Van de Velde’s remodelling of the Folkwang Museum at Hagen of 1900-2, quite Art Nouveau in its details, his Esche house at Chemnitz of 1903, and his Leuring house at Scheveningen in Holland of the next year, both very massive and heavily mansarded though unornamented externally like his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle, hardly require particular mention. However, for the school that he headed in Weimar he completed in 1906 a building even more devoid of Art Nouveau elements and notably straightforward in character. The plain white stucco walls below his usual heavy mansards were very frankly fenestrated with ranges of wide studio windows, perhaps in emulation of Mackintosh’s Glasgow Art School. Indeed, the general effect is even simpler and more rectilinear than that of its possible Scottish prototype. The problem of his responsibility or lack of responsibility for the design of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in Paris of 1911-13 has already been discussed (see Chapter [17]).
Van de Velde continued to build occasionally throughout all his long life—some portions of his Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo in Holland were only completed in 1953—but his last pre-war work was the theatre that he designed and executed in 1913-14 for the Werkbund Exhibition at Cologne. Some trace of the massively plastic quality of his Dresden hall of 1906—so different from the delicacy and grace of the Art Nouveau in its best period—remained in the curved walls and roof of this edifice, but the whole effect was lighter and plainer, more abstract one might almost say.
The resemblance of Olbrich’s Ernst Ludwig Haus of 1901 at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony to Mackintosh’s Art School has already been noted (see Chapter [17]). At Darmstadt he also continued to build houses for some years, and his work there culminated in the Exhibition Gallery and the Wedding Tower on the Matildenhöhe, erected in 1907. The former was blocky and somewhat classicizing in character, at once very plain and very formal. The latter, of brick, had a more Hanseatic flavour because of its arched and panelled gable; but it also included a novel motif, bands of windows that seem to carry round a corner, that was destined to be very influential everywhere in the twenties.
In the next and last year of Olbrich’s life—he died, it will be recalled, at the early age of forty-one—two important commissions came to him away from Darmstadt. The Feinhals house at Marienburg near Cologne repeats the blocky symmetrical composition of the Exhibition Building, the walls being articulated only with flat oblong panels. The loggia between, however, has a range of Greek Doric columns, clear evidence of the influence of Romantic Classicism that was growing stronger in Germany all through this decade. But Olbrich had little real appreciation of the subtle elegance of the work of Schinkel and his contemporaries, or so it would appear from this house.
The buildings of the East Cemetery in Munich, designed by Hans Grässel (1860-?) in 1894 and completed in 1900, are perhaps the first examples of this sort of ‘Neo-Neo-Classicism’. Yet beside the contemporary Neo-Baroque of the Munich Palace of Justice built in 1897 by Grässel’s master, Friedrich von Thiersch (1852-1921), nearly as over-scaled and aggressive as Wallot’s Reichstag in Berlin, the rather Schinkelesque work at the cemetery appears, in its crispness and its relative simplicity, almost as ‘modern’ as anything by Olbrich. As has been noted earlier, Schinkel remained a major inspiration to such a leader of the second generation of modern architects as Mies van der Rohe, so this influence has a continuing significance.
A much larger building by Olbrich than the house at Marienburg, also completed in the year of his death, the Tietz (now Kaufhof) Department Store in Düsseldorf, repeats the reiterative verticalism of those portions of Messel’s Wertheim store in Berlin that were built in 1900-4, though Olbrich’s detailing is not medievalizing like Messel’s but rather semi-Classical. Neither of these later things maintains the promise of his Ernst Ludwig Haus; they rather illustrate that general recession from bold innovation which characterized the architecture of this decade in Germany, a recession corresponding more or less closely to the general resurgence of ‘traditionalism’ in England and America that came a few years later (see Chapter [24]).
Peter Behrens (1868-1940), only a year younger than Olbrich, began his career as an architect at Darmstadt. From 1896 on, before being called there, he had only done decorative work of a markedly Art Nouveau sort. In his own house in the Artists’ Colony of 1900-1—the only one not built by Olbrich—the interiors are still quite Art Nouveau, but the clumsy exterior has little interest except as a document of revolt. Yet the plan is quite like that of Wright’s own house of 1889 in Oak Park, allowing a real flow of space through wide openings between entrance hall, living-room, and dining-room. By 1902 the ‘Hessian’ interior that he contributed to the Turin Exhibition was wholly rectilinear, presumably under the influence of Olbrich and Mackintosh. A similar severity characterized the work that he did, much of it merely open pergolas, for the Düsseldorf Garden and Art Exhibition of 1904.
By this time Behrens’s personal style was maturing, although his debt to Olbrich remained very evident. The Art Pavilion for the North-West German Art Exhibition held in Oldenburg in 1904 was a symmetrical composition of cubical masses, the flatness of their surfaces even more emphasized by linear panelling than in Olbrich’s work. The Obenauer house of 1905-6 at Sankt Johann near Saarbrücken is rather more loosely composed; indeed, its white stucco walls, slated roofs, and grouped windows distinctly recall Voysey’s houses, which were by this time very well known in Germany thanks to the Studio and Muthesius’s book. The garden front, however, is symmetrical and the plan not as open as that of his own house of four years earlier.
In Behrens’s next two buildings, the small Concert Hall in the Flora Garden at Cologne of 1906 and the large Crematorium at Delstern near Hagen completed the following year, the geometrical panelling in black and white, used both inside and out, recalls a little San Miniato in Florence. But the blocky geometry of the Oldenburg pavilion and its smooth flat surfaces were also repeated, so that both these buildings have a curiously model-like look as if they were made of sheets of cardboard.
Behrens’s two finest works up to this time, the Schröder house of 1908-9—no longer extant—and the Cuno house of 1909-10 in the Hassleyerstrasse at Eppenhausen near Hagen, have a much more solid appearance, with quarry-faced masonry below and roughcast walls above (Plate [148B]). The symmetrical façades, which correspond to completely symmetrical plans, are at once more tightly and more subtly composed. Here English influence seems to have been superseded by an attempt, rather more successful than Olbrich’s at Marienburg, to emulate Schinkel. A third early house by Behrens, the Goedecke house at Oppenhausen of 1911-12, is equally formal but not symmetrical, recalling thus a little Schinkel’s Schloss Glienecke near Potsdam.