CHAPTER 23 - Notes
[486]. See Note [[443]], Chapter [22].
[487]. Le Corbusier’s moulded pilotis supporting the Swiss Hostel in Paris (Plate [165B]) are two years later; those under the Unité d’Habitation, which resemble Aalto’s much more closely, were designed after the Second World War.
[488]. A hospital built in 1926-8 by Adolf Schneck and Richard Döcker (b. 1894) in Stuttgart is actually earlier but hardly comparable in quality.
[489]. For Howe’s earlier ‘traditional’ work see Monograph of the Work of Mellor, Meigs and Howe, New York, 1923; for an assessment of his later career, see also Zevi, B., ‘George Howe’, Journal of the American Institute of Architects, XXIV (1955), 176-9. For the PFSF see Jordy, W., and Stern, R., Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XXII (1962), entire June issue.
[490]. The same description applies roughly to Aalto’s work down to the buildings mentioned above, it may be noted.
[491]. See Jordan, R. F., ‘Lubetkin’, Architectural Review, CXVIII (1955), 36-44.
[492]. Technically the architects were J. Alan Slater and Arthur Hamilton Moberly (1885-1952) with Crabtree as designing associate. Professor Sir Charles Herbert Reilly (1874-1948), head of the School of Architecture at Liverpool, which he made one of the most advanced schools in the world in these years, was consultant. It is curious to recall that he had earlier been a consultant on Devonshire House in Piccadilly in London, built in 1924-6 by Carrère & Hastings (John M., 1858-1911; and Thomas, 1860-1929), when the influence of American ‘traditional’ architecture was strong in London (see Chapter [24]).
[493]. Amyas Douglas Connell (b. 1901), Basil Robert Ward (b. 1902), and Colin Anderson Lucas (b. 1906); see also Note [[492]] to this chapter.
[494]. For the late twenties and early thirties, when the newer architecture first penetrated England, see Pevsner, N., ‘Nine Swallows—No Summer’, Architectural Review, XCI (1942), 109-12, and Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘England and the Outside World’, Architectural Association Journal, LXXII (1956), 96-7 (this is a special number of the Journal devoted to the work of Connell, Ward & Lucas, 1927-39). See also Richards, J. M., ‘Wells Coates’, Architectural Review, CXXIV (1958), 357-60.
[495]. If Expressionism in architecture is an episode difficult to assess despite the real achievement of several of the architects involved with it (see Chapters [20] and [22]), Futurism is impossible to evaluate at all since it was only a ‘might have been’. Italian modern architecture since the thirties does not derive from the projects of Sant’Elia, many of which are only now being studied for the first time. Sant’Elia and the other architects associated with Futurism wished to cut all links with the past, Terragni re-linked the ‘International Style’—usually called architettura razionale under the Fascist regime—with Italian tradition, a line which several Italian modern architects have followed since. See Sartoris, A., Sant’Eliae l’architettura futurista, Rome, 1943; Tentori, F., ‘Le Origini Liberty di Antonio Sant’Elia’, L’Architettura, 1(1955), 206-8; Banham, R., ‘Futurism and Modern Architecture’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, LXIV (1957), 129-38, and ‘Futurist Manifesto’, Architectural Review, CXXVI (1959), 77-80. The greater part of Sant’Elia’s drawings are now available for study at the Villa Olmo, Como.
[496]. See Le Corbusier, UN Headquarters, New York, 1947.
[497]. See Rudolph, P., ‘Walter Gropius et son école’, L’Architecture d’ aujourd’hui, XX (1950), 1-116.
[498]. Credit for initiating the reform at Harvard must be given to the Dean of the school there, Joseph Hudnut (b. 1886), who invited Gropius to join his faculty.
[499]. Louis Skidmore (1897-1962), Nathaniel Owings (b. 1903), John O. Merrill (b. 1896).
[500]. Ralph Rapson is Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, it is relevant to note at this point.
[501]. See Le Corbusier, The Marseilles Block, London, 1953.
[502]. See Le Corbusier, Œuvre complète, [VI, 1957], 50-107.
[503]. See Stirling, J., ‘Ronchamp’, Architectural Review, CXIX (1956), 155-61. The best coverage is in Le Corbusier, Œuvre complète, [VI, 1957], 16-43, however. See also Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp, New York, 1957.
[504]. In collaboration with the French architect B.-H. Zehrfuss and the Italian engineer Pierluigi Nervi.
[505]. For a late published statement of Gropius’s principles, see The Scope of Total Architecture, New York, 1955, London [1956], although there is little there not to be found already in his other writings of the last forty years. See also Note [[482]] to Chapter [22].
[506]. Curiously enough Philip Johnson’s glass house in New Canaan, Conn., which obviously derives in several ways from the Farnsworth house, was actually erected first, in 1949; but of course Mies’s plan and model of the Farnsworth house had already been published by Johnson in his book Mies van der Rohe in 1947.
[507]. Although their design follows closely that of the two blocks built in 1949-51, the construction is actually of ferro-concrete, not steel.
[508]. Thanks to the continuance in the early post-war years of the reaction of the thirties, the buildings at the south end of the Coolsingel appear to present a curious inversion of chronology. While Dudok’s Bijenkorf Department Store of 1929-30, now demolished to open the view to the harbour, was characteristic of the ambiguity of much of his work, this ‘baby skyscraper’ of 1939-40 and also the contiguous Exchange by J. F. Staal (1879-1940), designed in 1929 and built in the thirties, appear much more ‘modern’ to mid-century eyes than the first big banks and so forth rebuilt after the war—these look as if they had been designed at least a generation ago. But the wave of reaction soon ran its course; the Lijnbaan of 1953-4, a complete shopping street by van den Broek & Bakema running parallel to the Coolsingel, if not the new Bijenkorf by Breuer of 1955-7, was among the most advanced projects carried out anywhere in the mid fifties.
[509]. Oud’s prominent Resistance Monument on the Dam in Amsterdam opposite the Royal Palace, completed in 1956, is hardly a work of architecture but rather an enlarged pedestal and frame for sculpture. Such a commission and the honorary doctorate he received in 1955 from the University of Leiden none the less indicate the high respect he was receiving in Holland by that time.
[510]. See Note [[511]] to Chapter [24].