Gill was less prolific than the Greene brothers, and most of what he built is less striking. Like Voysey, he was in principle a reformer not a revolutionary, finding his inspiration consciously in the local structural tradition of the early Spanish Missions and haciendas. As a result some of his buildings, such as the First Church of Christ Scientist of 1904-7 in San Diego or in Los Angeles the Laughlan house of 1907 and the Banning house of 1911, at 666 West 28th Street and 503 South Commonwealth Avenue respectively, with their elliptically arched loggias and their grilles of ornamental ironwork, are almost as ‘Spanish Colonial’ as the work of the outright traditionalists around him.

Gill’s most interesting and mature houses, thanks to their smooth stucco walls, large window areas, and avoidance of stylistic detail, can also have a deceptive air of being European rather than American and of a period some years later than that in which they were actually built. In his best work, such as the Dodge house (Plate [147B]) of 1915-16 at 950 North Kings Road in Los Angeles or the Scripps house at La Jolla of 1917, now the Art Centre, the asymmetrically organized blocks, crisply cut by large windows of various sizes carefully sashed and disposed, with roof terraces or flat roofs above, more than rival the contemporary houses of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos (Plate [155A]) in the abstract distinction of the composition. They even approach rather closely the most advanced European houses of the next decade (see Chapters [21] and [22]).

Gill’s interiors are especially fine and also quite like Loos’s. Very different from the rich orientalizing rooms designed by the Greenes, they are in fact more similar to real Japanese interiors in their severe elegance. The walls of fine smooth cabinet woods, with no mouldings at all, are warm in colour, and Voysey-like wooden grilles of plain square spindles give human scale. The whole effect, in its clarity of form and simplicity of means, is certainly more premonitory of the next stage of modern architecture than any other American work of its period.

Gill continued to practise intermittently down into the thirties, but his finest work was done in the second decade of the century. He had little influence locally and still less nationally, yet his best houses extend very notably the range of achievement of the first generation of modern architects in America, even though his later production declined sadly in quantity and even in quality. Wright alone was able to renew his career successfully after the reaction against modern architecture that dominated America from coast to coast during the twenty years from the First World War to the mid thirties finally came to an end.

CHAPTER 20
PETER BEHRENS AND OTHER GERMAN ARCHITECTS

The pattern of architectural development in Germany in the early decades of this century was rather different from that in either France or the United States. No academy, native or foreign, no influences from the École des Beaux-Arts discouraged innovation; yet there was an early and general reaction against the whimsicality and the decorative excesses of the Art Nouveau at which most of the younger men had tried their hands before 1900. After the First World War, however, the example of Expressionism in painting and sculpture led many architects to excesses of another sort. Expressionism in architecture,[[421]] or something very close to it, is not restricted to Germany. The most extreme example of any consequence, and probably the earliest, is Dutch, the Scheepvaarthuis in Amsterdam of 1912-13 by van der Meij (see Chapter [21]). In Germany around 1920 various architects who had earlier been predominantly ‘traditional’ in their approach were influenced by Expressionism, as well as others who were already programmatically modern; nor was that influence restricted to the modern architects of the first generation (see Chapter [22]).

The boundary line between what, in retrospect, still seems definitely modern and what now seems very similar to the ‘traditional’ work of these decades in other countries is much less sharp than in America. And no German architect of their own generation had the continuously creative achievement of a Perret or a Wright to his credit. Nevertheless Peter Behrens stands out among his contemporaries because of the vigorous boldness of his industrial buildings. Moreover, the influence of his factories of around 1910 was crucial on the next generation, and several of the later leaders actually worked in his office at that relevant period. Yet all but Behrens’s finest work can be matched in the production of other German architects; while his own vitality as an innovator was rather strictly limited to a few years and to what he did for one corporate client. That client was the A.E.G. (German General Electric Company), which had already employed Messel down to his death in 1909.

Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann (1851-1932) dominated the architectural scene in Berlin, where the latter was appointed City Architect in 1896 on the strength of his vast academic Imperial Law Courts of 1886-95 in Leipzig. In the early years of the century they both developed a formal mode that was more ‘traditional’ than modern. Despite Messel’s and Hoffmann’s usual preference for conventional sixteenth- or eighteenth-century models, Behrens was certainly not uninfluenced by their mode of design, even though his more positive sources of inspiration were of a less conservative order. Yet, in so far as one can sort out the different architectural camps in Germany in these years, Behrens must be considered well to the artistic ‘left’ of Messel and Hoffmann.

Germany was certainly very receptive to new ideas in decoration when Behrens’s architectural career began at the turn of the century—receptive rather than creative. There were other Germans who handled the Art Nouveau with considerable originality besides August Endell, notably Bernard Pankok (b. 1872) and Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957); but two foreigners, neither of them very prolific builders, seem to have been the most influential figures on the German architectural scene at the opening of the new century. The Belgian Van de Velde had moved from Paris to Berlin in 1899; the Austrian Olbrich was called to Darmstadt by the Grand Duke in the same year. Olbrich stayed at Darmstadt until his early death in 1908; Van de Velde, however, left Berlin in 1902 when he was invited to Weimar to head the School of Arts and Crafts there which later became the Bauhaus. Van de Velde’s finest Art Nouveau furniture dates from his Berlin years around 1900. As late as 1906,[[422]] the Central Hall which he designed in the Dresden Exhibition showed him still a competent if rather heavy-handed decorator in the Art Nouveau tradition.