CHAPTER 20 - Notes
[422]. Reviving interest in Expressionism has already led to considerable significant publication. See, for example, Dorfles, G., Barocco nell’architettura moderna, Milan, 1951, especially the second part; Gregotti, G., ‘L’Architettura del’Espressionismo’, Casabella, August 1961, [[260]]-48; Conrads, U., and Sperlich, H. G., Phantastische Architektur, Stuttgart, [1960]; and, for a particularly significant figure, Joedicke, J., ‘Haering at Garkau’, Architectural Review, CXXVII (1960), 313-18. For a remarkable Expressionist publication by an architect who was very active and influential in Germany in the 1920s, see Taut, B., Die Stadtkrone, Jena, 1919.
[423]. For the development of Van de Velde’s ideas in these years see Die Renaissance im modernen Kunstgewerbe, Berlin, 1901, and Vom neuen Stil, Leipzig, 1907. Van de Velde was a prolific writer, and it is impossible to give a complete list of his books and articles here. They will be found in Madsen’s Sources of Art Nouveau, 469.
[424]. See Bauer, C. K., Modern Housing, Boston and New York, 1934; and my Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, Chapters XIII and XIV.
[425]. See Schumacher, F., Das Wesen des neuzeitlichen Backsteinbaues, Munich, 1917. The rich and decorative use of brick is as characteristic of the Hamburg School as of the Amsterdam School in these decades (see Chapter [21]).
[426]. See Bie, O., Der Architekt Oskar Kaufmann, Berlin, 1928; Hegemann, W., German Bestelmeyer, Berlin [n.d.] and Mayer, H., and Rehdern, G., Wilhelm Kreis, Essen, 1953. In the twenties a large number of such well-illustrated monographs on individual German architects were published; it is much more difficult to find adequate documentation on the work of several architects in other countries who are of considerably greater originality and historical importance.
[427]. Paraboloid domes of ferro-concrete were used with brilliant spatial effect by Jacques Droz (b. 1882) at Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc in Nice. This was built in 1932, just at the same time that Böhm was building Sankt Engelbert. The plan, consisting of three intersecting ellipses, is very nearly identical with that of J. B. Neumann’s Baroque masterpiece Vierzehnheiligen; the result is very different, however, because of the continuity of the walls and roof here. Unfortunately Droz’s church was elaborated with a tower and other features of a rather ‘Jazz-Modern’ order.
[428]. Another German church-architect of the twenties who has still a very considerable reputation is Otto Bartning (b. 1883). He moved much earlier in this direction than Böhm. For a statement of his intentions, see Bartning, O., Vom neuen Kirchbau, Berlin, 1919.
[429]. See Maria Königin [Cologne, n.d.].
[430]. This is not the place to discuss these churches. It may be remarked here, however, that Candela’s church is considerably more Expressionist in appearance, especially the interior, than anything Böhm ever built in the twenties. Yet its strangely angular piers and vaults that look so much like the settings for the ‘Cabinet of Dr Caligari’, the most famous German Expressionist film, result from this engineer’s consistent use of the hyperbolic paraboloid forms which he favours primarily for technical reasons. De la Mora, Niemeyer, and Moya were content to use barrel-vault elements of plain parabolic section such as were first introduced by Böhm in 1925-6.
[431]. The triangular bay-window lighting the stairs is still somewhat Expressionist, but the interior treatment is in general more related to geometrical abstract art. The decoration approaches what came to be known as ‘Jazz-Modern’ when it became vulgarized in the next ten years or so in England. The contrast of the interiors that Behrens designed with the fine examples of Mackintosh’s furniture, brought from a house that he had remodelled earlier for the Bassett-Lowkes, appears rather shocking a generation later. What must have been considered a bit démodé in 1925 now represents to posterity—at least in the field of furniture design—the main line of advance in the early twentieth century; what then seemed in England to be ‘the last word’ has dated badly.
[432]. ‘New Objectivity’: A generic term for some of the advanced movements that succeeded Expressionism in the arts; in architecture, roughly equivalent to ‘Functionalism’.