EPILOGUE
The five years since the original edition of this book appeared have seen a building boom throughout the western world such as has rarely been equalled in other post-war periods; nor has this boom been confined to those countries of Europe and the Americas with which this account has chiefly been concerned. These have also been years of continuing—indeed increasing—uncertainty in architectural doctrine. As might have been expected, various tendencies already touched on in the preceding chapter—both positive (although often apparently reactionary) tendencies towards greater individuality, and negative or, at least in the present context, conservative tendencies towards somewhat tired repetition of pre-war clichés—have not only continued but become much stronger. The tonality of the over-all picture of current architectural production has by now definitely changed. That relative balance between what may, at their best, be called the Miesian and the Corbusian, still maintained almost everywhere in the mid fifties, had by the early sixties been upset. In hindsight, for example, it must now seem that such mature and established architects as the Finnish Alvar Aalto and the American Louis Kahn were inadequately treated in previous chapters—not to speak of such still older men whose activity has continued or been renewed as the Germans Hans Scharoun and the late Rudolf Schwarz. Various new names call for attention also: the Dutchman Aldo van Eyck, for example, the Norwegian Sverre Fehn, the Japanese Tange and Maekawa, the Italian Viganò, and the English firm of Stirling & Gowan, to mention but a few that were all but unknown internationally in the mid fifties whose work is now of rising consequence.
For all the evidences of change, it is almost as difficult as it was five years ago to isolate the common denominator of the new tendencies except in negative terms. It is still easier to be explicit about what architects are moving away from—what they are rejecting—than whither they are headed. Any attempt in a few words to describe positively the present architectural climate faces the difficulty that only in certain extreme works are novel architectural ideals and ideas wholly dominant; while by no means all the current building that does not follow in the newer directions, either by older architects such as Mies himself or by those who have stayed faithful to his canons—whether intentionally or by default of any alternative allegiance—can yet be dismissed as merely vulgar, provincial, or retardataire.
The rejection of the advanced doctrines of the 1920s and 1930s has rarely been total. The assumption of some writers, moreover, that there has yet been any serious and concerted return to Beaux-Arts or other pre-modern standards is, as regards the attitude of most mature architects—even those who actually have such backgrounds—still something of an exaggeration. On the other hand, the current sensibilities to which architects such as Aalto and Kahn, at least, have been successfully appealing—and in Aalto’s case for some twenty-five years already—are certainly very different from the sensibilities that once responded to the crisp geometries, the smooth surfaces, the glass walls, and the minimal detailing of the Bauhaus (Plate [161A]), the Savoye house (Plate [159]), and the Barcelona Pavilion (Plate [165A]). ‘Neo-Brutalism’, or brutalismo, is as dangerous a term to use indiscriminately as any other critical catchword that has been prematurely popularized. But it does suggest, at least by a play upon words in several languages, a current climate of taste which favours béton brut—naked concrete—and rough, usually rather dark-coloured, materials. Bricks, pre-cast slabs with a coarse aggregate in relief, or even stone masonry of rubble or quarry-faced granite, with rather heavy trim of raw or varnished wood and wrought iron, are widely preferred to the slicker, more highly finished elements that are the natural product of the increasing industrialization of the building crafts. But this is literally superficial.
Associated with the notable shift of preference as regards the texture of the skin, so to say, of buildings there has been a comparable rise of interest in broken silhouettes, uneven skylines, masses that are articulated rather than unified, and expressive exposure of individual structural elements, themselves often sculptural rather than mechanistic in character. This has affected in varying degree the work of almost all architects from the most Corbusian to the most Miesian. Windows, moreover, tend to be fewer and smaller, and their shapes are very likely to be vertical rather than horizontal, slots instead of ribbons. So also plans now emphasize the particularity of various internal functions and over-all organization tends towards additive compilation of contiguous spatial units, in some cases equal or modular, in others disparate in both size and shape. All this would once have been disapproved by most critics as under-studied, not to say amateurish, before Aalto’s mature work became a major international influence ([Plates 173B] and [182A]). There is surely some reflection of the painting and the sculpture of the past decade, even perhaps of its most advanced music, in the apparent intention to suggest freehand improvisation and randomness in an art whose works, however their designing may have been initiated, are necessarily in the end products of relatively long periods of preparatory study and of complex collaborative execution.
Yet to hazard such statements as these, even though they have long applied to much of the work of Aalto and are now true in varying degree of the production of architects as different in many basic ways as the Frenchman Guillaume Gillet or the Italian Franco Albini, is to be reminded of the prevalence of another kind of interest in more elaborate effects of detail—often denigrated as merely decorative—that is being exploited not only by such well-established architects as the Americans Edward Stone or Minoru Yamasaki, on the one hand, and by the German Egon Eiermann, on the other—otherwise quite opposed as a result of their very different training, experience, and personal dispositions—but by many others from Latin America to Asia and Africa.
Perhaps it may be said in very simple terms that what is widely recognized as the newest architecture has two aspects, one exaggeratedly masculine, the other almost daintily feminine. Both are in some cases to be found illustrated, in a curious kind of rhythmic alternation, by successive works of the same architect; both contrast with the neutral severity of the architecture of the immediately preceding period. Yet both clearly have their half-admitted precedents in the varied and even contradictory work over many decades of Frank Lloyd Wright and that of the Expressionists forty years and more ago.
Even if it could be accepted, for the moment, that these two tendencies represent the whole story, few would be impartial enough to admit that they are equally characteristic of the more serious architectural production of the present. Thanks to a revival of near-Puritanical asceticism in some quarters, sharply contrasting with the readiness in others to beguile with somewhat saccharine ‘beauty’, the more masculine aspect has been presented as superior morally and even as more ‘advanced’; for there are still those ready, as in the 1920s and 1930s, to plead near-Hegelian necessities for one or another direction in which architecture may be moving, necessities that are often in patent opposition to the actual pressures from the aesthetically neutral realm of technology.
But the two aspects so far noted do not, in any case, even suggest the full complexity of the present situation. A third, not necessarily related to the other two yet also, possibly, subsuming both, is more evident to historians than it is to most architects. Admitting the danger of pressing analogies with the morphology of earlier periods—the Gothic, say, or the Renaissance—there is at least a presumption that what we have known as ‘modern architecture’ is (rather prematurely, it must seem) already in a ‘late’ phase. Recurrent in late phases there have usually been two distinguishable but often closely related aspects of academicism: a return towards principles that dominated the arts before the stylistic revolution with which the particular cycle began, on the one hand, and on the other the reduction to an easily applied system of formal elements of the painfully evolved features that were peculiar to the preceding ‘high’ phase.
But reaction, to give this aspect of the current architectural scene an unnecessarily denigratory name, is quite likely in particular instances to be more due to the special circumstances of the current building boom than to any hypothetical life-pattern of modern architecture. In the first half of the twentieth century economic influences were supposed, at least, to favour both technological advance in the building sciences and, concommitantly, ‘advanced’ design in the aesthetic sense. Not always, however, were the theoretical economies actually realized—or not, at any rate, before considerable time had passed—and ‘advanced’ design often proved in practice not only expensive but physically uncomfortable. Then other kinds of technological development, by setting up even more expensive new standards of amenity, notably in such things as vertical transport, glare-control, and air conditioning, were already cancelling out the economies that mechanized methods of large-scale production were eventually making real. At the same time the inherent practical difficulties of such things as all-glass walls and completely open plans were increasingly realized as they were ever more generally and uncritically exploited. By the 1960s some of the technical improvements in building advocated since the 1920s, notably in the field of partial prefabrication and prefabrication of larger and larger components—whole sides of houses and flats, for example—had become widely viable, not to speak of new materials and structural methods that made certain features relatively easy and inexpensive to provide. Yet total prefabrication of dwelling units was remoter from realization—except in mobile units such as caravans—than a quarter of a century earlier, in part because the public’s willingness to accept the results of partial mechanization of house-production seemed actually, in many countries, to have diminished.
The major building problems of the post-war world were not and still are not the production of individual monuments: opera houses, churches, stadia, and the like, on which professional as well as public attention has tended to focus and for which drastically new kinds of architectural expression can most readily be invented. What has been more significant are the large-scale reconstruction of bombed or blighted cities, the rehousing of very considerable segments of the population, and the provision of the manufacturing facilities, the offices, and the stores required by greater industrial, financial, and commercial activity. Inevitably, in a boom period, the very large volume of production over large sectors of the total range of building has led, in such work, to a sort of stasis in stylistic development. A vast amount of architectural energy everywhere must go into the mere carrying out of unprecedentedly extensive plans the major decisions for which were made as many as ten or fifteen years ago. An inertial lag is very evident wherever large urban areas, whether cleared twenty years ago by bombing or in the last few years by schemes of urban renewal, have been or are being rebuilt. Large parts of the world outside North America, moreover, are only now first learning how to build very tall structures and hardly yet ready to modify creatively what they have just learned to do at all.
The last decade, and particularly the last five years, have seen the production of a great part of the urban and suburban settings in which we will probably be living for the rest of this century, and doubtless well into the next. Somewhat as the post-Napoleonic period carried out at an ever lower level of quality the ambitions and aspirations of the revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, so in the post-war years—and particularly the last five—there has come about the realization of many urbanistic ideals that once seemed fantastic or Utopian when they were first proposed some forty years ago. Inevitably there has been a diminution of visual interest when certain modes of design, first adumbrated in a few unique individual structures or in relatively modest housing projects in the 1920s by architects of intense conviction and high inventive power, have been applied wholesale, almost as clichés, by countless other men, usually much less able and less dedicated, throughout the whole world. Moreover, serious errors in the original ideals, perhaps only recognizable as those ideals came to large-scale actuality, have been discovered and denounced. To some critics certain earlier urban conditions, against whose vices those ideals were first invoked as correctives, have come to seem, by nostalgia, preferable in various human ways to the ‘brave new world’ of the 1920s which has, to such a surprising extent, become the real world of the 1960s.
But the reaction against the International Style, thus to describe in over-simplified form what seems to be the consensus of many of the changes of attitude in the last years, is by no means as yet a counter-revolution. If the canons of the permissible and the desirable have been broadened by current theory and practice towards various aspects of what may still be called the traditional—including, as by now also traditional, much that was common to various pre- or extra-international Style aspects of earlier modern architecture—certain of the presuppositions of the most advanced architects of the 1920s still seem, though usually in revised form, quite as forward-looking as ever. For the rather limited aspects of function recognized by the Functionalists (if there ever were architects truly meriting that name), for example, far more sophisticated conceptions of function have come to be accepted by most architects whose fields of work are not industrial or commercial.
Yet some engineers—the Italian Nervi, whose practice has become international in scope, the late Spaniard Torroja, the Mexican Candela, the Danish Arup, and the American Fuller, to mention but a few of the best known—have today reputations throughout the architectural profession, and even with the public, which neither the Swiss Maillart nor the lately deceased Frenchman Freyssinet had in their heyday half a century ago. None the less architecture is not more largely in the hands of the engineers today than it was earlier despite many prognoses, both pessimistic and optimistic, that the engineers are, or should be, taking over. Moreover the architectural quality, as distinguished from the technical ingenuity, of the works of the great engineers is often as notable as is that of those buildings by certain architects in which engineering principles are dominant such as Eero Saarinen’s Chantilly airport (Plate [190B]).
These paragraphs have necessarily been of the most general nature and critical rather than historical. Properly they should be illustrated by a considerable body of carefully described photographs, plans, and sections such as fortunately can be found in several current books covering either the whole world, or single countries, individual architects, or particular types of building. Some of the most useful of those that had appeared by the summer of 1962 will be found among the additions to the Bibliography. The few plates that it has been possible to add in this new edition cannot hope to present a conspectus of the various aspects of the current situation that have been at least mentioned in this Epilogue. But the plates of the Seagram Building (Plate [192]) and the Guggenheim Museum (Plate [188A] and [B]) may serve as a reminder that some of the dichotomies of the third quarter of this century in architecture could, in the late 1950s, be almost as well illustrated in the work of long-recognized masters of architecture as in that of men a generation or more younger. The illustrations of the work of Aalto, work actually of an earlier date, show clearly whence one of the winds of influence has for some time been blowing; while the plate of Japanese buildings (Plate [187]) in contrast to the Thyssen Haus (Plate [191]), illustrate the international Corbusian and the international Miesian of these last years at levels that are notably high, both in the size and prominence of the structures and, what is more important, in intrinsic quality.
Throughout its length this book has been less concerned with urbanism, with the architectural macrocosm, than with individual buildings; nor, for that matter, can photographs give the feeling of the newly rebuilt central and peripheral areas of our cities even as well as for the nineteenth century. The character of the Ludwigstrasse (Plate [10B]) or the Place de l’Opéra (Plate [70C]) can be fairly well apprehended from photographs; Park Avenue above the Grand Central Station, as rebuilt beginning with Lever House (Plate [189]) in the last decade, or the cities, as distinguished from the individual public monuments, of Chandigarh and Brasilia—or even Cumbernauld in Scotland or Vållingby in Sweden—cannot.
Despite all the confusion of architectural doctrine in the early 1960s, despite the vast areas of undistinguished and even manifestly bad building, these last years have seen their share of new masterworks, or at least of structures which in our present myopic view have already been accepted as such. Yet, on the negative side, several of the older leaders have left us: Wright, Freyssinet, Torroja, Skidmore, Schwarz, and, alas, a few rather younger men as well: Yorke in England, for example, and in America Eero Saarinen.
Saarinen’s work, since the General Motors Technical Institute completed in 1955 and illustrated here (Figure [55]; [Plate 168B]) which was so very Miesian, came by the late 1950s to epitomize the variety, not to say the incoherence, of the ambitions of many architects throughout the world in those years. Happily, after a mature career which lasted only eleven years compared to his father Eliel’s fifty, his contribution to American, indeed to world, architecture, culminated in two works, his colleges at Yale (Plate [185B]) and his airport outside Washington (Plate [190B]) that in their differing, even apparently opposed, ways express many of the aspirations of our day at as high a level, perhaps, as earlier modern architecture ever reached except in the greatest works of Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies. But what make Eero Saarinen in retrospect the typical architect of the late fifties and early sixties are, on the one hand, his Miesian beginnings, in sharp reaction to his father’s half-traditional romanticism, and on the other the fact that his oeuvre included many works which in their wilfulness and even, one may say, their frivolity were well below the median standards of serious achievement in those years. Thus he stood, to an extent not always realized in his brief lifetime when the kaleidoscopic diversity of his buildings dazzled those it did not shock, at the centre of his age. His remarkably successful career, remarkable even in a period—so unlike several of the earlier decades of this century—when few architects of quality, even the most ascetic or most fanciful, were wholly without employment, made plain one of the central facts about these last few years: that the style or movement we call ‘modern architecture’ had in many, perhaps in most, countries achieved such total acceptance that clients were willing, almost too willing, to trust their architects in whatever novel direction they might wish to move, in terms of structure, of materials, and of either asceticism or decorative elaboration, not to speak of philosophical content.
Remembering the extraordinary new developments in architecture that were under way in the 1760s two hundred years ago in the period with which the Introduction has dealt, the historian can only end by wondering whether in the welter of innovation of the last few years there lie somewhere the particular seeds from which the architecture of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries will grow; whether, to use another dubious historical analogy, the stylistic development of this quarter of our century corresponds to the Mannerism of the central decades of the sixteenth century in Italy. May we look forward, towards 2000 perhaps, to some such immanent movement, at once a synthesis of many preceding technical and stylistic innovations and a return to some at least of the principles of the preceding ‘high’ phase, yet above all a vital new creation with a life-expectancy of a hundred years and more, as was the Baroque around 1600? From the latest Baroque Western European architecture turned away two centuries ago; to the Baroque, in any revivalistic sense, it is hardly likely to return. Yet after the ever-increasing divergencies, which have been as characteristic of the mid century as convergence was of twentieth-century architecture down to the 1930s, will we—perhaps before another decade has passed—begin to sense the beginnings of a new synthesis?
Today, the problem must be posed in world terms. So far Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa have, on the whole, been learners and disciples of the West. Will the countries of Eastern Europe and the new countries of Asia and Africa soon be making contributions towards a new world-style, such as in the last few decades first the North Americans, then the Latin Americans, and now the Japanese have made? Will the history of Western European architecture continue to be the principal story (which thanks to political conditions has been largely true up to the present) or will the Western European tradition, to which this volume has been almost completely devoted, become in the succeeding period somewhat peripheral and even alien to a basically changed situation in which under-developed countries will increasingly, as they come of age, tend to throw off cultural tutelage as they have mostly already thrown off political tutelage?
The Brazilians could design and build in these last years Brasilia by themselves as well, perhaps better than Europeans or North Americans—above all, certainly, the architects of their own Portuguese homeland—could have built it for them. The Indians, on the other hand, have employed Le Corbusier and other Europeans, and the Iraqis have assigned the designing and building of their University to an American firm headed by an architect of German origin. The Japanese, who are in this respect already at the forefront, had employed Wright half a century ago for the Imperial Hotel; today it may perhaps be said that their own best work is superior to the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo whose designs they obtained from Le Corbusier. Yet current Japanese architecture is not and is not intended to be—witness the foreign-language editions of two of their architectural periodicals—outside the tradition of Western European architecture; indeed, it represents the latest notable contribution to that architecture with which this book has hitherto dealt. It is appropriate, therefore, that the roster of plates in this book, which began with buildings conceived—in effect at least—in Rome and built in France, in England, and even in North America, should end with buildings built in Asia following principles first adumbrated by a Swiss in France. The later eighteenth century turned inward in architecture towards the Rome and the Greece that were at the fountain-head of the Western European tradition; today we should perhaps be turning outward towards the new non-European world which is still in the mid twentieth century, in architecture as in so much else, the child of Europe. Symbolically, at least, the best hope of a new architectural synthesis in the decades to come may lie in this fact; so that later histories of twentieth-century architecture will perhaps give as much attention and space to India or to some of the new African states as little Holland or vast North America have received in this account of the architecture of the last two hundred years.
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY