Augustines dictum: Beauty is the radiance of
truth). When modied by the concept of the will of the epoch, this
became the basis of his belief that the spiritual could only become
active in the world in a historicized form, that is to say in the form of
technology.30 Such problems of surface and depth, the contingent and
the ideal, also lay behind the anti-formalism of Miess articles in G in
1923. These did not represent a materialist phase (later to be abjured)
as most commentators claim; they reected a topos of Modernist aesthetics derived from German Romanticism, according to which the
forms of art should, like those of nature, reveal an inner essence and not
be imposed from the outside.31
To enquire into Miess philosophical background is, of course, in no
way to suggest that his architecture was an expression of philosophical
ideas. For Mies, it was precisely the auto-referentiality of the work of
architecture that gave it access to the world of spiritual meaning. Miess
Modernism and his idealism were perfectly compatible.
Materialism versus idealism: the Swiss contribution

The Swiss journal ABC represents the extreme materialist wing of the
New Objectivity movement within the German speaking world.32
Published in nine issues between 1924 and 1928, the journal was edited
by an international group of architects, including the Swiss Hans
Schmidt (18931972) and Emil Roth (18931980), the Dutch Mart
Stam, and the Russian El Lissitzky (who ceased to be an editor when
he was expelled from Switzerland in 1925). The Swiss architect Hannes
Meyer (18891954) was also closely connected with ABC. The original
impetus for the groups formation came from SwissDutch connections that had been forged by two architects of the older generation,
Karl Moser (18601936) and H. P. Berlage, and the interest on the part
of young Swiss architects in Berlages plan for South Amsterdam.
The group was strongly opposed to De Stijls idealist and aesthetic
approach. As Jacques Gubler has observed: Where De Stijl postulated
the absolute of art and elementary form, ABC postulated the absolute
of technique and material.33 ABC believed that only a dictatorship of
science and technology would be able to satisfy the collective needs of
society.34 There are obvious connections between this philosophy and
that of the Constructivist First Working Group in Soviet Russia (see
pages 1235).
In their projects, Mart Stam and Hans Schmidt were primarily
interested in systems of prefabrication, particularly in reinforced concrete. Despite their anti-art stand, their main concern was to develop
an architectural language which reected serial production. Their
discourse was not essentially different from that of Neue Sachlichkeit
as a whole but it claimed to be more scientically rigorous. Stams
researches into prefabrication included reinterpretations of Mies van
der Rohes glass skyscraper of 19212 and Concrete Ofce Building of
1922 [125].35 Stam adapted Miess ideas to the needs of mass production; for example the curvilinear plan of the glass skyscraper was
transformed into a circle, and the two-way structure of the ofce building into a linear, additive structure.
Hannes Meyers theoretical position was also close to that of the
Constructivist Left. He claimed that architecture was merely one
instance of the technicalproductive process: The depreciation of all
125 Mart Stam
Reinterpretation of Mies van
der Rohes Concrete Ofce
Building of 1922
In this illustration in the
journal ABC (1925), Miess
structure has been
improved to make it suitable
for prefabrication. Form is
seen to follow process.
art works is an indisputable fact, and there is no doubt that their

replacement with a new exact science is merely a matter of time . . . art
is becoming invention and controlled reality.36 His early workparticularly the Freidorf-Siedlung near Basel (191921)was in the
neoclassical style typical of the Swiss Garden City movement, in
which he played an active part. After his rather late conversion to
Modernism in 1924, the projects he undertook with Hans Wittwer
varied between a rhetorical, mechanistic Constructivism (the projects
for the League of Nations competition of 1927 and the Petersschule in
Basel of 1926) and a dry rationalism (the Trade Union League School
in Bernau, Germany of 192830). When he succeeded Gropius as
director of the Bauhaus in 1928, Meyer introduced a rigorously productivist and anti-aesthetic regime which reversed Gropiuss
assiduously apolitical policy.
From Rationalism
toRevisionism:
Architecture in Italy
1920-65
The strong connection between the architectural avant-garde and

Fascism in Italy during the 'heroic' period of modern architecture has
always been an embarrassment to architectural historians. Yet in their
support for Fascism Italian modern architects reflected an anti-liberal,
anti-democratic attitude that was far from uncommon within the
European avant-gardes from the 19105 to the 19308. The search for a
'third way' between Marxism and capitalism that would combine precapitalist communitarian values with modernization became
translated into political reality only in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
The Germans made a distinction between 'modernization' and
'Modernism', embracing the first but restricting the second to specific
building types such as factories. The Italian Fascist Party was split: the
right wing was opposed to Modernism; the left wing supported it. The
Modernist architects, for their part, sympathized wholeheartedly with
a movement that shared their dislike of nineteenth-century liberalism
and their desire simultaneously to modernize and return to ancient
roots.
The Novecento
126 Carlo Scarpa

GipsotecaCanoviana,
1956-7, Possagno, Treviso
Scarpa's museums are
among the most interesting
examples of Italian post-war
museum design, in which
Modernist abstraction forms
the context for displays of
humanist art.
Two progressive movements in architecture made their appearance in

Italy after the First World War. Both rejected what they saw as the
individualism and nihilism of the Futurists and promised a 'return to
order'. This found expression in all the arts, for example in the Valori
Plastici movement in painting, which took its point of departure from
the metaphysical realism of Giorgio de Chirico.
The first of the movements was the 'Novecento', which emerged
towards the end of the war. This was a 'moderate' avant-garde that had
much in common with the German Biedermeier movement of a few
years earlier. It promoted an architecture which, though 'modern',
would restore its links with an anonymous classical tradition. The
leading architect of this movement was Giovanni Muzio (1893-1983),
183
whose Ca' Brutta apartment building in Milan (1919-22) was typical of

a style that emphasized the surface of the building and took pleasure in
mannerist, ironic deformations of conventional classical motifs.
Rationalism
The second progressive post-war movement was born in 1926 with the
formation of Gruppo 7. The members of this group, which included
Adalberto Libera (1903-63), Luigi Figini (1903-84), and Gino Pollini
(1903-91), were all students at the Milan Polytechnic and belonged to a
new, post-war generation. Their aims were summarized thus in the
journal Rassegna Italiana: 'The hallmark of the previous avant-garde
was . . . a vain aesthetic fury . . . that of today's youth is a desire for
lucidity and wisdom... we do not intend to break with tradition... the
new architecture should be the result of a close association between
logic and rationality/1 The rationalists' programme, with its fusion of
functionalism and the classical spirit, was largely borrowed from Le
Corbusier s articles in L'Esprit Nouveau. The intellectual leaders of the
movement were the art critic Edoardo Persico (1900-36) and the architect Giuseppe Pagano (1896-1945), respectively the director and chief
editor of the journal Casabella from the late 19205.
During the first half of the 19308 the political fortunes of the rationalists were in the ascendant following their successful participation in
a number of public projects. The most important of these were:
the University of Rome (1932-5)although the traditionalist
Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960) was the architect in charge, several
individual buildings were assigned to rationalists, including the
Physics Building by Pagano.
work for the Ministry of Communications, including a new railway
station in Florence by the Gruppo Toscana.
the new towns built on the reclaimed Pontine marshes south of
Rome, the most celebrated of which was Sabaudia, designed by a
group led by Luigi Piccinato (18991983), in which equal attention
was paid to socio-economic and symbolic-aesthetic issues.
In the north (beyond the immediate influence of Rome), rationalism
was also relatively successful despite the indifference and sometimes
the hostility of the Fascist Party. Important rationalist projects, both
private and public, were carried out by, among others, Figini and
Pollini (for example Figini's own house in Milan of 1934-5), and by
Giuseppe Terragni (1904-43) whose Casa del Fascio in Como (1932-6)
was a fusion of classical monumentalism and Modernist abstraction
[127]. Terragni was the most gifted of the Gruppo 7 architects. His
work is notable for, among other things, its complex interplay of
184 ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 1920-65
127 Giuseppe Terragni

Casa del Fascio, 19326,
Como
For Terragni the open
structural frame signied
Fascist transparency and
public accessibility. But the
building also has a dreamlike, timeless quality
reminiscent of the paintings
of Giorgio de Chirico.
surface and structural frame, as in the east faade of the Casa del Fascio
and in the Casa Giuliani-Figerio in Como (1939). Although Terragni
justied the Casa del Fascio in terms of the Mussolinian concept that
Fascism is a glass house into which all can enter,2 the classicizing
aspects of the building prompted Pagano to condemn it as formalist
and as representing an aristocratic sensibility.3 The conict between
Pagano and Terragni was not political (they were both ardent Fascists);
it was the same conict that had divided Hannes Meyer and Le
Corbusierthat between a moralistic rigour on the one hand and an
idealist aestheticism on the other.
In 1934 Mussolini himself belatedly announced his support of the
rationalists.4 But with the increase of patriotic sentiment at the outbreak of the Abyssinian War, the party veered to the right, and towards
the end of the 1930s the traditionalists, under the leadership of
Piacentini, became the dominant architectural faction. In the E42
Exposition near Rome of 1942 (now called EUR) most of the rationalists abandoned their Modernist position in favour of a stripped,
monumental classicism.
Post-war reconstruction
Under Fascism the development of an international Modernism had
been relatively free of political interference, despite antagonistic elements within the Fascist Party. Therefore there was considerable
continuity between pre-war and post-war architecture in Italy. But
paradoxically there were also strong revisionist pressures. Since most
Modernist architects in Italy had been keen supporters of Fascism, the
profession was driven, after the defeat of Fascism, to search for a new
architectural identity. Architects became engaged in a succession of
ideological debates which opened up the Modernist tradition to new
architecture in italy 192065 185
interpretations.5 In these debates Milan and Rome represented opposite poles. The Milanese architects continued the pre-war rationalist
programme established by Persico and Pagano, associating rationalism
with leftist politics.6
In Rome, where rationalism had never been a strong force, a critique of the rationalists was mounted by the architect-critic Bruno
Zevi (19182000). In two books, Towards an Organic Architecture (1945)
and A History of Modern Architecture (1950), he called for a more
humane architecture that would follow the examples of Frank Lloyd
Wright and Alvar Aalto. Zevi's Association for Organic Architecture
announced the promotion of'an architecture for the human being . ..
shaped to the human scale and satisfying the spiritual and psychological needs of man in society . . . organic architecture is therefore the
antithesis of a monumental architecture used to create official myths'.7
In its attack on the architecture of the Fascist era, Zevi s critique was
aimed at both neoclassicism and rationalism. But he shared most of the
ideals of the rationalists, particularly that of creating a genuinely
modern architecture in which social progress and technical innovation
would go hand in hand. These hopes were shattered when, in 1948, at
the beginning of the Cold War, the centre-right Christian Democrats
were returned to power. Far from inaugurating a programme of social
reform and technical modernization, the government concentrated on
shoring up the tangle of existing interest groups within the construction industry. In 1949 it created INA Casa (the Institute of Home
Insurance), with the aim of making 'provisions for increasing worker
employment, facilitating the construction of workers' housing'.8 The
priority given to reducing unemployment had the effect of inhibiting
technical advance in an industry still largely at a pre-industrial level.9
Neorealism
The artisanal state of the construction industry was also behind the
'Neorealist' movement, which was closely involved with INA Casa.
The movement was initiated by the architects Mario Ridolfi (1904-84)
and Ludovico Quaroni (1911-87) in a series of housing projects. These
included the Tiburtino Housing Estate (1944-54) by Ridolfi and
Quaroni [128], and housing in the Viale Etiopia (1950-4) by Ridolfi,
both in Rome. The projects made use of a constructional vocabulary
based on Ridolfi s \yoo\aManualedeirarchitetto (The Architect's Manual) >
published by the National Research Council in 1946, which aimed to
create a vernacular Esperanto that would be understood by ordinary
people.10 Ridolfi and Quaroni's projects were influenced by Swedish
housing and had much in common with the populist aims of
Backstrom and Reinius. Another Neorealist projectthe unbuilt
community centre for the Falchera housing estate in Turin (1950) by
l86 ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 1920-65
128 Mario Ridolfi and

Ludovico Quaroni
Tiburtino Housing Estate
1944-54, Rome
The self-consciously
vernacular quality in this
Neorealist project owed
much to the'New
Empiricism' of the Swedish
architects Backstrom and
Reinius.
Giovanni Astengo (1915-90)seems to have been directly influenced

by the Arsta Social Centre in Stockholm by the Ahlsen brothers (see
page 197).
Contextualism
If the Neorealist movement marks the first appearance of what Vittorio
Gregotti has called 'the striving for reality' in Italian post-war architecture, the same striving can be found in Ernesto Rogers's concept of an
architecture that responds to its urban context. In an article in
Casabella of 1955 entitled Tre-existing Conditions and Issues of
Contemporary Building Practice'11 Rogers (1909-69) advocated an
architecture which, while remaining explicitly modern in its
techniques, would respond formally to its historical and spatial
contextan architecture based on an existential rather than an
idealized reality.
ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 1920-65 187
129 Ernesto Rogers,

Lodovico Belgiojoso, and
Enrico Peressutti (BPR)
Off ice Bui Id ing, 1958-69,
Piazza Meda, Milan
An explicitly modern
technology is combined with
classical references, so that
the build ing accommodates
itself in scale to its urban
contexta deliberate
critique of the Modernist
tabula rasa.
This concept had already been broached in practical design before it

was theorized by Rogers. Two projects may be singled out as representing contrasting solutions to the same problem. In the INA Casa offices
in Parma (1950) by Franco Albini (1905-77) a visible concrete frame
provides a grid through which a play of vertically stressed solids and
voids is threaded. The complexities of daily life and the patterns of the
existing street fa$ade are suggested without disturbing the underlying
rationality of the idealized grid. In contrast to this, Rogers and his
partners Lodovico Belgiojoso (1909-2004) and Enrico Peressutti (1908-75)
(BPR), in their office building in the Piazza Meda in Milan (1958-69),
deform the rational structural grid to create a classical hierarchy of different floors [129]. In the first example two 'orders' are dialectically
superimposed; in the second a hybrid is created, not attempting to
imitate its context but creating its analogue.
A more literal interpretation of 'context' can be seen in the work of
the Roman architect and theorist Saverio Muratori (1910-73). For
Muratori, in his headquarters for the Christian Democratic Party in
the EUR quarter of Rome (1955), 'response to context' meant communicating with the public by way of familiar signs and reasserting
tradition. Muratori, like Ridolfi and Quaroni, was influenced by
Swedish architecture, but in its earlier, neoclassical phase. A more
superficial nostalgia for the past was characteristic of the 'Neoliberty'
movement which emerged in the mid-1950s, as exemplified by the villa
on Via XX Settembre in Milan (1954-5) by Luigi Caccia-Dominioni
(b. 1913). Neoliberty was concerned neither with the immediate
context nor with an eternal classicism; it believed that Jugendstil was
still capable of representing a culturally unfulfilled urban bourgeoisie.
Many Italian architects rejected contextualismincluding Giancarlo de Carlo (b. 1919) who, after a brief flirtation with Neorealism in
his early housing project at Matera in the 19505, reverted to a rationall88 ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 1920-65
ist-Brutalist style in his student housing at the University of Urbino

(1963-6). But the main criticism came from abroad, particularly from
the newly formed 'Team X*, at the 1959 CIAM congress in Otterlo (see
page 218). The chief objects of this attack were BPR's Torre Velasca in
Milan (1954-8), the Zattere apartments in Venice (1954-8) by Ignazio
Gardella (1905-99), and de Carlo's Matera scheme.
The dialectic of rationalism and organicism
130 Giovanni Michelucci

Church of S.Giovanni, 1962,
Autostrada del Sole, Florence
The building shows the
influence of both German
Expression ism and Le
Corbusier's chapel at
Ronchamp.
For a number of architects, breaking with the straitjacket of the rationalist tradition did not entail any stylistic negotiations with history. Like
Zevi, these architects accepted the abstract language of Modernism
but sought to extend it to freer realms of metaphor and expression. The
work of Giovanni Michelucci (1891-1991) developed from a rationalism that made some attempt to harmonize with its urban context (for
example at the Savings Bank in Pistoia of 1950) to a pure
Expressionism. In the Church of S. Giovanni overlooking the
Autostrada del Sole near Florence (1960-4) [130], he created an isolated Expressionist monument of pure German provenance (though it
also makes an oblique reference to Le Corbusier's chapel at
Ronchamp). The hermetic and intensely private work of Carlo Scarpa
(1902-78) contrasts sharply with Michelucci s public rhetoric. Scarpa's
subtle museum designs, such as the Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno,
Treviso (1956-7) [126 (see page 182)] and the Castelvecchio Museum in
Verona (1964), make a unique contribution to a genre which Italian
architects after the Second World Warincluding also Albini and
BPRmade their own.
ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 1920-65 189
A harder, less precious tendency emerged in the mid-1950s characterized by the use of exposed-face concrete structures, for example in
the Marchiondi Spaghiari Institute in Milan (19537) by Vittoriano
Vigan (191996). Sometimesas in the apartment building in the
Via Campania, Rome (19635) by the Passerelli brothers (Vincenzo,
b. 1904; Fausto, b. 1910; and Lucio, b. 1922) and an ofce building in the
Via Leopardi, Milan (195960) by Ludovico Magistretti (b. 1920)
the structure is clearly differentiated from a lighter inll. These
projects are related to international Brutalist currents deriving from
the late work of Le Corbusier.
A new urban dimension

At the end of the 1950s the attitude of Italian architect-planners to the
problem of the city underwent an important shift. Demographic
movements due to south-north migration as well as technical developments in the building industry led to a redenition of the scope of
urban planning, now seen to embrace larger city regions. According to
Manfredo Tafuri:
Italian intellectuals were becoming aware of a new reality; convulsive urbanization and the diffusion of mass communication had effected profound
transformations in society. These changes, along with rapid economic growth,
encouraged the formation of interpretative models that quickly replaced those
of the preceding decade . . . Neorealist myths were replaced by technological
ones . . . The entire concept of urban planning would be overhauled in the
early 1960s.12
The concept of the city region, seen as a set of dynamic relations in a

state of constant change, took the place of the xed model.13
An essential precondition of this concept was the revalidation of the
city as such. In 1959 the architect Giuseppe Samon (18981983) published a book entitled Urbanism and the Future of the City in which he
defended the big city and attacked the social assumptions of the
Garden City movement and the Anglo-American concept of the
small-town neighbourhood that had dominated Italian urban theory
since the war. At the same time a number of competitions were held for
the design of new business and administrative centres to be inserted
within existing cities. The rst and most inuential of such projects
was Quaronis design for the Quartiere Cepalle Barene di S. Giuliano
in Mestre (1959) [131], in which the city fabric, free to develop with the
minimum of planning constraints, was given focus by a monumental
group of buildings facing the lagoon. In this and similar projects, the
city was conceived as two parts, one xed and symbolic, the other continuously changing and essentially uncontrollable.14
In other contemporaneous projects, this dualistic concept was given
190 architecture in italy 192065
131 Ludovico Quaroni

Model, Quartiere Cepalle
Barene di S. Giuliano, 1959,
Mestre
This project was one of the
rst examples of large-scale
territorial thinking by Italian
architects in the 1960s,
linked with the international
Megastructural movement
but with a greater contextual
emphasis.
a more radical interpretation, according to which a continuous skeleton or infrastructure would contain randomly changing inll.15 This
development was not conned to Italy: similar concepts emerging in
Sweden will be discussed in the next chapter and in the context of the
Megastructural movement in chapter 11.
architecture in italy 192065 191
Neoclassicism,
Organicism, and the

Welfare State:
Architecture in
Scandinavia 1910-65
10
After the Second World War, the Modern Movement became identified with the victorious democracies and was adopted by the
professional establishments in Europe and America. With the emergence of the welfare state in Western Europe, a new concept of
'planning' took shapeone compatible with liberal democracy and
based on Keynesian economic doctrine.1 The chief model for this
combination of planning and capitalism was to be found in the
Scandinavian countries. Sweden in particular became a role model for
many architects in Western Europe and America. In order to understand the nature of this influence it will be necessary to trace the
development of architecture in Scandinavia since just before the First
World War.
From neoclassicism to Modernism in Denmark and Sweden
Detail of 135 Sigurd

Lewerentz
St. Mark's Church, 1956-60,

Bjorkhaven
The European neoclassical movement of the first decade of the twentieth century had a strong impact in Scandinavia, whose architects came
under the spell of the German Biedermeier revival disseminated by
Paul Mebes, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and Heinrich Tessenow. The
initial impulse for this tendency came from Denmark, where architects
had been studying such neoclassical predecessors as H. C. Hansen
since the i88os.2 Danish and Swedish architects became fascinated by
their own vernacular and classical traditions as exemplified in
sixteenth-century castles, Baroque palaces, and early-nineteenthcentury neoclassical buildings. An eclectic neoclassicism that
borrowed from local traditions, German eighteenth-century vernacular classicism, Friedrich Gilly (1772-1800), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,
and the Tuscan Renaissance, dominated Scandinavian architecture
193
from the First World War to the late 1920s. The severe Doricist
museum in Fborg (191215) by Carl Petersen (18741923) set the tone
of the entire movement.
In Germany, Expressionism intervened between neoclassicism and
the New Objectivity, but in Scandinavia there was a direct transition
from one to the other, revealing their similarities rather than their differences. Both Denmark and Sweden inaugurated programmes of
state-sponsored housing during the First World War to meet a
housing shortage that had been particularly acute in Scandinavia. At
that time the model being used for urban housing was that of eighteenth-century perimeter blocks. The clearest examples of the
transition from this model to Modernism can be seen in Denmark, in
the Hans Tavsensgade project in Norrebro (1919) by Paul Baumann
(18871963), where perimeter housing encloses a central communal
garden.3 With the new ideology of science and hygiene, there was a
progressive opening up of the courtyard to the outside, as in the Ved
Classens Have project in Copenhagen (19249) by Carl Petersen and
Paul Baumann.4 Eventually, as in Blidah Park (19324) by Ivar Bentsen
(18761943), the perimeter block disappeared altogether, to be replaced
by linear bars set in parkland.5 At the same time the regularly pierced
classical wall surface gave way to the free faade, even when loadbearing wall construction was still in use. Unlike Germany in the
1920s, however, hybrid, semi-enclosed layouts immediately appeared,
as in the Bellavista Estate at Klampenborg near Copenhagen (19347)
by Arne Jacobsen (190271).6
In Sweden, the arrival of the New Objectivity was announced by
two public projects: the student hostel in the Royal Institute of
Technology by Sven Markelius (18891972) and the Stockholm
Industrial Arts Exhibition buildings by Erik Gunnar Asplund
(18851940) with a team of other architects, both completed in 1930.
Whereas Markeliuss building was a competent work in the manner of
Oud or Dudok, Asplunds lakeside exhibition buildings brilliantly
exploited the lightness and transparency of modern materials in an
architecture that was popular, carnivalesque, and nautical [132]. By
1930 Asplund already had a distinguished neoclassical uvre to his
credit, including the rusticclassical Woodland Chapel at the
Cemetery of Enskede in Stockholm (191820)7 and the Ledoux-like
Stockholm Public Library (19208). His successive designs for the
addition to the Courthouse at Gothenburg (191336) show the evolution of his style from the national romanticism of the original
competition design, through neoclassicism, to Modernism. It is probable that Asplund, though undoubtedly a genuine convert to the New
Objectivity, never fully accepted the rigorous schematism of the
French and German movements and that for him the eighteenthcentury categories of bienscance (propriety) and character still had
194 architecture in scandinavia 191065
132 Erik Gunnar Asplund

Entrance Pavilion, Industrial
Arts Exhibition, 1930,
Stockholm
The spirit of festival pervades
this building with its agbedecked nautical
references. An open structure
forming a porte cochre to
the whole exhibition shelters
a smaller structure within
with terraces like the upper
decks of a liner.
some meaning. His last completed building, the Woodland Crematorium (193540), with its clever fusion of Modernist and classical
elements, would seem to bear this out.
The Modern Movement in Sweden
Social reform and housing

In Sweden, the new architecture was, from the start, closely identied
with the social reform movementjust as it had been some ten years
before in Germany. In 1932 the Social Democrats came to power and
instituted a series of reforms inspired by Prime Minister Per Albin
Hansens slogan comparing the state to the house of the people
(Folkhemmet).8 These reforms were carried out within a liberal democracy, but facilitated by a long tradition of state interventionism. At
their core was the housing programme. During the 1920s a vigorous
cooperative movement had paved the way for legislation which was to
result, after 1945, in a fully edged welfare state. Housing built by the
cooperatives (which often had their own architectural departments)
was extremely inuential in the spread of Modernist architecture in
Swedenfor example the layout of the Kvarnholmen Company
housing project by the architects of the KV cooperative9 was to be
widely imitated abroad.
Because of the success of the housing programme and the comparative lack of public opposition to the new architecture, the Modern
Movement in Sweden was completely lacking in the Jacobinism of
the French and German movements. Swedish critics found Le
Corbusiers ideas too theoretical and those of the German Modernists
too dogmatic, believing that the new should be reconciled with the
existing. This attitude was summed up in the words of the critic Hans
architecture in scandinavia 191065 195
133 Sven Backstrm and Lief

Reinius
Rosta Housing Estate, 1946,
Orebro
This project is typical of
Swedish social housing in the
1940s, with its pitched roofs
and pairs of small windows.
Eliot when he wrote: It seems to me that in Swedenunlike for Le

Corbusier in a France weighed down by stylethere exists a culture
of dwelling that is both suited to modern purposes and derived from
tradition.10
The New Empiricism

The architects Sven Backstrm (190392) and Lief Reinius (190795)
led the way in a Swedish revisionist movement after the Second
World War. They mixed Modernist macro-typologies with familiar
constructional techniques and decorative forms still in the repertoire
of ordinary builders and within the taste range of ordinary users
[133], seeking a more popular architecture that would acknowledge
psychological and irrational factors that please usandwhy not?
beauty.11 This ideologyenthusiastically dubbed The New
Empiricism by the British journal Architectural Review in 1947was
not in fact universally accepted in Sweden. The Swedish journal
Bggmsterenwhich had gone modern in 1928ran a debate on the
relative merits of a rational Apollonian and an irrational Dionysian
architecture,12 reviving, in the post-war context, a controversy that
had smouldered beneath the surface of the avant-garde since the
1920s.
Backstrm and Reiniuss housing estates at Danvikskippan,

Grndal, and Rosta were widely published in the international architectural press. Their honeycomb layout, breaking with the
rectilinearity of rationalism (in fact, borrowed from a 1928 project by
the German architect Alexander Klein)13 was adopted in the New
Town of Cumbernauld in Scotland and the Valco san Paulo housing
estate in Rome in the 1950s. British interest in the New Empiricism
was reciprocated by Swedish planners and architects who were inuenced by British urban planning theory as laid out in Patrick
Abercrombies Greater London Plan of 1944. The concept of neighbourhood community planning was adopted in the rsta Social Centre
(194353) built by Eric and Tore Ahlsn (190188 and 190691), in the
suburbs of Stockholm as a pilot scheme intended to correct what was
perceived as the principal defect of Swedish housingits lack of social
facilities.14
Systems design
During the 1960s and 1970s there was a dramatic increase in housing
production in Sweden. A programme was instituted which aimed at
providing one million dwellings between 1965 and 1974.15 Within this
programme, 40 per cent of dwellings took the form of high-rise, highdensity projects, using a Systems approach to planning and
construction. This approach maximized the use of standardized parts
and large-scale prefabrication, and was modelled on the technique of
Systems engineering used by the United States defence industry.16 The
approach was not restricted to Sweden. In Denmarkto speak of
Scandinavia alonethere was also a technically driven development in
mass housing which resulted in dense, high-rise projects such as that of
Hoje Gladsaxe (196070).17
In the late 1960s there was growing public opposition to this kind of
development, which was often unsatisfactory even at a purely technical
level. This reaction, which was exacerbated by the fall-out from the
French student revolt of 1968, was to lead to revisions in government
policy in both housing and urban renewal. Meanwhile, faced with
increasing exclusion by the building industry, architects tended to react
in one of two ways: either by accepting technological developments
and trying to take control of them; or by retreating into a world of oneoff projects of modest scale, where the economics of mass production
and mass consumption did not apply.
Large programmes
An attempt in the public sector simultaneously to rationalize and
humanize large-scale construction can be seen in the Structuralist
134 Peter Celsing

Cultural Centre, Culture
House, 196576, Stockholm
The multi-purpose cultural
centre, one of three elements
comprising Culture House,
forms a visual barrier dividing
the old from the new town.
The fully glazed faade is a
metaphor for social
transparency.
approach adopted by the Swedish National Planning Board.18 This

inaugurated a new way of thinking about the design of large buildings
predicated on the separation of two systems with different rates of
obsolescence: on the one hand, the building envelope with its structural support; on the other, the functional inll.
Two projects by individual architects also addressed the problem of
large-scale urban buildings in different and more pragmatic ways. The
rst is Citizens House in Orebro (1965) by Eric and Tore Ahlsn.19
This multi-purpose cultural centre occupies an entire city block; the
architects attempted to reduce its apparent mass by the articulation of
the different oors and variations of surface treatment. The second
project, the Culture House complex in Stockholm (196576) by Peter
Celsing (192074), had weightier urban and national implications
[134]. It has three elements: a large theatre, the resited Bank of
Sweden, and a cultural centre.20 The theatre is assimilated into the
existing urban fabric, while the other two elements stand out as
objectied, representative buildings. The complex closes the main
northsouth axis of the city, and is sited on the historical boundary
between the old town and the nineteenth-century commercial district.
Celsing preserved this distinction by attaching the bank and the
cultural centre to opposite sides of a thick service wall, which symbolically represents the ancient city wall. The bank, which faces the old
town, is a hermetic, classicizing cube. The cultural centre, which faces
the new town, has a long, uninterrupted, fully glazed faade with
accentuated oorplates. The brief for this building was written by
Pontius Hultn, later to become the rst director of the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, with which Celsings building shares the
Constructivist idea of a transparent multi-purpose building in which
visible interior functions take the place of traditional ornament.

Celsing's project, in giving a different character to each of its
components, resists the homogenizing effect of modern technology
and preserves the historical structure of the city; but it accepts the
change of aesthetics and scale brought about by economic and
technical developments.
Small projects
135 Sigurd Lewerentz
St. Mark's Church, 1956-60,
Bjorkhaven
The blind brick fagade of this
church is given meaning by
the signs of interior activity
windows and projecting
chapelswhich occur
randomly. In Lewerentz's
later buildings such
functional symbolism, with
its Gothic connotations,
makes a strange contrast with
the architect's earlier
neoclassicism.
The second kind of response adopted by Swedish architectsthe

retreat from technology to the small-scalecan be illustrated by a
series of small churches built in the 19508 and 19608 to cater for an
expanding suburban population. The most interesting of these were by
Peter Celsing and, from an earlier generation, Sigurd Lewerentz
(1885-1975). Celsing's Harlanda Church in Gothenburg (1952-8) is a
space defined by three shed-like brick structures.21 Lewerentz built
two churches during the same period: St. Marks, Bjorkhaven
(1956-60) [135] and St. Peter's, Klippan (i962-6).22 Early in his career
Lewerentz had been joint winner, with Asplund, of the Woodland
Cemetery competition (see note 7). In the 19508 he worked with Peter
Celsing on proposals for the restoration of Uppsala Cathedral. His last
ARCHITECTURE IN SCANDINAVIA 1910-65 199
two churches show the inuence of the younger architect but while
they are similar to Celsings in their use of exposed brick externally as
well as internally, Lewerentzs churches are both more daring in their
primitivist interpretation of tradition, and richer in symbolism, as for
example in the cruciform central column supporting the roof of St.
Peters Church.
The Modern Movement in Finland
Rationalism and neoclassicism

In 1904 the criticarchitects Sigurd Frosterus and Gustav Strengell
published a pamphlet entitled Architecture: a Challenge to our
Opponents, criticizing the result of the competition for Helsinki
Railway Station (190616), which had been won by Eliel Saarinen with
a late-Jugendstil design. The pamphlet attacked national romanticismwhich had been closely associated with Finnish national
liberationproposing in its place an architecture that was rationalist
and internationalist. In response to this criticism the nal versions of
Saarinens design for the station and Lars Soncks design for the Stock
Exchange (1911) were both modied. This turn to a structurally expressive rationalism based on the teachings of Viollet-le-Duc was,
however, short-lived. It was soon overtaken by the Swedish-inspired
neoclassical movement. Like rationalism, this movement was opposed
to the individualism of national romanticism, but the norms it proposed were formal and classical rather than structural.
Alvar Aalto and the New Objectivity

Both the rationalist and the neoclassical interludes paved the way for
the reception in Finland of the New Objectivity. Among the group of
young architects who turned to the new movement, Erik Bryggman
(18911955) and Alvar Aalto (18981976) stand out. Their joint entry for
the Turku Fair competition of 1929 is widely seen as having introduced
the new movement to the Finnish public.
Alvar Aalto soon emerged as the leader of the group with his competition-winning designs for the Public Library in Viipuri (192735)
and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Paimio (192933) [136, 137]. The
original entry for the Viipuri Library competition was neoclassical,
but during the prolonged design development it was transformed into
a Modernist scheme. The nal version, with its two hermetically
sealed bars sliding against each other in echelon, skewered by a transverse entry system, was Constructivist in its dynamic asymmetry,
though it retained the ghost of its original Beaux-Arts plan. Paimio
Sanatorium, on the contrary, was Modernist from the start, with
136 Alvar Aalto

Tuberculosis Sanatorium,
192933, Paimio
View of entrance courtyard.
The wing on the right
contains the wards.
slender, loosely articulated wings, angled to engage with the surrounding landscape.23 In both buildings, smooth white wall surfaces with
Mediterranean overtones are even more in evidence than in other
examples of international Modernism. But a new feature was the
attention paid to details; in the Paimio Sanatorium Aalto designed all
the furniture and ttings. It was because of their concern for the intimate and tactile aspects of modern design, as well as their manifest
formal qualities, that these two buildings instantly became icons of a
more resilient Modernism.
Regionalists and organicists

In the late 1930s, Finnish Modernist architects followed the European
trend in questioning the mechanistic premises of the New Objectivity,
returning to natural materials and traditional details. This is true of
both Bryggman and Aalto; but whereas Bryggman, in the
Resurrection Funerary Chapel in Turku (193841), introduced direct
quotations from tradition in the form of vaults and arches, Aalto, like
137AlvarAalto
Site plan, Tuberculosis
Sanatorium, 1929-33,
Paimio
Two short blocks containing
communal and technical
accommodation are loosely
anchored to a static T-shaped
element formed by the ward
block and the entrance wing,
creating a splayed forecourt.
The complex opens itself to
the surrounding landscape
but already shows Aalto's
penchant for semi-enclosed
compositions.
A Patients'wards, rest
terraces
B Common rooms
C Technical and service
rooms
D Garages
E Doctors' houses
F Employees' houses
Le Corbusier, retained the 'empty* language of the new movement,

seeking to fill it with new metaphors. In the Villa Mairea at
Noormarkku (1937^9) [138, 139], taut, curved walls faced with wood
sidings are contrasted with sharp-edged brick walls painted white. In
the living roomwhich like Miess Tugendhat House combines
different living zones within a single spacescreens of wooden poles
in random clusters become metonyms for the pine forest visible through
wall-to-wall plate-glass windows, creating a synthesis of modern technology, artisanship, and nature. This building, with its abruptly
juxtaposed elements and its metaphors of nature, was a radical departure from the linear logic of the New Objectivity.
The Villa Mairea was built for the entrepreneurs Harry and Maire
Gullichsen, for whom Aalto became architect in 1934, building the
Sunila Pulp Mill and its company workers' housing (1936-9). In the
same year he co-founded, with Maire Gullichsen, the Artek furniture
company and started designing chairs in laminated plywood. These
were inspired by the Luther Company in Tallinn, Estonia,24 but they
were also a development of the bentwood and tubular steel traditions.
In Aalto's furniture the application of new techniques to natural
materials resulted in shapes reminiscent of the paintings of Hans Arp.
202 ARCHITECTURE IN SCANDINAVIA 1910-65
138AlvarAalto
Villa Mairea, 1937-9,
Noormarkku
This interior view shows the
screen protecting the
staircase, which mimics the
pine forest surrounding the
house.
139AlvarAalto
Villa Mairea, 1937-9,
Noormarkku
Ground-floor plan, showing
the way the house wraps itself
round the garden to form a
protected clearing.
ARCHITECTURE IN SCANDINAVIA 1910-65 203
140AlvarAalto
Town Hall, 1949-52,
Saynatsalo
This small rustic building is
set around a courtyard open
at two adjacent corners. The
entrance to the court is
dominated by the
asymmetrical mass of the
council chamber,
symbolizing the community.
Aalto's enjoyment of the Gullichsens' patronage kept his exploration

of mechanical techniques within a certain Jugendstil tradition.
After the war, Aalto began to receive many commissions for public
buildings, including urban projects such as the Pensions Institute in
Helsinki, and rural projects such as the Town Hall in Saynatsalo
(1949-52) [140] and the Jyvaskyla University Campus (1950-7). These
projects constitute a well-defined middle period in Aalto s work, characterized typologically by semi-enclosed courtyards reminiscent of
vernacular farm buildings, and materially by the extensive use of handmade brick and clear-varnished wood. The return to picturesque
compositions dominated by volumes signifying community, indicates
a partial revival of the spirit of national romanticism.
In the late 19508, beginning with the Vuoksenniska Church in
Imatra (1957-9) [141], another change takes place in Aalto s work.
Rustic brickwork is replaced by white plaster or marble facings, while
at the same time the forms become increasingly complex. This elaborationwhich many critics (using a risky analogy) have called
'Baroque'can to some extent be attributed to a change in the type of
programme, from buildings providing the post-war infrastructure of
the modern welfare state (universities, administrative buildings) to
those with a more symbolic function (cultural centres, concert halls,
libraries, churches). But in spite of these changes, what remains constant in Aalto's work is its drawing on the forms of the natural world to
express growth and movement as a metaphor of human life. In this it
has certain affinities with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Rationalists and Constructivists

Aalto's well-deserved reputation has tended to obscure other tendencies at work in Finnish Modernism. In the 19508 there were two broad
204 ARCHITECTURE IN SCANDINAVIA 1910-65
141 Alvar Aalto

Vuoksenniska Church,
19579, Imatra
This building marks the
beginning of a more
sumptuous phase in Aaltos
work, in which rened
materials such as marble
facings replace rustic
brickwork. The forms also
become geometrically more
complex and curvilinear.
cultural models operating in Finnish architecture: on the one hand

Aaltos organic, regionalist model; on the other, a more rationalist or
purist model upheld by architects like Viljo Revell (191064) and Aulis
Blomstedt (190679), who continued to work in a vein closer to the
ideas of the early Modern Movement, particularly in its social concerns and its interest in modern materials and techniques. Aspects of
this tendency were prolonged into the 1960s by younger architects
such as Aarno Ruusuvuori (192592) and Pekka Pitknen (b. 1927).
The latters Funerary Chapel in Turku (1967) is a sensitive, minimalist
work in precisely formed in situ concrete [142]. Its pure, abstract forms
are in strong contrast with the nearby Resurrection Chapel by
Bryggman.
At the end of the 1960s the conict between these two models came
into the open. The young rationalists (or Constructivists, as they
called themselves) opposed what they saw as the Romantic tendencies
in the later work of Aalto and followers like Reima Pietil (192393).
They accused the older generation of concentrating on monumental
cultural buildings based on a subjectivist aesthetic lacking methodology, and of ignoring the social role of architecture.25 They were
supported by Aulis Blomstedt, head of the Helsinki University of
Technology since 1959a prominent theoretician who had developed
a modular system with the aim of reconciling modern mass production
with traditional architectural values.26
The Constructivists, who played an important part in Finnish
architectural discourse until the early 1970s, upheld the early Modern
142 Pekka Pitknen

Funeral Chapel, 1967, Turku
The work of this interesting
architect represents a
rationalist tendency in
Finnish architecture in the
1960s that was, at least in
part, a reaction against
Aaltos increasingly
naturalistic approach. Unlike
some of the other rationalists,
however, Pitknens work was
more purist than
technological or social in
spirit.
Movement ideal of collaboration between the architect, the engineer,

and the building industry. But after they had realized some interesting
small-scale industrial buildings, it became apparent that in the larger
eld the building industry was not prepared to operate on their terms.
In a later book, Kirmo Mikkola (193486), who was himself an inuential member of the Constructivist faction, put the matter thus: The
truth [of a technology-based architecture] was more difcult than the
ideal. The sought-after collaboration with industry did not materialize. The big construction companies stuck to their rigid unit system
created in the 1960s without any assistance from the architects.27
At the same time Mikkola acknowledged that the Constructivists
had excluded plastic and symbolic means of expression from their
buildings.
As in Sweden, the Systems-based approach described by Mikkola
had its greatest impact in the eld of public housing. Since the 1930s
low-cost social housing in Finland had consisted largely of dormitory
suburbs with few social facilities. (A notable exception to this was the
Garden City of Tapiola, begun in 1953 to the master plan of Arne Ervi,
which was conceived as a self-contained community.) One of the chief
models for these was Aaltos Sunila Housing, in which low-rise terraces were freely deployed in an Arcadian setting. This type became
known as Forest Housing. The social drawbacks of Forest Housing
had meanwhile become obvious. The application of large-scale
Systems design to isolated suburbs had the effect of aggravating these
deciencies, creating aesthetically poor and socially alienating environments. The mechanical application of industrial techniques to
housing, and the concomitant planning strategies, therefore led to
environmental results that were the exact opposite of the idyllic symbiosis of technology and nature envisaged by the Modern
Movementespecially by the rural and regionalist version of it promoted by Alvar Aalto.
From Le Corbusier
to Megastructures:
Urban Visions
193065
11
143 Constant
New Babylon: Group of
Sectors, 1959
This rst-oor plan of New
Babylon shows an unplanned
city of the future, conceived of
as expanding indenitely until
it eventually covers the whole
earth.
Urbanism and housing in late Le Corbusier

After his 1929 lecture tour of South America, Le Corbusier became
involved in a series of urban projects that were very different from his
previous city plans. Whereas the Ville Radieuse had been a schematic
design for an ideal site, the projects for Rio de Janeiro (1929) and the
Obus (explosive shell) plans for the city of Algiers (193242) were
intended for actual sites. They were also closely linked to Le
Corbusiers new-found interest in lhomme rel and regional cultures
based on local customs and geographies. In these projects modern
architecture and engineering extend their reach to vast colonial and
post-colonial territories and assume a new cosmological signicance in
their struggle with primordial nature.
In Rio and Algiers Le Corbusier did not abandon his earlier urbanism, but its forms became more sensitive to local topographies, and
there is a greater absorption of private life by monumental, collective
forms. Already in 1922, the Ville Contemporaine had envisaged a new
integration of private and collective life. For example, public circulation was seen as a single system, with the corridors serving the ats
becoming streets-in-the-air replacing access roads. In the Rio and
Algiers plans the integration of circulation and housing became the
dominant theme. Housing was slung under a viaduct carrying the main
highway, recalling the Roadtown project of 1910 by the American
architect Edgar Chambless [144]. In Algiers, the housing viaduct
followed a long sinuous route along the coast, while a separate group of
apartmentsthrough which another road was cut at mid-levelwas
sited further inland on the Fort de lEmpereur hills, connected by a
high-level viaduct to the business centre at the port, the cit daffaires.
Roads and housing were treated as a single, integrated system. One of
the most interesting aspects of the project is the separation of infrastructure and inll, allowing the inhabitants to build their own houses
209
144 Le Corbusier
Model, Obus A Project for
Algiers, 1933
In this rst project mass
housing is built under the
coastal viaduct while the
political and administrative
classes are housed on the
hills of Fort de lEmpereur.
The latter is linked to the
business centre at the port by
a viaduct that ies over the
Arab city, ensuring its
preservation and minimal
contact between colonizers
and the native population.
within the structure as if on suburban lotsthe adaptation the Domino idea of 1914 (see page 143) to a multi-storey building [145]. A
publicly nanced highway provides the framework for privately
nanced housing.
Le Corbusiers Algiers project coincided with growing public pressure for a development plan for the rapidly growing city. At the same
time that he was designing his unsolicited schemes, other proposals of
a more conventional kind were being pursued by the Algiers authorities themselves. Le Corbusiers rst plan was submitted in 1933 and was
immediately followed by two further proposals (19334) in which the
housing component was progressively eliminated. The project was
denitively rejected in 1934, but Le Corbusier continued to submit
with equal lack of successfurther proposals for the cit daffaires for
several years.1
It was while working on these that Le Corbusier developed the idea
of the sun-breaker (brise-soleil), rst proposed for the Durand project
in Algiers in 1933. This invention had enormous consequences in his
later style. Much more than a means of solar protection, the sunbreaker was an expressive device giving back to the Corbusian faade
the plasticity and play of scale that had been sacriced with the suppression of structure. Nothing shows more clearly the similarities and
differences between Le Corbusier and the Beaux-Arts. In his nal
version of the Algiers ofce tower Le Corbusier reverts to a primitive
210 from le corbusier to megastructures: urban visions 193065
145 Le Corbusier
Obus A Project for Algiers,
1933
This drawing of the Fort de
lEmpereur housing shows
the separation of support
structure and apartments,
which have a shorter life
cycle and can be in any style.
classicism quite different from the historical classicism of August

Perret. The orders are replaced by brise-soleils which give scale and
meaning to the faade through the representation of the hierarchy of
spaces within the building [146].
In 1945, Raoul Dautry, Minister of Reconstruction in the rst postwar French government, commissioned Le Corbusier to build a unit
dhabitation (approximately: unit of housing) in Marseilles.2 The key
concept was that the structure should be large enough to incorporate
the communal services required to support the daily lives of its inhabitants. The idea of such a collective was not new: examples were to be
found in the Soviet Union and Sweden dating from the 1930s. Where
the completed Unit dHabitation (194652) differed from these was in
its strong monumental presence. Although clearly inuenced by such
Russian schemes as the Vesnin brothers communal housing project for
Kusnetsk of 1930,3 the building does not reect the Vesnins socialist
agenda. According to Le Corbusier it was the culmination of his
concept of modern middle-class housing.4 It is closer to Charles
146 Le Corbusier
Obus E Project for Algiers,
1939
This ofce tower is the rst
appearance in Le Corbusiers
work of the brise-soleil (sunbreaker) as an integral part of
a concrete structure, by
means of which the internal
hierarchy of the building is
made legible.
from le corbusier to megastructures: urban visions 193065 211
Fourier's ideal collective palace, \htphalanstere (which similarly had a

population of 1,800), a Carthusian monastery, or a transatlantic liner
all of them self-contained communities. Internally, Le Corbusier used
a modified version of the interlocking duplex apartments first proposed for the Ville Contemporaine in 1922. Externally a system of
concrete sun-breakers, doubling as loggias and derived from the
Algiers office tower, made legible the internal spaces. Le Corbusier
described the Algiers office tower as 'a palace, no longer a boxa
palace worthy of reigning over the landscape'.5 He could equally well
have been describing the Unite.
Comparing Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation with his housing at
Algiers we see that they represent two very different concepts. While
the Unite is a discrete whole, designed to the last detail by the architect,
Algiers is an endless infrastructure with random infill. A similar difference existed between two new urban concepts that emerged during
and after the Second World War, both of which challenged the orthodoxies of the rationalist tradition. The first was that of the New
Monumentality, the second the rather complex urban philosophy of
Team X.
The New Monumentality
The idea of a New Monumentality was formulated by the older generation of modern architects in Europe and America in the 19405.
Already, in the mid-i93os, there had been a call by architects to reintroduce the concept of the monument into the Modernist canon. By
'monument' they did not mean 'memorial' in the strict etymological
sense, but the broader idea, introduced around the turn of the twentieth century, of representative as opposed to utilitarian buildings. In
Europe the concept was certainly influenced by the return to classicism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but for the Modernists a
return to monumentality meant a return to underlying principles not
to a specific style, and the debate remained at a somewhat abstract
level.6 One of the most striking post-war examples of such a nonhistoricist monumentality was Le Corbusier's Pilgrimage Church of
Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1951-5).
It was only in the 19408 that the proponents of a New
Monumentality began to connect it with a specific set of social and
political ideas. This happened when American Modernists re-identified the monument with democracyjust as their predecessors had at
the time of the City Beautiful movement. The context of this reevaluation was the American government's New Deal building
programme, which included the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1941,
the architect George Howe declared: 'The power plants and living
212 FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURES: URBAN VISIONS 1930-65
centres of TVA are an effort to carve a new pattern of life out of earth,
air, and water ... and make the land the likeness of the people so that
the people can come to be a likeness of the land.'7 Three years later,
Elizabeth Mock, a curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, wrote:
A democracy needs monuments, even though its requirements are not those
of a dictatorship. There must be occasional buildings which raise the everyday
casualness of living to a higher and more ceremonial plane, buildings which
give dignified and coherent form to that interdependence of the individual
and the social group which is the very nature of democracy.8
In 1943, Sigfried Giedionthen in exile in the United Statesentered

the debate. In collaboration with the French painter Fernand Leger
and the Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert (1902-83) he wrote a manifesto entitled 'Nine Points on Monumentality',9 and followed it up
with an essay called 'The Need for a New Monumentality'.10 In this
essay, Giedion focused on the need for civic centres symbolizing the
idea of 'community' in which all the visual arts would collaborate,
creating a new Gesamtkunstwerk. His concept of 'community' is
different from that of Howe and Mock. It does not invoke the idea of
democracy, but ratherat least by implicationthe German concept
of Volk. His description of the civic centre reminds one of Taut s
Volkhausy though his more immediate source is Le Corbusier.
According to Giedion: 'Only the imagination of real creators is suited
to building the lacking civic centres, to instil once more in the public
the old love of festivals, and to incorporate all the new materials, movement, colour, and technical possibilities. Who else could utilize them
for opening up new ways to invigorate the masses?'
In Le Corbusier's work, the civic centre makes its first tentative
appearance in 1934 with the projects for the Radiant Farm and the city
of Nemours in North Africa. One year earlier Sert had planned the
new industrial town of Cidade dos Motores near Rio de Janeiro. The
distinctly Corbusian buildings of its civic centre are arranged to form a
semi-enclosed square reminiscent of an Iberian Plaza Mayor. As if in
response Le Corbusier, in his civic centre for St. Die of 1946, included a
loosely defined square. In this project the group of buildings forming
the civic centre includes a unite ^habitation, clearly indicating Le
Corbusier's intention of giving monumental status to housing.
Two capital cities: Chandigarh and Brasilia

The capital cities of Chandigarh11 and Brasilia12 both embody the idea
of monumentality, but their monumental centres have national as
opposed to local connotations.
FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURESI URBAN VISIONS 1930-65 213
147LeCorbusier
Capitol, 1956, Chandigarh
In the final site plan a
complex organization of
monumentally conceived
buildings represents the
different organs of
government. The 'connective
tissue' of roads and parterres
relating the buildings to each
other was never built, nor was
the governor's palace (no. 3)
which the Indian prime
minister, Jawarhalal Nehru,
thought too authoritarian a
gesture.
148LeCorbusier
The Secretariat, 1951-63,
with the State Assembly
Building in the foreground,
Chandigarh
For the Capitol buildings Le
Corbusier devised a kind of
primitive classical Esperanto
which exploited the heroic
possibilities of roughfinished, in situ reinforced
concrete.
The original plan for Chandigarhthe capital of the new state of

East Punjabwas prepared by the American planner Albert Mayer.
After the untimely death of his Polish-American associate Matthew
Nowicki in 1950, Mayer was replaced by the team of Jane Drew,
Maxwell Fry, and Pierre Jeanneret, with Le Corbusier as consultant
and sole architect of the Capitol (state government buildings). For the
overall plan Le Corbusier merely regularized Mayer's Garden City
layout, but for the Capitol he started again from the beginning.
Nowicki's first scheme for the Capitol (which he later modified) was a
rectangular walled 'city' based on the seventeenth-century Mogul forts
of Agra and Delhi. Le Corbusier rejected any such model. The three
elements of the programmethe High Court, the Assembly, and the
Secretariatwere designed as a vast acropolis of separate monumental
structures, set against the backdrop of the Himalayan foothills [147].
These buildings have the strong GestaltofLe Corbusier's late style, and
in addition they are invested with a symbolism which, although partly
based on a private, associative language, has an immediately felt power
[148]. Le Corbusier's primitive, classical Esperanto reflected his
concept of a universal modern architecture modified by regional traditions.13 It fitted well with Prime Minister Jawarhalal Nehru's
aspirations to make India into a modern secular state.
The city of Brasilia has to be seen in the context of the unique development of Modernism in Brazil. The Modern Movement was
embraced almost overnight by the younger generation of Brazilian
architects in 1930the year that the future dictator Getulio Vargas was
elected president. Above all, it was Le Corbusier's rhetorical language
that appealed to the Brazilian architects. It was as if the force of an idea
could give instant birth to the new architecture and charge it with
popular symbolism. Among the many impressive public buildings in
which the language of Le Corbusier was adapted to Brazilian conditions, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio (1936-45) is
outstanding [149]. Designed by a team which included Lucio Costa
(1902-98), Jorge Moreira (1904-92), Affonso Reidy (1909-64), and
Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1907) working in close collaboration with Le
Corbusier himself, the building broke with the universal perimeter
block pattern of the Rio street grid, becoming an objet-type in the
centre of the block. In its diagrammatic separation of offices and collective functions this building seemed to manyeven in Europea
more perfect realization of Corbusian ideas than Le Corbusier's own
public buildings, constrained as they often were by odd-shaped urban
sites.
The idea for a new capital city of Brazil on the central plateau,
which had been envisaged ever since the eighteenth century, was
finally realized by President J. Kubitschek de Oliveira in 1956. The
competition for the masterplan was won by Lucio Costa, and Oscar
149 Lcio Costa, Oscar

Niemeyer, and others;
consultant Le Corbusier
Ministry of Education and
Public Health, 193645, Rio
de Janeiro
This remarkable design is the
purest built example of a new
type, already proposed by Le
Corbusier in his unbuilt
Rentenanstalt project for
Zrich (1933). The ofce
slab is set back from the
street frontage on pilotis,
freeing the entire site for
public open space. It was
also the rst building to use
Le Corbusiers brises-soleil.
Niemeyer was appointed architect of the government centre. Costas

plan was simplistically schematic: it comprised two axes, one residential and the other honoric, the latter terminating at one end in the
institutions of central government and at the other in those of the
municipality. The central commercial and cultural facilities occurred at
the intersection of the two axesan abstract point in space. Perhaps
for this reason, Brasilia seems to be a city without a centre. Niemeyers
government complex was developed in a brilliant, theatrical style that
had all the facility but little of the vigour of his early work and seems
diminished by the innitude of the surrounding landscape.
Chandigarh and Brasilia are both middle-class cities from which
lower-paid workers, necessary for the cities economies, are excluded.
In Chandigarh, though ofcially non-existent, such workers are
216 from le corbusier to megastructures: urban visions 193065
allowed to squat in the interstices of the city;14 in Brasilia, they are banished to unplanned satellite towns from which they commute daily to
work [150]. The two cities, despite their Modernist and universalist
pretensions, owe much to the persistent traditions of their respective
countries.
CIAM and Team X
After the Second World War the urban doctrine tacitly accepted by
architects of the Modern Movement was that promoted by the
Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). CIAM
had been founded in 1928 as the international platform of the Modern
Movement, which at that time was still opposed by large sections of
the profession. Branches were quickly formed in the different countries of Western Europe and America. The first meeting was held at La
Sarraz, Switzerland, in the chateau of Helene de Mandrot, a wealthy
patroness of the arts who had been a keen supporter of Art Deco until
persuaded by Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion to take up the cause
of modern architecture (and who was to commission a house from Le
Corbusier at Le Pradet near Toulon the following year).15 Four further
meetings were to take place before the Second World War. Housing
and urbanism soon became the main focus of discussion at these congresses. The early debates reflected the conflict between the leftists,
who saw the movement as an arm of the socialist revolution, and the
liberals for whom the aims of the movement were primarily cultural
and technical. After 1930, when most of the leftists moved to Russia,
CIAM became increasingly dominated by Le Corbusier and the
general secretary of the organization, Sigfried Giedion.
150 Lucio Costa
Brasilia Masterplan, 1957
The plan shows the original
concept entirely engulfed by
unplanned satellite
development.
FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURES: URBAN VISIONS 1930-65 2IJ
CIAM urban doctrine became enshrined in the 'Charte d'Athenes'

(Athens Charter'). Published by Le Corbusier in 1942, while France
was under German occupation, this document was Le Corbusier's
heavily edited version of the unpublished proceedings of the fourth
CIAM meeting, which had taken place on the SS Patris en route from
Marseilles to Athens in 1933. Most of the book was a restatement of
commonplaces so general as to be acceptable to almost anyone, but it
was strictly rationalistic and analytical in tone and was based on a classificatory system that divided the city into four watertight functions:
living, working, recreation, and circulation. This Cartesian and formalistic approach to the complex problems of the city was
unacceptable to younger members of CIAM who joined after the war.
In spite of the ideas reflected in the Athens Charter, Le Corbusier
himself, as we have seen, had been moving steadily away from his
earlier rationalism, although he had never fully disavowed it. It was
this ambiguity that allowed him to remain an important figure for the
post-war generation, who felt that his ideas had been trivialized by
most of the second generation of modern architectsthose born in the
first decade of the twentieth century. A sort of alliance was formed
between Le Corbusier and the young members, who beganwith Le
Corbusier's complicityto play a dominant role in CIAM discussions
from the ninth congress at Aix-en-Provence (1953) onwards. In 1954,
after the Dutch 'Doom Group' had explicitly repudiated the Athens
Charter, the CIAM council entrusted an enlarged Doom Group with
the organization of the tenth CIAM meeting, to be held in Dubrovnik
in 1956. At this point, the Doom-based group started calling itself
TeamX'.16
Dubrovnik was to be the last meeting of CIAM in its old form. As a
result of the irresolvable conflict that arose during the meeting between
the middle and the younger generations, CIAM, which had clearly
ceased to represent a monolithic Modern Movement, was dissolved
and replaced by a new 'CIAM research group for social and visual relationships'. The first and only congress under the new aegis took place
at Otterlo, Holland, in 1959. It was at this meeting that the British
architects Alison and Peter Smithson (Alison 192893; Peter 1923-2003)
and the Dutch Aldo van Eyck (1918-99) attacked the Italian 'contextualists' (see page 187).
Team X was opposed not only to the Athens Charter but also to the
New Monumentality. It is true that both wanted to reintroduce into
modern architecture the experience of 'community', but while the New
Monumentality aimed at creating the symbols of community within
an urban framework that was still rationalistic, Team X wanted an
architecture that was the expression of community. Whereas one
accepted architecture as a mediated representation, the other sought a
primal language in which form and meaning would be one. In attack2l8 FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURES: URBAN VISIONS 1930-65
151 Alison and Peter

Smithson
Urban Reidentification, 1959
This drawing, similar in
concept to Golden Lane, is an
adaptation of Le Corbusier's a
redent housing to local
contingencies, giving an
impression of organic growth.
ing the Athens Charter, the Smithsons claimed: 'Our hierarchy of

associations is woven into a modified continuum representing the true
complexity of human association ... we are of the opinion that a hierarchy of human association should replace the functional hierarchy of
the Charte d'Athenes.'17 For them the key to community in the city did
not lie in a separate 'city core' consisting of representative public buildings, but within the realm of dwelling itself, where a more immediate
relationship between the nuclear family and the community could be
established.
It is important to realize, however, that in spite of Team X's manifest opposition to Le Corbusier's rationalist urban theory, it was from
Le Corbusier that they drew an important part of their inspiration.
This was particularly true of the Smithsons and of Georges Candilis
(1913-95), Alexis Josic (b. 1921), and Shadrach Woods (1923-73) (who
had formed part of the design team working on the Marseilles Unite
d'Habitation). The Smithsons' Golden Lane workers' housing competition project of 1952 was essentially a modification of Le Corbusier's
a redents housing project for Hot no. 6 in Paris of 1936, with its supple
adaptation to the contingencies of progressive slum clearance and its
'streets in the air'[151].
According to the Smithsons, infrastructure should do more than
facilitate spontaneous community formationit was needed to give
'coherence' to the urban structure: 'The aim of urbanism is comprehensibility, i.e. clarity of organization.'18 In this, they seemed to
acknowledge that there was a gap between spontaneous human association and its formal representation.19 For the Smithsons, however, this
problem could be overcome by means of a dualistic planning strategy
that developed 'road and communication systems as the urban infrastructure . . . [using] the possibilities offered by "throw-away"
FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURES: URBAN VISIONS 1930-65 219
152 Georges Candilis, Alexis

Josic, and Shadrach Woods
Free University, 1964-79,
Berlin
In this project, a regular grid
formed the matrix for an ad
/?oc development of
buildings. Everybody is equal
and free under the law. The
theme of freedom within
order is reinforced by Jean
Prouve's prefabricated
constructional system.
technology to create a new sort of environment with different cycles of

change for the different functions'.20
These ideas were developed in a series of projects in the early 19605.
For example, the partnership of Candilis, Josic, and Woods developed
schemes with circulation networks to which different functional
volumes were randomly attached. These networks were either treelike (as in the Toulouse-le-Mirail or Caen Herouville projects, both
1961) or grid-like (as in the Free University of Berlin, 1964-79) [152].
The same concept of a defining network of circulation lay behind
an earlier project: the Orphanage in Amsterdam (1957-60) by Aldo
van Eyck [153]. Anticipating the Free University in some respects,
the orphanage is a 'mat' building, isomorphous with the space
it occupies. But here, instead of a dialectic between a fixed
infrastructure and a random infill, we find a dialectic between
repeating external forms and interior spaces that move freely across
their borders, creatingin Van Eyck's terminology'in-between
spaces' and 'thresholds' by which private and public spaces are
connected.
Systems theory
By the end of the 19505 there existed two conceptual models for the
kind of urban ideas being explored by Team X. The first model was a
conflation of social theories based on the concept of 'community'
(Gemeinschaff) and the psychology of perception.21 These ideas often
seem to lie behind the 'tree' and 'threshold' metaphors used by Woods,
the Smithsons, and Van Eyck. But latent in much of the work of Team
X there was another model that had been gaining ground in the human
sciences since the Second World War: 'Systems theory'. This seeks to
apply the common principle of self-regulation to machines, psychology, and societyin fact to all 'organized' wholes. Founding itself
on the belief that instrumental technology now replaces all other
220 FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURESI URBAN VISIONS 1930-65
153AldovanEyck
Orphanage, 1957-60,
Amsterdam
The plan shows how in this
project a number of semiautonomous 'houses' are
unified within a tree-like
circulation structure to form
a community.
tendencies, it sees societies as information systems designed to maintain 'homeostasis'decentralized wholes in which no one level is 'in
control'.22
Though both models differ from rationalism in being organic and
holistic (i.e. they cannot be mechanically broken down into separate
parts), they are nonetheless in conflict with each other. The first looks
back to the lost 'wholeness' of craft-based communities and cultures:
the second looks forward to a capitalist world of open structures within
which democracy, individualism, commodification, and an ethos of
consumption are unimpeded by any a priori set of cultural codes. That
this contradiction may have affected the Smithsons never to be fully
resolved seems to be reflected in the somewhat indecisive quality of

their later work.
Aspects of Systems theory, particularly cybernetics, found their way
into architectural discourse in the late 19505. Swedish and Dutch
Structuralism and the Megastructure movement all saw them as
applicable to the complex problems of design in modern mass society.
A 'cybernetic', self-regulating element was introduced into the way
cities and large buildings were conceptualized. Instead of users being
presented with predetermined spatial patterns, they were nowat
least in theoryoffered the means to alter their own micro-environment and decide their own patterns of behaviour.
Dutch Structuralism
In 1952 the Dutch architect Wim van Bodegraven underlined the need
for architects to create a structure of forms that could change with time
yet retain its coherence and 'meaning'.23 This demand, as well as the
example of Van Eyck's orphanage with its superimposition of centralized order and local freedom, were the inspiration behind a new
tendency in Holland known as 'Structuralism'. This was initiated by
Piet Blom (b. 1934) and Joop van Stigt in their 1962 Prix de Rome design
for a 'Village of Children', in which the combination of order and flexibility, centrality and dispersal, was achieved in terms of a prefabricated
system which allowed identical, 'recognizable' units to be combined
according to a set of rules [154]. This basic idea was further developed
by Herman Hertzberger (b. 1932) and others in Holland, where its application became rather widespread in the 19608 and i97os.24
154 Piet Blom and Joop van
Stigt
Village of Children, 1962
In this opening salvo of Dutch
Structuralism, Van Eyck's
concept of additive 'houses'
form ing a higher-order
community is systematized in
three dimensions.
Megastructures
The Megastructural movement, which was contemporaneous with
Dutch Structuralism, was not concerned with fixed, recognizable
units. It was posited on a built environment without cultural norms
and in a continuous state of flux. In a publication of 1964, the architect
Fumihiko Maki (b. 1928), one of the original members of the Japanese
Metabolists, distinguished between three types of what he called 'collective form': firstly, Compositional formin which there is a fixed
relation between different pre-formed buildings (this is the classical
way of achieving collective form and includes the civic centre at St. Die
by Le Corbusier and that of Brasilia by Niemeyer); secondly,
Megastructural forma large frame in which all the functions of a city
are housed (this involves the coexistence of structures with different
rates of obsolescence); and thirdly, Group forman additive collection of typologically similar building units (characteristic of
'unplanned' vernacular villages).25
Within this broad classification, 'Megastructural form' presents an
array of different approaches. A very broad distinction can be made
between projects which stress the long-term elements and those which
stress the variable elementsa matter of emphasis, since examples of
flexible and fixed elements occur in both groups. Within the first cate
gory the Japanese Metabolists and the British Archigram will be
discussed.
Metabolism and Archigram

The Metabolists emerged at the World Design Conference in Tokyo
of 1960, simultaneously with the publication of the Tokyo Bay Project
by Kenzo Tange (b. 1913). In describing this project, Tange used words
with biological connotations such as 'cell' and 'metabolism'26 and he
later claimed that the project was a breakthrough from 'functionalism'
to a 'structural approach',27 suggesting that he was aware of at least
some aspects of Systems theory. Tange's project proposed the construction of a new city of 10 million people over the water in Tokyo Bay
as a solution to the acute problem of urban congestion in Tokyo. The
new city was centred around a double transport spine which housed all
the public buildings and to which were attached extendible secondary
spines of housing. Tange had worked in Le Corbusier s atelier, and the
plan resembled that of the Ville Radieuse in its overall structure. But it
differed from the Ville Radieuse in its total detachment from any
natural terrain and in its randomized, abacus-like housing units [155].
In two other projectsCities in the Air (1959) by Kiyonori Kikutake
(b. 1928), also proposed for Tokyo Bay, and the Joint Core Stem
FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURES: URBAN VISIONS 1930-65 223
155 Kenzo Tanged eft)

Tokyo Bay Project, 1960
Like the VilleRadieuse, this
project consists of a spine of
public buildings flanked by
housing able to expand
laterally. But where the
pattern of housing is
predetermined in Le
Corbusier's scheme, here it is
shown as unpredictable. Only
the macro-structure is
controlled. The microstructure is self-regulating.
156 Aratalsozaki (above)

Joint Core Stem system,
1960
I nth is project a quasimolecular pattern is given

monumental scale.
proposal (1960) by Arata Isozaki (b. 1931)there is a complete break

with Corbusian precedent. In both, repeating series of multi-storey
cylindrical nodes form the infrastructure, either standing alone or connected by deep lattice beams which contain housing [156].28
In the Metabolist projects, Utopian and pragmatic aspects are not
clearly differentiated, which seems to be a general characteristic of
Japanese Modernism. The work of the British Archigram group, on
the contrary, was unashamedly Utopian and apocalyptic in its imagery.
The group was founded by Peter Cook (b. 1936) in 1961 and its
internationally distributed broadsheets helped to consolidate the
Megastructural movement's international self-image. The rich
iconography of projects such as Plug-in City (1964) was derived from
many sources, including space comics, popular science fiction, Pop Art,
and the technology of oil refineries and underwater research, as well as
from such Metabolist projects as Kikutake's cylindrical towers. The use
of ready-made and popular images was a deliberate assault on architecture as a conventionalized, 'upper-class' disciplinean invasion of'low
art' into architecture's hallowed precincts, especially those of the
Modern Movement itself. In their almost obsessive elaboration of
detail, in the frank eclecticism of their imagery, and in their presentation of projects from the outside, Archigram's drawings bear a certain
resemblance to those of Sant'Elia's Citta Nuova (see pages 103-5). But
there is a pervasive irony in the work that seems carefully designed to
prevent the technological environment it conjures up from becoming
too menacing [157].29
Homo Ludens
The projects that fall within the second category of Megastructural
form are primarily concerned with the ability of cybernetic machines
157 Archigram
Plug-in City, 1964
In this project eclectic
typologies are interconnected
in an endless web-like
structure.
to make it possible for a built environment to be self-regulating, in

other words to adapt to the changing desires of the human communities that inhabit it. This idea is implicit in Archigram and Metabolism,
but in the work of Cedric Price (1934-2004), Yona Friedman (b. 1923),
Michael Webb (b. 1927), and Victor E. Nieuwenhuys, known as
Constant (b. 1920), it becomes the central issue. For all these designers,
the leading idea is that of'play'. According to Constant, speaking of his
New Babylon (1957-70): 'The environment of Homo Ludens ('man at
play') has first of all to be flexible, changeable, making possible any
change of place or mood, any mode of behaviour/30
158 Yona Friedman

L'Urbanisme Spatiale,
1960-2
A seven-storey open structure

of unconvincing lightness
here shown against the
backdrop of Manhattan
hovers above an
uninterrupted ground level
reserved for transport and
parks.
Cedric Price's Fun Palace (1961)commissioned by the impresario

Joan Littlewood and designed in collaboration with the structural
engineer Frank Newby and the cybernetics expert Gordon Paskwas
aborted due to lack of funds, but only after most of the technical details
had been prepared. Michael Webb's Sin Centre (1957-62) represents
the seductive image of an organic structure in a state of pulsating
desire. Yona Friedman, in his impressionistic drawings for TUrbanisme
Spatiale (1960-62), proposedwith a complete lack of technical
detaila multi-storey metal space-frame suspended high above Paris
in which 'the usable volumes occupy the voids of [the] infrastructure
and their arrangement follows the will of the people' [158].31
Among Megastructuralists the work of Constant is unique in its
conscious connections with the early twentieth-century avantgardesFuturism, Constructivism, and De Stijl. A member of the
COBRA group of painters, Constant joined Guy Debord s Situationist International in I95/.32 It was in this context that he began the series
of models and drawings depicting the city of New Babylon (the name
was suggested by Debord)a series that he continued for another ten
years after his break with Debord in i96o.33 New Babylon sets out to
FROM LE CORBUSIER TO MEGASTRUCTURES: URBAN VISIONS 1930-65 22J
159 Constant
New Babylon (1959-): view
of New Babylonian Sectors,
1971
Constant's representations
are less picturesque than
those of Archigram or
Friedman and give a more ad
hoc and more
uncompromising image of a
totally mechanized spatial
world.
give architectural form to the Situationist concept of derive (drifting)

and of the 'psycho-geographical' mapping of the city. Its main concepts can be traced back to a 1953 essay (published in 1958) entitled
Tormulary for a New UrbanisnY, by Lettrist International member
Gilles Ivain (pseudonym for Ivan Chtchegloff ).34
Constant's city [143 (see page 208), 159] is based on a long-term
prognosis of modern society. His writings predict a world in which
nature will have been totally superseded by technology, fixed communities by nomadic flows, work by leisure. In his city, production and
mechanical transportation (which are said to have destroyed social life
in existing cities) occur at ground level, while all social life, now free to
develop without any impediment, takes place within a vast structure
raised onpi/otis. This structure, which forms a network that will eventually cover the entire globe, is a continuous multi-storey loft space
containing all living and social functions, which will be continuously
rebuilt by the population, aided by cybernetic machines. The permanent structure, like that of Le Corbusier's Algiers viaduct, is a series of
fixed floorplates constituting the 'ground levels' of the city (unlike
Cedric Price's Fun Palace where the floors are mobile). The population
will migrate at will from one part of the city to another and communities will continually form and reform. Since work has been abolished,
life will be spent in creative social interaction and imaginative play in
an environment that has been completely aestheticized. Contrary to
Constant's avowed intentions, the dominant impression of this aesthetic Utopia is one of boredom and claustrophobia. It is like an
endless shopping mall without exit signs. Moreover, while social life is
in a state of constant agitation, economics and government seem, like
industrial production, to have vanished into a state of automated

perfection. It pictures a lobotomized world from which power and
conict have been eradicated.
Whether Megastructures emphasize a relatively xed infrastructure or its self-regulating, responsive inll, they are all predicated on a
dominant ideathat of the city as an open web or network, the contents of which can develop according to an internal dynamic. In
contrast to the traditional Cartesian schema promoted by the Athens
Charter, according to which the city consists of a closed hierarchy of
discrete parts controlled by a centre, the Megastructural city is presented as an indivisible, organic, self-regulating whole. Problems seem
to arise when this abstract concept is hypostasized and given form as an
architectural image. The idea immediately takes on the clothing of a
Utopia or a dystopia, depending on whether the hidden mechanism of
the system is read as benign or sinister. It is all too easy to see
Constants New Babylon, for example, as an allegory for a post-industrial, capitalist world, in which an invisible network, though able to
maintain and reproduce itself efciently, is no longer guided by any
rational telos.
Pax Americana:
Architecture in
America 194565
12

Seagram Building, 19548,
New York
The dening moment for the introduction of the Modern Movement

into America is usually seen to have been the exhibition at the New
York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of 1932 and the accompanying
book, The International Style, by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell
Hitchcock. This book presented the Modern Movement as an incident in the evolution of style, and downplayed its progressive social
content. The explanation for this can probably be found in the different cultural and political conditions prevailing in America and Europe
at the time.
In Europe, the period between 1910 and 1930 was one of unprecedented social and cultural upheaval. Sweeping social reforms were
being initiated by liberal governments, particularly in the realm of
public housing. At the same time there was a powerful avant-garde
movement in all the arts supported by a small but inuential minority
of the cultural elite. During the same period in America this parallelism between socially progressive ideas and the artistic avant-garde
was largely lacking. Garden City settlements of the 1920s and 1930s,
like Sunnyside Gardens in New York, Radburn in New Jersey, and
Greenbelt near Washington, DC, all by Clarence Stein and Henry
Wright, were still basically within the Arts and Crafts tradition.
Projects derived from the 1920s European avant-garde, such as
Stonorov and Kastners Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia, were
rare. Given the lack of commonly perceived connection between the
avant-garde and social reform it is hardly surprising that Hitchcock
and Johnson should have emphasized the purely stylistic aspects of the
Modern Movement. Yet there were other voices; for example, in parallel with the International Style exhibit, MoMA mounted an
exhibition of social housing curated by the architectural critic Lewis
Mumford (18951990) and his assistant Catherine Bauer, which
included examples of the Arts and Crafts movement and Neue
Sachlichkeit in Germany.
Lewis Mumfords writings in the 1920s still carried the imprint of
William Morriss rejection of modern technology. But towards the end
of the decade he came increasingly under the inuence of the optimistic
evolutionism of the Scottish urbanist Patrick Geddes. According to
231
Geddes, the present paleotechnic phase in civilization would give way

to a neotechnic phase in which electricity would succeed coal as a
source of power, and biological principles would replace mechanistic
ones. After visiting the new housing in Weimar Germany in 1932,
Mumford became convinced that such a neotechnic phase was in the
making. His books Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Culture of
Cities (1938) contained the essence of his new philosophy.1
Mumfords partner on the German tour was Catherine Bauera
young writer whose visit to Ernst Mays New Frankfurt two years
earlier had, in her own words, transformed her from an aesthete into a
housing reformer. After turning the research material collected on the
German tour into a book, Modern Housing, she became acknowledged
as the foremost American expert on social housing. Bauer realized
(unlike Mumford) that the success of social housing in America
depended on grass-roots political action. In 1934, she became director
of the Philadelphia Labor Housing Conference, founded by the architect Oskar Stonorov and John Edelman of the Hosiery Workers
Union, whose purposeultimately abortivewas to create a laboursponsored housing cooperative.
Mumford and Bauers enthusiasm for the German housing movement must be seen against the background of the general openness to
European social ideas that characterized the New Deal, as the
Roosevelt administration searched for ways to alleviate the effects of
the Depression. But the ow of ideas across the Atlantic in the interwar period was not only from east to west. Especially during the early
1920s, European reformers, both in Western Europe and in Soviet
Russia, envious of the high living standards of American workers,
sought to harness American ideas to their various programmes of
reconstruction and reform. American technology and production
management were emulated by European industry and became important early points of reference for the Modern Movement.2
After the Second World War the situation changed radically.
America emerged from the war as the dominant power and as the creditor of an impoverished and ruined Europe. Though some of the
welfare programmes inaugurated by the New Deal remained intact,
there was now unbounded condence in American capitalism.
Modern architecture became accepted worldwide by the architectural
profession, but it was pursued under totally different political conditions in America and Europe. In the welfare state economies of
post-war Europe modern architecture, whether orthodox or revisionist, became the norm for public projects. Within this ethos architects,
working either in government or private ofces, began to study problems of large-scale architectural production. In England in the late
1940s, for example, Hertfordshire County Council implemented a
school programme based on a modular system of prefabrication.3 In
232 pax americana: architecture in america 194565
Europe as a whole the many points of connection between modern

architecture and the welfare state encouraged the experimental work of
Team X and the Megastructuralist movements (see pages 217 and 223).
During the same period in America the most vital developments in
modern architecture were in the private sector. Even public projects
were nanced by private agencies (albeit with federal or state help) and
this tended to inhibit, though it did not altogether eliminate, the
development of an ideology-driven Modernism. Precisely because of
the different conditions of architectural production in America and
Europe, however, the mutual inuence was still strong. In Europe this
inuence was chiey felt in two areas: the rst, technology, reinforced
the tradition of Modernist rationalism; the second, popular and
rapidly changing cultural forms, ran counter to it.
In this chapter three major themes will be examined: rstly, the
individual housein particular, the Case Study House Program; secondly, corporate ofce building; and thirdly, critiques of Modernist
rationalism, the pressures of consumerism, and the search for an architecture of public symbolism.
The Case Study House Program

In the 1920s in Western Europe, the individual house had played an
important role in the birth of the Modern Movement. But in the two
decades after the Second World War, European domestic building was
largely conned to government housing programmes, which consisted
mostly of high-rise apartments or row houses in the cities or the new
towns. In America, by contrast, most new housing took the form of
large suburban settlements, made necessary by the accelerated migration of white middle-class families from the cities to the outer suburbs
and carried out by private developers.4 At the same time there was a
large market in one-off family houses, extending from the modest and
pre-designed to the lavish and purpose-designed.
The stylistic tendencies within the housing market were the result
of a complex interplay between various interested parties, including
the loan agencies, the building industry, and professional and cultural
pressure groups. Museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in
New York and progressive journals such as Architectural Record tried to
popularize modern house design, but with only modest success. In 1951
Architectural Record, commenting on a House of Ideas sponsored by the
journal House and Garden, described it as a fusion of the crisp, clean
lines of the International Style and the rambling openness of the
Ranch House Style. The design typied a no-nonsense Modernism
unencumbered by theory which gained some popularity in the United
States in the 1950s.5
In this encounter between Modernism and the housing market, the
pax americana: architecture in america 194565 233
example of southern California played a crucial role. Ever since the

early years of the twentieth century, with such buildings as the Gamble
House by Greene and Greene (19078) and Dodge House by Irving
Gill (191416), Los Angeles had shown itself to be receptive to an innovative domestic architecture. This tradition had been continued in the
1920s with the Los Angeles houses of Frank Lloyd Wright and the
work of Austrian immigrants Rudolph Schindler (18871953) and
Richard Neutra (18921970)for example, the justly admired houses
that each of them built for Dr Phillip Lovell (19235 and 19279
respectively).
It was in Los Angeles after the Second World War that a vigorous
attempt was made to inuence the more expensive end of the post-war
house market in the direction of modern architecture: the Case Study
House Program. This was initiated by John Entenza, an amateur of
modern art and architecture who became ownereditor of the magazine Arts and Architecture in 1938, turning it into a mouthpiece of the
avant-garde. In the July issue of 1944 Entenzatogether with photographer and graphic artist Herbert Matter and architects and designers
Ray and Charles Eames (191288 and 190778), Eero Saarinen
(191061), and Richard Buckminster Fuller (18951983)published a
manifesto calling for the application of wartime technology to the
post-war housing problem. The montages by Herbert Matter
announcing the manifesto showed a familiarity with Futurist and
Constructivist graphics, but they placed a new emphasis on the
analogy between machines, the human nervous system, and molecular
structures. The manifesto recast Bauhaus and Corbusian ideology in
terms of post-war American technology. In dening the principles on
which the post-war house should be based, it declared:
The house is an instrument of service. Degrees of service are real and can be
measured. They are not dependent on taste. The house should not assert itself
by its architectural design. In fact, the better integrated the services of the
house become, the less one is apt to be conscious of the physical way in which
it has been done. The kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, utilities, and storage will
prot most by an industrialized system of prefabrication. In the livingrecreational areas variation becomes a valid personal preference. A designer must
know what the house must supply to meet the physiological and psychological
needs of the members of the family.6
Optimistic and positivistic in tone, the manifesto promoted the belief

that an art based on psychological laws and an architecture based on
scientic method would lead to a unied culture in tune with the
modern age. The aim of the manifesto was not social revolution but a
revolution in aesthetics, starting with the enlightened bourgeoisie and
ltering down to the masses. Nonetheless, the manifesto had a moral
and social as well as an aesthetic agenda: the particular aesthetic it pro234 pax americana: architecture in america 194565
moted was one of transparency and authenticity, inseparable, it was

thought, from the ideals of a rational and just social order.
Prefabrication techniques, combining standardization and choice,
would make the new aesthetic principles available to everyone. Where
it differed from the European Modern Movement and from social
reformers like Lewis Mumford and Catherine Bauer was in its
assumption that the uniform culture it envisaged was compatible with
a market-based capitalism.
To carry out this ambitious agenda Entenza commissioned or
adopted a series of suburban houses in southern California by
Modernist architects, including among others William Wurster
(18951973), Ralph Rapson (b. 1914), and Richard Neutra, in order to
build up a case study of the new domestic architecture. In spite of their
differences these houses had many features in common, not all of
which were derived from the theory presented in the manifesto. They
were, for a start, nearly all of one storey with at roofs. The plans were
open and informal but tended to be bi-nuclear, the living rooms and
bedrooms being remote from each other. The inside was opened up to
the outside by means of large areas of glazing. A tendency towards picturesque dispersal was counteracted by the economic need for cubic
simplicity. Nearly all the houses had unrendered brick replacesa
reassuring reference to the pre-industrial past. The layouts reected a
somewhat ritualized suburban life stylenon-rational and conformist
rather than rational and free as the theory claimed. Despite the use of
forms connoting prefabrication and mechanization most of the houses
were built of blockwork with wood framing, and the exibility of the
plans owed as much to traditional American building techniques as
they did to new technology and materials.
Around 1950, the Case Study houses underwent a marked change,
which rst becomes noticeable in those by Raphael Soriano (190788),
Craig Ellwood (192292), and Pierre Koenig (b. 1925) [161]. In these
houses there was a new concentration on modular construction and
prefabrication. The houses were thought of more as assembled systems
than as designs in the traditional sense. It became possible to talk of an
architecture of steel and glass. Nearly all the houses now had steel
frames and the structure and method of assembly became clearly
visible while the plans became simpler and less picturesque. Discussing
Craig Ellwoods House 17 of 19545, the Italian journal Domus wrote:
In fact, we do not nd here innovations in the scheme of composition,
in the treatment of space, structure or materials, but solutions of
details, perfections of equipment and materials, which make this
architecture more profound and more concrete.7
Two Case Study houses built between 1945 and 1949 stand somewhat apart from the other houses of the earlier phase, though they
foreshadow the second phase in many ways: Case Study House 9, built
161 Pierre Koenig
Case Study House 21,1958,

Los Angeles
This house, with its
panoramic view, unites inside
and outside space, private
life and the infinite-sublime.
Although largely
prefabricated, it is highly
site-specific.
for Jophn Entenza, designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen,

and House 8 designed by Charles Eames and his wife Ray for their
own use.8 The two houses shared the same site in Pacific Palisades.
Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen had met in 1937 when Eames was
on a fellowship at Cranbrook Academy of Art, of which Eero's father
Eliel was both designer and director. During the early 19408 they
frequently collaborated, particularly in the design of moulded plywood furniture, in which Eames was an important pioneer. The
Entenza House is a single-storey volume compressed within a square
perimeter. Externally the house is enigmatically neutral; its qualities
lie entirely in its interior, ingeniously calibrated to the needs of a
bachelor-aesthete.
The Eames House is altogether more remarkable [162]. It is almost
unique among case study houses in being organized on two storeys. It
consists of a steel and glass cage with one long side built close up
against a steep embankment and the other sides open to the undulating, eucalyptus-strewn site. Its proportions are roughly those of Le
Corbusier s Maison Citrohanboth have a double-height living room
at one end overlooked by a bedroom balconybut in relation to the
Maison Citrohan the Eames House is rotated through 90 degrees and
the blank flank wall has become a front. Instead of being monolithic,
236 PAX AMERICANA: ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 1945-65
162 Charles and Ray Eames

Case Study House 8,
19459, Pacic Palisades
This house is assembled from
standard industrial elements
and is non-site-specic. Its
light, nomadic quality relates
it more to the ideas of Le
Corbusier, Ginsburg, or
Buckminster Fuller, than to
the typical ground-hungry
American house of the
period.
like Le Corbusiers house, it is additive. Its slender steel frame is

absorbed into the thickness of the skin. The anonymous grid of standard factory glazing, slightly reminiscent of the screen walls of a
traditional Japanese house, conceals an interior of cluttered, sensuous,
fetishistic objectsa far cry from the chilly rituals of the other Case
Study houses. There is no doubt that the Eames House looks back to
the Arts and Crafts tradition in certain ways. Its brilliance lies in the
fact that it achieves its effects by the use of as-found factory components and without sentimentality.
The corporate ofce building

Perhaps the greatest single achievement of American architecture after
the Second World War was the establishment of the modern corporate
ofce building as a type, imitated all over the world. Skidmore,
Owings, and Merrill (SOM) were the leaders of this development.
Founded in Chicago in 1933 by Nathaniel Owings (190384) and Louis
Skidmore (18971962), the rm came to prominence during the war
with the commission to build the city of Oak Ridge in Tennessee for
the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb. After
the war, the rm grew into a huge multi-partner organization with
163 Skidmore, Owings, and

Merrill
Lever House, 19512, New
York
This was the rst of SOMs
skyscraper ofce blocks. Its
curtain wall was widely
imitated throughout the
world.
ofces in Chicago and New York and later in San Francisco and
Portland, Oregon.
The rst high-rise ofce building by SOM was Lever House in
New York (19512) [163]. This was one of four American buildings
which were the rst to realize Mies van der Rohes and Le Corbusiers
pre-war visions of the glass skyscraper. The other three were: the
Equitable Life Assurance Building in Portland, Oregon (19447) by
Pietro Belluschi (18991994); the United Nations Secretariat in New
York (194750) by Wallace Harrison (18951981) with Le Corbusier as
consultant; and Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago (194851) by
Mies van der Rohe.9 To this list should be added the pre-war Ministry
of Education building in Rio de Janeiro (193645) by a team including
Lcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, with Le Corbusier as consultant
(see page 216).
In its site organization Lever House is similar to, and probably
derived from, the Rio building.10 It was the rst building in Manhattan
to be set back from the plot boundary, though unlike the Rio building
the tower rises up from a three-storey perimeter courtyard block on
pilotis. But in its use of a uniform curtain wall on all surfaces it followed
a Miesian rather than a Corbusian prototype. From 1952, indeed, Mies
became the dominant inuence on SOM. Due to the rms decentralized ofce organization and its somewhat empirical approach to
design, its work showed considerable variation in detail, but these variations occurred within a strict set of functional parameters: maximum
exibility of spatial planning; maximum standardization of parts and
modular coordination of all systems;11 air conditioning; fully glazed
and sealed curtain walls; all-day articial lighting; and deep ofce
space.
The rm of SOM was a new phenomenon in the history of
Modernism. For the rst time the anonymity that had been aimed at
by the rationalist wing of the Modern Movement appeared to have
been achieved. Thanks to technical and professional efciency combined with a simple and consistent aesthetic, SOM were able to marry
the ambitions of Modernist rationalism with those of advanced capitalism and corporate bureaucracy [164, 165]. In their work modern
architectureor at least a convincing version of itbecame normalized within the political structures of the Cold War and the
militaryindustrial complex.
SOM may have been unique in its size and in the anonymity of its
organization but it was part of a general post-war expansion of corporate ofce building in which many architects took part. Among these
the work of Eero Saarinen is of particular interest. Eero was the partner
of his father Eliel until the latters death in 1950, and he had inherited
from his father a belief in the high mission of the individual creative
architect. He also adhered to the Beaux-Arts maxim that a buildings

Merrill
US Air Force Academy,
195462, Colorado Springs
This complex shows the
aptness of an architecture
without rhetoric for the
rhetorical representation of
power.
166 Eero Saarinen

General Motors Technical
Center, 194856, Warren,
Michigan
The somewhat Expressionist
quality of Eliel Saarinens
original design, was ironed
out to produce a building
geared towards
decentralization and
exibility. The identity of the
various departments was
established by colour-coding.
form should express its character. This led him, in the design of the
General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan (194856)
[166], which he took over on the death of his father, to develop an
architecture that embraced and promoted GMs technical, stylistic,
and corporate ideas. The design was highly inventivefor example, in
its adaptation of the neoprene gasket from car to building design, in the
luminous ceiling of the dome of the sales hall, and in its use of bright,
glazed-tile colour-coding on the gable walls of each department building. At the level of organization, the design both facilitated and
represented GMs corporate policy of decentralized control and exibility. A universal grid of 5 feet allowed for interchangeability of parts
and exibility of planning, while on the faades the module was
endlessly repeated in the window mullions at the expense of any
expression of structure. The ofce campus, grouped round an articial
lake, was designed to be seen from a moving car. Thus, a predisposition
towards expressive functionalism inherited from his fathers Jugendstil

Merrill
Union Carbide Building,
195760, New York
In SOMs interiors, modular
coordination is both the
means and the meaning of
the corporate ofce.

Preliminary scheme, Illinois
Institute of Technology,
1939, Chicago
This layout creates a closed
hierarchy. In the built
scheme all the buildings are
reduced to rectangular
pavilions with only a minimal
gesture towards hierarchical
order. This momentous
surrender to the logic of the
American street grid set the
tone for all Miess
subsequent work.
background ironically led Saarinen to produce a copybook design of

rationalist anonymity.12
Mies van der Rohe in America

The American work of Mies van der Rohe occupies a position that is
both central and peripheral to the development of the corporate ofce
building: central in the sense that Miess designs for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (194056) and Lake Shore Drive
Apartments provided the basic formal syntax for the corporate buildings of SOM and Saarinen; peripheral in the sense that Mies
maintained a certain detachment from the immediate needs of his
clients. Miess rst scheme for the IIT campus was classical with two
identical, symmetrically placed auditoria [167], continuing the compositional characteristics of his German workfor instance, the Silk
Industry Ofces in Krefeld of 1937. When it was discovered that the
existing road grid could not be altered, Mies changed the layout,
turning an articulated composition into an assemblage of rectangular
pavilions in a way that conformed to the abstract conditions of the
American grid [168]. All Miess energy went into discovering and perfecting the types corresponding to what he saw as the will of the epoch,
and once he had arrived at a typical solution he simply repeated it.
Whereas in the work of SOM the same rational schema would often
vary in detail from project to project, for Mies there was no difference
between the personal solution and the type. A case in point is his use of

Alumni Hall, Illinois Institute
of Technology, 19456
The abstract yet neoclassical
severity of Miess IIT
pavilions had an enormous
inuence on American
architecture in the 1950s,
particularly that of the
corporate ofce block and the
work of SOM and Eero
Saarinen.
I-beams in his curtain wall faades. First adopted in Lake Shore Drive
Apartments, these elementswhich among other functions provide
stiffening for the window sectionsread ambiguously as both mullions
and columns, recalling the equally ambiguous vertical elements of Sullivans Wainwright Building (see page 243) and Eliel Saarinens Chicago
Tribune ofces. Miess I-beam is an as-found element with denite
structural connotations, but at the same time it is explicitly decorative,
being welded to the surface of a pre-existent structure [160 (see page
230), 169, 170]. Mies claimed to be creating an anonymous vernacular
and repudiated Le Corbusiers individualism,13 but his minimal forms
are still rhetorical and speak of the remnants of a high art tradition even
as they reject any reconciliation between history and modernity.
Countercurrents
We must now look at some of the countercurrents that began to make
themselves felt in the 1950s. These were active at very different levels
169 Mies van der Rohe (left)

New York
The I-beam mullions create
an ornamental surface that is
quasi-structurala
treatment of the ofce faade
that goes back to Sullivans
Wainwright Building. Note
the illuminated ceiling grid,
which extends the faade
module into the body of the
building.

(above)
New York
In this detail of the curtain
wall the supplementary,
ornamental nature of the Ibeam mullion is clear.
and often pulled in opposite directions. Some were broad analyses of

American society carried out by academic sociologists or journalists;
others were attempts by designers or architects to correct what they
saw as the weaknesses of Modernist artistic and architectural theory.
The critique of corporatism

Miess carefully worked out idealist philosophy and his disdain for the
trivia of everyday life in favour of a puried expression of the Zeitgeist
coincided exactly with the worldly demands of corporate disciplinea
discipline that was accepted by SOM uncritically and on its own terms.
It was precisely this corporate discipline that was attacked by writers
like David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd, 1950) and William H. Whyte
(The Organisation Man, 1956), who saw the corporation as a dehumanized collective producing a new type of other-directed character,
nervously conforming to the opinions of (corporate) peers. These criticisms were markedly different from those of late-nineteenth-century
German sociologists like Georg Simmel. Whereas for Simmel individualism (the blas type) was a defensive mechanism developed to
deal with the loss of community in an economy based on money, for
Reisman and Whyte individualism was a primary American virtue,

threatened by corporate conformism.
The critique of corporatism was also mounted on a more political
level. C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) saw the signs of a new,
insidious kind of totalitarianism in the very dispersal of power that was
the essence of corporate capitalismevident in the multiple links
between the corporations, the military, and government. Millss pessimism was not shared, however, by fellow sociologist Talcott Parsons,
for whom the web-like structure of modern political power was symptomatic of a well-performing, self-regulating social system that
necessarily resulted in the sacrice of the individual to the organic
whole (see Systems theory, page 220).
Beyond rationalism: desire and community

The Case Study houses and the corporate architecture of SOM can be
seen to have represented a sort of ideal moment when post-war political and technical optimism in America coincided with the cultural
philosophy of a normative Modernist architecture. But there were
commercial and industrial currents that threatened this ideology. A
challenge to the cultural assumptions of mainstream Modernism had
already been laid down in the late 1920s when the General Motors
Corporation, breaking with the Fordist tradition, adapted their production cycle to allow for different rates of obsolescence: a slow one for
the chassis, following the laws of technical evolution; a fast one for the
body, following those of fashion.14
The introduction of styling into the automobile industry set the
pace for a whole generation of American industrial designers like
Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and Henry Dreyfus, who
sought to reconcile the Bauhaus principles of good design with the
demands of the market. Art theorist and teacher Georgy Kepes recommended applying the principles of Gestalt psychology to advertising to
counteract the formlessness of modern life.15 Ernst Dichter in his book
The Strategy of Desire (1960), spoke of the dual responsibility of the
designer to understand the sociology and psychology of the public, and
to uphold public taste.16 However, once the market had been accepted
as a player in the culture of modernity it was obvious that the
WerkbundBauhaus ideal of universal norms of taste for the whole
design eld, from the commodity to the building, could not be sustained. This was abundantly clear to British Pop Artists such as
Richard Hamilton who assimilated advertising to high art, making
ironic use of the unconscious drives that champions of the Bauhaus
tradition like Kepes sought to sublimate.
At the architectural end of the spectrum, there were attempts to
reintroduce into architecture the monumentality outlawed by main246 pax americana: architecture in america 194565
171 Eero Saarinen

TWA Terminal, JFK Airport,
195662, New York
In his later work Saarinen
became increasingly
Expressionist in his
approach, attempting to
capture the essential
character of each project.
172 Edward Durrell Stone

US Embassy, 1954, New
Delhi, India
This work is representative of
American neoclassicism of
the 1950s.
stream rationalism. The corporate work of SOM and Eero Saarinen

was clearly rationalist in spirit, yet this did not prevent them introducing symbolic buildings at the appropriate moment, as in SOMs
Expressionist chapel for the US Air Force Academy at Colorado
Springs (195462). Indeed Saarinen became increasingly obsessed with
the expression of the character of each building. This can be seen in
his auditorium and chapel at MIT (19505), in the dormitories at Yale
University (195862), and in the TWA terminal at Idlewild (now JFK)
Airport (195662) [171].
In the late 1950s many Modernist architects turned to neoPalladianism, including TAC (Gropiuss rm), Philip Johnson, John
Johansen, Edward Durrell Stone [172], and Minoru Yamasaki. This
often took the form of symmetrical plans and a Pompeian17 reading of
173 Louis Kahn

Adler House, 19545,
Philadelphia
The plan shows how the
house is broken down into
ve identical structural
elements accommodating
different functions. The
composition is free,
contiguities being
determined by circulation
requirements.
Modernist lightness and transparencyas in the many new American

embassies that were springing up at that time in the capital cities of
Europe and Asia.
Louis Kahn
In the work of Louis Kahn (190174) the critique of mainstream
Modernism was both more subtle and more radical than that of the
architects so far mentioned. Nonetheless, Kahns work can best be
approached in the context of the New Monumentality movement promoted by Sigfried Giedion, Josep Lluis Sert, and Kahns mentor,
George Howe.18 From his early years as an architect Kahn was actively
involved in the housing reform movement and spent the years from
1940 to 1947 as the chief designer in successive partnerships with
George Howe and Oskar Stonorov, working on government housing
projects. He was deeply sympathetic to the communitarian ideas of
writers like Lewis Mumford, Paul and Percival Goodman, and
Hannah Arendt, and shared their belief in the need for a civic architec248 pax americana: architecture in america 194565
174 Louis Kahn
Jewish Community Center,

1954-9, Trenton
Here the structural aedicules
are organized on a binary grid.
There are two kinds of space:
primary (served) and
secondary (servant).
Partitions may occur only on
grid lines and are optional,
depending on distribution
requirements. For extra-large
spaces columns are omitted
but the roof pattern remains
constant.
ture that would inspire people with a sense of common purpose and
democratic participation.
A few years after he started practising on his own in 1947, Kahn s
work began to depart radically from the received Modernist tradition.
In his new work there seems to have been a fusion of the ideas of
Viollet-le-Duc and those of neoclassicism (traceable, in particular, to
the writings of the early-nineteenth-century theoretician Quatremere
de Quincy), both available to Kahn through the Beaux-Arts tradition
in which he was formed. On the one hand he was drawn to Viollet's
structural rationalism. On the other hand he believed in the concept of
unchanging forms or types.19
For Kahn, a convergence between the two traditions was suggested
by the Platonic geometries found in nature, as demonstrated in the
books of Ernst Haeckel and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.20 A
similar interest in these geometries was shown by Buckminster Fuller,
Robert Le Ricolais (1897-1977), and Konrad Wachsmann (1901-80),
PAX AMERICANA: ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 1945-65 249
175 Louis Kahn

Richards Medical Research
Laboratories, University of
Pennsylvania, 195765,
Philadelphia
Here the servedservant
principle is adapted to a
multi-storey building. It
proved difcult to reconcile
the demanding technical
requirements of the
laboratories with Kahns
formal system.
whose polyhedral space-frame structures strongly inuenced Kahns

architecture in the early 1950s (Kahn referred to space-frames as
hollow stones).
Kahns critique of Modernism started with a rejection of the free
plan. He believed that in uncoupling form from structure the free plan
as variously interpreted by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had
opened up a void that could only be lled by subjective intuition. Miess
sensitivities, he said, react to imposed structural order with little inspiration . . . Le Corbusier . . . passes through order impatiently and
hurries to form.21 Kahns breakthrough to a different ordering principle
came with his Adler and DeVore house projects (19545) [173] and the
Trenton Bath House (1957), where the aggregation of identical rooms
reduced architecture to its most primitive unit of meaning. In subsequent projects these units were organized in a number of ways: as
close-packed agglomerations, as strings, as random clusters, or as small
spaces grouped round a central space. The signicant element is always
the room-space itself. As Kahn expressed it: Space made by a dome

and then divided by walls is not the same space . . . a room should be a
constructed entity or an ordered segment of a construction system.22
Kahns double allegiance to structural organicism and classicism
to a whole that has not yet appeared and a whole that has been
lostcuts across this generalized schema. The unbuilt project for a
Jewish Community Center at Trenton (19549) [174] exhibits both
these tendencies. A new arbitrary relation between form and function
appears. Architectural forms no longer correspond to immutable
causal relationships as they are supposed to do in functionalism. A
binary grid is set up in which the only xed hierarchy is that between
positive (served) and negative (servant) spaces. Apart from this, any
combination of functions can be inserted.
In the adaptation of an architectural programme to this a priori
system a new tension arises between Platonic and circumstantial
orders.23 In the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania (195765) [175] Kahn had difculty in
reconciling a highly technical programme to the system.24 In the Salk
Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla (195965) he solved the
problem by relegating the bulk of the programme to two enormous,
exible sheds and restricting symbolic expression to xed administrative pavilions facing the plaza (there is an analogy here to the exhibition
pavilions in the Chicago Worlds Fair).
At the other extreme lie projects like the First Unitarian Church in
Rochester (1961) [176] and the National Assembly Building at Dhaka,
176 Louis Kahn
Plan, First Unitarian Church,
1961, Rochester, New York
In this building the secondary
rooms are clustered
according to empirical needs
around the church hall. Kahn
avoids strict classical
symmetry.
Bangladesh (196283) [177, 178],25 where secondary spaces are grouped

round a central volume, as in Byzantine and centralized Renaissance
churches. In the nal version of the Rochester building, the symmetry
is distorted by circumstantial, secular pressures. But in the Dhaka
Assembly the geometrical expression of unity is unremitting; nothing
circumstantial disturbs the rigidly hieratic order. It is clear that for
Kahn the Dhaka Assembly had taken on strong religious connotations.
We no longer nd the connection between democratic social practices
and symbolic forms that were characteristic of his early civic designs.
From the very outset of the Modern Movement a ssure had opened
up between two dominant and opposed conceptsorganic expression
177 Louis Kahn
National Assembly Building,
196283, Dhaka
The Platonic volumes are
punctured by geometrical
openings that avoid stylistic
reference. The building is
monumental and hermetic,
suggesting a religious rather
than secular purpose.
178 Louis Kahn

National Assembly Building,
196283, Dhaka
The plan shows how the
servant spaces are
symmetrically grouped round
the assembly chamber.
on the one hand and the normative and standardized on the other.
Adolf Behnes distinction between functionalism and rationalism,
Le Corbusiers concept of the free plan, and the dislocation in Mies van
der Rohes American phase between the regular building envelope and
its variable content, were merely particular, working formulations of a
more general problem of disjunction.
Louis Kahn, whether we see his work as derived from Viollet-leDuc or the classical tradition, started from the same problem, but
moved in a different direction. This direction was being explored at the
same time by Team X, and had been adumbrated by Le Corbusier in
his accentuation of each living cell in the Unit dHabitation and other
post-war projects. For Kahngoing much further than Le Corbusier
in this directionarchitecture only took on meaning when a unit of
structure coincided with a unit of habitable space. This made the free
plan inoperative and gave rise to a new problem: instead of being free to
develop independently, as they were according to the logic of the free

plan, ideal and circumstantial orders were now locked in a dialectic,
directing attention to the conict between transcendent architectural
values and the contingencies of the modern economy.
Louis Kahn belonged rmly to the Modernist tradition in at least
one respect: he wanted to create an architecture that would embody a
new politico-moral order. In his attempt to achieve this he arrived at a
surprising new formulation of an old problemhow to achieve an
architecture that would be absolutely new but at the same time would
reafrm timeless architectural truths.
The effect of this effort was to bring to a head and accelerate the
existing crisis within the Modern Movement. Rational functionalism
had seemed to take on a new lease of life in post-war America, but by
the 1960s its principles seemed incapable of dealing with the web-like
complexities of late capitalism. The Utopian promise of a new, unied,
and universal architecture was becoming increasingly implausible. If
there could still be said to be a spirit of the epoch, a Zeitgeist, it was
now the self-contradictory one of pluralism. Modernism was to
survive, but only after abandoning its totalizing claims and by a process
of continual self-cancellation. Paradoxically, the work of Louis
Kahnanchored as it was in a belief in a transcendent orderwas one
of the chief propelling agents in this emerging regime of uncertainty.
Notes
Chapter 1. Art Nouveau 1890-1910

1. Debora L. Silverman,^r/Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France:
Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989),
172-85.
2. Fraôis Loyer, 'France: Viollet-le-Duc to Tony Gamier', in
Frank Russell (ed.), ArtNouveau Architecture (London, 1979), 103.
3. For example, Eugenia W. Herbert, The Artist and Social
Reform: France and Belgium, 1885-/#p#(New Haven, 1961), 74-8;
H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: the Reorientation of
European Social Thought 1890-1930 (New York, 1961,1977),
33-66; David Lindenfeld, The Transformation ofPositivism:
Alexis Meinong and European Thought 1880-1920 (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1980), 7-8.
4. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform, 75.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Jean-Paul Bouillon, Art Nouveau 1870-1914 (New York, 1985),
11-31.
7. Ibid., 26.
8. Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: in Search of
Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 139-52.
9. Bouillon, Art Nouveau 1870-1914,223.
10. See Amy Fumiko Ogato, Cottages and Crafts in Fin-de-Siecle
Belgium (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1996).
n. Maurice Culot, 'Belgium, Red Steel and Blue Aesthetic', in
Russell, Art Nouveau Architecture, 79,96.
12. Victor Horta, quoted in Culot, ibid., 99.
13. Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, 1785-1843.
14. Richard Padovan, 'Holland', in Russell, Art Nouveau
Architecture, 138.
15. Luis Domenech i Montaner, quoted in Timothy Benton,
'Spain: Modernismo in Catalonia', in Russell, Art Nouveau
Architecture, 56.
16. The catenary had already been studied in France and
England in the late eighteenth century. In Germany, Heinrich
Hubsch (1795-1863) proposed the catenary as a method of
determining the forces in vaulted buildings; Georg Germann,
The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and
Ideas (London, 1972), 175-6.
17. Alois Riegl, Die Spatromanische Kunstindustrie (Vienna,
1901), trans. R. Wmkes, Late Roman Art Industry (Rome, 1985),
and Stiljragen (Berlin, 1893), trans. Problems of Style:
Foundations of a History ofOrnament (Princeton, 1992).
18. Akos Moravanszky, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention
and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture,
1867-1918(Cambridge, Mass., 1998), chapter 4, Art Nouveau'.
19. Ibid., chapter 2, 'The City as Political Monument'.

20. Max Eisler, quoted in Ezio Godoli, Austria', in Russell, Art
Nouveau Architecture, 248.
21. Nancy Troy, The Decorative Arts in Fin-de-Siecle France: Art
Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, 1991), 52-102.
Chapter 2. Organicism versus Classicism: Chicago
1890-1910
1. William H. Jordy, American Buildings and their Architects:
Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Century
(Anchor Books, New York, 1972), chapter i, 'Masonry Block
and Metal Skeleton', 28-52.
2. Michael). Lewis, 'Rundbogenstil', in Jane Turner (ed.), The
Dictionary of Art (London, 1996).
3. For an analysis of the formal evolution of the Chicago office
fa9ade, see Heinrich Klotz, 'The Chicago Multi-storey as a
Design Problem', in John Zukovsky (ed.), Chicago Architecture
(Art Institute of Chicago, 1987).
4. Donald Drew Egbert, 'The Idea of Organic Expression in
American Architecture', in Stow Persons, Evolutionary
Thought in America (New Haven, 1950), 336-97.
5. H. W. Janson, Form Follows Functionor Does It?
(Maasrssen, Netherlands, 1982).
6. Dankmar Adler, quoted in Narciso Menocal, Architecture as
Nature: the Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan (University
of Wisconsin, Madison, 1981), 43.
7. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An
Autobiography (1918), quoted in Mario Manieri-Elia, 'Toward
the "Imperial City": Daniel Burnham and the City
Beautiful Movement', in Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co,
Mario Manieri-Elia and ManfredoTafuri, The American City:
From the Civil War to the New Deaf (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 39.
8. For a detailed account of the World s Fair see Manieri-Elia,
ibid., 8-46.
9. Fiske KimbaH, American Architecture (New York, 1928), 168;
Manieri-Elia, ibid.
10. For the Chicago plan and the City Beautiful movement see
Manieri-Elia, ibid., 46-104.
11. Charles W. Eliot, 'The New Plan of Chicago', quoted in
Manieri-Elia, ibid., 101.
12. Francesco Dal Co, 'From Parks to the Region', The
American City. 200-4. A similar theory favouring technology
over market capitalism was being propounded around 1900 in
Germany by social theorists like Werner Sombart, see Fr.
Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design and Mass Culture before the
255
First World War, 200 ff. This theory re-emerged during the
Wewimar Republic, see Jeffry Herf, Reactionary Modernism.
13. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream: Mora/ism
and the Model Home (Chicago, 1980), 160; Manieri-Elia, ibid., 91.
14. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream, chapter
4, The Homelike World'; Manieri-Elia, ibid.
15. H. Allen Brooks, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and
his Mid-west Contemporaries (Toronto, 1972), 31,64,65.
16. Inland Architect and News Record, vol. 37, no. 5, June 1901,34,
35; Brooks, The Prairie School, 39,41; David Van Zanten,
'Chicago in Architectural History', in Elizabeth Blair
MacDougall(ed.), The Architectural Historian in America
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1990).
17. These were summarized as: Composition, Transition,
Subordination, Repetition, and Symmetry; Arthur Wesley
Dow, Composition (New York, 1899), 17.
18. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
(London and New York, 1960), chapter 3.
19. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Art and Craft of the Machine'
(catalogue of the i4th Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club, 1901), reprinted in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (ed.),
Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. i (New York, 1992).
20. Giorgio Ciucci, The City in Agrarian Ideology and Frank
Lloyd Wright: Origins and Development of Broad Acres', in
The American City, 304; Leonard K. Eaton, Two Chicago
Architects and their Clients: Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van
Doren Shaw (New York, 1969), demonstrates that, while
Howard van Doren Shaw's clients were members of the
establishment and connected with old money, Wright's were
mostly'outsiders'. This would appear to be consistent with their
respective architectural tastes.
Chapter 3. Culture and Industry: Germany 1907-14
1. The English equivalent of Volk is 'folk', but where its
resonances in English are merely quaint, in German it is more
or less the equivalent of'Germanness', particularly as distinct
from French civilizationa connotation that goes back to the
dawn of German national consciousness in the late eighteenth
century.
2. Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: the Politics of Reform
in the Applied Arts (Princeton, 1978), 24.
3. Friedrich Naumann, quoted in Stanford Anderson, 'Peter
Behrens and the Cultural Policy of Historial Determinism', in
Oppositions, no. n, Winter, 77.
4. Fritz Schumacher, quoted in Anderson, ibid., 66.
5. Campbell, The German Werkbund, 38-56.
6. Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the
Bauhaus in Weimar (Urbana, London, 1971), 32, n. 45.
7. The word Gesta/tis used here in the sense given by Wolfgang
Kohler, in Gestalt Psychology (New York, 1961), 177^8: 'In the
German Languageat least since Goethethe noun
"Gestalt" has two meanings: besides the connotation of "shape"
or "form" as a property of things, it has the meaning of a
concrete, individual, and characteristic entity, existing as
something detached and having a shape or form as one of its
attributes.'
8. For a discussion of German formalist aesthetics, see Harry
Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomu, Empathy, Form
256 NOTES
and Space: Problems of German Aesthetics 1873-1893 (Los Angeles,

1994), Introduction.
9. For a discussion of'type' as a concept in late-eighteenthcentury French neoclassical discourse, see Anthony Vidler,
The idea of Type: the Transformation of the Academic Ideal',
Oppositions, 8, Spring 1977. Though today it is hardly possible to
discuss the notion of type without reference to this French
tradition, Muthesius's awareness of it can only have been
indirect at bestprobably via Durand and Schinkel.
10. Hermann Muthesius, proclamation at the Werkbund
Congress at Cologne, 1914, quoted in Ulrich Conrads, Programs
and Manifestos of 20th-century Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.,
1971), 28.
11. Frederick J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass
Culture before the First World War (New Haven, 1996), 106-20.
12. Ibid., 164-76.
13. Ibid., 151-61.
14. According to the critic Franz Servaes, writing in 1905, The
curtailment of the personality [is] the first commandment of
style'; quoted in Schwartz, ibid., 162.
15. See anon., 'Recent English Domestic Work' in the special
issue of The Architectural Review, vol. 5, Mervyn E. Macartney
(ed.) (London, 1912); and Horace Field and Michael Bunney,
English Domestic Architecture of the XVII and XVIII Centuries
(Cleveland, Ohio, 1905).
16. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture
(London, 1980), 96.
17. Peter Behrens, quoted in Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the
Creation of the Bauhaus, 32.
18. Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus,
30.
19. Schwartz, The Werkbund, 206.
20. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life',
published as 'Die Grosstadt und das Geistesleben' in Die
Grosstadtyjahrbuck der Gehe-Stiftung 9,1903. Published in
English in Donald Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel: On Individuality
and Social Forms (Chicago, 1971), 324-39.
22. Adolf Behne, 'Kunst, Handwerk, Technik', DieNeue
Rundschau, 33, no. 10,1922, trans. 'Art, Craft, Technology', in
Francesco Dal Co, Figures ofArchitecture and Thought (New
York, 1990), 324-8.
23. Emil Rathenau's son, Walter, was a pupil ofWilhelm
Dilthey and Hermann Helmholtz and believed passionately in
the power of technology to improve society.
24. Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 98.
Chapter 4. The Urn and the Chamberpot: Adolf Loos

1900-30
1. For Kraus see Peter Demetz, 'Introduction', and Walter
Benjamin, 'Karl Kraus', in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections:
Walter Benjamin (New York, 1978).
2. Loos later published two collections of essays: InsLeere
Gesprochen, Vienna, 1932, trans. Spoken into the Void
(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), consisting chiefly of articles which
appeared in the Neue Freie Presse on the occasion of the Vienna
Jubilee exhibition of 1898; and Trotzdem (Innsbruck, 1931) (not
translated into English), containing essays written between
1900 and 1930 (including a selection from DasAndere}.

3. Adolf Loos, 'Ornament and Education', 1924, in Trotzdem.
4. Adolf Loos, The Superfluous', 1908, in Trotzdem.
5. Ibid.
6. Adolf Loos, 'Cultural Degeneration', 1908, in Trotzdem.
7. Adolf Loos, Architecture', 1910, in Trotzdem.
8. Loos, 'Ornament and Education'.
9. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture (New York, 1960),
book i, chapter:.
10. Karl Kraus, Nachts (Leipzig, 1918), 290, quoted in Massimo
Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: on the Philosophy of Modern
Architecture (New Haven, 1993), chapter 10,147.
11. Loos, 'Ornament and Education'.
12. Karl Kraus, Die Packet, December 1913,389-90.
13. Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, chapter n, 151. The
phrase refers to Wittgenstein's concept of'language games' in
the Philosophical Investigations.
14. Adolf Loos, 'Potemkin City', 1898, in Spoken into the Void.
15. Loos explicitly connected this use of materials with
Gottfried Semper s theory of Bekleidung.
16. James D. Kornwolf, M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts and
Crafts Movement (Baltimore, 1972), 170. Kornwolf, 208, n. 35,
convincingly argues that Baillie Scott was the main source for
Loos's Arts and Crafts related interiors, not Richardson, as
stated by Ludwig Miinz and Gustav Kunstler in Adolf 'Loos,
Pioneer of Modern Architecture (Vienna, 1964; London, 1966),
201.
17. Miinz and Kunstler, Adolf Loos, 39.
18. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, EntretienssurTArchitecture (Paris
1863-71), trans. Discourses on Architecture (New York 1889,1959),
chapter 19, 'Domestic ArchitectureCountry Houses'.
19. Adolf Loos, 'Joseph Veillich', 1929, in Trotzdem.
20. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern
Architecture and Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 244.
21. Ibid., 250.
22. Loos, Architecture'.
23. According to Loos's partner Heinrich Kulka, he would
make many alterations during construction, saying, 'I do not
like the height of this ceiling. Change it.' Colomina, Privacy
and Publicity, 269.
24. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight (eds), Selected
Writings ofE. TA.Hoffmann, vol. i (Chicago, 1969), 168. This
story was reprinted in Bruno Taut, Fruhlicht, 1920.
25. Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, chapter 14. As Cacciari
points out, the split between the exterior and the interior in
Loos's houses echoes Georg Simmel's concept of the split in the
psychology of modern man in the context of the metropolis.
Exchange no longer takes place between individuals as it did in
the traditional small town but is the result of an abstract
rationality.
26. Ibid., 167.
27. This is the view of a group of Italian critics, whose chief
representative was Massimo Cacciari.
5. Expressionism and Futurism
1. Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven,
1987), 174-176.
2. Ibid., 176.
3. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (London,

1967), 115, originally published 1908.
4. Iain Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism
(Cambridge, 1982), i.
5. Rosemary Haag Bletter, 'Expressionist Architecture', in
Rose-Carol Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism:
Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Period to the Rise of
National Socialism (New York, 1993), 122. The date of this article
is extremely important, because it proves thatTaut's
millennialist ideas originated before the First World War.
6. On the tension in Taut's thought between the practical and
symbolic role of architecture, see Marcel Franciscono, Walter
Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar (Chicago,
1971), 94-95.
7. See Bruno Taut, Ein Wohnhaus (Stuttgart, 1927), which
documents the colour scheme for Taut's own house. In this
connection see Mark Wigley, White Walls: Designer Dresses
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 34~I58. Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkronen (Jena, 1919), quoted in Whyte,
Bruno Taut, 78.
9. For a discussion of Expressionist symbolism, see Rosemary
Haag Bletter, 'The Interpretation of the Glass Dream: Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor',
in \:\\t Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 40, no. i,
1981,20-43. A fascination with mystical traditions had been
widespread among architects and artists since the 18905. This
interest is reflected in the increased popularity of syncretist religions, such as Theosophy, as newly defined by Helena
Blavatsky, and Anthroposophy, founded by Rudolf Steiner,
which attempted to fuse the Indian and Christian gnostic traditions, and which were to continue to interest avant-garde
architects well into the 19205. A curious example of this fascination is the English Arts and Crafts architect W. R. Lethaby,
who wrote a book, Architecture, Symbolism and Myth (London,
1891; New York, 1975), on the Oriental and Neoplatonic traditions. Taut's conception of the Kristallhaus clearly falls within
this broad nexus of ideas.
10. Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni, La Citta Mondiale
(Venice, 1982). Otlet was to commission a new version of this
project in 1926, Le Corbusier's Mundaneum.
11. Peter Behrens anticipated vast theatres in which works that
included music would be staged; Franciscono, Walter Gropius
and the Creation of the Bauhaus, 95-96.
12. Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture (New York, 1973),
13. Pehnt notes that the number of theatres in Europe rose from
302 in 1896 to 2,499 m 1926.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Whyte, Bruno Taut, chapter 5.
15. According to Whyte, 'decentralizing and a return to the land
were part of a vision which preoccupied both the exreme Right
and the extreme Left', ibid., 105. Whyte cites Heinrich
Tessenow s Handwerk und Kleinstadt (1918) as an example of the
fusion of a conservative Heimatschutz and Kropotkin's anarchosocialism.
16. Bruno Taut, quoted in Whyte, Bruno Taut, 99.
17. Whyte, Bruno Taut, 127.
18. Richard Hiilsenbeck, DerNeue Mensch (1917), quoted in
Whyte, ibid., 139.
NOTES 257
19. Richard Hulsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, and Jefim

Golyscheff, quoted in Whyte, ibid., 140.
20. Umbri Apollonio (ed.)> Futurist Manifestos (London,
1973),19.
21. Filippo Marinetti, Futurismo e Fascismo (1924), quoted in
Adrian Lyttleton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy
1919-1929 (Princeton, 1973), 368.
22. Marjory Perloff, The Futurist Movement: Avant-Garde,
Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, 1986),
chapter i.
23. Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 27.
24. Esther Da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant'E/ia:
Retreat into the Future (New Haven, 1995), 75.
25. Umberto Boccioni, 'Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Painting' (1910), reprinted in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 27.
26. Umberto Boccioni, quoted in Manfredo Tafuri, History and
Theories of Architecture (Granada, 1980), originally published as
Teorie e storia di architettura (Laterza, 1976).
27. Umberto Boccioni, quoted in Perloff, The Futurist
Movement, 52.
29. Da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant'E/ia, 139.
31. Da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant'E/ia, 211.
32. Da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant'E/ia, chapter 5,
gives a detailed account of the history of Sant'Elia's
manifesto.
33. Ibid., 68-71.
34. Ibid., 21.
35. Manfedo Tafuri, History ana1 Theories of Architecture, 30-4.
6. The Avant-gardes in Holland and Russia
1. Wim de Wit, 'The Amsterdam School: Definition and
Delineation', in The Amsterdam School: Dutch Expressionist
Architecture 1915-1930 (Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1983), 29-66.
2. H. L. C. Jaffe, DeStijl 1917-1931: the Dutch Contribution to Art
(Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 56-62.
3. Yve- Alain Bois, Painting as Model, 'The De Stijl Idea'
(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 102-106.
4. See Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (Chicago, 1975, 1996),
70-106.
5. According to Rosen 'Melody is a definite shape, an arabesque
with a quasi-dramatic structure of tension and resolution', ibid.,
99. 'Let's sit down, I hear melody,' Mondrian is reported to have
said to a dancing partner; Piet Mondrian (Museum of Modern
Art, New York, 1996), 77.
6. Bart van der Leek, De Stijl, vol. i, no. 4, March 1918, 37,
quoted in Bois, 'The De Stijl Idea', in.
7. For an illuminating analysis of the controversy between Oud
and Mondrian on the relation of architecture and painting, see
Yve- Alain Bois, 'Mondrian and the Theory of Architecture',
Assemblage 4, 103-30.
8. See Eduard F. Sekler, Joseph Hoffmann: the Architectural Work
(Princeton, 1985), 59.
9. Theo van Doesburg, 'Towards a Plastic Architecture', De
Stijl, VI, no. 6-7, 1924.
10. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and
Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, 1983), 321-34.
258 NOTES
n. J. J. P. Oud, quoted in Jaffe, De Stijl'1917-1931,193.

(London, 1980), 204.
13. Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven,
1983)* 83-9314. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, 274-99.
15. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 98.
16. Ibid., 65.
17. Boris Arvatov, quoted in Lodder, Russian Constructivism,
107.
18. Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 208.
19. The word 'contemporary' was used to avoid 'modern',
associated in Russian with Art Nouveau; Jean-Louis Cohen,
verbal information.
20. For the conflict between OSA and ASNOVA, see Hugh D.
Hudson Jr., Blueprints and Blood: the Stalinization of Soviet
Architecture (Princeton, 1994), chapter 3.
21. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 227.
22. El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenberg, Veshch, 1922, quoted in
Lodder, ibid., 228.
23. Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and
City Planning 1917-1935 (New York, 1970), 143.
24. The sectional interlocking of apartments and access
corridors in the Narkomfin Building strongly resembles one of
Le Corbusier's sketches for the Ville Contemporaine of 1922;
see Le Corbusier, (Euvre Complete, vol. i. (Zurich, 1929), 32. It
has normally been assumed that Le Corbusier's cross-over
apartment type for the Ville Radieuse and the Unite
d'Habitation was influenced by Moisei Ginsburg.
25. Okhitovitch was arrested by the NKVD in 1935 and died in
prison two years later; see Hudson, Blueprints and Blood, 160.
26. Jean-Louis Cohen, 'Architecture and Modernity in the
Soviet Union 1900-1937', inyf+/,June 1991, no. 6,20-41.
27. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine
(The Hague, 1955).
28. Founded in 1929, Hudson, Blueprints and Blood, 126.
Chapter 7. Return to Order: Le Corbusier and Modern
Architecture in France 1920-35
1. For Jeanneret's early career see H. Allen Brooks, Le Corbusier's
Formative Years (Chicago, 1997); for his early intellectual
formation see Paul Venable Turner, The Education ofLe
Corbusier (New York, 1977); for his interior designs and
furniture and his connections with the French decorative arts
see Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France
(New Haven, 1991), chapter 3.
2. All the articles signed Ozenfant-Jeanneret, Le
Corbusier-Saugnier, and Ozenfant were later published by
Cres in the Collection de LEsprit Nouveau (Paris, 1925), which
included Vers uneArchitecture, L'ArtDe'coratifd'Aujourd'hui, and
Urbanisme by Le Corbusier, and La Peinture Moderne by
Ozenfant and Jeanneret.
3. Charles Henry (1859-1926) was author of LEsthetique
Scientific, his psycho-physical theory of art influenced formalist
aesthetics in the inter-war period.
4. Paul Dermee, 'Domaine de L'Esprit Nouveau', LEsprit
Nouveau, no. i, October 1920, Introduction; quoted in Rejean
Legault, LAppareilde /'Architecture: New Materials and
Architectural Modernity in France 1889-1934 (PhD dissertation,

MIT, 1997), 176.
5. Fran9oise Will-Levaillant, 'Norm et Form a Travers L'Esprit
Nouveau', in Le Retoura I'Ordre dans lesArts Plastiques et
['Architecture 1919-1925 (proceedings of a colloquium at the
Universite de Saint-Etienne, Centre Interdisciplinaire
d'Etudes et de Recherche sur 1'Expression Contemporaine, 8,
1974), 256.
6. Jeanneret, 'Ce Salon d'Automne', L'Esprit Nouveau, no. 28,
January 1925,2332-5, quoted in Legault, LAppareilde
['Architecture, 261.
7. L'Esprit Nouveau, no. 4.
8. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, 'Purisme', L'Esprit Nouveau, no. 4,
October 1920,369.
9. For an analysis of Ozenfant and Jeanneret's theory of Purism
see Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian
Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton,
1989), 381-9.
10. Jeanneret, quoted in Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts
in France, 145.
n. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France, 136-45.
12. Ibid., 139.
13. Ibid., chapter 4,' Reconstructing Art Deco'.
14. Arthur Ruegg, 'Le Pavilion de L'Esprit nouveau en tant que
musee imaginaire', in Stanislas von Moos (ed.), L'Esprit
Nouveau: Le Cor busier et I 'Industrie 1920-1925 (S trasbourg,
1987), 134.
15. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, LaPeintureModerne, 168, quoted in
Ruegg, ibid, 137.
(London and New York, 1960), 202.
17. Legault, L'Appareil de I 'Architecture, 188.
18. Le Corbusier, (Euvre Complete, vol. i (Zurich, 1929), 25.
19. Robert Mallet-Stevens, interviews with Guillaume
Janneau, Bulletin dela VieArtistique,}\M\z 1923 and December
1924, quoted in Legault, L'Appareil del'Architecture, 267,283.
20. Le Corbusier, Precisions (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 83.
21. Le Corbusier, letter to Madame Meyer, (Euvre Complete,
vol. i (Zurich, 1929), quoted in Monique Eleb-Vidal, 'Hotel
Particuliere', in J. Lucan (ed.), Le Corbusier, une Encyclopedic
(Paris, 1987), 175.
22. See Bruno Reichlin, 'Le Corbusier and De StijT, in
Casabella, vol. 50, no. 520-1,1986,100-8. Reichlin demonstrates
the influence of van Doesburg in the entrance hall of the
Maison La Roche of 1923.
23. Le Corbusier, (Euvre Complete, vol. i (Zurich, 1929), 189.
24. Le Corbusier, Precisions, 9.
25. Francesco Passanti, 'The Vernacular, Modernism and Le
Corbusier', m Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
vol. 56, no. 4, December 1997,443- êe a^so Christopher Green,
'The Architect as Artist', in Michael Raeburn and Victoria
Wilson (eds), Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century (London,
1987), 117
26. Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron,
Building in Ferro-concrete (Los Angeles, 1995), 169.
27. See Norma Evenson, Paris: a Century of Change 1878-1978
(New Haven, 1979), chapter 2.
28. Ibid., 31.
29. See Le Corbusier, (Euvre Complete, vol. i (Zurich, 1929), 26;

Lotissement 'Dom-ino'.
30. See Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 'The Strategy of the Grands
Travaux', 121-61.
31. On Le Corbusier's connections with neo-syndicalism see
Mary McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from
Regional Syndicalism to Vichy (PhD dissertation, Princeton
University, 1985), chapter 3, Architecture and Revolution:
Regional Syndicalism and the Plan', 94-166. See also Robert
Fishman, 'From Radiant City to Vichy: Le Corbusier's Plans
and Politics 1928-1942', in Russell Walden (ed.), The Open
Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 244-85.
On Fascism and proto-Fascism in France between the late
nineteenth century and the 19405 see Zeev Sternhell, Neither
Left nor Right (Princeton, 1993).
32. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism, Technology,
Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge,
1984), chapter i, 'The Paradox of Reactionary Modernism', 1-17.
33. Christopher Green, 'The Architect as Artist', 114 ff. It was at
this time, as Green points out, that Le Corbusier began to
include organic and non-geometrical objects in his paintings.
34. Le Corbusier, Une Maison, un Palais (Paris, 1928), 49, trans,
author.
35. Le Corbusier, (Euvre Complete, vol. 2 (Zurich, 1929), 186.
36. Le Corbusier, 'Urbanisme des trois etablissements
humains', 1946,93, quoted in McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia,
chapter 5, 'La Ferme Radieuse', 296.
37. Le Corbusier, Precisions, 218.
Chapter 8. Weimar Germany: the Dialectic of the
Modern 1920-33
1. For a discussion of the term 'Neue Sachlichkeit', see
Rosemary Haag Blotter's Introduction to Adolf Behne's The
Modern Functional Building (Los Angeles, 1996), 47-53. For an
original and convincing definition of Sachlichkeit see Francesco
Passanti, 'The Vernacular, Modernism and Le Corbusier', in
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 56, no. 4,
December 1997,443 ff. In the unexpected context of a text on Le
Corbusier, Passanti argues that 'sache ('thing' or 'fact') refers not
to an abstract universal but to an object that is socially
constructed and has become 'second nature'. Another way of
putting this is to say that sache refers to something within
language, not beyond it, following the theory of Jacques Lacan;
see The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis 1959-60 (originally published in French as Le
Seminaire, Livre VII, LEthiquedelapsychanalyse, 1959-60, Paris,
1986) translated by Dennis Porter, New York, 1922,43-5.
2. Franz Roh, Post-Expressionism, Magic Realism: Problems of
Recent European Painting, 1925, quoted in Rose-Carol Washton
Long (ed.), German Expressionism: Documentsfrom the End of
the Wilhelmine Period to the Rise of National Socialism (New
York, 1993), 294.
3. English translation in Dal Co, Figures of Architecture and
Thought (New York, 1990), 324-8.
4. Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the
Bauhaus in Weimar (Urbana, ILL., 1971), 132.
5. The Bauhaus Manifesto is quoted in full in Gillian Naylor,
NOTES 259
The Bauhaus Reassessed (London, 1985), 53-4.

6. See Franciscono, Walter Gropius, chapter 6,173-236.
7. Josef Albers, quoted in Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed, 101.
(London and New York, 1960), 282.
9. Walter Gropius, quoted in Richard Pommer and Christian
Otto, Weissenhof7927and'the Modern Movement in Architecture
(Chicago, 1991), ii.
10. Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed, 144-60.
11. Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany,
1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), chapter 4.
12. See Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The Movement for
Housing Reform in Germany and France, 1840-1914 (Cambridge,
1985), chapters 10, n, and 12,21^-76.
(London, 1980), 176. Manfredo Tafuri points out that for
nineteenth-century town planners like Stubben there was no
direct link between planning and the architectural avantgardea fact that he attributes to their political conservatism.
In Weimar Germany, both planning and Modernist
architecture were associated with a Socialist agenda.
14. Pommer and Otto, Weissenhof 1927,39.
15. Nicholas Bullock, 'First the Kitchen then the Fasade', in
Journal of Design History, vol. i, nos. 3 and 4,1988,177.
16. In 1927 a federal institution was founded for research into the
economic and constructional problems of mass housing (the
Reichsforchungsgesellschaft), but the housing programme was
terminated before this research could take effect.
17. Adolf Behne, 'Dammerstock', in Die Form, H6,1930, trans,
Margerita Navarro Baldeweg and author.
18. See Rosemary Haag Bletter, 'Expressionism and the New
Objectivity', in Art Journal, summer 1983,108 ff.
19. Schultze-Naumburg's books included ABCdesBauens,Art
and Race, and The Face of the German House; see Lane,
Architecture and Politics, chapter 5.
20. Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building, 138.
21. Theo van Doesburg, On European Architecture: Complete
Essays from Het Bouwbedrijf 1924-1931 (Boston, 1990),
'Defending the Spirit of Space: Against Dogmatic
Functionalism', 88-95.
22. See also Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth
Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art
(Princeton, 1983), 36-37.
23. Fragmentation of the box is the thesis of Bruno Zevi's
influential book Poetica deWarchitettura neoplastica (Milan,
1953). Though the thesis is still persuasive, Zevi s ethicopolitical interpretation now seems dated. See also Richard
Padovan s important article, 'Mies van der Rohe Reinterpreted',
in IUA: International Architect, no. 3,1984,38-43.
24. Mies adopted his mother's maiden name, Rohe, and added
the faintly aristocratic-sounding Van der'.
25. Other members of this circle included Ludwig
Hilbersheimer, Hans Arp, Naum Gabo, Frederick Kiesler,
Man Ray, Walter Benjamin, Philippe Soupault and Raoul
Hausmann; Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: a Critical
Biography (Chicago, 1985), 89.
26. Mies van der Rohe, G, no. 2,1923.
260 NOTES
27. Though Mies denied any influence from De Stijl, van

Doesburg s Counter-constructions are the most obvious source
for the Brick Country House. Most critics, however, suggest
that Mies's source was van Doesburg's painting Rhythm of a
Russian Dance of 1918, which is graphically closer to the pattern
of Mies s plan. Be this as it may, the spatial concept suggested by
Mies's building is the same as that of the Counter-constructions
as described by van Doesburg in De Stijl m 1924 (quoted in
chapter 6).
28. Christian Norberg-Schulz, 'Talks with Mies van der Rohe',
in Ârchitectured'aujourd'hui, no. 79,1958,100.
29. See the opening pages of Rosalind Krauss's essay 'The Grid,
the Cloud and the Detail', in DetlefMertins (ed.), The Presence
of Mies (Princeton, 1984).
30. This view was reinforced by Mies's reading of the
existentialist philosopher Romano Guardini in 1925; see Fritz
Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building
ytfr/(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), chapter 6,196 ff.
31. According to F. W. J. Schelling: 'What must give the work of
art as a whole its beauty can no longer be form but something
above form, namely the essence... the expression of the spirit
that must dwell there'. Quoted in Svetlan Todorov, Theories of
the Symbol (Ccxnd\ University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1982), 169.
32. For ABC, see Jacques Gubler, Nationalisme et
Internationalisme dans I 'ArchitectureModerne de la Suisse
(Lausanne, 1975), 109-41.
33. Ibid., 117.
34. Ibid., 118.
35. In ABC, nos. 3-4,1925.
36. Hannes Meyer, quoted in Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern
Architecture, 168.
Chapter 9. From Rationalism to Revisionism:

Architecture in Italy 1920-65
1. Gruppo 7, Rassegna Italiana, 1926, quoted in Vittorio
Gregotti, New Directions in Italian Architecture (London, 1968),
132. Giuseppe Terragni, quoted in Dennis Doordan, Building
Modern Italy, Italian Architecture 1914-1936 (Princeton, 1988), 137.
3. Giuseppe Pagano, quoted in Doordan, Building Modern Italy,
140. See also Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture (London,
1971), 596; and Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern
Architecture (London, 1980), 284-5. With apparent
inconsistency, these authors praise Terragni for his formal
subtlety, yet condemn him for his formalism.
4. Doordan, Building Modern Italy, 109.
5. Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 3.
6. Gregotti, New Directions, 39-40.
7. Bruno Zevi, quoted in Gregotti, New Directions, 40.
8. INA Casa's announcement of aims, quoted in Tafuri, History
of Italian Architecture, 89.
9. Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 16.
10. Ibid., 11-13.
11. For an English translation of this essay see Joan Ockman
(ed.), Architecture Culture 1943-1968 (New York, 1993), 200.
12. Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 74.

13. Ibid., 75.
14. Ibid., 76.
15. Gregotti, New Directions, 107,115.
Chapter 10. Neoclassicism, Organicism, and the Welfare
State: Architecture in Scandinavia 1910-65
1. According to the economist John Maynard Keynes, the
periodic depressions that had plagued capitalism in the
nineteenth century could be avoided by the use of deficit
spending in times of recession. Keynes placed the emphasis on
the stimulation of demand.
2. Hendrick O. Andersson, 'Modern Classicism in Norden', in
Scio Paavilainen (ed.), Nordic Classicism 1910-1930 (Museum of
Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, 1992).
3. Seejorgen Sestoftandjorgen Christiansen, Guide to Danish
Architecture Vol. /, 1800-1960 (Copenhagen, 1991), 212.
4. Ibid., 214.
5. Ibid., 218
6. Ibid., 220.
7. The Woodland Chapel at Enskede was part of a competition
project won in collaboration with Sigurd Lewerentz. It is often
difficult to distinguish between Asplund and Lewerentz's
respective contributions.
9. The KV cooperative was a cooperative for the retailing of
household goods and food, see Eva Rudberg, 'Early
Functionalism' in Twentieth-Century Architecture, Sweden,
80.
10. Hans Eliot, quoted in Eva Eriksson, 'Rationalism and
Classicism 1915-1930', in Twentieth-Century Architecture,
Sweden, 46.
n. Backstrom, quoted in Rudberg, 'Building the Welfare of the
Folkhemmet', 126.
12. Ibid., 126.
13. See Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern
Architecture (London, 1980), 187.
14. The neighbourhood idea, inherited from the Garden City
movement, attempted to recover small-town community
values. In the 19605 such neighbourhood social centres were
increasingly challenged by the demand for leisure facilities that
could be provided only by a larger urban catchment area; see
Rudberg, op. cit. 'Building the Welfare', 118-21,139.
15. Claes Caldenby, 'The Time for Large Programmes', in
Twentieth-Century Architecture, Sweden, 142.
16. Ibid. See also the discussion of Systems theory in
chapter n.
17. See Kim Dircknick, Guide to Danish Architecture, Vol. II,
1960-95 (Copenhagen, 1995), 57.
18. Caldenby, 'The Time for Large Programmes', 155. There
was also a contemporary 'Structuralist' movement in Holland.
Both movements shared some basic ideas, but differed in
others. Dutch Structuralism is discussed in chapter n in the
context of the Megastructural movement.
19. Caldenby, 'The Time for Large Programmes', 151.
20. Caldenby, 'The Time for Large Programmes', 153, and
Wilfred Wang et al., The Architecture of Peter Celsing
(Stockholm, 1996), 19, fig. i and 60 ff.
21. Wang, The Architecture of Peter Celsing, 82 ff.

22. Claes Dimling (ed.), ArchitectSigurd'Lewerentz (Stockholm,
1997), 146 ff and 165 ff.
23. It is probable that the Paimio Sanatorium was influenced by
Johannes Duiker's Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hilversum
(1926-8). Aalto saw this building on his tour of modern
buildings in France and Holland in the summer of 1928. For a
discussion of this problem, see Eija Rauske, 'Paimio
Sanatorium', in Aalto in Seven Buildings (Museum of Finnish
Architecture, Helsinki, 1998), 13.
24. Paul David Pearson, Ahar Aalto and the International Style
(New York, 1978), 141.
25. Kirmo Mikkola, Architecture in Finland in the2oth Century
(Helsinki, 1981), 55.
26. Ibid.,53.
27. Ibid., 55,56.
Chapter 11. From Le Corbusier to Megastructures:

Urban Visions 1930-65
1. Mary McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusierfrom
Regional Syndicalism to Vichy (PhD dissertation, Princeton
University, 1985), chapter 6.
2. The design was bitterly attacked by the Societee des
architects diplomes par le gouvernement and the Conseil
superieur d'hygiene, which warned that the building would
endanger the mental health of its inhabitants; Stanislas von
Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.,
1979), 158.
3. Ibid., 177.
4. Le Corbusier, CEuvre Complete, vol. 4 (Zurich, 1929), 174.
5. Le Corbusier, quoted in McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia,
chapter 6,362.
6. For example, a debate in the Swiss journal Das Werk and the
Swedish journal Byggmdstaren between 1937 and 1940 involving
the art critic Peter Meyer and the architects Hans Schmidt and
Gunnar Sundbarg; see Christine C. and George R. Collins,
'Monumentality: a Critical Matter in Modern Architecture', in
Harvard Architectural Review, vol. 4, no. 4,1985,15-35.
7. George Howe, quoted in Collins, ibid.
8. Elizabeth Mock, quoted in Collins, ibid.
9. Sigfried Giedion, Josep Lluis Sert, and Fernand Leger, 'Nine
Points on Monumentality', originally planned for a 1943 publication by American Abstract Artists, reprinted in Joan Ockman
(ed.), Architecture Culture 1943-1968(New York, 1993), 29-30.
10. Sigfried Giedion, 'The Need for a New Monumentality' in
Paul Zucker (ed.), New Architecture and City Planning (New
York, 1944), 549-68.
11. Norma Evenson: Chandigarh (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1966).
12. Norma Evenson: Two Brazilian Cities (New Haven, 1973).
13. See Le Corbusier, Precisions (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 218
quoted on page 156 of this book.
14. For a discussion of the gap between concept and reality in
Chandigarh, see Madhu Sarin, 'Chandigarh as a Place to Live
in', in Russell Walden (ed.), The Open Hand (Cambridge,
Mass., 1977), 374.
NOTES 26l
15. Jacques Gubler, Nationalisme etInternationalisme dans

VArchitecture Modernede la Suisse (Lausanne, 1975), 145-152.
i6.The original members of Team X were: J. B. Bakema, Aide
van Eyck, Sandy van Ginkel and Hovens-Greve from Holland;
Alison and Peter Smithson, W. and G. Howell, and John
Voelcker from England; Georges Candilis and Shadrach
Woods from France; and Rolf Gutmann from Switzerland; see
AAGS (Architectural Association General Studies) Theory and
History Papers i, 'The Emergence of Team X out of CIAJVT
(Architectural Association, London, 1982), compiled by Alison
Smithson.
17. Alison Smithson (ed.), Team XPrimer (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968), 78.
18. Ibid., 48.
19. This was reminiscent of the dilemma that had faced
Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and other proponents of
Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life) in Germany at the turn of
the twentieth century; see, for example, Georg Simmel, 'The
Conflict of Modern Culture' (1918) in Donald Levine (ed.),
Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago,
I971), 375-39320. Alison Smithson (ed.), TeamXPrimer, 48, 52.
21. For example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of
Perception, 1945 (London, 1962,1989).
22. For Systems theory references see Further Reading, page
268.
23. Wim van Heuvel, Structuralism in Dutch Architecture
(Rotterdam, 1992), 15.
24.The structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, with
which the Dutch Structuralists claimed an affinity, shares the
holism of Systems theory: both postulate the existence of
'structures' that have an objective existence independent of the
subject but, whereas Structuralism sees these as stable,
establishing long-term cultural norms, Systems theory sees
them as dynamic, driven by function.
25. Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (School of
Architecture, Washington University, St Louis, 1964).
26. David B. Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese
Architecture, 1868 to the Present (Tokyo and New York, 1987),
179.
27. Ibid., 181.
28. Tange's report on the Tokyo Bay competition is a brilliantly
concise statement of the aims of the Metabolist movement as a
whole and illustrates the fusion of Utopian and pragmatic
elements that is characteristic of the Japanese movement. It is
reprinted in Qc\tm2if\, Architecture Culture, 327 ff.
29. Antoine Picon, La ville territoire des cyborgs (Paris,
1998), 74.
30. Quoted in Banham, Megastructure (London and New York,
1976), 81.
31. Quoted in Banham, ibid., 60.
32. The Situationists were influenced by the writings on the city
of the Marxist Sociologist Henri Lefebvre; see Henri Lefebvre,
'The Right to the City', 1967, reprinted in QcVm&n, Architecture
Culture, 427 ff.
33. A characteristic feature of Constant's models is that their
structure is designed to the scale of the models themselves
rather than to that of the architecture which they ostensibly
262 NOTES
represent, indicating that the models are the work of someone

trained as a sculptor and a painter, not as an architect.
34. Gilles Ivain's 'Formulary for a New Urbanism' is reprinted in
Ockmzn, Architecture Culture, 167 ff.
Chapter 12. Pax Americana: Architecture in America
1945-65
1. In his later book The City in History (1961), Mumford was to
revert to something like his previous pessimism.
2. For an account of the relation between American and
European progressive legislation between 1890 and 1945, see
Daniel T. Rodgers, At/an tic Crossings: Social Politics in a
Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). The foregoing
account is indebted to Rodgers's book.
3. For the Hertfordshire schools programme, see Richard
Llewellyn-Davies and John Weeks, 'The Hertfordshire
Achievement' m Architectural Review, June 1952,367^-72; and
D. Ehrenkrantz and John D. Day, 'Flexibility through
Standardisation' in Progressive Architecture, vol. 38, July 1957,
105-15.
4. The development of suburbia was greatly accelerated by the
Interstate Highways Act of 1956, which provided for 41,000
miles of new highway to be built with a 90 per cent federal
subsidy. The Act was the result often years of intensive lobbying by the American Road Builders' Association (within which
General Motors formed the largest group); see Reinhold
Martin, Architecture and Organization: USA c.K}$6 (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1999), chapter 4, 260.
5. For an account of the American house in the 19505 and 19605,
see Markjarzombek, 'Good-Life Modernism and Beyond:
The American House in the 19508 and 19605, a Commentary',
in The Cornell Journal of Architecture, 4,1991,76-93.
6. Charles Eames, John Entenza, and Herbert Matter, 'What is
a House?', in Arts and Architecture, July 1944.
7. 'La Casa 1955 di "Arts and Architecture'", in Domus, 320, July
1956,21, quoted in Reyner Banham, 'Klarheit, Erlichkeit,
Einfachkeit... and Wit too', in Elizabeth A. T. Smith (ed.),
Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case
Study Houses (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 183.
8. For Charles and Ray Eames see John Neuhart, Marilyn
Neuhart, and Ray Eames, Eames Design: the Work of the Office of
Charles and Ray Eames (New York, 1989), and An Eames
Celebration', m Architectural Design, September 1966.
9. William H. Jordy, American Buildings and their Architects: the
Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century
(Anchor Books, New York, 1976), 232.
10. Henry Russell Hitchcock, 'Introduction', in Skidmore,
O wings, and Merrill, Architecture of Skidmore, Owings, and
Merrill, 7950-7962 (New York, 1963).
11. Total modular coordination was in fact never achieved
owing to the dimensional inflexibility of the mechanical
services industries; verbal information from Robert
Heintches.
12. For an account of Eero Saarinen's General Motors
Technical Center, see Martin, Architecture and Organization,
chapter 12. In the long run, GM's policy of styling has proved
a near disaster for the American automobile industry.
13. In an informal conversation with students at the
Architectural Association, London, May 1959, Mies said that,

though he greatly admired Le Corbusier, he disagreed with his
individualistic and monumental approach.
14. For a contemporary English view of American automobile
design in the 1950s, see Reyner Banham, Vehicles of Desire,
in Art, September 1955, reprinted in Mary Banham et al. (eds),
A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley, 1996).
15. On Georgy Kepess inuential aesthetic philosophy, see
Martin, Architecture and Organization, chapter 2.
16. Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure 19401975
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 268.
17. In the representation of architecture in the wall frescoes at
Pompeii, the columns are elongated and etherealized.
18. See Louis Kahn, Monumentality, typed transcript, 14
November 1961, published in Paul Zucker (ed.), New
Architecture and City Planning (New York, 1944), 577588. This
article shows how close Kahns views on this subject were to
those of Sigfried Giedion (see chapter 11).
19. There was a common interest in classicism among
anglophone architects in the early 1950s, partly triggered by the
publication of Rudolf Wittkowers Architectural Principles in the
Age of Humanism in 1949. This interest was shared by Kahn with
both the Smithsons and Wittkowers pupil, Colin Rowe. See
Henry Millon, Rudolf Wittkowers Architectural Principles in
the Age of Humanism and its Inuence on the Development of
Modern Architecture, in Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, 31, 1972, 839.
20. Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms in Nature (New York, 1974),
originally published 18991904; DArcy Wentworth
Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge, 1961), originally
published 1917. Two exhibitions at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in LondonOn Growth and Form in 1951
and Parallel of Life and Art in 1953testify to the popularity

of these ideas at the time. DArcy Thompsons Pythagorean
model, however, only applied at the level of gross biological
forms, not at the level of biochemistry; it therefore gave a
one-sided picture of the problem of form in biology. See Joseph
Needham, Biochemical Aspects of Form and Growth, in
Lancelot Law Whyte (ed.), Aspects of Form (London, 1951).
21. Louis Kahn, quoted in David B. Brownlee and David G. De
Long, Louis I. Kahn: in the Realm of Architecture (New York,
1992), 58.
22. Louis Kahn, quoted ibid., 58.
23. For an insightful comparison between Kahns Jewish
Community Center and Miess unbuilt Library and
Administration Building, Illinois Institute of Technology,
Chicago, see Colin Rowe, Neoclassicism and Modern
Architecture II, in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other
Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). Kahns Community Center
bears a family resemblance to the work of Aldo van Eyck and
the Dutch Structuralists. The Dutch architects shared Kahns
interest in Viollet-le-Ducs structural rationalism, transmitted
to them through H. P. Berlage. But they also shared his desire
to return to the irreducible house-like unit of architecture (see
chapter 11). The degree of mutual inuence, if any, is not clear.
24. See Jordy, American Buildings and their Architects, 40726;
and Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well Tempered
Environment (Chicago, 1969), 24655.
25. For Kahns concept of an architecture of public symbolism,
see Sarah Williams Ksiazak, Architectural Culture in the 1950s:
Louis Kahn and the National Assembly at Dhaka, in Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians, 52, December 1993, 41635,
and Critiques of Liberal Individualism: Louis Kahns Civic
Projects 19471957, in Assemblage, 31, 1996, 5679.
notes 263
Further Reading
This is a starting place for readers who wish to explore various
topics in greater detail. A more detailed list of sources can be
found on the Oxford History of Art website.
General
Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
(London and New York, 1960).
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge,
Mass., 1967).
Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture
(London, 1980).
Chapter 1. Art Nouveau 18901910
General
Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts in Western
Europe: a Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968
(New York, 1970).
Eugnia W. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and
Belgium, 18851898 (New Haven, 1961).
H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: the Reorientation of
European Social Thought 18901930 (New York, 1961, 1977).
David Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism: Alexis
Meinong and European Thought 18801920 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1980), chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5.
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Sicle Vienna (New York, 1980).
Theory
Barry Bergdoll (ed.), The Foundations of Architecture (New York,
1990) contains an English translation of extracts from Violletle-Ducs Dictionnaire Raisonn dArchitecture.
Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: in Search of Architecture
(Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford, 1972).
The Art Nouveau movement
Jean-Paul Bouillon, Art Nouveau 18701914 (New York, 1985).
Akos Moravnszky, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and
Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 18671918
Frank Russell (ed.), Art Nouveau Architecture (London, 1979).
T. Schudi Madsen, Sources of Art Nouveau (New York, 1955) and
Art Nouveau (New York, 1967).
Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Sicle France:
Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989).
264
Nancy Troy, The Decorative Arts in Fin-de-Sicle France: Art

Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, 1991).
Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture (1896), trans. Harry F.
Mallgrave (Los Angeles, 1988).
Individual architects
Alan Crawford, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (London, 1995).
David Dernie and Alastair Carew-Cox, Victor Horta (London,
1995).
Heinz Garetsegger, Otto Wagner (New York, 1979).
Ian Latham, Joseph Maria Olbrich (New York, 1988).
Eduard F. Sekler, Josef Hoffmann: the Architectural Work
(Princeton, 1985).
Klaus-Jrgen Sembach, Henry van de Velde (New York, 1989).
Ignasi de Sol-Morales, Antoni Gaud (New York, 1984).
Pieter Singelenberg, H. P. Berlage (Utrecht, 1972).
Chapter 2. Organicism versus Classicism: Chicago

18901910
Primary sources
Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New
York, 1965).
Louis Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (New York,
1956).
Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York, 1977).
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Art and Craft of the Machine
(catalogue of the 14th Annual Exhibition of the Chicago
Architectural Club, 1901), reprinted in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
(ed.), Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1 (New York,
1992).
Frank Lloyd Wright, In the Cause of Architecture, The
Architectural Record, 1908, reprinted in Brooks Pfeiffer (ed.),
Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1.
General
Donald Drew Egbert, The Idea of Organic Expression in
American Architecture in Stow Persons, Evolutionary Thought
in America (New Haven, 1950).
Fiske Kimball, American Architecture (New York, 1928).
Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades (New York, 1931).
Montgomery Schuyler, American Architecture and Other
Writings (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).
Caroline van Eck, Organicism in Nineteenth-Century
Architecture: an Inquiry into its Theoretical and Philosophical
Background (Amsterdam, 1994).
The Chicago School

Leonard K. Eaton, American Architecture Comes of Age
William H. Jordy, American Buildings and their Architects:
Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Century (New
York, 1972).
Heinrich Klotz, The Chicago Multistorey as a Design
Problem, in John Zukovsky (ed.), Chicago Architecture (Art
Institute of Chicago, 1987).
Mario Manieri-Elia, Toward the Imperial City: Daniel
Burnham and the City Beautiful Movement, in Giorgio
Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-Elia and
Manfredo Tafuri, The American City: From the Civil War to
the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), originally published
as La Citt Americana della Guerra Civile al New Deal
(Laterza, 1973).
The home and the Social Reform movement
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream: Moralism
and the Model Home (Chicago, 1980).
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School
H. Allen Brooks, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his
Mid-west Contemporaries (Toronto, 1972).
Giorgio Ciucci, The City in Agrarian Ideology and Frank
Lloyd Wright: Origins and Development of Broad Acres, in
The American City (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
Leonard K. Eaton, Two Chicago Architects and their Clients: Frank
Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw (New York, 1969).
Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton,
1996).
Henry Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials (New York,
1942).
Norris Kelly Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright: a Study in Architectural
Content (American Life Foundation and Institute, 1979).
Thomas Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner
(Oxford, 1974).
Mario Manieri-Elia, Louis Henry Sullivan (New York, 1996).
Narciso Menocal, Architecture as Nature: the Transcendentalist
Idea of Louis Sullivan (Madison, 1981).
Robert C. Twombly, Louis Sullivan: his Life and Work (New
York, 1986).
Chapter 3. Culture and Industry: Germany 190714

General
Louis Dumont, German Ideology: from France to Germany and
Back (Chicago, 1994).
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford, 1993).
Donald I. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social
Forms (Chicago, 1971).
George L. Mosse, The Crisis in German Ideology (New York,
1964, 1998).
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (New York, 1965).
Aesthetics
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomu, Empathy,
Form and Space: Problems of German Aesthetics 18731893 (Los

Angeles, 1994).
Michael Podro, The Manifold of Perception: Theories of Art from
Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford, 1972), and The Critical Historians of
Art (New Haven, 1982).
Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search
for Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1995).
The Deutscher Werkbund
Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: the Politics of Reform in
the Applied Arts (Princeton, 1978).
Francesco Dal Co, Figures of Architecture and Thought (New
York, 1990).
Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the
Bauhaus in Weimar (Chicago, 1971).
Mark Jarsombek, The Kunstgewerbe, the Werkbund, and the
Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period, Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians, 53, March 1994, 79.
Frederick J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass
Culture before the First World War (New Haven, 1996).
Style and ideology
Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
Stanford Anderson, The Legacy of German Neoclassicism
and Biedermeier: Tessenow, Behrens, Loos, and Mies,
Assemblage, 15, 6387.
Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis (Cambridge, Mass., 1986),
chapter 3 (for a discussion of Gropiuss Fagus Factory).
Tilmann Buddensieg, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the
AEG, trans. Iain Boyd Whyte (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
Heinrich Tessenow, House Building and Such Things, in
Richard Burdett and Wilfred Wang (eds), 9H, no. 8, 1989, On
Rigour.
Chapter 4. The Urn and the Chamberpot: Adolf Loos

190030
Primary sources
Adolf Loos, Ins Leere Gesprochen, trans. Spoken into the Void
A few scattered essays from Trotzdem have been translated and
appear in Mnz and Knstler, Safran and Wang, and Rissilada
(see below).
General
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Sicle Vienna (New York, 1980), chapters
2, 6, and 7.
Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture (1896), trans. Harry F.
Mallgrave (Los Angeles, 1988).
The work of Adolf Loos
Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: on the Philosophy of
Modern Architecture (New Haven, 1993).
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture
and Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos: Theory and Works (New
York, 1982).
Ludwig Mnz and Gustav Knstler, Adolf Loos, Pioneer of
further reading 265
Modern Architecture (Vienna, 1964; London, 1966).

Max Rissalada (ed.)> Raumplan versus Plan Libre (New York,
1988).
Burkhardt Rukschcio and Roland Schachel, La Vieetl'CEuvre
de Adolf Loos (Brussels, 1982).
Yahuda Safran and Wilfred Wang (eds), The Architecture of
Adolf Loos (The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985).
PanayotisTournikiotis,ytfdfo^L00$ (Princeton, 1994).
Chapter 5. Expressionism and Futurism
Expressionism
Primary sources
Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur(Berlin, 1914), trans. Glass
Architecture (New York, 1972).
Bruno Taut, Alpine ArchitekturQlagzn, 1919), trans. Alpine
Architecture (New York, 1972).
Bruno Taut, Friihlicht (Berlin, 1963).
Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkronen (Jena, 1919).
Bruno Taut, Ein Wohnhaus (Stuttgart, 1927).
General
Rosemary Haag Bletter, 'The Interpretation of the Glass
Dream: Expressionist Architecture and the History of the
Crystal Metaphor' in ^.Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, 40, no. i, 1981,20-43.
Bauhausin Weimar (Chicago, 1971).
Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art andIdea (New Haven,
1987).
Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture (New York, 1973).
Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in 2oth
Century German Literature (Stanford University Press, 1954).
Documentsfrom the End of the Wilhelmine Period to the Rise of
National Socialism (G. K. Hall and Company, 1993).
Joan Weinstein, 'The November Revolution and the
Institutionalization of Expressionism in Berlin', in R. Hertz
and N. Klein (eds), Twentieth-Century Art Theory (New York,
1990).
Iain Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism
(Cambridge, 1982).
Futurism
Primary sources
Umbrio Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London, 1973).
General
1919-1929 (Princeton, 1973), chapter 14.
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, AvantGuerre and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, 1986).
Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzella, Futurism (Oxford, 1973).
Esther Da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant'Elia: Retreat
into the Future (New Haven, 1995).
266 FURTHER READING
Sanford Quinter, 'La Citta Nuova, Modernity and Continuity',

in Zone, 1986,81-121.
Chapter 6. The Avant-gardes in Holland and Russia
Holland
Primary sources
Theo van Doesburg, On European Architecture: Complete Essays
from HetBouwbedrijf 1924-1931 (Boston, 1990).
General
Carel Blotkamp (ed.), De Stijl 1917-1922: the Formative Years
Yve-Alain Bois, Pain f ing as Model, 'The De Stijl Idea'
Warncke Carsten-Peter, The Ideal as Art: De Stijl 1917-1931
(Cologne, 1994).
H. L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl1917-1931: the Dutch Contribution to Art
Jan Molema, The New Movement in the Netherlands 1924-1936
(Rotterdam, 1996).
Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Environment (Cambridge, Mass.,
1983)Individual architects
Evert van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg: PainterArchitect (The
Hague, 1988).
Russia
Primary sources
Moise Ginsburg, Style andEpoque (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
El Lissitzky, Russia: an Architecture for World Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 1970; original: Vienna, 1930).
General
Stephen Bann, The Tradition of Constructivism (London,
I974)Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture and Modernity in the Soviet
Union 1900-1937', in^+{7(1991, part i, no. 3,46-67; part 2, no.
6,20-41; part 3, no. 8,13-19; part 4, no. 10,11-21).
Catherine Cooke, The Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art,
Architecture and the City (London, 1995).
Kenneth Frampton, 'The New Collectivity: Art and
Architecture in the Soviet Union, 1918-1932' in Kenneth
Frampton, Modern Architecture: a Critical History (London,
1982).
Hugh D. Hudson Jr., Blueprints and Blood: the Stalinization of
Soviet Architecture (Princeton, 1994).
Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture
(New York, 1987).
Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and
City Planning 1917-1935 (New York, 1970).
Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven,
1983)Oleg Shvidovsky, Building in the USSR (London, 1971).
Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, 'The Avant-Garde,
Urbanism and Planning in Soviet Russia', in Manfredo Tafuri
and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (Milan, 1972; New
York, 1976).
Frederick S. Starr, Konstantin Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass
Society (Princeton, 1978).
Chapter 7. Return to Order: Le Corbusier and Modern
Architecture in France 1920-35
Writings by Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London, 1935).
Le Corbusier, L'ArtDe'coratifd'Aujourd'bui (Paris, 1925), trans.
The Decorative Art of Today (London, 1987).
Le Corbusier, CEuvre Complete, vol. 11910-29, vol. 21929-34,
vol. 31934-38 (Zurich).
Le Corbusier, Precisions surunEtat"Present del'Architecture etde
rUrbanisme (Paris, 1930), trans. Precisions (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
Le Corbusier, Quandles Cathe'drales Etaient Blanches (Paris,
1937), trans. When the Cathedrals Were White (London, 1947).
Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris, 1925), trans. The City of
Tomorrow (London, 1929).
Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris, 1923), trans. Towards a
New Architecture (London, 1927).
Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse (Editions de 1'Architecrure
d'Aujourd'hui, 1933), trans. The Radiant City (London, 1964).
Le Corbusier, Le Voyaged'Orient (Paris, 1966), trans. Ivan
Zaknic and Nicole Pertuisier (eds), Journey to the East
Otherprimary sources
Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Risen, Bauen in
Eisenbeton (Leipzig, 1928), trans. Building in France, Building in
Iron, Building in Ferro-concrete (Los Angeles, 1995).
On Le Corbusier
Timothy Benton, The Villas of Le Corbusier (New Haven, 1987).
Brian Brace Taylor, Le Corbusier; the City of Refuge, Paris,
1929-1933 (Chicago, 1987).
H. Allen Brooks, Le Corbusier's Formative Years (Chicago, 1997)
is the definitive work on the early career of Le Corbusier.
Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR
(Princeton, 1992).
Norma Evenson, Le Corbusier: the Machine and the Grand
Design (New York, 1969).
Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), Part
III, chapters 18-28.
Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France (New
Haven, 1991), chapters 2,3, and 4.
Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis
(Cambridge, Mass., 1979), first published as Le Corbusier,
Elemente einer Synthese (Zurich, 1968).
Other individual architects
Brian Brace Taylor, Pierre Chareau, Designer and Architect
(Cologne, 1992).
Maurice Culot (ed.), Robert Mallet-Stevens, Architecte
(Brussels, 1977).
Chapter 8. Weimar Germany: the Dialectic of the
Modern 1920-33
Primary sources
Adolf Behne, DerModerne Zweckbau (Munich, 1926, though
written in 1923), trans. The Modern Functional Building (Los

Angeles, 1996).
Theo van Doesburg, On European Architecture: Complete Essays
from Bouwbedrijf, 1924-1931 (Basel, 1990), 88 ff.
Both texts discuss the controversy over functionalism and
rationalism and give an insight into architectural discussions of
the time.
General
Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes
and Architecture from Piranesi to the 19705 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1987), chapters 4 and 7.
Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Period to the Rise of
National Socialism (New York, 1993), part 4.
John Willet, Art and'Politics in the Weimar Period: the New
Sobriety 1917-1933 (New York, 1978).
TheBauhaus
Bauhausin Weimar (Chicago, 1971).
Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed (London, 1985).
Social housing
Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany,
1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
Richard Pommer and Christian Otto, Weissenhof 1927 and the
Modern Movement in Architecture (Chicago, 1991).
See also Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, chapter 7.
Mies van derRohe
Robin Evans, 'Mies van der Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries',
AAFiles, 19, Spring 1990.
Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the
BuildingArt (Cambridge, Mass., 1991) includes transcriptions
of all Mies's writings.
Richard Padovan, 'Mies van der Rohe Reinterpreted', in UIA:
International Architect, issue 3,1984,38-43.
Franz Schulze, Mies van derRohe: a Critical Biography
(Chicago, 1985).
Ignasi Sola Morales, 'Mies van der Rohe and Minimalism', in
Detlef Mertins (ed.), The Presence of Mies (Princeton, 1994).
Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van derRohe: the Villas and Country
Houses (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985).
ABC
Claude Schnzidt, Hannes Meyer: Bui/dings, Projects, and
Writings, bilingual German and English edition (Switzerland,
1965)Other architects
F. R. S. Yorke, The Modern House (London, 1934,1962).
Chapter 9. From Rationalism to Revisionism:
Architecture in Italy 1920-65
Dennis Doordan, Building Modern Italy, Italian Architecture
1914-1936 (Princeton, 1988).
Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940
FURTHER READING 267
(Cambridge, Mass., 1991) covers both the Novecento and the

Rationalist movements.
Vittorio Gregotti, New Directions in Italian Architecture
(London, 1968).
1919-1929 (Princeton, 1987).
Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985
Chapter 10. Neoclassicism, Organicism, and the Welfare
State: Architecture in Scandinavia 1910-65
Denmark and Sweden
Scio Paavilainen (ed.), Nordic Classicism 19101930 (Museum of
Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, 1992).
Claes Caldenby, Joran Lindvall, and Wilfred Wang (eds),
Twentieth-Century Architecture, Sweden (Munich, 1998).
Kim Dircknick, Guide to Danish Architecture Vol. II1960-1995
(Copenhagen, 1995).
Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 'Jorn Utzon:
Transcultural Form and the Tectonic Metaphor' (Cambridge,
Mass., 1995).
Jorgen Sestoftandjorgen Christiansen, Guide to Danish
Architecture Vol. /, 1800-1960 (Copenhagen, 1995).
Claes Dimling (ed.), ArchitectSigurd'Lewerentz (Stockholm,
I997)Eva Rudberg, Sven Markelius, Architect (Stockholm,
1989).
Felix Salaguren Beascoa de Corral, Arnejacobsen Works and
Projects (Barcelona, 1989).
Wilfred Wang et al., The Architecture of Peter Celsing
(Stockholm, 1996).
Stuart Wrede, The Architecture ofGunnarAsplund
Finland
Taisto Makela, Architecture and Modern Identity in Finland'
in Mariann Aav (ed.), Finnish Modern Design: Utopian Ideals
andEvery-Day Reality (New Haven, 1998).
Kirmo Mikkola, Architecture in Finland in the2oth Century
(Helsinki, 1981).
Malcolm Quantrill, Finnish Architecture and the Modernist
Tradition (London, 1995).
Karl Fleig (z&.\Alvar Aalto, vols. i and 2 (Zurich, 1963,1978), a
collection of the complete works of Aalto.
Paul David Pearson, AlvarAalto and the International Style
(New York, 1978).
Goran Schildt,A/varAa/to The Early Years, The Decisive Years,
and The Mature Years (New York, 1984-91).
Chapter 11. From Le Corbusier to Megastructures:
Urban Visions 1930-65
General
H. Allen Brooks (ed.), Le Corbusier (Princeton, 1987).
Le Corbusier, CEuvre Complete (Zurich, 1929-70), vols. 2-7.
268 FURTHER READING
Stanislas von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis

The New Monumentality
Christine C. and George R. Collins, 'Monumentality: a
Critical Matter in Modern Architecture', in Harvard
Architectural Review, vol. 4, no. 4,1985,15-35.
Sigfried Giedion, Josep Lluis Sert, and Fernand Leger, 'Nine
Points on Monumentality', reprinted in Joan Ockman (ed.),
Architecture Culture 1943-1968 (New York, 1993), 29-30.
Chandigarh and Brasilia
Norma Evenson: Chandigarh (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966)
and Two Brazilian Cities (New Haven, 1973).
Madhu Sarin, 'Chandigarh as a Place to Live in', in Russell
Walden (ed.), The Open Hand (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
James Holston, The Modernist City: an Anthropological Critique
of Brasilia (Chicago, 1989).
CIAMand Team X
AAGS (Architectural Association General Studies), Theory
and History Papers i, 'The Emergence of Team X out of
CIAM' (Architectural Association, London, 1982).
Le Corbusier, La Charte d'Athenes (1942), trans. The Athens
Charter (New York, 1973).
Eric P. Mumford, The CIAM Discourse of Urbanism, 1928-1959
Oscar Newman, CIAM 59 in Otterlo (Stuttgart, 1961).
Alison Smithson (ed.), Team XPrimer (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968).
Systems Theory
Ludwigvon Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory (London, 1968).
Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition
(Minneapolis, 1983).
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics
and Society (London and Boston, 1950).
Structuralism and Megastructures
Reyner Banham, Megastructure (London and New York,
1976).
Wim van Heuvel, Structuralism in Dutch Architecture
(Rotterdam, 1992).
Hilde Heynen, 'New Babylon: the Antinomies of Utopia', in
Assemblage, 29, April 1996,25-39.
David B. Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese
Architecture, 1868 to the Present (Tokyo and New York, 1987),
chapters 7 and 8.
Situationists
Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (eds), Situationists: Art,
Politics, Urbanism (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona,
1996).
Elisabeth Sussman (ed.), On the Passage of a Few People Through
a Rather Brief Moment in Time: the Situationist International,
7957-7972 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
Mark Wigley, Constant s New BabyIon: a Hyper-Architecture of
Desire (Rotterdam, 1998).
Chapter 12. Pax Americana: Architecture in the USA

194565
General
Donald Albrecht (ed.), World War II and the American Dream:
How War-time Building Changed a Nation (Washington, DC,
1995).
William H. Jordy, American Buildings and their Architects: the
Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century
(New York, 1976).
Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture 19431968 (New York, 1993).
Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure 19401975
Political and social background
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Cambridge,
Mass., 1965), rst published 1909.
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford, 1956, 2000).
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950).
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a
Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
The Case Study House Program
Charles Eames, John Entenza, and Herbert Matter, What is a
House? in Arts and Architecture, July 1944.
Elizabeth A. T. Smith (ed.), Blueprints for Modern Living:
History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Cambridge, Mass.,
1989).
Charles Eames
John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart, and Ray Eames, Eames
Design: the Work of the Ofce of Charles and Ray Eames (New
York, 1989).
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen, Eero Saarinen on His Work (New Haven,
1968).
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Architecture of Skidmore,
Owings, and Merrill, 19501962 (New York, 1963).
Mies van der Rohe
Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1947).
Detlef Mertins (ed.), The Presence of Mies (Princeton, 1994).
Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
Louis Kahn
David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long, Louis I. Kahn: in the
Realm of Architecture (New York, 1992).
Sarah Williams Ksiazak, Architectural Culture in the 1950s:
Louis Kahn and the National Assembly at Dhaka, in Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 52, December 1993,
41635.
Critiques of Liberal Individualism: Louis Kahns Civic Projects
19471957, in Assemblage, 31, 1996, 5679.
further reading 269
Timeline
Art and architecture
1890
1890
W. L. B. Jenney, Fair Store, Chicago

Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als
Erzieher
William Morris, News from Nowhere
1891
Antoni Gaud begins transept faades of

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn
Root, Monadnock Building, Chicago
Louis Sullivan, Wainwright Building,
St. Louis, and Ornament in
Architecture
Events
1890
1891
1892
1893
Victor Horta, Htel Tassel, Brussels

August Schmarsow, The Essence of
Architectural Creation
Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form
in the Fine Arts
Alois Riegl, Questions of Style
Munich Secession founded
Edvard Munch, The Scream
Burnham and Co., Reliance Building,
Chicago
Henry Van de Velde, The Purication of
Art
1893
1895
Henry Van de Velde, Bloemenwerf,

Uccle, Belgium
Siegfried Bing opens LArt Nouveau
gallery, Paris
1895
1896
Louis Sullivan, The Tall Ofce Building

Artistically Considered
Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Alfred Lichtwark forms Art Education
Movement in Germany
Vereinigten Werksttten founded in
Munich
Vienna Secession founded
1896
Antoni Gaud begins Chapel of the

Colonia Gell, Barcelona
Hctor Guimard, Castel Branger, Paris
Otto Wagner, Majolica House, Vienna
Dresdner Werksttten fr
Handwerkskunst founded
Karl Kraus founds Die Fackel in Vienna
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure
Class
Victor Horta, Maison du Peuple,
Brussels
Founding of artists colony, Darmstadt,
Germany
Hctor Guimard, Paris Mtro stations
1898
1894
1897
1898
1899
1900
1892
1900
270 timeline
1894
1897
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

Sioux Indians massacred at Wounded
Knee, South Dakota
Forth Bridge near Edinburgh completed
Herman Hollerith develops a punch card
machine, later founds IBM
Whitcombe Judson invents the zipper
Franois Hennebique patents a

reinforced-concrete system
Rudolph Diesel develops diesel engine
Department of Social Sciences and
Anthropology founded at the University
of Chicago
Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago
Thomas A. Edison invents the movie
projector
Claude Debussy, Prelude to the

Afternoon of a Faun
Guglielmo Marconi invents wireless
telegraphy
Jesse W. Reno invents the escalator
Dreyfus Affair begins in France
Sino-Japanese War begins
Lumire brothers show rst motion
pictures using lm projection
Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen discovers
X-rays
Joseph Thomson discovers the electron
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
London School of Economics founded
Henri Becquerel founds science of
radioactivity
First modern Olympics held
Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in
Sociology
Jane Addams founds Hull House in
Chicago
Theodor Herzl calls rst Zionist Congress
Ivan Pavlov conducts classical
conditioning experiments
H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds
Spanish-American War
1899
Boxer Rebellion begins in China

Boer War begins in South Africa
Max Planck proposes quantum theory
1900
Worlds Fair, Paris

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of
Dreams
John Ruskin dies
Timeline
1901
Frank Lloyd Wright lecture on The Art

and Craft of the Machine, Chicago
Alois Riegl, The Late Roman Art Industry
1901
1902
Ferdinand Avenarius forms the

Drerbund in Germany
Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science
of Expression and General Linguistic
Auguste Perret, apartment house at 25
Rue Franklin, Paris
Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and
Mental Life
Wiener Werksttte founded
H. P. Berlage, Stock Exchange,
Amsterdam
Hermann Muthesius, Das Englische
Haus
Bund Heimatschutz formed in Germany
Paul Mebes, Um 1800
Fauvism emerges at the Salon
dAutomne in Paris
Expressionists form Die Brcke in
Dresden
Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen
open Little Gallery of the PhotoSecession in New York
Alexandr Bogdanov founds Proletkult in
Russia
Deutscher Werkbund founded in Munich
Peter Behrens appointed design
consultant to AEG
Adolf Loos, Krntner Bar, Vienna
Mies van der Rohe, Riehl House,
Potsdam, Germany
Cubism developed by Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque in Paris
Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street,
Dresden
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and
Empathy
Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett,
Plan of Chicago
Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in
Practice
Sergei Diaghilev founds Ballets Russes
in Paris
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory,
Berlin
Neue Knstler Vereinegung founded in
Munich
Herwarth Walden founds Expressionist
Der Sturm review in Berlin
First of two Wasmuth volumes on Frank
Lloyd Wright published in Europe
Walter Gropius lectures on Kunst und
Industriebau, Germany
First Blaue Reiter art exhibition,
Munich
Futurist exhibition, Milan
Adolf Loos, Looshaus, Vienna
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the
Spiritual in Art
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
Events
1910
1911
First transatlantic radio telegraphic

transmission
Victor Talking Machine Co. formed
Queen Victoria of England dies
Colonies of Australia united
Willis H. Carrier invents air conditioning
Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium
1903
Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst forms

Womens Social and Political Union in
Britain
Orville and Wilbur Wright achieve rst
powered aircraft ight
Ford Motor Company formed in Detroit
1904
Isadora Duncan founds school of

modern dance in Berlin
Russo-Japanese War begins
First Russian Revolution fails
Albert Einstein formulates the special
theory of relativity
1905
1906
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
1907
William James, Pragmatism

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry
Adams
1908
Georges Sorel, Reections on Violence

Young Turk Revolution in Turkey
1909
P. D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Dimension

First newsreel lms
Louis Blriot ies across the English
Channel
1910
Igor Stravinsky, The Firebird

Arnold Schnberg formulates an
Expressionist atonal music system
Boer republics united as South Africa
Frederick Taylor, The Principles of
Scientic Management
Gustav Mahler, Ninth Symphony
Roald Amundsen reaches South Pole
1911
timeline 271
Timeline
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1920
1921
1922
Events
Daniel Burnham & Co., Conway

Building, Chicago
Mikhail Larionov and Natalia
Goncharova create Rayonism in Russia
Walter Gropius, Fagus Factory, Alfeld an
der Leine, Germany
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a
Staircase
Kasimir Malevich founds Suprematist
movement in Russia
1912
The sinking of the Titanic

African National Congress founded in
South Africa
1913
Antonio SantElia, project for La Citt

Nuova
Deutscher Werkbund exhibition, Cologne
Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur
Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and
Melancholy of a Street
Le Corbusier, Dom-ino frame
Heinrich Wlfin, Principles of Art
History
Alfred Stieglitz, Marcel Duchamp, and
Francis Picabia found journal 291 in
New York
Hugo Ball founds Cabaret Voltaire in
Zurich and begins Dada movement
1914
First performance of Igor Stravinskys

The Rite of Spring
Marcel Proust publishes rst volume of
Remembrance of Things Past
Niels Bohr develops quantum
mechanics
Standard time signal issued worldwide
Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound found
magazine BLAST in London and create
Vorticism
First World War breaks out following
assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand of Austria in Serbia
Panama Canal opens
D. W. Grifth, The Birth of a Nation
Albert Einstein publishes General
Theory of Relativity
1915
1916
Henry van de Velde, Formules de la

Beaut Architectonique Moderne
De Stijl rst published in the
Netherlands
Berlin Dada movement founded
Novembergruppe and Arbeitsrat fur
Kunst formed in Germany
De Stijl Manifesto
Bauhaus established by Walter Gropius
in Weimar
Exhibition for Unknown Architects,
Berlin
Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur
1917
Hans Poelzig, project for Salzburg

Festspielhaus
Vladimir Tatlin, project for a Monument
to the Third International
Bruno Taut founds magazine Frhlicht
Le Corbusier and Amde Ozenfant
found the review LEsprit Nouveau in
Paris
First International Dada Fair, Berlin
Wassili Luckhardt, Peoples Theatre
project
Theo van Doesburg moves to Weimar
First Working Group of Constructivists
formed in Moscow
1920
Otto Bartning, Sternkirche project,

Germany
Adolf Behne, Kunst, Handwerk,
Technik
Chicago Tribune Tower competition
Le Corbusier, Ville Contemporaine
1922
272 timeline
1918
1919
1921
M. H. J. Schoenmaeker, The Principles

of Plastic Mathematics
Easter Rebellion against British in
Ireland
DArcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth
and Form
Bolsheviks seize power in Russia
America enters First World War
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
First World War ends
Civil War begins in Russia
Robert Wiene, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Treaty of Versailles between First World
War Allies and Germany
Spartacus workers uprising in Berlin
League of Nations founded
Ernest Rutherford splits the atom
Britain establishes Jewish state in
Palestine
Irish Civil War
Suffrage granted to women in the USA
Vladimir Lenin institutes the New
Economic Plan (NEP)
First commercial radio broadcast
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logicophilosophicus

Karel Capek coins term robot in play
R.U.R.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
founded
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle
F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu
Arnold Schnberg rst employs serial
system in Op. 25 Piano Suite
T. S. Eliot, Waste Land
Timeline
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
DadaConstructivist meeting, Weimar

Adolf Loos, Rufer House, Vienna
Alexei Gan, Konstruktivizm manifesto
El Lissitzky founds Veshch (Object) in
Berlin
Hans Richter, El Lissitzky, and Werner
Grf found journal G in Berlin
Lszl Moholy-Nagy joins Bauhaus
Exhibition of Soviet Art, Berlin
Giovanni Muzio, Ca Brutto, Milan
Art and Technology: A New Unity
exhibition, Bauhaus, Weimar
Adolf Behne writes Der Moderne
Zweckbau, published in 1926
Mies van der Rohe, Lessing House
project
Exhibition of work of Theo van Doesburg
and Cor van Eesteren in Paris
Nikolai Ladovsky founds Association of
New Architects (ASNOVA)
Gerrit Rietveld, Schroeder House,

Utrecht, the Netherlands
Robert Mallet-Stevens, Project for a Villa
Swiss journal ABC begins publication
Moisei Ginsburg, Style and Epoch
Andr Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism
Erich Mendelsohn, Einstein Tower,
Potsdam, Germany
Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture
Exposition des Arts Dcoratifs et
Industriels, Paris
Bauhaus moves to Dessau
Ernst May appointed city architect for
Frankfurt-am-Main
Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, Mannheim
Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA)
formed
Adolf Loos, Tristan Tzara House, Paris
Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer,
Petersschule, Basel
El Lissitzky, Proun Room, Hanover
Grete Schtte-Lihotsky, Frankfurt
Kitchen
Paul Schultze-Naumburg, ABC des
Bauens
Gruppo 7 formed in Milan
Deutscher Werkbund-sponsored
exhibition, Weissenhofsiedlung,
Stuttgart
Ilya Golosov, Zuyev Workers Club,
Moscow
Ivan Leonidov, Lenin Institute project,
Moscow
Sigfried Giedion, Building in France,
Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete
First meeting of CIAM at La Sarraz,
Switzerland
Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu
Architektur
Adolf Loos, Moller House, Vienna
Walter Gropius, Siemensstadt, Berlin
Rudolf Steiner, Goetheanum, Dornach,
Switzerland
Events
1922
James Joyce, Ulysses

USSR formed
Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau
assassinated in Germany
Reform in Turkey led by Ataturk
1923
Ernst Cassirer publishes rst of three volumes of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Georg Lukcs, History and ClassConsciousness
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
Hyperination in Germany
Neon advertising signs introduced
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Ren Clair inaugurates Surrealist lm
with Entracte
Ferdinand Lger and Dudley Murphy,
Ballet mcanique
Rudolf Steiner founds Anthroposophy
Society
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
1924
1925
Charlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush

Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Scopes evolution trial in USA
Alban Berg, Wozzeck
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
1926
Fritz Lang, Metropolis

John Logie Baird, C. F. Jenkins, and
D. Mihaly invent the television
1927
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

The Jazz Singer, rst motion picture
with sound
Joseph Stalin comes to power in USSR
Charles Lindbergh makes rst solo
transatlantic ight
1928
Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill,

Threepenny Opera
Andr Breton, Nadja
Equal voting rights granted to women in
Britain
First Five Year Plan in the USSR
Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
timeline 273
Timeline
1930
Events
1929
Moisei Ginsburg, Narkomn apartment

block, Moscow
Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion
Museum of Modern Art founded in New
York
Henry Russell Hitchcock, Modern
Architecture
Johannes Brinkman and Leendert
Cornelis van der Vlugt, Van Nelle
Factory, Rotterdam
1929
1930
Adolf Loos, Mller House, Prague

Erik Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm
Industrial Arts Exhibition buildings
Mies van der Rohe, Tugendhat House,
Ernst May and Hannes Meyer move to
the Soviet Union
Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France
Berlin Building Exposition
Salvador Dali, The Persistence of
Memory
The Dessau Bauhaus closes
The International Style: Architecture
since 1922 exhibition at MoMA, New
York
Rockefeller Center opens in New York
Le Corbusier, Ville Radieuse
Le Corbusier, Cit de Refuge, Paris
Alvar Aalto, Tuberculosis Sanatorium,
Paimio, Finland
Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis
Corbusier
Surrealist review Minotaure founded in
Paris
Socialist Realism ordained as ofcial
style in USSR
John Dewey, Art as Experience
Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art
Herbert Read, Art and Industry
1930
1935
Mies van der Rohe, Hubbe House

project, Magdeburg, Germany
J. J. P. Oud, Nieuwe Bouwkunste in
Holland en Europe
Marcello Piacentini, University of Rome
1935
1936
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the

Modern Movement
Frank Lloyd Wright, Falling Water, Bear
Run, Pennsylvania
Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio,
Como, Italy
Degenerate Art Exhibition staged by
Hitler in Munich
Pablo Picasso, Guernica
Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea, Noormarkku,
Finland
1936
1931
1932
1933
1934
1937
1938
274 timeline
Louis Buuel and Salvador Dali, Un

Chien Andalou
Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie
Camera
Eugne Freysinnet develops prestressed
concrete
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia
Martha Graham founds dance company
Hugo Eckener ies around the world
Stock market crash on Wall Street marks
beginning of Great Depression
Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses
Luis Buuel, LAge dor
Gandhis Salt March, India
Robert Maillart, Salginatobel Bridge,
Switzerland
First World Cup soccer match
1931
Fritz Lang, M
George Washington Bridge in New York
completed
1932
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Social Democrats come to power in
Sweden
BASF and AEG develop magnetic tape
recording in Germany
Alexander Kojve begins lectures on
Hegel in Paris
Andr Malraux, Mans Fate
Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of
Germany
American Congress adopts New Deal
social and economic measures
1933
1934
1937
1938
Cole Porter, Anything Goes

Lewis Mumford, Technics and
Civilization
Arnold Toynbee, rst volume of The
Study of History
Mao Tse-tung begins Long March in
China
Stalin begins purge of political leaders in
the USSR
John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money
Hoover Dam completed in Colorado,
America
Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will
Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times
Popular Front comes to power in
France
Spanish Civil War begins
BBC inaugurates television service
Alan Turing adumbrates a programmable
computer
American aviator Amelia Earhart lost

over Pacic
Jean Renoir, The Great Illusion
Kristallnacht attack on Jews in Germany
Munich Pact between Britain, France,
Germany and Italy
Arthur H. Compton and George Inman
invent the uorescent light
Timeline
1939
1940
1940
1941
1942
Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and

Kitsch
Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology
Hans Hofmanns Spring marks the
beginning of Abstract Expressionism in
America
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and
Architecture
1939
Espoizione Universale di Roma (EUR)

planned but never opened
1942
1943
1944
1940
1941
1943
Patrick Abercrombie, Greater London
Plan
Bruno Zevi, Towards an Organic
Architecture
1944
1946
Knoll Associates founded

Mario Ridol, Manuale dellarchitetto
1946
1947
First Levittown suburban tract

development founded on Long Island,
New York
The New Empiricism movement begins
in Sweden
Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion
Jackson Pollock begins drip paintings
Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes
Command
COBRA group of painters founded
Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost
Center
1947
1949
Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural

Principles in the Age of Humanism
Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton
School, Norfolk, Britain
Philip Johnson, Glass House, New
Canaan, Connecticut
Eames House, Pacic Palisades,
California
INA Casa created in Italy
1949
1950
Bruno Zevi, A History of Modern

Architecture
Jean Dubuffets Le Metasyx (Corps de
Dame) exemplies art brut
Festival of Britain, London
Le Corbusier and others begin plan of
Chandigarh
E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a
Hobby Horse
Le Corbusier, Unit dHabitation,
Marseilles
Alvar Aalto, Syntsalo Town Hall,
Finland
1950
1945
1948
1950
Events
1951
1952
1945
1948
German invasion of Poland begins

Second World War
New York Worlds Fair
Robert M. Page invents radar
Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses in USA

Orson Welles, Citizen Kane
Japan bombs Pearl Harbor in Hawaii:
America enters the war
Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project
create rst articial atomic reaction
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and
Nothingness
Germany develops V2 rocket
Allies stage D-Day invasion of Normandy
John von Neumann theorizes a
programmable computer
Roberto Rossellini, Rome, Open City
Germany surrenders, ending Second
World War in Europe
America drops atomic bombs on Japan
United Nations established
New Town Act, Britain
ENIAC electronic vacuum tube
computer developed
India gains independence; state of
Pakistan created
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT) established in Geneva
Chuck Yeager ies at supersonic speed
Vittorio de Sica, The Bicycle Thieves

Marshall Plan institutes American
nancial aid to Europe
Communists assume power in
Czechoslovakia
Berlin blockade and airlift
Gandhi assassinated
Nation of Israel established
Scientists at Bell Labs invent transistor
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Elementary
Structures of Kinship
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) founded
Eastern Germany becomes an independent state under Communist government
Apartheid instituted in South Africa
Mao Tse-tung seizes power in China
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd
Korean War begins
1951
Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon

Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical
Bride
Computers sold commercially
1952
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

John Cage, 433
America explodes rst hydrogen bomb
timeline 275
Timeline
1952
1953
1954
1953
Richard Buckminster Fuller, geodesic

dome
Mario Ridol and Ludovico Quaroni,
Tiburtino Housing Estate, Rome
Robert Rauschenbergs The Bed
establishes American Pop Art
1954
Lcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer begin

Brasilia plan
Sigurd Lewerentz, St. Marks Church,
Birkhaven, Sweden
Team X challenge to CIAM
Jrn Utzon, Sydney Opera House
Situationist International formed in Paris
Constant begins New Babylon series
Carlo Scarpa, Gipsoteca Canoviana,
Treviso, Italy
BPR, Torre Velasca, Milan
1956
1959
Alvar Aalto, Vuoksenniska Church,

Imatra, Finland
Giuseppe Samon, Urbanism and the
Future of the City
Ludovico Quaroni, plan for Quartiere
Cepalle Barene di S. Giuliano in Mestre,
Italy
1959
1960
Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in

the First Machine Age
Archigram group formed in Britain
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities
1960
George Kubler, The Shape of Time

Richard Buckminster Fuller, project for a
geodesic dome over midtown Manhattan
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe
Louis Kahn begins work on capital
complex at Dhaka
Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam
1962
Donald Judd and others exhibit rst

Minimalist works in New York
Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without
Architects exhibition, MoMA, New York
Giovanni Michelucci, Church of S.
Giovanni, Florence
Peter Celsing begins work on Culture
House complex, Stockholm
Reyner Banham, A House is not a Home
Le Corbusier dies
1964
1955
1956
1957
1958
1960
Independent Group established in

London
Michel Tapi, An Other Art
Meyer Shapiro, Style
Events
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
276 timeline
1955
1957
1958
1961
1963
1965
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

reach the summit of Mount Everest
Francis H. C. Crick and James D. Watson
discover DNA
Vietnam divided after French defeat
Algerian war of independence begins
Construction of Disneyland in Anaheim,
California begins
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Jonas Salk announces development of
polio vaccine
Federal Interstate Highway Act passed in
America
Nikita Khrushchev denounces Stalin in
the USSR
Hungarian uprising put down by USSR
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Sputnik satellite launched by USSR
European Economic Community (EEC)
founded
Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless
Franois Truffaut, The 400 Blows
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the
Scientic Revolution
Jack S. Kilby of Texas Instruments
invents the integrated circuit
NixonKhrushchev Kitchen Debate
Fidel Castro seizes power in Cuba
Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita
Sharpeville massacre in South Africa
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin
becomes rst man to travel in space
Berlin Wall erected
American invasion of Cuba at the Bay of
Pigs
Construction begins on the Severn
Bridge, Britain
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinthe
Rachel Carsons Silent Spring begins a
new environmental movement
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientic Revolutions
Cuban missile crisis
Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny develop
BASIC computer language
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
President John F. Kennedy assassinated
in Dallas
Cultural Revolution begins in China
New York Worlds Fair
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution signals
Americas entry into war in Vietnam
IndiaPakistan War
American forces sent to Vietnam
IBM develops word processing
List of Illustrations
The author and publisher would like to thank the following

individuals and institutions who have kindly given permission
to reproduce the illustrations listed below.
1. Victor Horta. View within the octagonal stair hall, Hotel Van
Eetvelde, 1895, Brussels. Photo Bastin ScEvrard, Brussels.
DACS2002.
2. Eugene Rousseau. Jardiniere, 1887. Musee des Arts
Decoratifs, Paris/photo Laurent-SullyJaulmes. Tous droits
reserves.
3. Henry van de Velde. Chair, 1896. Nordenfjeldske
Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim.
4. Henry van de Velde. Havana Cigar Shop, 1899, Berlin.
Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
5. Victor Horta. First-floor plan, Hotel Van Eetvelde, 1895,
Brussels. Drawing courtesy David Dernie, from D. Dernie and
A. Carew-Cox, Victor Horta (Academy Editions, 1995), p. 121.
DACS2002.
6. Hector Guimard. Maison Coilliot, 1897, Lille. Photo Felipe
Ferre, Paris.
7. Lucien Weissenburger. 24 Rue Lionnais, 1903, Nancy. Photo
Achim Bednorz, Cologne.
8. Hendrick Petrus Berlage. The ground floor of the top-lit stair
hall, Villa Henny, 1898, The Hague. Berlage Archive
(inv. ph. 0059) Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam.
9. Antoni Gaudi. Chapel of the Colonia Giiell, 1898-1914,
Barcelona. Photo Institut Amatller d'Art Hispanic,
Barcelona.
10 and n. Otto Wagner. Post Office Savings Bank, 1904-6,
Vienna. Photo Tim Benton, Cambridge.
12. Joseph Maria Olbrich. A decorated casket, 1901. Institut
Mathildenhohe, Museum Kiinstlerkolonie, Darmstadt.
13 and 14. Joseph Maria Olbrich. Two postcards, 1904, showing
a group of Olbrich s houses in the Darmstadt artists' colony.
Institut Mathildenhohe, Museum Kunstlerkolonie,
Darmstadt.
15. Josef Hoffmann. Palais Stoclet, 1905-11, Brussels. Photo The
Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of
London.
16. Josef Hoffmann. Palais Stoclet, 1905-11, Brussels. Bildarchiv
Foto Marburg.
17. Charles Rennie Mackintosh. House for an Art Lover, 1900.
Photo Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.
18. Richard Riemerschmid. Chest, 1905. Christies Images,
London. DACS 2002.
19. Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. The Auditorium

Building, 1886-9, Chicago. Photo The Conway Library,
Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
20. Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root. The Rookery
Building, 1885-6, Chicago. The Chicago Historical
Society/photo J. Taylor.
21. Henry Hobson Richardson. The Marshall Field Wholesale
Store, 1885-7, Chicago (demolished). Photo RIBA
Photographs Library, London.
22. Burnham and Co. The Reliance Building, 1891-4, Chicago.
Photo Angelo Hornack Library, London.
23. Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. The Wainwright
Building, 1890-2, St Louis. Missouri Historical Society.
24. Louis Sullivan. 'The High Building Question', 1891. From
The Graphic (ityi).
25. Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted. World's
Columbian Exposition, 1893, Chicago, plan showingjackson
Park and Midway Plaisance. Chicago Historical Society.
26. Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted. The Court
of Honour (demolished). Chicago Historical Society.
27. Burnham and Co. The Conway Building, 1912, Chicago.
Chicago Historical Society.
28. Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett. City plan for
Chicago, 1909. Drawing by Jules Guerin. Chicago Historical
Society.
29. Frank Lloyd Wright. Ward Willits House, 1902, Highland
Park, Illinois. Photo Paul Rocheleau, Richmond, MA.
30. Frank Lloyd Wright. Ward Willits House, 1902, Highland
Park, Illinois, ground-floor plan. 2001 the Frank Lloyd
Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ. ARS, NY and DACS,
London 2002.
31. Frank Lloyd Wright. Coonley House, 1908, Riverside,
Illinois. Photo Courtesy The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives,
Scottsdale, AZ. ARS, NY and DACS, London 2002.
32. Frank Lloyd Wright. The Robie House, 1908-10, South
Woodlawn, Chicago. Photo The University of Michigan
Library, Ann Arbor, MI. ARS, NY and DACS, London
2OO2.
33. Peter Behrens. AEG Turbine Factory, 1908-9, Berlin. Photo

Achim Bednorz, Cologne. DACS 2002.
34. Heinrich Tessenow. Houses designed for the Garden City
of Hohensalza, 1911-14.
35. Heinrich Tessenow. Dalcroze Institute, 1911-12, Hellerau.
Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
36. Heinrich Tessenow. Dalcroze Institute, 1911-12, Hellerau, a
77
dance performance, with a set by Adolphe Appia. Photo

Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, Geneva. CID.
37. Peter Behrens, AEG Pavilion, Shipbuilding Exposition,
1908, Berlin. DACS 2002.
38. Peter Behrens. Design for the cover of an AEG prospectus,
1910. DACS 2002.
39. Peter Behrens. AEG Turbine Factory, 19089, Berlin.
Photo Achim Bednorz, Cologne. DACS 2002.
40. Peter Behrens. AEG Turbine Factory, 19089, Berlin, detail
of rocker. Photo Achim Bednorz, Cologne. DACS 2002.
41. Peter Behrens. AEG Turbine Factory, 19089, Berlin, corner
buttress. Photo Achim Bednorz, Cologne. DACS 2002.
42. Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer. Fagus Factory, 191112,
Alfeld an der Leine. AKG London/photo Erik Bohr.
43. Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer. Fagus Factory, 191112,
Alfeld an Leine, entrance lobby. Photo Achim Bednorz,
Cologne.
44. Adolf Loos. Krntner Bar, 1907, Vienna. AKG
London/photo Erich Lessing. DACS 2002.
45. Adolf Loos. The Looshaus, 190911, Michaelerplatz,
Vienna. Adolf Loos Archiv, Grasche Sammlung Albertina,
Vienna. DACS 2002.
46. Adolf Loos. Chest of drawers, c.1900. Courtesy Board of
Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. DACS
2002.
47. Adolf Loos. Scheu House, 1912, Vienna. Adolf Loos Archiv,
Grasche Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. DACS 2002.
48. Adolf Loos. Mller House, 192930, Prague. Drawing from
M. Risselada (ed.), Raumplan versus Plan Libre (Delft
University Press, 1987), p. 79. DACS 2002.
49. Adolf Loos. Moller House, 19278, Vienna, plan and
section from M. Risselada (ed.) Raumplan versus Plan Libre
(Delft University Press, 1987), p. 35, g. 25. DACS 2002.
50. Adolf Loos. Rufer House, 1922, diagrammatic elevations,
from P. Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (Princeton Architectural Press,
1994; original edition Editions Macula, Paris), p. 68, g. 49a.
DACS 2002.
51. Adolf Loos. Scheu House, 1912, Vienna. Adolf Loos Archiv,
Grasche Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. DACS 2002.
52. Adolf Loos. Mller House, 192930, Prague. Adolf Loos
Archiv, Grasche Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. DACS
2002.
53. Antonio SantElia. Power Station, 1914. Consuelo Accetti
Collection, Milan.
54. Oskar Kokoschka. Murderer, Hope of Women, 1909.
Poster. DACS 2002.
55. Bruno Taut. Haus des Himmels, 1919, from Frhlicht. RIBA
Library, London. 56 Bruno Taut. Snow, Ice, Glass, from Alpine
Architektur (1919). RIBA Library, London.
57. Bruno Taut. Glass Pavilion, Werkbund Exhibition, 1914,
Cologne. Werkbundarchiv, Museum der Dinge, Berlin.
58. Hans Poelzig. Grosses Schausspielhaus, 1919, Berlin
(demolished c.1980). Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
59. Wassili Luckhardt. Project for a Peoples Theatre, 1921,
external view, plan and section. Stiftung Archiv der Akademie
der Knste, Sammlung Baukunst, Berlin.
60. Otto Bartning. Sternkirche, 1922. Technisches Universitt
Darmstadt.
278 list of illustrations
61. Rudolf Steiner. Goetheanum, 19248, Dornach. Photo

Achim Bednorz, Cologne. DACS 2002.
62. Hermann Finsterlin. Traum aus Glas, 1920. Watercolour,
19 29 cm. Graphische Sammlung (inv. GL1277), Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart.
63. Wenzel Hablik. Exhibition Building, 1920. Watercolour.
Wenzel Hablik Museum, Itzehoe.
64. Jem Golyscheff. Little Houses with Illuminated Roofs,
1920.
65. Umberto Boccioni. Dynamism of a Speeding Horse +
Houses. 191415. Gouache and oil on wood and cardboard, with
collage, copper and iron sheet, tin coating 112.9 115 cm. The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice/photo David Heald.
66. Antonio SantElia. Modern Building, 1913. Museo Civico,
Como.
67. Joz` e Plec`nik. A page from the Rome sketchbook: a
monument to Victor Emmanuel, 1899. Architectural Museum,
Ljubljana.
68. Antonio SantElia. La Citt Nuova, 1914. Museo Civico,
Como.
69. Otto Wagner. Project from the Ferdinandsbrcke, 1905,
Vienna.
70. Emil Hoppe. Sketch for a tower, 1902.
71. Umberto Boccioni. Table+Bottle+Houses, 1912.
Axonometric drawing. Private Collection.
72. Piet Mondrian. Composition I with Red, Yellow and Blue,
1921. 103 100 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague/ 2002
Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o Beeldrecht, Amsterdam,
Holland and DACS, London.
73. Vilmos Huszar. Spatial Colour Composition for a Stairwell,
1918. From Levende Kunst, 2 (1919), p. 60. DACS 2002.
74. Jan Wils. De Dubbele Sleutel, 1918. Wils Archive (inv. 1711),
Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam.
75. Theo van Doesburg and Hans Vogel. Studies for Purely
Architectural Sculpture Resulting from Ground Plan, 1921.
Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, Rijswijk
(Amsterdam)/photo Kim Koster. DACS 2002.
76. Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis Van Eesteren.
Axonometric drawing of Htel Particulier, 1923. Collection Van
Eesteren-Fluck en Van Lohuizen-Foundation, The
Hague/photo Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam.
DACS 2002.
77. Theo van Doesburg. Counter-construction (Construction
in Space-Time II), 1923. Gouache, ink and pencil on paper,
46 39.7 cm Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (inv. 527), Madrid.
DACS 2002.
78. J. J. P. Oud. Social Housing, 19247, Hook of Holland.
RIBA Photographs Collection, London. DACS 2002.
79. Johannes Brinkman and Leendert Cornelis van der Vlugt.
Sonneveld House, 1928. Netherlands Photo Archive
(Collection Jan Kamman)/Netherlands Architecture Institute,
Rotterdam.
80. Nikolai Ladovsky. Design for a Commune, 1920.
81. Kasimir Malevich. Arkhitekton, 1924.
82. Vladimir Tatlin. Monument to the Third International,
191920. Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet
Studies, London.
83. Alexander Rodchenko. Drawing of a chess table, 1925.

Rodchenko Archiv, Moscow. DACS 2002.
84. Lyubov Popova. Set for Meyerhold s Bio-mechanical
Theatre, 1922.
85. Alexander and Viktor Vesnin. Competition Design for the
Moscow Headquarters of the Leningrad Pravda, 1924.
DACS 2002.
86. Moisei Ginsburg. Narkomfin Housing, 1928-9, Moscow.
87. Konstantin Melnikov. The USSR Pavilion, Exposition des
Arts Decoratifs, 1925, Paris.
88. Ivan Leonidov. The Lenin Institute of Librarianship, 1927.
From A. Kopp, Architecture et Urbanism SovietiquesdesAnnees
Vingt. Ville et Revolution (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1967),
p. 199.
89. Boris lofan. Palace of the Soviets, 1931-3. Photo Novosti
(London).
90. Jeanneret/Le Corbusier. Still Life, 1919. Fondation Le
Corbusier (FLC 304), Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2002.
91. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Pavilion de L'Esprit
Nouveau at the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, 1925, Paris.
Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2002.
92. Auguste Perret. Musee des Travaux Publics, 1936-46, Paris.
L'Institut Francais d'Architecture, Paris.
93. Le Corbusier. Dom-ino Frame, 1914. Fondation Le
Corbusier (FLC 19209), Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2002.
94. Le Corbusier. Citrohan House, 1925-7,
Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart. Fondation Le Corbusier
(Li(2)4o), Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London
2OO2.
95. Rob Mallet-Stevens. Project for a Villa, 1924. ADAGP,

Paris and DACS, London 2002.
96. Le Corbusier. Housing, 1928. Pessac. FLC/ADAGP,
97. Le Corbusier. Four House Types, 1929. Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London
2OO2.
98. Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye, 1929-31, Poissy. Photo Jaime

Ardiles-Arce, New \o&J Architectural Digest, New York and
Los Angeles. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London
2002.
99. Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye, 1929-31, Poissy. First floor.

Fondation Le Corbusier ^2(17)35), Paris. FLC/ADAGP,
100. Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye, 1929-31, Poissy. Plans.
Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2002.
101. Le Corbusier. Ville Contemporaine, 1922. Fondation Le
Corbusier (29711), Paris. DACS. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2002.
102. Le Corbusier. Cite de Refuge, 1929-33, Paris. Fondation Le
Corbusier (10907), Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2002.
103. Le Corbusier. Cite de Refuge, 1929-33, Paris. Fondation Le
London 2002.
104. Le Corbusier. Villa de Mandrot, 1931, Pradet. Fondation

Le Corbusier ^2(19)16), Paris. FLC/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2002.
105. Le Corbusier. Radiant Village Cooperatif, 1934-8.
Fondation Le Corbusier ^3(20)61), Paris. FLC/ADAGP,
106. Mies van der Rohe. German Pavilion, International
Exposition, 1929, Barcelona (demolished, rebuilt 1986). Photo
Eloi Bonjoch, Barcelona. DACS 2002.
107. Lyonel Feininger. Cover of the 'Bauhaus Manifesto', 1919.
Woodcut, black ink on green wove paper, 30.2 x 18.6 cm.
Courtesy of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University
Art Museums, Gift of Mrs Lyonel Feininger/photo Rick
Stafford Harvard University. DACS 2002.
108. Marianne Brandt. Ceiling light, 1927. Bauhaus Archiv,
Museum fur Gestaltung, Berlin. VG Bild Kunst, Bonn.
109. and no Walter Gropius. Bauhaus Building, 1926, Dessau.
Photo AKG (London).
in. Otto Haesler and Walter Gropius. Dammerstock Estate,
1927^8, Karlsruhe, plan.
112. Walter Gropius. Apartment Block, 1928, Siemensstadt,
Berlin. Photo Achim Bednorz, Cologne.
113. Housing, 1925-7, Dusseldorf. Photo Ullstein Bild,
Berlin/Photo Hedda Walther, 1937.
114 and 115. Hans Scharoun. Schminke House, 1933, Lobau.
Photos Achim Bednorz, Cologne.
116. Mies van der Rohe. Riehl House, 1907, Berlin
(Neubabelsberg, Potsdam). Photograph Courtesy The Mies
van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. DACS 2002.
117. Mies van der Rohe. Plans, Brick Country House, 1924,
Concrete Country House, 1923, and Lessing House, 1923.
Drawings by Alan Colquhoun. DACS 2002.
118. Mies van der Rohe. Wolf House, 1925-7, Guben
(demolished). Photograph courtesy The Mies van der Rohe
Archive, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. .
119. Mies van der Rohe. Tugendhat House, 1928-30, Brno,
Czech Republic. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
120. Mies van der Rohe. Tugendhat House, 1928-30, Brno,
Czech Republic. RIBA Photographs Collection, London.
DACS 2002.
121. Mies van der Rohe. Upper and lower-floor plans,
Tugendhat House, 1928-30, Brno, Czech Republic. Both ink
on illustration board, 76.5 x 102 cm. The Mies van der Rohe
Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the
Architect. 2001 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
DACS 2002.
122. Mies van der Rohe. Site and floor plan, German Pavilion,
International Exposition, 1929, Barcelona (demolished, rebuilt
1986). From I. de Sola-Morales, C. Cirici, and F. Ramos, Mies
van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo
Gili, 1993), p. 29, fig. 53.
123. Mies van der Rohe. Hubbe House, 1935, Magdeburg.
Perspective of living room and terrace with Elbe River. Pencil
on illustration board, 49.2 x 67.4 cm. The Mies van der Rohe
Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the
architect. 2001 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
DACS 2002.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 279
124. Mies van der Rohe. Hubbe House, 1935, Magdeburg. Plan
with furniture placement. Pencil on illustration board,
48 x 67.3 cm. The Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Gift of the architect. 2001 The
Museum of Modern Art, New York. DACS 2002.
125. Mart Stam. Reinterpretation of Mies van der Rohe's
Concrete Office Building of 1922.
126. Carlo Scarpa. Gipsoteca Canoviana, 1956-7, Possagno,
Treviso. Arcaid, London/photo Richard Bryant.
127. Giuseppe Terragni. Casa del Fascio, 1932-6, Como. Photo
Tim Benton, Cambridge.
128. Mario Ridolfi and Ludovico Quaroni. Tiburtino Housing
Estate, 1944-54, Rome. Photo Andrea Jemolo, Rome.
129. Ernesto Rogers, Lodovico Belgiojoso and Enrico
Peressutti (BPR). Office Building, 1958-69, Piazza Meda,
Milan. Photo Archivio Electa, Milan.
130. Giovanni Michelucci. church of S. Giovanni, 1962,
Autostrada del Sole, Florence. Photo AKG (London).
131. Ludovico Quaroni. Model, Quartiere Cepalle Barene di
Giuliano, 1959, Mestre. Fondo Quaroni, Archivicio Storico
Olivetti, Ivrea.
132. Erik Gunnar Asplund. Entrance Pavilion, Industrial Arts
Exhibition, 1930, Stockholm. Arkitekturmuseet,
Stockholm/photo Okand.
133. Sven Backstrom and Lief Reinius. rosta Housing Estate,
1946, Orebro. Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm/photo Max
Plunger.
134. Peter Celsing. Cultural Centre, Culture House, 1965-76,
Stockholm. Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm/photo Thomas
Hjerten.
135. Sigurd Lewerentz. St. Marks Church, 1956-60, Bjorkhaven.
Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm/photo Max Plunger.
136. Alva Aalto. Tuberculosis Sanatorium, 1929-33, Paimio.
Alvar Aalto Foundation/ Alvar Aalto Museum,
Jyvaskyla/photo G. Welin.
137. Alvar Aalto. Site plan, Tuberculosis Sanatorium, 1929-33,
Paimio. Alvar Aalto Foundation/Alvar Aalto Museum,
Jyvaskyla.
138. Alvar Aalto. Villa Mairea, 1937^9, Noormarkku. Alvar
Aalto Foundation/Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyvaskyla/photo
E. Makinen.
139. Alvar Aalto. Villa Mairea, 1937^9, Noormarkku. Groundfloor plan. Alvar Aalto Foundation/Alvar Aalto Museum,
Jyvaskyla.
140. Alvar Aalto. Town Hall, 1949-52, Saynatsalo. Alvar Aalto
Foundation/Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyvaskyla/Photo
M. Kapanen.
141. Alvar Aalto. Vuoksenniska church, 1957^9, Imatra. Aalvar
Aalto Foundation/ Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyvaskyla/photo
M. Kapanen.
142. Pekka Pitkanen. Funeral Chapel, 1967, Turku. Museum of
Finnish Architecture, Helsinki/photo Arvo Salminen.
143. Constant. New Babylon: Group of Sectors, 1959. Collotype
and ink, 57 x 68 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The
Hague/Beeldrecht Amstelveen/ DACS 2002.
144. Le Corbusier. Model, Obus A. Project for Algiers, 1933.
Fondation Le Corbusier (1,1(1)63), Paris. FLC/ADAGP,
280 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
145. Le Corbusier. Obus A Project for Algiers, 1933.

Fondation Le Corbusier (14345), Paris. FLC/ADAGP,
146. Le Corbusier. Obus E Project for Algiers, 1939.
Fondation Le Corbusier (14594) Paris. FLC/ADAGP,
147. Le Corbusier. Capitol, 1956, Chandigarh. Fondation Le
London 2002.
148. Le Corbusier. The Secretariat, 1951-63, with the State
Assembly Building in the foreground, Chandigarh. Photo Alan
Colquhoun.
149. Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and others; consultant Le
Corbusier. Ministery of Education and Public Health,
1936-45, Rio de Janeiro. RIBA Photographs Collection,
London.
150. Liicio Costa. Brasilia Masterplan, 1957. From N. Evenson,
Two Brazilian Capitals (Yale University Press, 1972), fig. 154.
151. Alison and Peter Smithson. Urban Reidentification,
1959152. Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods. Free

University, 1964-79, Berlin.
153. Aldo van Eyck. Orphanage, 1957-60, Amsterdam.
154. Piet Blom andjoop van Stigt. Village of Children, 1962.
155. Kenzo Tange. Tokyo Bay Project, 1960. Kenzo Tange
Associates, Tokyo.
156. Arata Isozaki. Joint Core Stem system, 1960. Arato Isozaki
&, Associates, Tokyo.
157. Archigram. Plug-in City, 1964.
158. Yona Friedman. L'Urbanisme Spatiale, 1960-2.
159. Constant. New Babylon (1959-): view of New Babylonian
Sectors, 1971. Watercolour and pencil on photomontage,
135 x 223 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague/Beeldrecht
Amstelveen/ DACS 2002.
160. Mies van der Rohe. Seagram Building, 1954-8, New York.
161. Pierre Koenig. Case Study House 21,1958, Los Angeles.
Photo Julius Shulman, Los Angeles.
162. Charles and Ray Eames. Case Study House 8,1945-9,
Pacific Palisades. Photo Julius Shulman, Los Angeles.
163. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Lever House, 1951-2, New
York. Photo Angelo Hornack Library, London.
164. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. US Air Force Academy,
1954-62, Colorado Springs. Chicago Historical Society/photo
Hedrich-Blessing.
165. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Union Carbide Building,
1957-60, New York. Esto, Mamaroneck, NY/photo Ezra
Stoller.
166. Eero Saarinen. General Motors Technical Center, 1948-56,
Warren, Michigan. Esto, Mamaroneck, New York/photo
Ezra Stoller.
167. Mies van der Rohe. Preliminary scheme, Illinois Institute
of Technology, 1939, Chicago. Aerial perspective. Pencil, conte
crayon on illustration board, 101.5 x I29-5 cm- The Mies van der
Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of
the Architect. 2001 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
DACS 2002.
168. Mies van der Rohe. Alumni Hall, Illinois Institute of
Technology, 19456. Chicago Historical Society/photo

Hedrich-Blessing.
169. Mies van der Rohe. Seagram Building, 19548, New York.
170. Mies van der Rohe. Seagram Building, 19548, New York.
I-beam mullions from J. Joedicke, Ofce Buildings (London:
Crosby Lockwood & Sons, 1962; r/1968 Penguin Books),
g. 268.
171. Eero Saarinen. TWA Terminal, JFK Airport, 195662,
New York. Esto, Mamaroneck, NY/photo Ezra Stoller.
172. Edward Durrell Stone. US Embassy, 1954, New Delhi,
India. Photo Alan Colquhoun.
173. Louis Kahn. Adler House, 19545, Philadelphia. Plan.
1977 Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum
Commission.
174. Louis Kahn. Jewish Community Center, 19549, Trenton.
Plan. 1977 Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of

Commission.
175. Louis Kahn. Richards Medical Research Laboratories,
University of Pennsylvania, 195765, Philadelphia. Photo Grant
Mudford, Los Angeles.
176. Louis Kahn. Plan, First Unitarian church, 1961, Rochester,
New York. 1977 Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of
Commission.
177. Louis Kahn. National Assembly Building, 196283, Dhaka.
The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva/photo Reha Gunay.
178. Louis Kahn. National Assembly Building, 196283, Dhaka.
1977 Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania
and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
The publisher and author apologize for any errors or omissions
in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these
at the earliest opportunity.
list of illustrations 281
Index
Note: references to illustrations and
captions are in italic. There may also be
textual references on the same pages.
Alto, Alvar 200,207,202,2oj, 20^, 205
Activist literary movement 95
Adams, Henry 43
Addams,Jane5o
Adler House, Philadelphia 248,250
Adler, Dankmar j^, jj, 38,40,41,42
AEG (Allgemeine ElektricitatsGesellschaft) 68
Pavilion, Shipbuilding Exposition,
Berlin 64,65
prospectus 65
Turbine Factory, Berlin56,57,65,66,
67,69,77
AFK (Arbeitsrat fur Kunst) 95-6,99,159
Ahlsen, Eric and Tore 197,198
Albers, Josef 161,162
Albini, Franco 188
Algiers 209,2/0,2/7,212
All Union Society of Proletarian
Architects (VOPRA) 135
Alliance for German Applied Arts 58
Alpine Architektur 97
Altenberg, Peter 74
Amsterdam School 89,109, no
Amsterdam Stock Exchange 24
anarchism 18,61,95
Andersen, Hendrik92~3
Andre, Emile 23
Appia, Adolphe 6j, 64,103
Arbeitsrat fur Kunst seeAFK
Archigram group 225,226
Architectura et Amicitia group 24
Architectural League of America,
Chicago 51,52
Architekton72j
Arp, Hans 160
Art Education Movement 58
Art Nouveau 13-33: $^tf/$0Jugendstil
in Austria 26-32
in Belgium 18-21,25
in France 16-18,21-3
282
in Germany 32-3
in Holland 24
in Spain 24-6
Art Nouveau gallery, U 22
Arts and Crafts 13-14,15,19-20,50,51,
58,62
Arvatov, Boris 125
Ashbee, Charles Robert 28,29
ASNOVA (Association of New
Architects) 122,127^8
Asplund, Erik Gunnar 194,795
Association for Organic Architecture
186
Astengo, Giovanni 186-7
Athens Charter 218-19,229
Atwood, Charles B. jp, 45
Auditorium Building, Chicago j^, jj, 38,
39,4i
Austria
Academy of Fine Arts
(Wagnerschule) 104-5
Art Nouveau in 26-32
Avenarius, Ferdinand 58
axonometry777,118
Backstrom, Sven 796,197
Balla, Giacomo 100
Banham, Reyner 161
Barcelona International Exposition
(1929) 75<?, 759,176,777
Bartning, Otto 95,166
Baudelaire, Charles 16
Bauer, Catherine 231,232
Bauhaus 96,160-3, f^4
Manifesto 160,767
Baumann, Paul 194
Bayer, Herbert 162
Bazel,K.PC.2 4
Behne, Adolf 68,89,93,95,159-60,166,
169,253
Behrens, Peter 32,56,57,58,62,64-7,69,
76>77>I37
Belgiojoso, Lodovico 188
Belgium
Art Nouveau in 18-21,25
Arts and Crafts movement 19-20

Bellamy, Edward 49
Belluschi, Pietro 239
Bennett, E. H. 46,48,49
Bentsen, Ivar 194
Berenguer, Francesc 25
Berg, Max 165
Bergson, Henri 99
Berlage, Hendrick Petrus 24,25,81, no,
165,180
Berlin Free University 220
Bernhard, Karl 65
Bezard, Norbert 155
Biedermeier 29-30
Bing, Siegfried (Samuel) 22
Bio-Mechanical Theatre 726
Blaue Reiter group 87^8
Blom,Piet222
Blomstedt, Aulis 205
Boccioni, Umberto 100,707,103,105,
706,107, in
Bogdanov (Alexandr Malinovsky) 120
Bois, Yve-Alain in
Bosselt, Rudolf 59
Botticher, Karl 17
BPR (Belgiojoso, Peressutti, Rogers)
188,189
Bracquemond, Felix 15,17
Brandt, Marianne i6j
Brasilia 213,214,216,277
Breuer, Marcel 126,162
Brick Country House 772,773,174,176
Brinkman, Johannes 118,779
Briicke group 87^-8
Bryggmann, Erik 200,201,205
Bund Heimatschutz58
Burgerweeshuis Orphanage,
Amsterdam 220,227
Burnham, Daniel 37,38,39,43,44,45,48,
49
Burnham and Co. J9,46,47
Caccia-Dominioni, Luigi 188

Cacciari, Massimo 76
Camini, Aldo see van Doesburg, Theo
Candilis, Georges 219,220

Carpenter Center, Harvard iji
Carra, Carlo 100
Casa del Fascio, Como 184,185
Casa Vicens 25
Case Study House Program, Los
Angeles 233-7
House 212j6
Castel Beranger, Paris 23
Celsing, Peter 198,199
ceramics 77
Chambless, Edgar 209
Chambon, Alban 21
Chandigarh 213,214,215,216-17
Chapel of the Colonia Giiell 26
Chicago School 36-43
Chicago 35-55
City Beautiful movement 46-9
city plan 46,48,49
social reform 49-51
World's Columbian Exposition 43-6,
49
Chtchegloff, Ivan see Ivain, Gilles

churches 199-200
CIAM (Congres Internationaux
d'Architecture Moderne) 217-18
Cingria-Vaneyre, Alexandre 156
Cite de Refuge, Paris /jj, 154
Citrohan House 143-4,145,146,236-7
Citta Nuova, La 103,104
City Beautiful movement 46-9
classicism
Germany 64,65
versus organicism 35-55
COBRA group 227
Colomina, Beatrix 82
Comite central des beaux-arts appliques
a 1'industrie 14
Composition i with Red, Yellow and
Blue 112
Comte, Auguste 16
Concrete Country House 162,772,173,174
Concrete Office Building 180
Congres Internationaux d'Architecture
Moderne see CIAM
Congress of International Progressive
Artists, Diisseldorf 160
Constant (Nieuwenhuys, Victor E.) 2o#,
209,226,227,22#, 229
Constructivism 121,126-7,r^0
in Finland 204-7
First Working Group 122,123,124-5,
128,180
and Rationalism 122-6
Constructivist Congress, Weimar 160
contextualism 187-9
Conway Building, Chicago 46,47
Cook, Peter 225
Coonley House, Riverside 53,5^,55

corporate office building 237-42
corporatism, critique of 245-6
Costa, Lucio 214,2/6,2/7,239
Counter-constructions /o#, 7/7,118
Craig, Gordon 103
Cubism 100
Cuijpers, Petrus Josephus Herbertus 24
Culture House complex, Stockholm 198
Cuno House, Hagen-Eppenhausen 65
Dada 98-9
Dalcroze Institute, Hellerau 62,6j
Daly, Cesar-Denis 15
Dammerstock Estate, Karlsruhe 165,166
Darmstadt artists' colony 64
Dawes Plan 163
de Carlo, Giancarlo 188-9
De Chirico, Giorgio 183
DeDubbeleSleutel//^
De Stijl 109-18,139
Debord, Guy 227
decorative arts 15,19,27,113,138
Dermee, Paul 138
Destree, Jules 18-19
Deutscher Werkbund 13-14,53,58-9,137
Diamond Workers' Building,
Amsterdam 24
Dichter, Ernst 246
Domenech i Montaner, Lluis 24-5
Dom-ino frame 143,144,149
Doom Group see Team X
Dow, Arthur Wesley 51
Dresden Technische Hochschule 58
Dresdner Werkstatte 58
Drew, Jane 214
Dubois, Max 138,143
Durerbund 58
Diisseldorf School 65
Dynamism of a Speeding Horse +
Houses /o/
42 Exposition see EUR
Eames House 236-7
Eames, Charles 234,235-6,2J7
Eames, Ray 234,236,2J7
Edelman, John H. 41,232
Effort Moderne gallery, L' 115
Ehrenburg, Ilya 128
Einfuhlung (empathy) 88
Eisler,Max32
Eliot, Charles 46,49
Eliot, Hans 195-6
Ellwood, Craig 235
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 41
Endell, August 32
Entenza, John 234-6
Entenza House 235-6
Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse 28

Esprit Nouveau 138-40,141,156
EUR, Rome (42 Exposition, 1942) 185
Exhibition Building 97
Exhibition for Unknown Architects
96-8
Exhibition of Contemporary
Architecture, Moscow (1927) 132
Exhibition of Soviet Art (1922) 160
Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, Paris
(1925) 72J, 7J7, 141
Expressionism 87^99
and architecture 89-95
and Dada 98-9
and politics 95-6
Fagus Factory 69-71
Fascism 183,184,185
Feininger, Lyonel 767
Fiedler, Conrad 59,88
Figini, Luigi 184
Finch, Willy 19
fine arts movement 19,121,123-4
Finland, Modern Movement in 200-7
Finsterlin, Hermann 97
First Unitarian Church, Rochester 257,
252
Fischer, Theodor 58,137
Forbat, Fred 166
France, Art Nouveau in 16-18,21-3
Frederick, Christine 165
Free Workshops see Vkhutemas
Friedman, Yona 226,227
Frosterus, Sigurd 200
Friilicht 90,98
Fry, Maxwell 214
Fuchs, Georg 64
Fuller, Richard Buckminster 234,249-50
functionalism 169-70
furniture 18,24, j2,33,50,78-9
Futurism 87,99-107
and architecture 100-7
and Cubism 100
G (G: Material zur Elementaren
Gestaltung) 173
Galle, Emile 15,23
Gan, Alexei 121,123,124
Gardella, Ignazio 189
Garden City, Hohensalza 62
Garden City movement 61-2,90-1,149,
206,231
Gaudi i Cornet, Antoni 25,26
Geddes, Patrick 231-2
Gemeinschaft'tf, 159
General Motors Technical Center,
Michigan 2^0,241
George, Henry 49
INDEX 283
Germany 57,69,138
Art Nouveau in 32-3
Deutscher Werkbund 13-14,53,58-9,
137
social housing 163-9
Gesellschaftsj, 159
Gesfa!fS9
Giedion, Siegfried 36,149,213,214,217,
248
Gillman, Charlotte Perkins 50
Ginsburg, Moisei 127,129, /jo, 133
Gipsoteca Canoviana, Possagno /&, 183,
189
Glaserne Kette group 98
Glass Pavillion, Werkbund Exhibition,
Cologne 91,92
Goetheanum, Dornach 95,96
Golosov, Ilya 127,131
Golyscheff, Jefim 98,99
Graf, Werner 173
Great Exhibition of Industry of all
Nations (1851) 14
Gregotti, Vittorio 187
Gropius, Walter 60,165,166,767,247
and AFK 89,95,96
and Bauhaus 160-3,7^> J8i
Fagus Factory 68-71
Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin 93
Gruppo 7:184-5
Gruppo Toscana 184
Gubler, Jacques 180
Guerin, Jules 48, 49
Guild of Handicraft, London 28
Guimard, Hector 22
Gullichsen, Maire 202
Guevrekian, Gabriel 144
Hablik,Wenzel97
Haesler, Otto 165,166
Hamilton, Richard 246
Hansen, Per Albin 195
Haring, Hugo 166,170
Harrison, Wallace 239
Hartlaub, Gustav 159
Haus des Himmels 90
Hausmann, Raoul p#, 99
Havana Cigar Shop 79
Hebrard, Ernst 92-3
Heimatschutz movement 169
Hellerau 62-4
Henard, Eugene 149
Hertzberger, Herman 222
Higher State Artistic and Technical
Workshops see Vkhutemas
Highland Parkj2,5j
Hilberseimer, Ludwig 127
Hildebrand, Adolf 88
Hill House 29
Hiller, Kurt 95
Hitchcock, Henry Russell 36,231
Hoffmann, E.T. A. 82
Hoffmann, Josef 28-9, jo, j7, 32,58,73,
78,81,115
Holabird, William 38-9
Holland 24,122
avant-garde in 109-20
Homo Ludens 225-9
Hoppe, Emil 106
Horta, Victor 72, 7j, 20,21
Hotel Solvay 20-1
Hotel Van Eetvelde, Brussels 72, /j, 20,
21,24,25
House for an Art Lover 29, jo, j2
housing 24,217
in America 231-2,233-7
Case Study House Program 233-7
Darmstadt 29, jo
Diisseldorf/d#
in England 79,81
in Finland 206-7
in France 81
in Germany 163-9
Le Corbusier 209-12
Loos 79-84
in Sweden 194,195-6
Howe, George 212-13,248
Hubbe House 177, ij8
Hull House 50,51,53
Hiilsenbeck, Richard 98-9
Hulten, Pontius 198
Humbert de Romans concert hall, Paris
Jacobsen, Arne 194

Jeanneret, Charles Edouard see Le
Corbusier
Jeanneret, Pierre 141,142,155,214
Jenney, William Le Baron 38
Jewish Community Center, Trenton
23
Hunt, Myron 51
Huszar, Vilmos no, in, //j, 114
Ladovsky, Nikolai 121,722

Lagardelle, Hubert 154
Lamour, Philippe 154
Langbehn, Julius 57
Laugier, Abbe Marc-Antoine 37
Lauweriks, J. L. M. 24,64
Le Corbusier jo, 137^57,223
Algiers project 209,270,277,212
Athens Charter 218
brise-soleil (sun-breakers) 210,277,
Idealism 41,179-81
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
242,243
INA Casa (Institute of Home
Insurance)186,188
individualism 245-6
industrial art 14-15,19,121,123-4
Industrial Arts Exhibition, Stockholm
(1930) 194,195
industrial capitalism 14
Industrial Revolution 13,14-15
Inkhuk (Moscow Institute of Artistic
culture) 121-2
lofan, Boris 134,135
Isozaki, Arata 223,225
Italy 184-5,186
Itten, Johannes 160-1
Ivain, Gilles (Chtchegloff, Ivan) 228
Jackson Park, Chicago 43-4,45
Court of Honor 44,45,46
284 INDEX
249,25J
JFK Airport, New York 247
Johnson, Philip 231
Joint Core Stem system 223,225
Jones, Owen 14
Josic, Alexis 219,220
Jourdain, Francis 141
Jugendstil 28,32-3,64,65,69,70,89
Kahn, Louis 46,248-54,248,249,250,
2J/, 252, 25J
Kandinsky, Wassily in
Kant, Immanuel59
Karntner Bar, Vienna 72,7j, 79
Kepes, Georgy 246
Kikutake, Kiyonori 223,225
Kimball, Fiske 36,46
Klerk, Michel de no
Klimt, Gustav 29
Koenig, Pierre 235,236
Kokoschka,OskarS
Kraus, Karl 74,76
Kromhaut, W. 24
Kropotkin, Pyotr 95
Kultury)
Kunsfwo/ten 89
216
Chandigarh 213,27^, 275,216-7
and L'Esprit Nouveau 138-9
'Five Points of a New Architecture'
146-9
housing 7jd, 146,147,148,755,209-12
Maison Citrohan 143-4,7^5,146,
236-7
objet-type 214
and Pavilion de L'Esprit Nouveau
140-1,7^2
pilotis 750,757,216
public buildings 747,752,153-4
Regional Syndicalism 154-7
and reinforced-concrete frame 142-6
Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles 211-12,

219,253
urbanism 209-12
Le Ricolais, Robert 249-50
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 131
Leger, Fernand 213
L'Enfant, Pierre Charles 46
Lenin 126-7
Lenin Institute of Librarianship 132
Leonidov, Ivan 131, 7j2,133
Les XX painters' group 19
Lessing House 772, 7/j, 174
Lettrist International 228
Lever House, New York 238,239
Lewerentz, Sigurd 792, /pj, /pp, 200
Libera, Adalberto 184
Libre Esthetique 19,21,33
Lichtwark, Alfred 58
Lissitzky, El 123,128,160,173,179-80
Little Houses with Illuminated Roofs 98
London Town Planning conference
(1910)49
Loos, Adolf 73-85,140-1
critical reception 84-5
decorum 75-7
furniture 78
housing 79-84
interiors 77^-9
Raumplan 80,81,83-4
Looshaus, Vienna 76,77
Lorch, Emil5i
Luckhardt, Hans 169-70
Luckhardt, Wassili 94,95,169-70
Lunacharski, Commisar 121
Lur$at, Andre 144
Lutyens, Edwin 51
machine craft 53,59-61
Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 29, jo, 32
Magistretti, Ludovico 190
Maison Citrohan 143-4,145,146,236-7
Maison Coilliot 22,23
Maison du Peuple, Brussels 19,21,24
Maki, Fumihiko 223
Malevich, Kasimir 122,123
Malinovsky, Alexandr see Bogdanov
Mallet-Stevens, Robert 144,145,146
Mamontov, Sawa 120
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 99-100,
/07,103
Markelius, Sven 194
Marshall Field Wholesale Store38
materialism 179-81
Matter, Herbert 234
Maus, Octave 19
May, Ernst 133,165,166-7
Mayer, Albert 213-14
McKim, Charles 46
Mebes, Paul 62,193

Megastructure movement 222,223,
226-9,233
Melnikov, Konstantin 129,7j7,132
Mendelsohn, Erich 169-70
Mentessi, Giuseppe 105
Metabolists 223,226
Meyer, Adolf 69,70
Meyer, Erna 165
Meyer, Hannes 133,180-1
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 126
Michelucci, Giovanni 189
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig &, 170-9
in America 2jo, 239,242-3,2^2,247,
244,245* 253
in Germany 170-9
Mikkola, Kirmo 206
Mills, C.Wright 246
Milyutin, Nikolai 129,133
Mock, Elizabeth 213
Modern Movement 74
in Brazil 214
CIAM 217^18
in Finland 200-7
in Germany 69
in Sweden 195-200
Modernisme, Spain 24-6
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 160-1
Moller House, Vienna 81, &, 83
MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) 231,
233
Monadnock Building 39
Mondrian, Piet no, in, 772,113
Monument to the Third International
124
Moreira, Jorge 214
Morris, William 14,19,50,59,120
Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner 14
Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture
(Inkhuk) 121-2
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture 121
Moser, Karl 180
Moser, Kolo 28
Muche, Georg 162
Muller House, Prague &>, 81,83,84
Mumford, Lewis 36,231,232
Munich Secession 64
Muratori, Saverio 188
Musee des Travaux Publics, Paris 143
Museum Cafe, Vienna 79
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 51
Muthesius, Hermann 58,59-61,62,68,
75
Muzio, Giovanni 183-4
Nancy School 23
Narkofim Housing, Moscow 129,7jo
National Assembly Building, Dhaka 251,

252,253
Naturalism 16
Naumann, Friedrich 58
Neoclassicism, in Finland 200
Neoplasticism in, 120,122
Neorealism 186-7
Neo-Syndicalism 154-7
Neue Sachlichkeit see New Objectivity
Neutra, Richard 234,235
New Academy (Vkhutemas studio) 131
New Babylon 2o<9,209,226,227,22#, 229
New Deal 232
New Empiricism 196-7
New Monumentality 212-13,218,248
New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)
159,165,169
in Finland 200-1
Nieuwe Sachlichkeit 120
in Sweden 194
Newby, Frank 227
Niemeyer, Oscar 214,276,223,239
Nieuwenhuys, Victor E. see Constant
Novecento 183-4
Novembergruppe 96
Nowicki, Matthew 214
Nuove Tendenze 101,103
objet-type 140,7^7,142,146
Obmas (United Workshops of the Left)

121
Obrist, Hermann 32
Okhitovitch, Mikhail 129
Olbrich, Joseph Maria 28,29, jo, 58
Olmsted, Frederick Law 43,44,45
organicism 189-90
in Finland 201-4
versus classicism 35-55
Organization for Proletarian Culture
(Proletkult) 120,127
ornament 17^-18,42,75,165
OSA (Union of Contemporary
Architects) 127^-9,133
Osthaus, Karl Ernst 60
Otlet, Paul 92-3
Oud, J. J. P. no, 112-13, H4 H8> JI9-> I2o,
165
Ouspensky, P. D. 122
Owings, Nathaniel 237
Ozenfant, Amedee 138,139
Pagano, Giuseppe 184,185
Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatarium 200,
2O7, 2O2
Palace of Culture 132-3

Palace of the Soviets (lofan) 134,135
Palais Stoclet, Brussels 29, jo, 31
Paris Metro 23
INDEX 285
Parsons, Talcott 246

Parti Ouvrier Beige (POB) 18-19
Pask, Gordon 227
Passanti, Francesco 148
Passerelli brothers 190
Paul, Bruno 32-3,73,78,137
People's Theatre 93,94,95
Peressutti, Enrico 188
Perkins, D wight H. 51
Perret, Auguste 137,142,143
Persico, Edoardo 184
Petersen, Carl 194
Piacentini, Marcello 184,185
Piazza Meda office building, Milan 188
Picard, Edmund 19
Piccinato, Luigi 184
Pietila, Reima 205
pilotis 148, 750, 152,2/6,228,239
Pitkanen, Pekka 205,206
Plecnik,Joze83,io2
Plug-in City 225,226
POB (Parti Ouvrier Beige) 18-19
Poelzig, Hans 93
Poincare, Henri 169
Pollini, Gino 184
Popova, Lyubov 125,126
Positivism 16
Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna 27,28
Prairie School 36,51-5
Prampolini, Enrico 100
Pravda 127,128
prefabrication 197,232,234-5
Price, Cedric 226,227
production art see industrial art
Proletarian Council of Intellectual
Workers 95
Proletkult (Organization for Proletarian
Culture) 121,127
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 154
Prouve, Jean 220
Quaroni, Ludovico 186, i8j, 190,191
Quartiere Cepalle Barene di S. Giuliano,
Mestre 190,797
Radiant Village Cooperatif 155,756
Rapson, Ralph 235
Rationalism 121,122,169-70,189-90
and Constructivism 122-6
in Finland 200,204-7
in Italy 184-5,186
Raumplan 81
Regional Syndicalism see NeoSyndicalism
regionalism 201-4
Reidy, Affonso 214
Reinius, Lief 796,197
Reliance Building, Chicago jp
286
Re veil, Viljo 205

Richards Medical Research
Laboratories, University of
Pennsylvania 250,251
Richardson, Henry Hobson 38,53
Richter, Hans 160,172-3
Ridolfi, Mario i86,7<?7
Riegl, Alois 27
Riehl House, Berlin 772,7/j
Riemerschmid, Richard j2,33,62,73
Rienhardt, Max 93
Riesman, David 245-6
Rietveld, Gerrit no, 118
Rio de Janeiro 209,214,276,239
Robie House, Chicago 53,5^,55
Roche, Martin 38-9
Rodchenko, Alexandr 121,123,725
Rogers, Ernesto 187,188
Roh, Franz 159
Romanticism 57,82,92,179
Rookery Building, Chicago j/, 38
Root, John Wellborn j/, 38,39,45
Rosenberg, Leonce 115
Roth, Emil 179-80
Rousseau, Eugene 15,77
Riiegg, Arthur 142
Rufer House &?, 83
Rundbogenstil 38
Ruskin,Johni4
Russia 120-35
Russolo, Luigi 100
Ruusuvuori, Aarno 205
S. Giovanni, Florence 189
Saarinen, Eero 234,235-6,239,2^0,247,
242,2^7
Saarinen, Eliel 200,236,239
Sagrada Familia 25,26
St Augustine 179
Salons d'Automne 144,149
Samona, Giuseppe 190
Sant'Elia, Antonio 86,87,101,702,103,
70^, 105-7
Sauvage, Henri 23,103
Saynatsalo Town Hall 20^
Scarpa, Carlo /&, 7^,189
Scharoun, Hans 166,770,777
Scheerbart, Paul 92
Scheu House, Vienna 79,8j
Schindler, Rudolph 234
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 61
Schmidt, Hans 179-80
Schmidt, Karl 58
Schminke House, Lobau 770,777
Schoenmaeker, M. J. H. in
School of Arts and Crafts, Diisseldorf 64
School of Sacre Coeur, Paris 22
Schroeder House, Utrecht 118
INDEX
Schultze-Naumburg, Paul 58,169,193

Schumacher, Fritz 58-9,165
Schiitte-Lihotzky, Crete 165
Schuyler, Montgomery 35-6,55
Scott, M. H. Baillie 29,78,81
Seagram Building, New York 244,245,
230,231
Semenov, V. N. 133
Semper, Gottfried 17
Senate Park Commission 46
Serrurier-Bovy, Gustave 19-20
Sert, Josep Luis 213,248
Severini, Gino 100
Shaw, Howard Van Doren 51
Shipbuilding Exposition, Berlin 64,65
Shklovsky, Viktor 132
Sichtbarkeit (pure visibility) 88
Simmel, Georg 66,245
Sitte, Camillo 28,62
Situationist International 227^8
Skidmore, Louis 237
Small, Albion 49-50
Smithson, Alison and Peter 218,279,220,
221-2
Social Realism 135
social reform movement 195-6
Socialist Realism 132
SOM (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill)
237, 238, 2J9, 2^0, 2^7, 242, 245, 247
Sonck, Lars 200

Sonneveld House, Rotterdam 118,779
Sorel, Georges 99,154
SoriayMatai29
Soriano, Raphael 235
space 21,30,31,53,63,64,78,79,81,83,
101,118,149,174
Spain
Art Nouveau in 24-6
Barcelona International Exposition
75^,759,176,777
Spatial Colour composition for a
Stairwell 77j
Spencer, Robert C. 51
St Mark s Church, Biorkhaven 792,79j,
799
Stam, Mart 126,167-8,179,7<?o

Stein, Clarence 231
Steiner, Rudolf 95,96
Stepanova, Varvara 121,123,125
Sternkirche project 95
Still Life (Le Corbusier) 7^7
Stone, Edward Durrell2^7
Stonorov, Oskar 231,232, 248
Strengell, Gustav 200
Stroganov School of Industrial Design
121
structural rationalism 15
Structuralism 197,222
Stiibben, Joseph 49
Sturm, DerS?, 88,89,92,99
Sturm gallery, Berlin 87,88
Sullivan, Louis j^,jj, 38,39,40,41,42,
43>5i
Sweden 194-200
Swedenborg, Emanuel 16
Swedish National Planning Board 197^8
Symbolism 16
Systems theory 220-2
Table + Bottle + Houses 106
Tacoma Building 38-9
Tafuri, Manfredo 190
Talbot, Marion 50
Tallmadge, Thomas 36
Tange, Kenzo 223, 224, 225
Tassel, Emile 20
Tatlin, Vladimir 124
Taut, Bruno 60, 82, 89-95, J66
Taut, Max 90
Taylor, Frederick Winslow 50
Team X 218-19, 233, 253
'Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Painting' 100
Terragni, Giuseppe 184, 185
Tessenow, Heinrich 61-4, 137, 193
Tiburtino Housing Estate 186, 187
Tokyo Bay Project 223, 224, 225
Tonnies, Ferdinand 57
Transcendentalism 41, 49
Traum aus Glas 97
Trotsky, Leon 127
Tugendhat House 172, 775, 776, 177
Turku Funerary Chapel 205, 206
Typmerung (typification) 59-61, 71
Tzara, Tristan 160
Union Carbide Building, New York 241
Union centrale des arts decoratifs
(previously Union centrale des
beaux-arts appliques a 1'industrie)
H
Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles 211-12,
219,253
United Workshops of the Left (Obmas)
121
University of Chicago 49-50
urbanism 92, 129, 149, 152, 190-1, 217
Le Corbusier and 209-12
Urbanisme Spatiale 227

US Air Force Academy, Colorado
Springs 240,247
US Embassy, New Delhi 247
Valori Plastici movement 183
van Bodegraven, Wim 222
Van de Velde, Henry 7^, 79,21,22,60,68,
74,81
Van der Leek, Bart no, in, 112,114
Van der Vlugt, Leendert Cornells 118,
779
van Doesburg, Theo (pseudonym: Aldo
Camini) no, in, 113,114-18,120,
160,169
Counter-constructions 70<9,777,118
cubic compositions 775,776
Van Eesteren, Cornelis 115,776
Van Eyck, Aldo 218,220,227
Van Nelle Factory, Rotterdam 118
VanStigt,Joop222
Vandervelde, Emile 18-19
Van't Hoff, Robert no
Vantongerloo, Georges no
Veblen, Thorstein 49
Veillach, Joseph 78
Vereinigten Werkstatten fur Kunst und
Handwerk33,58,62
Verhaeren, Emile 16,19
Vesnin, Alexander 121,127,128
Vesnin, Viktor 128
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts 28
Vienna Secession (Wiener Sezession)
28,33
Vienna Secession Exhibition (1902) 115
Vigano, Vittoriano 190
Viipuri Public Library 200
Villa de Mandrot, Pradet 755
Villa Favre-Jacot, La Chaux-de-Fonds
138
Villa Henny, the Hague 24,25
Villa Jeanneret, La Chaux-de-Fonds 138
Villa Mairea, Noormarkku 202,2oj
Villa Savoye, Poissy 148-9,750,757
Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds 138
Village of Children 222
Ville Contemporaine 149,752,209
Ville Radieuse 152
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel 13,
15,79,81
Vischer, Robert 88
Vkhutemas (Higher State Artistic and
Technical Workshops) 121,125,
131
Vogel, Hans 775
Volk 57,91,159
Volkhaus 91
VOPRA (All Union Society of
Proletarian Architects) 135
Vorkurs 161
Voysey, Charles Annesley 29
Vuoksenniska Church, Imatra 204,205
Wachsmann, Konrad 249-50

Wagenfeld, Wilhelm 163
Wagner, Martin 165
Wagner, Otto 27,28,76,103,70^, 705
Wagnerschule 104-5
Wainwright Building, St. Louis 39,40,
41,42
Walden, Herwarth 92
Ward Willits House, Highland Parkj2,
53
Washington Park 43-4
Webb, Michael 226,227
Weissenburger, Lucien 2j
Werkbund 64,74,91, p2
Whyte, Iain Boyd 89
Whyte, William H. 245-6
Wiegand House, Berlin 65
Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession)
28
Wiener Werkstatte 28,73
Will-Levaillant, Fran9oise 140
Wils, Jan no, 114, 115
Wittwer, Hans 181
Wolf House, Guben 172,77^, 175
Woods, Shadrach 219,220
World s Columbian Exposition
(Chicago World s Exhibition)
43-6,49
Worringer, William 88-9
Wright, Frank Lloyd 36,51-5,68,234
Wright, Henry 231
Wurster, William 235
Zevi, Bruno 186
Zeilenbau 165
Zivilisation 57,159
Zueblin, Charles 49
INDEX 287

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Modern Architecture

Oxford History of Art

Alan Colquhoun was born in 1921 and

University. His other publications

Oxford History of Art

Native North American

Oxford History of Art

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Art Nouveau 18901910

Organicism versus Classicism: Chicago 18901910

Culture and Industry: Germany 190714

The Urn and the Chamberpot: Adolf Loos 190030

Expressionism and Futurism

The Avant-gardes in Holland and Russia

Return to Order: Le Corbusier and Modern Architecture

Weimar Germany: the Dialectic of the Modern 192033

From Rationalism to Revisionism: Architecture in

Neoclassicism, Organicism, and the Welfare State:

From Le Corbusier to Megastructures:

Pax Americana: Architecture in America 194565

Many people haveknowingly or unknowinglycontributed to the

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The term modern architecture is ambiguous. It can be understood to

must exhibit the cultural totality characteristic of all historical periods.

In 1892 the short-lived but vigorous Art Nouveau movement was

The reform of the industrial arts

not destroyed artisanal traditions in France as thoroughly as the

Viollet-le-Duc and structural rationalism

Art Nouveau in Belgium and France

Underlying formal principles

work of the 1870s and 1880s [2].6 Common to these proto-Art

3 Henry van de Velde

of this theory, which was developed in the context of Greek antiquity, it

In their desire to extend these principles beyond the isolated object,

4 Henry van de Velde

for example, the lawyers Emile Vandervelde and Jules Destrehad

Chambre dArtisan, both characterized by a simplicity and sobriety

Drawing by David Dernie

20 art nouveau 18901910

designed between 1892 and 1895, present an ingenious range of

Paris and Nancy

connotations. The term Art Nouveau had been in circulation in

Photo Filipe Ferr, Paris

22 art nouveau 18901910

Coilliot in Lille (1897) [6], were based on illustrations in Viollets

Dutch Art Nouveau and the work of H. P. Berlage

8 Hendrick Petrus Berlage

The ground floor of the top-l it

nature and by the ornamental riches offered us by the buildings of

work, however protean, seems to have been based on two simple

Austria and Germany: from Jugendstil to classicism

art nouveau 18901910 27

Post Office Savings Bank,

emblem of political and cultural freedom,18 as in Catalonia, Finland,