Gropius, born in 1883, is the eldest of the five and older than Mendelsohn also; Le Corbusier, Rietveld, and Mies were born in 1888; Oud in 1890. Gropius’s career began as early as 1906, when he erected some plain brick workmen’s houses in Pomerania even before he had finished his professional training at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. A leading professor in this school was Theodor Fischer, Bonatz’s master, in whose office Oud later spent a few months in 1911. After a year of travel in Spain, Italy, and Holland Gropius entered Behrens’s office in 1908, remaining there till 1910. On leaving Behrens he designed in 1911, with Adolf Meyer, the Fagus Factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine. He worked again in partnership with Meyer from after the First World War until the latter’s death in 1925.
Directly as this Alfeld factory—it made shoe-lasts—follows from Behrens’s work for the A.E.G., notably the front of the Turbine Factory of 1909, its architectural expression is much more advanced (Plate [158B]). There the great window remained, for all its size, but a window; here, in the main three-storey block, the slightly projecting metal chassis rise unbroken over very wide areas bounded by narrow brick piers, and the storey levels are barely indicated by solid panels identical in treatment with the glazed sash above and below them. This arrangement of transparent and opaque elements identically handled may almost—but not quite—be considered to constitute a ‘curtain-wall’.[[451]] The omission of piers at the corners, a structural novelty here, enormously enhances the effect of transparent volume as opposed to that of solid mass. In the organization of the various industrial elements of the complete plant that are associated with the glazed block there is neither symmetry, such as Behrens was only beginning to relinquish, nor yet asymmetry of the more casual and picturesque sort; instead a modular regularity controls the whole composition. This factory has long been recognized historically as one of the most important[[452]] buildings of the twentieth century.
Gropius’s next building, the Hall of Machinery at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1914 in Cologne, was in some ways less advanced. The main façades of this were quite symmetrical; and in the articulation of the brick piers of the ground storey, in the heavily framed central entrance and, above all, in the projecting slab roofs of the raised corners there appears to have been some direct influence from the work of Wright, notably from his hotel of 1909 in Mason City, Iowa. (This was published in the Wasmuth book of 1910, where Gropius would almost certainly have seen it.) The glazed front of the principal storey, however, and especially the rounded glass stair-towers at the ends were not at all Wrightian; they carried still further the expression of architecture as transparent volume already evident in the Fagus Factory and approached very closely indeed the mature curtain-wall concept, although at a modest scale.
Mies remained with Behrens a year longer than Gropius, after having spent three earlier years with Bruno Paul[[453]] (1874-1954), a more conservative architect whose best work was done as a furniture designer. His independent career began in a much less spectacular fashion than that of Gropius. The Perls house of 1911 at Zehlendorf outside Berlin was as formally symmetrical as Behrens’s houses at Hagen of 1908-9 and rather more Schinkelesque. The Urbig house of 1914 at Neubabelsberg was very correctly late-eighteenth-century in its detailing. His most important work of these years, however, was the project for the H. E. L. J. Kröller house in The Hague of 1912, intended to contain the large and famous Kröller-Müller Collection of modern paintings now at Otterlo. Of this a full-scale wood and canvas model was erected on the actual site, but it was never built. The formal though asymmetrical organization of the severe horizontal blocks, the incorporation of voids in the composition by means of loggias and pilastrades, and the cold austerity of the refined detailing of the masonry all approach very closely such things by Schinkel as the Zivilcasino at Potsdam and Schloss Glienecke, even if the characteristic belvedere tower of the latter is significantly omitted. In many ways this project was as premonitory of later modern architecture as the Fagus Factory, although the latter, as an executed building, has properly received much more notice.[[454]] Both Gropius and Mies were involved in the First World War from 1914 to 1918, so that the next stage in their careers opened only in 1919.
Le Corbusier, Oud, and Rietveld were neutral nationals, but their production of these early years, although less interrupted by the war, is mostly not of much intrinsic interest. After two years with Perret in Paris Le Corbusier had spent six months in Behrens’s office in 1910.[[455]] His first house,[[456]] built for his parents at La Chaux de Fond in Switzerland in 1913, is more closely related to Behrens’s early houses in its plain white stucco walls and fairly restricted fenestration than it is to the work of Perret or to Behrens’s A.E.G. factories of 1909-11. The plan is the most interesting feature: this provides a central living area out of which other more specialized rooms open to left and right through wide glazed doors, a scheme that seems to derive from Perret’s planning, or perhaps that of Loos,[[457]] rather than from Wright’s.
Le Corbusier’s next significant work was a war-time project of 1914-15 for low-cost houses called Dom-Ino. These seem to derive not from anything of Perret’s or Behrens’s but rather directly from the ones that Tony Garnier had proposed for his ‘Cité Industrielle’ as early as 1901-4,[[458]] but they are still plainer, probably because of the concurrent influence of Loos. However, Le Corbusier’s only important executed building of the War years, the Villa Schwoff of 1916 at La Chaux de Fond, is closer to Perret in its elaborate formality,[[459]] its much simplified academic detail, and its concrete-and-brick construction. The plan represents an advance over that of his parents’ house, however, for the main living area here is carried up two storeys and lighted by a tall window-wall towards the garden. Of special significance also is the arrangement of all the flat roofs as usable terraces.
The next year, 1917, De Stijl was founded, and soon Oud and Rietveld as members of the group began to collaborate with the Dutch abstract painters and sculptors generally known as Neoplasticists.[[460]] In this year Oud built two villas by the seashore: Allegonda at Katwijk, designed in association with the architect M. Kamerlingh Onnes; and De Vonk at Noordwijkerhout, with interiors decorated by the De Stijl painter and critic Theo van Doesburg. The Dutch had no direct contact with Behrens, unlike the other three, but Oud was briefly with Fischer in Munich in 1911, as has been said. However, Oud’s work down to this time had been essentially Berlagian: moreover, it was Berlage who evoked his interest in the work of Wright. Nevertheless, there is nothing Wrightian about these villas, but rather a Loos-like reduction of architecture to white stucco cubes. The interest of De Vonk is largely confined to the floors of bold geometric pattern executed in coloured tile by van Doesburg; Allegonda was much modified by Oud in 1927. Rietveld was still primarily a furniture designer until 1921.
In 1918 Oud became City Architect of Rotterdam, where his brother occupied a prominent political position, and began work at once on the Spangen Housing Estate, Blocks I and II being of that year, Blocks VIII and IX of the next. The Tuschendijken Estate followed in 1920. These housing blocks, even more than the seaside villas, are notable for their negative rather than their positive qualities. All the elaboration of form and detail of the Amsterdam School was put aside in favour of an ascetic regularity. But various projects of these years illustrate how boldly Oud was attempting, partly under the influence of his painter and sculptor friends, partly under that of Wright, to arrive at new formal concepts. But Oud was not alone in these years in attempting to translate the ideals of De Stijl into architecture. Gerrit Rietveld, in a jewellery shop in Amsterdam built in 1921, was probably the first fully to realize Neoplasticist concepts in three dimensions and at architectural scale.[[461]]
In Paris in the first post-war years Le Corbusier was also closely involved with painters; indeed, he himself was then as much, or more, a painter as an architect, and he has never ceased painting since. With the French painter Amédée Ozenfant he had written a book on art, Après le cubisme, published in Paris in 1918; together they developed a post-Cubist sort of abstract painting, partly inspired by their friend Fernand Léger and partly by their interest in the simple shapes of everyday objects. This they called ‘Purisme’. In support of their ideas about all the arts they began in 1920[[462]] to publish a review, L’Esprit nouveau, which continued to appear until 1925, the nursery years of the new architecture.
In succession to his Dom-Ino system of multiple housing of 1914-15, Le Corbusier was developing at this time the Troyes system, using poured concrete, and also the Monol system with a reinforced-concrete skeleton deriving technically from the innovations of Perret. But the definitive formulation of his new ideals for architecture, focused as they were at this time on the sociological problem of the low-cost dwelling, lay a year or two ahead. Having no official position, he did not need, like Oud, to produce executed work in quantity before his own concepts matured. Gropius’s earliest work, back in 1906, had been a low-cost housing scheme, as has been noted, and in 1911 he built another housing estate, at Wittenberg-an-der-Elbe. Economical housing was increasingly recognized as a social service for which architects ought to exploit to the utmost their technical abilities; from the first it offered a common challenge to the Dutchman, the Swiss-Parisian, and the German.