Considerably taller than the Chilehaus, but not otherwise very distinguished, were two other German skyscrapers of the twenties. Kreis’s Wilhelm Marx Haus of 1924 in Düsseldorf, a thirteen-storey tower crowned with curious openwork tracery of inter-laced brick, is still a conspicuous feature of the local skyline; but the Planetarium and associated buildings that he erected at the Gesolei there two years later are better examples of the fairly restrained mode that he and others usually employed in these years. The plainer and better proportioned seventeen-storey Hochhaus am Hansaring in Cologne was built in 1925 by Jacob Koerfer (b. 1875).
Although only a few skyscrapers actually rose in European cities in the twenties, the theme nevertheless fascinated the younger architects. Many bold designs for them were projected, some of them of real significance for later developments in both the Old World and the New (see Chapter [22]). The international competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower held in 1922, which many Europeans entered and the Finn Eliel Saarinen all but won, signally focused attention on a type of building hitherto considered unsuitable for the Old World, and generally accepted in Europe only in the 1950s (see Chapters [21] and [25]).
The churches of Böhm, all of them Catholic, have a suavity that Höger’s work lacks, but at least equal forcefulness. The Suabian War Memorial Church of 1923 at Neu-Ulm is like an imaginative film-set of the period, being a sort of free fantasia on Gothic themes with little feeling of structural reality. But the boldest of Böhm’s churches, that he built at Bischofsheim in 1926, seems almost to take off from the engineer Freyssinet’s hangars at Orly. The paraboloid forms are here very frankly used; yet the concrete ‘barrel’ vault of the nave, intersected by lower cross-vaults over the bays of the aisles, creates a strong emotional effect that is both Gothic and Expressionist in tone. The finest of his churches, however, may be Sankt Engelbert at Cologne-Riehl of 1931-3. This is circular in plan and very ingeniously roofed, not with a dome,[[426]] but with lobes of paraboloid barrel-vaulting.
However, in a church built in 1929, Sankt Josef at Hindenburg in Upper Silesia, Böhm had already turned away from the emotionalism of his earlier work towards simple rectangular forms.[[427]] This simplicity he has maintained in his post-war churches, with the result that his last work, Maria Königin,[[428]] built at Marienburg outside Cologne in 1954, with its squarish plan, very slender metal supports, and side wall of glass, has very little churchly flavour left. Yet some of Böhm’s very late projects indicated that many of his ambitions of thirty years ago still remained with him to the end; they may well some day find effective expression at the hands of his son or of Rudolf Schwarz now that a more emotional approach to church-design has been revived internationally.
Compared to such a French church of the twenties as Perret’s Notre-Dame at Le Raincy or such a Swiss church as Moser’s Sankt Antonius in Basel, both using concrete in the rectangular and skeletal mode usually preferred at that time, Böhm’s churches of the twenties once seemed semi-traditional rather than modern. One can now see, however, that there is a different and more emotive line of development in modern church architecture to which, for example, Gaudí’s unfinished churches at San Coloma and Barcelona belong, as do also such later Latin American examples in ferro-concrete as the Purísima at Monterrey in Mexico by Enrique de la Mora (b. 1907) of 1939-47, São Francisco at Pampulha in Brazil, built by Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1901) in 1943, Nuestra Señora de los Milagros in Mexico City by Felix Candela (b. 1910), completed in 1955, and several completed in the mid fifties by Juvenal Moya at Bogotá in Colombia[[429]] (see Chapters [23] and [25]). Expressionism may have been less of a cul de sac than its brief impingement on Behrens might lead one to suppose. Certainly it was a potent force for a few years after the First World War, and played then a significant role in breaking down the rule of ‘tasteful’ traditionalism inherited from the preceding decade.[[430]]
As the twenties progressed, however, and extreme Expressionist influence generally receded, Behrens gave evidence of his awareness of the quite different direction that modern architecture had just taken in the hands of certain younger men, several of whom had actually been his own pupils or at least his employees. In 1925-6 he built New Ways, a house in Northampton, England, for S. J. Bassett-Lowke, earlier a client of Mackintosh’s. With its smooth white stucco walls, horizontally grouped windows, and flat roof, this is of considerable historical interest, although of very little intrinsic merit.[[431]] No such advanced work had yet been done in England by local architects, and at this time only a very few houses of a comparably advanced character had been executed anywhere (see Chapter [22]).
Despite his unusual openness of mind, which led Behrens in his fifties to attempt to rival juniors barely started on their careers—or, quite as probably, because of the lack of strong personal conviction of which this gives evidence—Behrens did not, like Perret and Wright in later life, continue to be very creative beyond this date. In Vienna, where he was called in the mid twenties to be professor of architecture at the Akademie, he settled into a sort of compromise mode. The low-cost housing blocks that he built in Vienna in 1924-5 on the Margaretengürtel, in the Stromstrasse, and in the Konstanziastrasse illustrate his characteristic uncertainty of direction in these years. If considerably sounder, they are also much less adventurous than the Bassett-Lowke house designed at almost the same time. This can be seen still more clearly at the Weissenhof in Stuttgart where many of the buildings of the German Werkbund’s housing exhibition held in 1927 remain in use today. There Behrens’s block of flats stands very near one designed by the director of this exhibition, his former assistant Mies van der Rohe (Plate [162B]), and not far from houses by such other leaders of the new generation as Gropius, Le Corbusier—who had both worked in his office also—and Oud (see Chapter [22]). The contrast between his massive block and their light and open structures is the more striking because Behrens here so evidently set out to meet his juniors more than half-way.
Behrens’s very latest work, the factory for the Austrian Tobacco Administration at Linz built in 1930 in association with Alexander Popp (b. 1891), was rather less conservative because of the nature of the commission. It is less mechanistic than the industrial work done so much earlier for the A.E.G., yet nonetheless impressive for its consistency of treatment and also for its human scale. The Linz factory provides a not unworthy concluding note to Behrens’s ambiguous career.
The vast productivity of the German architects of Behrens’s generation, both before and after the First World War, building in a boom which only came to a close around 1930 with the world-wide depression, makes it difficult to choose specific examples worth the emphasis of even brief mention. The situation is made no easier by the considerable versatility of most of the leading figures. Those few buildings that have been specifically mentioned—even most of Behrens’s own work except for his A.E.G. factories—should be considered typical of the upper level of German achievement in these decades rather than monuments of unique distinction like the best things done by Perret and by Wright in the same decades. Yet, it is worth noting, for a long time neither Wright nor Perret had much effect on the general scene in their own countries, for all the seminal effect of their influence on younger architects everywhere; while the Germans achieved a tremendous volume of what can be called ‘half-modern’ work that notably changed the whole character of several large cities. Thus the way was prepared for a very early and widespread acceptance of the next stage of modern architecture, an acceptance so premature that it induced in the thirties a sharp reaction.
In 1933 a regime rose to power in Germany with doctrinaire objections to the latest phase of modern architecture, ironically castigated as Kultur-Bolschevismus immediately after the Bolsheviks had rejected it as unacceptably bourgeois! As a result, the leaders of the younger generation almost all emigrated (see Chapter [23]); while with few exceptions those German architects who remained at home turned backwards in their tracks, though not very far backwards. Most German production in the Nazi period is all but indistinguishable, indeed, from what was considered most advanced before the First World War and even for some years thereafter. Very little of it deserves specific mention. As was the case around 1910, the more nearly the structures were of an engineering order—as for instance Bonatz’s bridges for the Autobahn built over the years 1935-41—the less they were likely to be stylized along the heavy near-Classical or semi-medieval lines the later Imperial period had established as conventional a generation before. Even the housing that Bonatz built after the War in 1945-6 at Ankara in Turkey and his Opera House there of 1947-8 are hardly as advanced as his Zeppelinbau office building of 1929-31 opposite the station in Stuttgart. Like Behrens at the same time, he had attempted there—with a certain amount of real success—to follow the ascetic principles of the younger generation that had just been so well illustrated at Stuttgart in the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 on the Weissenhof (see Chapter [22]).