At first his houses looked, externally, rather like quite conventional ones from which all elements of traditional detail had been scraped, as do many of the contemporary projects included in Garnier’s ‘Cité Industrielle’. Gradually, however, Loos came to handle his simple elements of external design with more of that assurance which his domestic interiors had displayed from as early as the flat in Vienna remodelled for Leopold Langer in 1901 (Plate [155B]). Both the placing and the sashing of his windows were more carefully studied; and the proportions and the juxtapositions of his rather boxy masses were abstractly ordered well before a Neoplasticist like Georges Vantongerloo in Holland arrived at somewhat similar effects in sculpture (see Chapter [22]). Compared to Wright’s more complex and articulated experimentation with abstract composition in the house of 1909 for Mrs Thomas Gale or the Coonley Playhouse of 1912, there remains, nevertheless, a distinctly negative quality about all Loos’s work. He seems to have been principally concerned to clear away inherited tradition in order to lay the foundations of an immanent new architecture. That new architecture, however, he himself was never able to bring fully into being, although others did so under his influence by the time he was in his early fifties (see Chapter [22]).
In Loos’s larger urban work, such as the prominent Goldman & Salatsch Building of 1910 in the Michaelerplatz in Vienna, he was ready to use marble externally and even to include classically detailed columns. But in the ground storey of this store he increased the articulated space effects characteristic of the interiors of his flats and houses to almost monumental scale. Here, in the small Kärntner Bar of 1907, and in the Café Capua of 1913, both also in Vienna, his use of fine materials with their polished surfaces uninterrupted by mouldings would eventually prove as potent an inspiration to architects of the next generation as did his more ascetic written doctrine.
The Café Capua is gone; the Goldman & Salatsch interior drastically remodelled; but the Kärntner Bar, in the Kärntner Durchgang behind 10 Kärntnerstrasse, remains a small masterpiece of modern design. During the Nazi occupation the façade lost the American flag in stained glass which ran across the top, but the exterior was never of much interest in any case. The interior is fortunately completely intact (Plate [151]). Skilful use of mirrors quite disguises its very small dimensions. Above smooth dark mahogany walls, set like screens between plain green marble piers, unframed panels of mirror that reach to the ceiling allow one to see the strong reticulated pattern of the yellow marble ceiling extending left and right and to the rear just as if the actual area of the bar were merely an enclave in a much larger space. Because of the particular height of the mahogany wainscoting this illusion is quite perfect, for one sees only about as great a space reflected on either side as that one is actually in; if the mirrors came lower, a greater extension on either side and at the rear would be suggested than could possibly be plausible as a reflection. A continuous grille of square panels filled with translucent yellow onyx takes the place of the mirror panel across the top of the front wall. Not until Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 was marble used again by a modern architect with such assurance (Plate [165A]).
It was not these urban commissions, however, but Loos’s free-standing houses that the next generation of architects studied most closely. For example, Loos’s sort of domestic open planning, not Wright’s, was probably the major influence on the Continent after the First World War. Moreover, the neutrality, not to say the negativity, of the exteriors of his houses provided better even than Garnier’s projects the raw material with which a positive sort of architectural design could be created by younger men in the early twenties. Loos’s achievement before the First World War was largely in the domestic field; after the war most of his executed work still consisted of houses and shop interiors, although he made several extremely interesting projects for larger edifices and erected a large sugar refinery for the Rohrbacher Company in Czechoslovakia in 1919.
The Rufer house in Vienna of 1922 is a narrow three-storey block rather similar to Voysey’s Forster house of 1891 at Bedford Park. This has a most interesting sort of open plan, with the dining-room on a higher level than the living room. Loos was also working in other countries now; for his reputation, though limited to the most advanced circles, was increasingly international. His most considerable production of this decade was the house he built in 1926 for the writer Tristan Tzara at 14 Avenue Junod in Paris, where Loos had settled four years earlier. In the Tzara house the interior is arranged somewhat like that of the Rufer house: the dining room opens into the living room but on a higher level. The tall, rather blank front, slightly concave in plan, has a more positive character than those of most of his houses, because the two-storey void sunk into its centre provides a dominating plastic feature above the solid rubble of the ground storey.
Of still later work the Kuhner house of 1930 at Payerbach in the wooded hills near Vienna is the most original example. A two-storey hall, opening towards the view through a window-wall, occupies most of the interior, with the various other living spaces opening into it on the main floor and the bedrooms reached from a gallery above. Above the masonry base the house is externally of log-construction, chalet-like, with Tyrolean roofs of low pitch and wide-spreading eaves. This reversion to peasant materials, and even to peasant forms, was curiously premonitory of a direction modern architecture took in several countries in the thirties (see Chapter [23]). Had Loos lived longer he might, like Wright in that decade, have returned to the centre of the stage. As it was, his major contribution antedated the First World War.
Perret, Wright, Behrens, and Loos: on the whole these are the four most important architects of the first modern generation, important both for their personal contribution and also for their decisive influence on later architecture. Outside the countries in which these men worked, notably in Holland and in Scandinavia, there were also architects of distinction belonging to this generation but their achievement was more limited and their influence more local, at least before the First World War. Yet Holland, between 1910 and 1925, came closer than any other country to creating a modern style, or phase of style, that was universally accepted at home; the origins, moreover, go back to the nineties. There was, properly speaking, no prefatory Art Nouveau episode in Holland of any consequence in spite of a considerable activity in the decorative arts inspired, in part at least, by serious study of the crafts of Indonesia.
Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934), the leader of the national school, was considerably older than Perret, Wright, Behrens, or Loos, although much younger than Wagner. As in Wagner’s case, his earliest work, dating from the eighties, is of a generically Renaissance character, though much less suave and academic. The influence of Cuijpers soon led him towards a medieval mode—not Gothic, however, but round-arched. Compared to Rundbogenstil work of the best period fifty years earlier, his round-arched buildings of the nineties are rather gawky, but not without originality in their ornamentation; above all, they are vigorously structural in their expression in a ‘realistic’ and, indeed, almost High Victorian way. However, the insurance company buildings in Amsterdam and The Hague that best illustrate this phase were later enlarged by him in a chaster mode, thereby losing much of their anachronistic flavour.
Berlage’s major opportunity came with the competition for the design of the Amsterdam Exchange held in 1897. This competition he won with a project which seems rather Richardsonian[[436]] to American eyes, though he did not—apparently—know much about American work at that time. For this very extensive public edifice, built over the years 1898-1903, he used, not the stone of his insurance office across the Damrak of 1893, but the red brick of his Hague insurance office, also of 1893, varied with a modicum of stone trim still quite crudely notched and chamfered. Inside, the principal interior has exposed metal principals above galleried walls of brick and stone. In Berlage’s masculine vigour and defiant gracelessness of detailing one could hardly have a greater contrast to such another major public building, designed and built at almost precisely the same time, as Horta’s Maison du Peuple in Brussels. But Horta’s masterpiece climaxed rather than opened his career as an architect of international importance; certainly it did not lead to the development of a national modern school in Belgium. At least for Holland, the Exchange was more seminal, even if it lacked the revolutionary character of Wright’s houses of these years or Perret’s block of flats in the Rue Franklin in Paris. A fairer comparison would be with Voysey’s contemporary houses, the work of an architect who was by intention rather a ‘reformer’ than a drastic innovator, or with Martin Nyrop’s Town Hall in Copenhagen begun five years earlier.
Berlage’s near-Richardsonian mode of this period is still better illustrated in a smaller structure, that built for the Diamond Workers’ Trade Union in the Henri Polak Laan in Amsterdam in 1899-1900 (Plate [150]). In this, the organization of the windows into a sort of brick-mullioned screen and the less aggressive handling of the carved stone detail produces a façade not unworthy of comparison with Richardson’s Sever Hall or Gaudí’s Casa Güell (Plate [96B]). It is notable, however, that it is work of the seventies and eighties in America and in Spain that comes to mind, not work of this date.