The flats that Mies built in the Afrikanische Strasse in Berlin in 1924-5 were more in line with Gropius’s and Le Corbusier’s contemporary work than his private houses. Moreover, his block of flats (Plate [162B]) at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 on the Weissenhof at Stuttgart, of which he was the general director, with its lines of broad window-bands broken occasionally by vertical stair-windows, had an elasticity of planning and a clarity and subtlety of expression much superior to Gropius’s taller and longer slabs at Dammerstock and Siemensstadt.
In 1929 came Mies’s masterpiece, one of the few buildings by which the twentieth century might wish to be measured against the great ages of the past (Plate [165A]). The German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition, although built of permanent materials—steel, glass, marble, and travertine—was, like most exhibition buildings, only temporary. But few structures have come to be so widely known after their demolition, or so intensely admired through reproductions, except perhaps Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Set on a raised travertine base almost like a Greek stylobate, in which lies an oblong reflecting pool, the space within the pavilion was defined by no bounding walls at all but solely by the rectangle of its thin roof-slab. This was supported, almost immaterially, on a few regularly spaced metal members of delicate cruciform section sheathed in chromium. The covered area was subdivided, rather in the manner of the project of 1922 for a brick country house, by tall plate-glass panels carried in light metal chassis, some transparent, some opaque, and also by screens of highly polished marble standing apart from the metal supports. The disposition of these screens is asymmetrical but exquisitely ordered; yet it has none of that Neoplasticist complexity evident in the placing of the partitioning elements in the project of 1922. As a result, the articulated space of the pavilion has a classic serenity quite unlike the more dynamically flowing interiors of Wright’s houses. At the Berlin Building Exhibition in 1931 Mies repeated the Barcelona Pavilion in less sumptuous materials, making only slight changes in the plan so that it might provide a model for a house.
Figure 50. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Brno, Tugendhat house, 1930, plan
More than a little of the special quality of space-distribution in this exhibit Mies had been able to achieve already in the Tugendhat house of 1930 at Brno in Czechoslovakia. There also the screens that subdivide the unified living-space are quite separate from the delicate cruciform metal supports (Figure [50]). One of them, made of macassar ebony, partially encloses the dining-area and is semicircular in plan, thus notably enriching the general spatial effect. Externally this house is less remarkable. At the upper, or entrance, level towards the street it is quite closed in and even rather forbidding; but at the rear towards the garden there is a continuous, room-high glass wall framed by stucco bands above and below. At one end an open terrace is included within the rectangle of the plan, and from this a broad flight of stone stairs descends to the ground. The contrast with the somewhat similar rear of Le Corbusier’s Les Terrasses expresses well the considerable range of different effects possible within the tight limits of the new architecture even in this, its most rigidly doctrinaire period of the late twenties.
Within the twenties, both in France and in Germany, the new architecture received its full formulation, first in projects and shortly afterwards in executed work. At the same time Le Corbusier and Gropius provided in articles and in books the arguments in its defence.[[483]] Both are extremely articulate men, the one with the emotional intensity of a poet or a preacher, the other with the cool logic of a scientist or a professor. They soon found excited readers and later devoted followers all over the western world as their writings were exported, translated,[[484]] and paraphrased; but the significant activity of this period was by no means only French and German. Despite the continuing vitality of the Amsterdam School through the mid twenties, the new Dutch school associated with Rotterdam rose rapidly in national and international significance. Oud,[[485]] indeed, brought the new architecture to maturity in Holland in precisely the same years as Le Corbusier and their German contemporaries; Rietveld and several others made signal contributions also, in Rietveld’s case perhaps equal in importance to Oud’s.
The Oud Mathenesse housing estate at Rotterdam, which Oud undertook in 1922, is rather different from Spangen and Tuschendijken. At first sight it may appear more conservative, since it consists of small terrace houses with visible tiled roofs rather than tall blocks of flats. But rendered and painted walls replaced the brick of the earlier Rotterdam work, recalling the Loos-like treatment of his seaside villas as also the rather Wrightian projects he had designed in the intervening years. Moreover, the shapes and subdivisions of the windows were very carefully considered, so that the general effect is quite similar to the most advanced projects of Le Corbusier and of Mies designed in this same year. The influence of the De Stijl artists may not be very apparent in the façades of the houses and shops; but in the temporary building superintendent’s office that Oud built here in 1923 cubical wooden elements painted in primary colours produced a composition quite like a Neoplasticist painting developed in three dimensions. It should be noted, however, that this was not, like Dudok’s work of the period, at all related to the very complex Neoplasticist sculpture of Vantongerloo. Oud’s façade of 1925 for the Café de Unie in Rotterdam, being two-dimensional, was even more like a Mondrian painting raised to architectural scale.
It has already been mentioned that in 1923 van Doesburg was engaged in collaboration with van Eesteren on some remarkable studies, half abstract paintings, half architectural isometrics. Rietveld, in the Schroeder house of 1924 in Utrecht (Plate [164B]), boldly carried such a hypothetical Neoplasticist architecture of discrete planes and structural lines into the world of reality even more completely than in his earlier shop in Amsterdam.
But by this time, Oud felt he had learned what Neoplasticism had to offer him. He was in any case now personally closer to Mondrian than to van Doesburg, and Mondrian had left Holland for Paris. In Oud’s first really mature work, which remains also his masterpiece, two terraces with shops at their ends built at the Hook of Holland in 1926-7 but designed a year or two earlier, all overt emulation of contemporary painting disappeared, except for the restriction of colour to white-painted rendering with only small touches of the primaries on some of the minor elements of wood and metal (Plate [163B]). The serenity of these smooth façades with their long regular ranges of horizontal windows, the extreme refinement of the detailing of the fences and the doorways, and, above all, the lyricism of the rounded shops, their walls all of glass under a cantilevered slab bent down at the ends, were unequalled by anything Le Corbusier or Gropius or Mies had yet built. Reputedly it was the influence of Van de Velde that led Oud to introduce curves here, much to the disgust of the Neoplasticists.
Oud’s terrace-houses in the 1927 exhibition at Stuttgart were equally exemplary in their perfection of finish but slightly less interesting in their over-all design. Those by a still younger Dutch architect, Mart Stam (b. 1899), were perhaps superior. Then there followed Oud’s very large Kiefhoek housing project at Rotterdam which was built in 1928-30. Here the windows of the upper storey of each terrace became a continuous band, but something of the earlier refinement was lost just as in Gropius’s Siemensstadt blocks of the same period.