Until the second generation appeared on the scene in the twenties France produced little modern architecture of much interest besides Perret’s work. The department stores of the early years of the century, still strongly under the influence of the Art Nouveau, have already been mentioned (see Chapter [17]). After Perret the most important architect was Tony Garnier (1867-1948), and he is of more significance for a vast project that he prepared in his youth than for the executed work of his maturity. In the later decades of the eighteenth century, when the Romantic Classical revolution in architecture was getting under way, projects were often of more interest than executed buildings for their premonitions of what was to come, and this was particularly true in France. It was true again in the early decades of the twentieth century, down at least to Le Corbusier’s project for the Palace of the League of Nations of 1927-8.
Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’ summarized his own aspirations and also provided a wealth of ideas from which later generations of Romantic Classical architects could draw inspiration. So, at the opening of the twentieth century, Garnier’s very complete scheme for a ‘Cité Industrielle’[[404]] contained a wealth of ideas on which architects drew well into the 1920s. Like that of the ‘Ville Idéale’, the interest of the ‘Cité Industrielle’ is threefold: sociological, urbanistic, and architectural. Henceforth the industrial city would be more and more accepted as normal and not exceptional. Its needs both general and specific—so notably recognized by Garnier, all the way from the provision of adequate workers’ housing to various sorts of industrial plants—would become more and more important preoccupations of most modern architects. In coping generally with the manifold needs of an industrial community Garnier also faced in detail many very different individual architectural problems with considerable ingenuity.
Garnier’s solutions in the main were very simple and direct, but they often had a merely negative character, as of buildings of academic design scraped of all surface paraphernalia, rather than displaying any fresh and creative approach. But an important part of the main architectural development for some twenty years was to be such a purging of inherited excess. Garnier reduced architecture to basic, if not particularly unfamiliar, terms; on his foundations the next generation began, in the twenties, to build something much more positive; thus his influence was parallel to that of Loos (see Chapters [20] and [21]). His contribution to the twentieth century’s repertory of forms was less than Ledoux’s had been to that of the nineteenth a hundred years earlier; notably inferior in quality to Ledoux’s was his own actual production, moreover.
Garnier’s appointment as Architect of the City of Lyons in 1905, a position which he retained until 1919, might seem to have provided the perfect opportunity to realize his dreams as, but for the Revolution, should Ledoux’s appointment by Louis XV to build the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans. But neither the Municipal Slaughterhouse of Lyons at La Mouche, executed in 1909-13, the Herriot Hospital at Grange-Blanche, designed in 1911 and begun in 1915, nor the Olympic Stadium of 1913-16 at Lyons realize much more than the obvious practical implications of the detailed projects for various buildings in his ‘Cité Industrielle’.[[405]] The slaughterhouse is bold structurally but clumsily industrial in its handling, with none of the refinement of Perret’s factories; the more highly finished stadium has irrelevant Classical touches in the detailing, simple though it is, of the concrete elements.
Garnier’s work after the First World War began with the hospital, which was completed only in 1930, and included a large low-cost housing project in the États-Unis quarter of Lyons designed as early as 1920 but executed only in 1928-30. Both are quite overshadowed by the comparable work of the next generation in these years—that in other countries at least, if not that in France. The Moncey Telephone Office at Lyons of 1927, the Textile School at La Croix-Rousse of 1930, and the Hôtel de Ville of the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt of 1931-4, on which another architect, J.-H.-E. Debat-Ponsan (b. 1882), a pupil of Victor Laloux, collaborated, differ very little from the scraped academicism of most French public architecture of this period. The houses Garnier built in 1909 at St-Rambert and in 1910 at St-Cyr (Mont d’Or) are among his best executed works; all the same, except for their early date, they are hardly very notable.
Two blocks of flats built by Henri Sauvage (1873-1932) in 1925 in the Rue des Amiraux and in the Rue Vavin in Paris, faced with glazed white brick and stepped back in section to provide terraces for the upper floors, are well above the level of quality of Garnier’s later work without approaching that of Perret’s. That in the Rue des Amiraux, being for working-class occupancy, is more significant of the international aspirations of the period. Although less drastically novel than the low-cost housing of the twenties in Holland and Germany, this has survived very well because of its permanent grime-proof surfacing. It has been rather unjustly forgotten, largely because it lies off the main line of international development (see Chapter [21]).
Most French production in the twenties remained completely subject to academic discipline although it was often tricked out with the sort of modish decoration that flourished particularly at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925. Yet at the same time Paris, as the world capital of modern art, was one of the three great foci of architectural advance. The linkage between advanced painting and the Art Nouveau in the nineties was discussed earlier (see Chapter [16]). Perret employed Symbolist and Neo-Impressionist painters as collaborators, beginning with the Théâtre des Champs Élysées before the First World War. But there is no real parallel between his architecture and that of Garnier or Sauvage on the one hand and the art of the great twentieth-century masters of the École de Paris on the other. Picasso, Gris, Braque, Matisse, and Derain had no effective influence on architecture. Characteristically Perret employed Bourdelle, not Maillol, when he needed sculpture. With the next generation the situation entirely changed; but the new architects of the twenties, not only in France but everywhere, for all their greater sophistication and their close association with advanced painters and sculptors, still owed at least as much to Perret and to Garnier if not to Sauvage.
To the most creative new architects who appeared around 1920 Garnier’s project for the ‘Cité Industrielle’ offered both a challenge and an inspiration, but Perret was by far the more important influence. Somewhat later, towards 1930, that influence became almost ubiquitous in France, and its effect grew increasingly banal as the ferro-concrete Classicism of Perret’s later work gradually replaced the official and inherited tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts, by that time nearly obsolete even in France.[[406]] As has so often happened in France before, a youthful rebel, after being accepted late in life by the academic authorities, was only too ready to support a new discipline that had itself already become academic. Thus is cultural continuity maintained in France at the expense of variety and recurrent new growth. The situation was rather different in America, as we shall soon see.