Wrightian ideas were readily accepted by many Dutch architects previously inspired chiefly by Berlage, not to speak of their influence on Berlage himself. Admiration for Wright’s work undoubtedly played a real part in the rapid modulation of Dutch architecture towards greater severity and a more geometrical discipline in the twenties. But the major significance of the lively Dutch interest in the American lies in its effect on the development of a few younger men in these years. To the Amsterdam School there had arisen a strong opposition led by architects belonging to the De Stijl group of artists who were active in Rotterdam and Utrecht. Yet the Amsterdam School architects continued for some time to be highly productive, and the work of several prominent men, notably J. F. Staal (1879-1940) and W. M. Dudok (b. 1884), was related to both camps. But by the time Berlage was engaged on the big concrete-framed Netherlands Insurance Company Building in The Hague in 1925-6 its very Wrightian character had just been superseded in the projects and the production of Rietveld and Oud by a more ascetic mode parallel to that adumbrated by the new architects of France and Germany in the early twenties (see Chapter [22]).
In the new building of the Scandinavian countries before and after the First World War admirers in other countries thought to recognize an originality and vitality comparable to that of contemporary Dutch work. As has already been remarked, it has since become evident that most of what was produced in these decades in Denmark and Sweden did not really differ very much from the work of ‘traditionalists’ elsewhere. Despite extremely elegant and often piquant stylization, comparable but superior to that of most German work in this period, continued maintenance of inherited principles of design and the general use of reminiscent detail sharply differentiated the characteristic production of the Scandinavians from that of the Dutch, and of course far more from that of Wright or Loos. What such men as Ragnar Östberg (1866-1945), and E. G. Asplund (1885-1940) down to his sharp change of style in the late twenties, designed and built in Sweden or P. V. Jensen Klint (1853-1930) and Kay Fisker (b. 1893)—down to his parallel change of style—in Denmark was generally still rated ‘modern’ a generation ago; almost all of it may now be more properly classed with ‘traditional’ work in other countries. In quality, however, it often more than rivals all but the finest modern German, Austrian, and Dutch work of its day (see Chapter [24]).
An exception to this statement as regards Sweden is the remarkable Engelbrekt Church of 1904-14 in Stockholm by L. I. Wahlman (b. 1870), with its great parabolic arches and its vertically massed exterior dominated by a very tall and svelte tower; there much of the experimentalism of the nineties lived on. For its influence, this is possibly a more important twentieth-century church than Perret’s at Le Raincy. An even more considerable exception is a large part of the prolific production of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950) both in the Old World and in the New. Saarinen was the leading architect of Finland down to the twenties; after his removal to the United States he was Wright’s only rival of his own generation on the American scene, the careers of the early modern architects of the West Coast being by then in decline (see Chapter [19]).
Saarinen’s earliest work in partnership with Herman Gesellius (1874-1916) and A. E. Lindgren (1874-1929) dates from the nineties. In 1900 he designed the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition; this offered a powerful, though rather cranky, statement of Nordic originality quite opposed to the Latin elegance of the contemporary Art Nouveau and not without kinship to Berlage’s Amsterdam Exchange. At home important public commissions followed rapidly: the National Museum in Helsinki in 1902 and the Helsinki railway station, for which he won the competition in 1904. This large and complex structure, built over the years 1910-14, is Saarinen’s principal early work. In size and in monumentality it rivals Bonatz’s Stuttgart station and also the vast stations that ‘traditional’ architects in America were building at much the same time (see Chapter [24]). But there is much less of ‘tradition’ here than at the Stuttgart or, a fortiori, in the American stations. The heaviness and the grandeur are more than a little Germanic so that the fairest comparison is with Stürzenacker’s Karlsruhe station, on the whole more straightforward in design and certainly much more delicately detailed.
Saarinen’s achievement in his homeland made him well known throughout Europe; as early as 1905 one of his principal works had been a country house, Molchow, in Brandenburg in Germany. The project that he entered in the Chicago Tribune Tower competition in 1922 brought him suddenly to American attention. Although a Gothic design by John Mead Howells (b. 1868) and Raymond Hood (1881-1934) won this competition and was executed[[440]] on Michigan Avenue, in 1923-5, Saarinen’s project (which in any case received a financially generous second premium) had a tremendous succès d’estime, including the accolade of Sullivan himself. In retrospect the design appears almost as medievalizing as Howells & Hood’s; but the elegance of the silhouette and the consistency of the detailing, stylized nearly to the point of absolute originality, had an enormous contemporary appeal.
By this time Americans were beginning to grow bored with the increasingly forced adaptation of familiar styles of the past to skyscraper design. Yet in 1922 they were hardly ready to recognize the positive qualities of the very plain reticulated tower, elaborated with certain minor Constructivist touches, that was proposed by Walter Gropius (b. 1883) and Adolf Meyer (d. 1925) (Plate [158A]). Today it is easy to see how close this came to reviving the Chicago tradition of the early skyscrapers, a tradition almost forgotten since the First World War, as also its great importance in the crystallization of a new architecture in the early twenties (see Chapter [22]).
Saarinen, after settling in the United States in 1922, designed various other skyscrapers along the lines of his Chicago project, none of them built. However, other architects at once picked up his relatively novel ideas; and undoubtedly his ideas played an important part in turning American skyscraper architects away from their long-continued dependence on the styles of the past. Hood himself was not least affected, as his black and gold American Radiator Building[[441]] on West 40th Street in New York, completed in 1924 even before the Chicago Tribune Tower, soon made evident. In Detroit, near which city Saarinen settled, Albert Kahn’s Fisher Building is even more Saarinenesque and quite unrelated to his contemporary factories.
Called to Bloomfield Hills, Mich., by the Booth publishing family, Saarinen’s first work in America was the Cranbrook School for Boys, a very extensive group of buildings begun in 1925. Here an almost Swedish elegance of craftsmanship and a profusion of semi-traditional detail were combined in a somewhat whimsical manner rather recalling English work of forty or fifty years earlier. The girls’ school near by, however, Kingswood, begun in 1929, is much simpler, with an almost Wrightian horizontality and crispness of expression.
When American building activity revived in the late thirties Saarinen continued to develop. From 1937 on his American-trained son Eero (1911-61), destined later to be one of the leaders of post-war architecture in the United States, doubtless played some part in encouraging that bolder structural expression and increasing sparseness of ornamentation that characterizes his finest late works. These qualities are already very evident in the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, N.Y., of 1938; while the contrast between the straightforwardness of the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Ill., of 1939, on which the Chicago firm of Perkins, Wheeler & Will collaborated, and the quaintness and fussiness of the Cranbrook School is quite startling.
Most distinguished of all the late Saarinen works are his Tabernacle Church at Columbus, Ind., designed in 1940 and built in 1941-2, and the similar but smaller Christ Lutheran Church in Minneapolis that was built in 1949 just before his death (Plate [157B]). Cool, clear, and rational, the distinguished handling of brickwork in these churches, the knowing control of light, and the careful ordering of space in the interiors remain exemplary. Their towers are more refined versions of Moser’s on Sankt Antonius in Basel; yet the massing of their blocky external elements almost seems to belong to an earlier tradition, that of the English Victorian Gothic churches of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, whose reminiscent forms they wholly abjure, and with which neither of the Saarinens was probably familiar.