Like the Dutch and Le Corbusier, Gropius was involved with painters in the early post-war years. Appointed in 1919 head of the Art School in Weimar and also of the Arts and Crafts School there which Van de Velde had run before the War, he combined them and named the new school the Bauhaus.[[463]] Here teachers of painting and sculpture and architecture worked in closest association with teachers of the crafts in continuation and extension of the English Arts and Crafts ideals of the eighties and nineties. Soon this rather Viennese approach, brought to the Bauhaus by Adolf Itten, with its emphasis on handicraft, was revised by Gropius so that it might better fit an increasingly industrialized society.[[464]] To his faculty Gropius brought such advanced painters as the German-American Lyonel Feininger in 1919 and in 1922 the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee. Yet it was not their refined art but rather Expressionist painting and sculpture which still influenced the jagged War Monument that he erected in Weimar in 1921. His architectural ideals in the early post-war years before 1922, moreover, seem to have been rather closer to Poelzig’s or Mendelsohn’s than to those of Le Corbusier, Oud, or Rietveld.
Figure 44. Le Corbusier: First project for Citrohan house, 1919-20, perspective
As has been several times stated already, certain remarkable projects best displayed the direction in which several of the architects of the younger generation were moving, along nearly parallel lines, in these years preceding the general revival of building production in the mid twenties. Gropius’s Chicago Tribune project of 1922, in which the line of his development shifted away from Expressionism, has already been discussed out of sequence (Plate [158A]). But the most significant projects, earlier than this by several years, were by Mies and by Le Corbusier. Mies’s early work had not been very adventurous up to the time when he proposed, in 1919 and in 1920-1, two revolutionary glazed skyscrapers to be built in Berlin. In both, the floors were to be cantilevered out from central supporting cores and the curtain-walls enclosing them merely light metal chassis holding great panes of glass. However, their plans, respectively jagged and curvilinear, reflected the strong influence of Expressionism, an influence that disappeared from Mies’s as from Gropius’s work the very next year, after the Germans became aware of the architectural implications of Dutch Neoplasticism and also of Russian Constructivism. Van Doesburg,[[465]] it should be noted, visited the Bauhaus in 1922, and for a short but crucial period both Gropius and Mies seem to have drawn from Dutch sources as much inspiration as the young Dutch architects. In addition to the obvious debts of Dudok, Oud, and Rietveld to Neoplasticism, Cornelis van Eesteren (b. 1897), today City Architect of Amsterdam, was actually collaborating with van Doesburg in these years on various house projects.
Less striking than Mies’s skyscrapers, but more buildable, were Le Corbusier’s successive Citrohan projects for houses of 1919-22 (Plate [160A]; Figures 44 and 45). Brought to public attention first in L’Esprit nouveau and later in his extremely influential book Vers une architecture, published in Paris in 1923 and shortly translated into English and German, these adumbrated a new aesthetic of architecture more completely than anything that he or any other architect had yet proposed on paper, much less built. Modest in size, each Citrohan house was to consist largely of a two-storey living-room fronted like that of the La Chaux de Fond house of 1916 with a tall window-wall. This would occupy most of the façade, and it was here set within a very plain frame of rendered concrete. The dining area was to be at the rear under a balcony from which the bedroom would open. Thus the section is similar to Wright’s Millard house of 1923.
The earlier version of the house was intended to stand on the ground (Figure [44]); in the later scheme the whole cube of the house was to be lifted up on pilotis, that is, free-standing piers of reinforced concrete constituting, Perret-like, essential parts of the structural skeleton (Plate [160A]; Figure 45). Like Sullivan’s piers at the base of the Guaranty Building of 1894-5 (Plate #119:pl119) the effect of these pilotis, allowing circumambient space to pass under the enclosed building above, was to enhance very strongly the look of volume as opposed to mass. This treatment, possible only with skeleton construction in ferro-concrete, steel, or wood, soon became one of the most significant formal devices differentiating the new architecture of the twenties from what preceded it. The later Citrohan project was thus the first of the ‘boxes on stilts’ against which Wright continually protested, even though his own buildings themselves tended more and more frequently to be lifted off the ground by one means or another.
Figure 45. Le Corbusier:
Second project for
Citrohan house, 1922,
plans and section
If the structural methods employed here by Le Corbusier came from Perret, the external expression of his lifted box seems rather to derive from Garnier or Loos, although the rendered surfaces were evidently intended to be smoother and flatter than those of Loos’s executed houses (Plate [155A]) and the pattern of the windows much more regularly organized in the wall-plane. With the roof terrace on top surrounded by parapets continuous with the wall-planes below, even the earlier type is apprehended as volume rather than mass, especially as there were no deep window reveals to suggest thickness in the walls such as appear in Garnier’s projects and Loos’s executed work. By keeping the openings absolutely in the wall-plane, as Hoffmann had done on the Stoclet house, the very exact geometrical discipline of the design of the façades could be maintained even when seen in perspective. As a result, however, the underlying structure was expressed only in the pilotis of the later project. Yet the wide expanse of the window-wall at the front and the characteristic shape of the other windows, oblongs extended horizontally,[[466]] would obviously not have been practical but for the long spans made possible by the ferro-concrete skeleton.
There was in the Citrohan projects no very close similarity to Le Corbusier’s Purist pictures of these years other than the crisply geometrical ordering of the very flat façades and the untextured smoothness of their surfaces. However, the extreme mechanical precision and the more-than-Loosian rejection of the inessential clearly reflected an aesthetic parallel to that adumbrated in his paintings. Certainly the effect was—as Wright and others recurrently complained—likely to prove more pictorial than architectonic when such things were executed. There was no ornament such as Oud had, in some sense, obtained at Katwijk from his painter-collaborator van Doesburg; indeed, there was hardly any detail at all, at least as architectural detail was understood by Perret and Behrens. In this respect also Le Corbusier’s new architecture was closest to the personal style of Loos.