The presumed necessity of achieving monumentality undoubtedly compromised the purity of Perret’s expression of structure throughout the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. During the War, which followed so soon after the inauguration of the theatre in 1913, an important industrial commission of Perret’s produced what would be for the next generation of architects a more exemplary work. The warehouses built at Casablanca in North Africa in 1915-16—there are also others there of 1919—required no representational display; they are almost ‘pure’ engineering in concrete. But the lightness of their walls, pierced with abstract patterns formed by ventilating holes, and the elegance of their thin shell vaults of segmental section displayed the potentialities of a quite new structural aesthetic, at once delicate and precise, with no echoes at all of the massive masonry buildings of the past.
The interior of the Esders Clothing Factory at 78 Avenue Philippe-Auguste in Paris, erected just after the War in 1919, and several smaller industrial buildings for the metal-working firm of Wallut & Grange at Montataire, Oise, of 1919-21 were more readily studied by younger architects and, in the case of the Esders factory, much grander in scale than the North African warehouses. Even more elegant than the warehouses, and equally ‘pure’, was the atelier of the decorator Durand built in Paris in the Rue Olivier-Métra in 1922. This has a shell vault rising from the floor broken, along one side only, by a long skylight over widely spaced ribs that continue the curve of the vault.
By this time, of course, ferro-concrete was in general use for industrial building throughout most of the western world. In France the vast parabolic-vaulted aircraft hangar at Orly, Seine, designed by the engineer Eugène Freyssinet (1879-1962) in 1916, overshadowed in size and boldness anything built by Perret. This very exceptional utilitarian construction, magnificent in form yet quite without architectural pretension, was destroyed during the Second World War. To Tony Garnier’s work in Lyons we shall turn later.
In America Frank Lloyd Wright used ferro-concrete for his modest E.Z. Polish Factory in Chicago in 1905, just as Ernest L. Ransome was completing the first mature example of a large plant of ferro-concrete frame construction, the United Shoe Machinery Plant in Beverly, Mass., begun in 1903.[[397]] All over the Middle West, moreover, grain elevators[[398]] were rising in the form of gigantic linked cylinders. In Switzerland the great engineer Robert Maillart (1872-1940) in his factories and bridges was using concrete in several new ways as different from the elevators as from the usual timber-like frames of the French and the Americans or the shell vaults of Perret and Freyssinet. Everywhere the importance of ferro-concrete as the prime building material of the twentieth century was receiving increasing recognition; for it was a material more universally available than structural steel and also so elastic in its potentialities that these have hardly even yet been adequately explored.[[399]] In the early twenties, when a younger generation of architects all over Europe turned their major attention to ferro-concrete as the most modern of building materials, Perret was the architect who had the most to offer them—how limited had been Wright’s exploitation of concrete up to this time we shall shortly see (see Chapter [19]). When Perret erected the church of Notre-Dame at Le Raincy, S.-et-O., near Paris in 1922-3 concrete came of age as a building material in somewhat the same way that cast iron had done in a series of major English and French edifices of the 1840s (see Chapter [7]).
Figure 37. Auguste Perret: Le Raincy, S.-et-O., Notre-Dame, 1922-3, plan
The Le Raincy church is not revolutionary in plan, being a basilica with aisles and an apse; unlike de Baudot’s church, however, it has no specific elements of Gothic reminiscence in the interior (Plate [141]). Instead it provides what the medieval builders of Saint-Urbain at Troyes or King’s College Chapel in Cambridge had obviously sought to achieve, a complete cage of glass supported by a minimal skeleton of solid elements. The broad segmental shell vault of the nave, with smaller vaults running crosswise over the aisle bays in the Cistercian way, is carried on no walls at all but only on the slightest of free-standing columns reeded vertically by the forms in which they were cast (Figure [37]). Quite separate from this supporting skeleton is the continuous enclosing screen of pre-cast concrete units, pierced and filled with coloured glass designed by Maurice Denis. This is carried round the entire rectangle of interior space and bowed out at the east end in a segmental curve to form a shallow apse behind the altar. Only at the front is the clarity of the conception compromised by the awkward impingement of the clusters of columns that shoot up to form the tower.
Deserting the dilute Classicism that was his natural bent, Perret allowed the clustered piers of his tower to rise into the sky, supporting nothing at the top, in order to approximate the outline of a Gothic spire. Even more than in the interior, where one is aware only of the lowest stage, the verticalism and the medieval suggestion of this feature, so over-ingeniously composed of standard ferro-concrete elements, seems quite at odds with the severe concrete-and-glass box that provides the body of the church. Few other ferro-concrete churches[[400]] of the twenties, least of all Perret’s own Sainte-Thérèse at Montmagny, S.-et-O., of 1925-6 and other French ones by his imitators, rival Notre-Dame at Le Raincy. The largest and boldest, Sankt Antonius at Basel in Switzerland, built by Karl Moser (1860-1936) in 1926-7, seems somewhat heavy and factory-like. Its plain rectangular tower, however, rising free at one corner of the church, is much simpler and more original than Perret’s spire and has been frequently and successfully emulated by other architects. Of quite a different order are the Expressionist churches of the German Dominikus Böhm, which have, in the long run, had at least as wide an influence (see Chapters 20 and 25).
Two remodelled Paris banks, one of 1922 for the Société Marseillaise de Crédit in the Rue Auber and another of 1925 for the Crédit National Hôtelier, gave evidence of Perret’s capacity to extend the implications of ferro-concrete design to more conventional problems. These interiors are almost wholly devoid of ornament, and they largely depend for their effectiveness, like the foyer of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, upon the careful proportioning of the exposed elements of the skeleton construction. In 1924 the Palais de Bois, a temporary exhibition building at the Porte Maillot in Paris, showed how this sense of direct structural expression could be exploited in a building all of timber. This was much more successful than the theatre that Perret built in 1924-5 for the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. Of a quite different order was the Tour d’Orientation at Grenoble, also of 1924-5. Here Perret was far happier in achieving something comparable to the richness of medieval spires with standard structural elements and pre-cast panels than in the tower of his church at Le Raincy, for this is much more structurally conceived and quite devoid of Gothic reminiscence in the outline.
The mid twenties also brought to Perret, by this time widely recognized in advanced circles as the leading French architect, several commissions for houses, chiefly for artists, in France and even as far afield as Egypt. Characteristically French in his preoccupation with large, not to say monumental, problems, house-design was not Perret’s forte in the way it was that of his American and Austrian contemporaries Wright and Loos. Moreover by this date certain younger architects, particularly Le Corbusier and two or three others in Paris, had set under way a revolution in domestic architecture as drastic as Wright’s of twenty-five years earlier (see Chapter [22]).