Of the first generation of modern architects not even Wright still survives. As long as he continued in active production the story that the last four chapters have tried to tell could not be completed but in 1959, with his death, an architectural epoch came finally to an end. It was a rich epoch and a complex one because the men of that generation were all great individualists and proud of it. In most countries they had to fight a vigorous battle for the right to personal expression, a battle that they carried through to recognition against entrenched inertia, both professional and lay. Yet in general, the links of this generation with the later nineteenth century remained close, both in their dependence on handicraft and in their frequent tendency—least evident with Wright and Loos—to accept (up to a point) personal stylization of earlier architectural forms[[442]] as a substitute for that basic originality of which all were at their best truly capable.

Not since the late eighteenth century had there been any such wide international renewal of architectural aspiration. Just as then, a new generation would profit from the experiments of their elders, taking much from each, but rejecting much as well, in order to create a style—or at least a discipline—aiming at universality. By its essential principles, this discipline could not have the variety and the intensity of personal expression which gives such colour and life to the work of the older men. Just as in the early nineteenth century, however, the architects who succeeded the great originals were far more able than they to work together. By joining their individual efforts the men of the next generation changed the character of almost all architectural production in a way that their elders were quite unable to do. Thus there came into being an architecture more completely of its own century than any style-phase of the previous hundred years—up to the Art Nouveau at least—had ever been wholly of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER 22
THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH

The project that Gropius and Meyer offered in the competition of 1922 for the Chicago Tribune Tower, unlike Saarinen’s, attracted very little contemporary attention in America (Plate [158A]). Such a stripped expression of skeleton construction had, up to that time in America, been seen only in factories and warehouses. Even in Chicago, moreover, the New York ideal of the shaped tower had quite replaced the Sullivanian slab as the favourite form for pretentious skyscrapers. Ten years later, however, when the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture was held at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York it was evident that the kind of architecture represented by Gropius’s project had become widely accepted in several European countries. By that date it was even possible to deduce from the executed work of Gropius and his chief European contemporaries, most of which was shown in the exhibition, the existence of a new style christened ‘international’[[443]] by Alfred Barr, the Museum’s director. Whether the new architecture that came into being in the twenties in Europe and has since spread throughout the western world should in fact be considered a style, or even a style-phase, remains a matter of controversy; but for forty years now it has been readily distinguishable from what the older generation of modern architects produced.

In 1922 this new architecture hardly existed except in the form of projects. Some of the most strikingly novel buildings built in the early twenties were by Willem Marinus Dudok (b. 1884) in Holland and by Erich Mendelsohn[[444]] (1887-1953) in Germany. These no longer belonged to the realm of the earlier, pre-war modern architecture. Yet the work of neither was as indicative of the direction the newer architecture was taking in these formative years as is the Gropius Chicago Tribune project. Very shortly, however, both Dudok and Mendelsohn drew closer to the main current of development of this decade, although they continued to be, in varying degree, individualists rather than whole-hearted converts to the dominant architectural mode of their generation.

Dudok’s work as City Architect of Hilversum, beginning with the Public Baths and the Dr H. Bavinck School in 1921, is remarkably simple and direct (Plate [157A]). The abstract crispness and clarity of his compositions are very different from the whimsically curved surfaces of de Klerk’s and Kramer’s housing blocks (Plate [156A] and [B]). This rigidly geometrical organization of the forms reflects his earlier contact with the group of Dutch abstract artists known as De Stijl,[[445]] notably the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg and the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo. But Dudok’s continued emphasis on the fine quality of his brickwork, the massiveness of his characteristically interlocking blocks, and a certain basically decorative intention still link his buildings of the twenties at Hilversum with the ideals of the older generation. Dudok’s work of this period was certainly novel—and even modern in a very advanced way for the date—but it remained quite Dutch in its idiosyncrasies, not ‘international’.

The plasticity of Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, designed in 1919 and completed in 1921, at Neubabelsberg near Berlin (Plate [153B]) seems at first sight not unrelated to that of Gaudí’s hewn-stone Casa Milá in Barcelona of 1905-10 (Plate [137A]). But it was originally intended to be executed in poured concrete—for technical reasons it is in fact mostly of brick rendered with cement—and what one might call the ‘overtones’ of the forms are more mechanistic than organic. Like Dudok, Mendelsohn had been influenced by a local school of painting. But the images he distorted according to the tenets of Expressionism came from the world of machines not, like Gaudí’s, from the world of plants and animals. Mendelsohn’s earlier war-time sketches[[446]] make this origin even more evident. The extreme point of this sort of abstract sculptural Expressionism[[447]] in the twenties is found in the work of no architect but in the mountainous cult edifice called the Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland, designed by the creator of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner[[448]] and begun in 1923.

Mendelsohn himself rejected this excessively plastic approach to architecture—an approach to which a reversion can be noted on the part of Le Corbusier in the last decade, incidentally (Plate [167])—even before the Einstein Tower was completed. The hat factory that he built at Luckenwalde in 1920-3 was in the direct line of descent from the industrial work Behrens and Poelzig had done before the First World War. This was rightly recognized as one of the signal productions of those crucial years of the early twenties when the concepts of the new architecture were first being tentatively realized in France and in Holland, and very shortly, of course in Germany. Dudok’s buildings at Hilversum of the early twenties had a very considerable international influence;[[449]] Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower did not, at least not on architecture.[[450]] However, other work of his done in the next few years was much admired and also widely emulated, both in Germany and abroad, by the younger architects.

In spite of the importance in these years of the executed work of Dudok and of Mendelsohn, several other architects certainly had far more to do with determining the direction that architecture took from 1922 on. One was a Swiss then working in Paris, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier. At this time more painter than architect, Le Corbusier had earlier been an assistant of Perret’s and had also worked briefly for Behrens and even for Josef Hoffmann. Two others were Dutchmen. J.J.P. Oud had practised in association with Dudok at Leiden in 1912-13, and from 1917 and 1918 he and G.T. Rietveld were in much closer contact with the artists of De Stijl than Dudok ever was, being actual members of that small cohesive group. Two more were Germans, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both of whom had been Behrens’s assistants, respectively for two and for three years.