Articles in L’Esprit nouveau and later the illustrations in Vers une architecture revealed the sources of Le Corbusier’s extra-architectural inspiration and made such inspiration available to others who cared to look about them with his particular vision and his clearly defined ideals for the modern world. Works of engineering, American grain-elevators and the like;[[467]] the forms of things that move—ocean liners, motor cars and aeroplanes:[[468]] such things provided some of the visual prototypes for Le Corbusier’s new aesthetic of architecture.[[469]] But there was also the social motive of developing a method of building houses to satisfy the needs of all classes. Moreover, Le Corbusier was already—to use a term introduced later—as much a ‘planner’ as an architect. In 1922 he prepared a project for a city of three million inhabitants. This proposed at the core a geometrically ordered group of widely spaced cruciform skyscrapers and, round the core, ranges of blocks of flats of moderate height, not arranged along narrow streets, but broadly distributed over a park-like terrain.
Le Corbusier had many years to wait before the world caught up with his ideas as a planner as these were promulgated in his book Urbanisme, published in Paris in 1925. But as an architect[[470]] he was shortly building in and near Paris a series of houses, most of them of considerably greater size than his Citrohan project. Moreover, in 1927, at the Werkbund Exhibition in Stuttgart, he finally brought that to execution also, although some minor modifications were incorporated.[[471]] Le Corbusier’s very first post-war houses—one at Vaucresson, S.-et-O., near Paris, which has been remodelled quite beyond recognition, and the house for Ozenfant at 53 Avenue Reille in the Montrouge district of Paris, both designed in 1922 and built in 1923—were naturally not very adequate expressions of his ideals[[472]] (Figure [46]). But, beginning with the contiguous La Roche and Jeanneret houses, designed originally in 1922 also and executed with many modifications and improvements in 1924 in the Square du Dr Blanche in the Auteuil district of Paris, and culminating in the Savoye house at Poissy, S.-et-O., of 1929-30 (Plate [159]), the new aesthetic[[473]] of the Citrohan project was exploited with increasing virtuosity. Le Corbusier developed much further the spatial unity of his plans, usually keeping inside a defining rectangle but articulating that in various ways: at the Savoye house, for example, the main terrace is within the same raised box as the enclosed rooms (Figure [47]). The treatment of the exteriors likewise grew simpler and more open. Horizontal windows were grouped and extended to form continuous ribbons all the way across façades, and roofs at various levels, being completely flat, served as outdoor living-spaces. This is best seen at Les Terrasses (Plate [160B]), the house built in 1927 for Michael Stein at 17 Rue du Professeur Pauchet in Garches, S.-et-O.
Figure 46. Le Corbusier:
Vaucresson, S.-et-O., house, 1923, plans
Different colours were often used on different walls to emphasize them as individual planes, particularly in interiors. Curved elements, such as were introduced earlier in the plan of the Vaucresson house (Figure [46]), appeared at the Savoye house in screens that rose around the upper roof-terrace (Plate [159]). Moreover, the geometrical discipline of his tracés régulateurs based on the Golden Section was used with ever-increasing consistency.[[474]] At the same time the use of different colours and of curves produced, particularly at the Savoye house, a lyricism closely related to that of Purist paintings of the early twenties. This is curious, since in his paintings dating from the late twenties Le Corbusier was moving away from Purism, under the influence of Fernand Léger (and perhaps even of Surrealism), towards a looser and more connotative mode.
Figure 47. Le Corbusier: Poissy, S.-et-O., Savoye house, 1929-30, plan
Le Corbusier was not the only architect of the new generation building houses in Paris in these years. Beside his, those by the Belgian Robert Mallet-Stevens (b. 1886)[[475]] are at once cruder and more superficial in their design. In the Rue Mallet-Stevens near Le Corbusier’s La Roche and Jeanneret houses, where he built several houses close together in 1926-7, he provided a somewhat depressing glimpse of the future, a glimpse which has often proved, alas, to be only too accurate a generation later. The Cité Seurat, on the other side of Paris near Le Corbusier’s Ozenfant house, offered an even larger group of new houses of the same period, several of them of much higher quality. The Chana Orloff house there is by Perret; but most of the others are by André Lurçat[[476]] (b. 1892), an architect of much more integrity than Mallet-Stevens, if without Le Corbusier’s genius. The best of Lurçat’s houses, where they have been adequately maintained, possess certain common-sense virtues that Le Corbusier’s lack; in the late twenties and early thirties they provided paradigms at least as popular as Le Corbusier’s. His school of 1931 in Villejuif, Seine, has a special importance also, as it was in the field of school-building[[477]] that the new architecture first became widely accepted later in the thirties in several countries. Le Corbusier’s activity was much greater than Lurçat’s, however, and in one major project at least he extended the scope of the new architecture far beyond the realm of the modest private dwellings that he and Lurçat were so largely restricted to building in the twenties.
In 1925, in the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, Le Corbusier had shown a dwelling unit of the Citrohan type arranged as a flat with a large terrace at one side, following an unexecuted project of 1922. The actual housing estate that he built at Pessac outside Bordeaux in 1925-6 was less successful, although by this time many young architects concerned with housing in other countries were finding inspiration in his work and perhaps even more in his ideas. But it was in an entirely different realm that Le Corbusier had, like Saarinen in the Chicago Tribune competition, a failure which was nonetheless a tremendous succès d’estime. Le Corbusier’s project for the Palace of the League of Nations[[478]] came very close to winning the competition of 1927. Moreover, the totally undistinguished scheme jointly produced by the elderly Frenchman P.-H. Nénot (1853-1934), who had built the new Sorbonne in Paris in 1884-9, and various other architects from several different countries eventually executed in Geneva never received the attention or the flattery of world-wide emulation and imitation which Le Corbusier’s project did. This led, for example, to his selection to design the Centrosoyus in Moscow in 1928. Begun the following year, this was finally finished in 1936, but with most inadequate supervision. However, the Communist ‘party line’[[479]] turned sharply against modern architecture in the early thirties, and no more projects by Western European architects were invited after the Palace of the Soviets competition held in 1931.
If Le Corbusier in the twenties was, by force of circumstances, almost more completely restricted to house-building than Wright had been in the preceding decades, Gropius’s career in Germany developed very differently. In 1925 he was invited by the city of Dessau to come there from Weimar and re-establish the Bauhaus; in that year and the next he had a chance to build a very large and complex structure to house the school as well as his own and several other professors’ houses. The houses were not notable additions to the new canon, although they were soon as much imitated as Le Corbusier’s and Lurçat’s. However, the Bauhaus building itself was the first major example of the new architecture to be executed, illustrating on a large scale most of its possibilities and principal themes, none of them by this date altogether novel.