CHAPTER 18
MODERN ARCHITECTS OF THE FIRST GENERATION IN FRANCE: AUGUSTE PERRET AND TONY GARNIER
No better name than ‘modern’ has yet been found for what has come to be the characteristic architecture of the twentieth century throughout the western world, well beyond its confines also in Japan, India, and Africa, and increasingly in most of the Communist countries. Alternative adjectives such as ‘rational’, ‘functional’, ‘international’, or ‘organic’ all have the disadvantage of being either vaguer or more tendentious. Whether the Art Nouveau or such things as Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Voysey’s houses all truly belong, in their rather sharply differing ways, to a first stage of modern architecture or are transitional and prefatory may still be debated; but from the earliest years of this century several continuous lines of development can certainly be traced. These lines were in the main convergent through the twenties, if increasingly divergent in the middle decades of the century. By stressing generic changes rather than specific achievements the development can be presented almost anonymously, somewhat as the nineteenth-century development of commercial architecture was outlined earlier in this book (see Chapter [14]). But it is more humanistic, and at least as true to the detailed facts, to consider modern architecture as deriving from the individual activities of a few leaders rather than from some Hegelian historic necessity. Of those leaders one group, born in the late 1860s, constitutes the first generation; a group born some twenty years later forms a second generation; since the 1930s still another generation has come to the fore.
A somewhat similar succession of three generations could be distinguished in the case of Romantic Classicism, the last universal style in architecture. What sets the twentieth-century situation apart from that of the earlier period has been the marked prolongation of the activity of the first generation, two of whose leading members, Wright and Perret, lived on and remained active well beyond 1950. Wright continued in vigorous production down to his death in 1959. The leaders of the second generation, who first moved towards the centre of the stage in the early twenties, are mostly still alive; two of them at least, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, have been rather more productive since 1946 than they were earlier in their careers (see Chapter [21]).
While some influence from their juniors can be noted in the later work of the modern architects of the first generation, a real difference between their approach to architecture and that of the second generation has continued. Those who have come forward since the mid thirties owe much to the first generation as well as to the second, yet they have also manifested some significant characteristics that are their own. The modern architecture of the last sixty years may well be presented historically in terms of the work of two generations of leaders (see Chapters [18]-[23]), and then of the production of the decade following the Second World War (see Chapter [25]). But modern architecture, even very broadly interpreted, includes only a small fraction of all building production down to the war; the work of those supporters of the ‘tradition’ in the twentieth century bulked much larger in quantity, even if it very rarely rivalled the modern work in interest or quality (see Chapter [24]). An [Epilogue] will touch on the current scene in the early sixties.
The leaders of the first generation of modern architects remained great individualists to the last. It is therefore not easy to draw any general stylistic picture from their production, even for the years before the twenties when they were the only modern architects. The leaders of the second generation drew their inspiration, in most cases, not from one but from several of the older men; yet their work was so convergent that by the mid twenties a body of doctrine had come to exist deriving partly from their theories and partly from their few executed buildings and their many projects. With the increasingly wide acceptance of this body of doctrine critics were soon ready to recognize the existence of a new style as coherent, as consistent, and almost as universally employed by younger architects everywhere as the Romantic Classical style had been at the opening of the nineteenth century (see Chapter [22]).
Towards the constitution of this new style each of the great architects of the first generation had made notable contributions; yet their executed work, and even more their theories, remained independent of it. To appreciate that work only in the light of what they had in common with their juniors is to miss much of the richness and all of the idiosyncrasy of their achievement. In considering the work of these older architects for its own sake, what sets it apart from the Art Nouveau, whose protagonists were in many cases their exact contemporaries, must first be indicated and evaluated. For example, their rejection of ornament, at most but relative, provides only a minor and negative point of differentiation. In their positive preoccupation with structure and its direct architectonic expression, and also their reform and revitalization of planning concepts, however, they went much further than most of the Art Nouveau designers of 1900. It is true that such architects as Horta and Jourdain, when working with metal and glass, were concerned with the expression of structure, but that expression was usually more decorative than architectonic ([Plates 132B] and [133]). Traditional materials, such as stone and brick, in the hands of Art Nouveau architects and their spiritual brothers often lost all their natural character, being treated like so much clay. The sense of materials, both new and old, and the determination of their proper use preoccupied all the leading architects of the first generation, something for which only the English and the Americans prepared the way in the nineteenth century.
The new importance of structure and its expression, the preoccupation with a particular building material, is nowhere more evident than in the work of Auguste Perret (1874-1954), the only great French architect of this generation. Associated as he was with the family contracting firm of A. & G. Perret, which specialized early in the use of reinforced concrete, he saw as his principal task the development of formulas of design for concrete as valid as those so long established in France for building with stone. The other architects of his generation came more gradually and less whole-heartedly to the exploitation of new materials—it is paradoxical, for example, that the characteristic Art Nouveau interest in exposed metal construction came generally to an end about 1905—and their work as a result is more various and less doctrinaire. Because of Perret’s clear definition of his goal and his single-minded advance along a predetermined line, his somewhat limited architectural achievement may well be considered before the protean many-sidedness of Wright’s in America and the ambiguity of Peter Behrens’s in Germany, not to speak of the important contributions of Wagner and Loos in Austria, and of Berlage and de Klerk in Holland (see Chapters [19], [20], and [21]).
Auguste Perret came of Burgundian stock, but by the accident of his father’s exile from France after the Commune he was born in Brussels. His education was entirely French. He left the École des Beaux-Arts to enter the family’s building firm without waiting to receive the Government’s diploma, somewhat as Wright went out into the practical world with but two years of engineering school behind him. His career began almost at once, for he built his first house at Berneval in 1890. Several blocks of flats and an office building in Paris followed in the next eight years; the Municipal Casino at St-Malo, built in 1899, was the first work of any real consequence. There he and his brother Gustave (1876-?) used reinforced concrete for an unsupported slab floor of 54-foot span. Executed otherwise in local granite and wood, this building has a certain bold simplicity as remote from ‘Beaux-Arts’ as from Art Nouveau work of the period.
Reinforced concrete,[[395]] that is concrete strengthened by internal reinforcing rods of metal, seems to have been invented by a French gardener named Joseph Monnier in 1849, but he used it only for flower pots and outdoor furniture. In 1847 François Coignet (1814-88) built some houses of poured concrete without reinforcement; in 1852 for a house at 72 Rue Charles Michel in St-Denis, Seine, Coignet first employed his own system of béton armé, to use his term. That term has since remained current in French—the German term is Eisenbeton, the Italian cimento armato. During the next four decades ferro-concrete, to give it its simplest English name, was developed very gradually by Coignet and by François Hennebique (1842-1921) with no very notable architectural results. Detailed research is gradually revealing many instances of its early use by various men in different countries; but neither in the scale of its employment nor in the achievement of new and characteristic modes of expression does its history in these decades rival that of iron in the first half of the nineteenth century (see Chapter [7]).