At Kiefhoek Oud was called on to provide a church as well as housing. Its vices as well as its virtues epitomize very well the state of the new architecture at the end of the decade (Plate [164A]). Considered as elements in an abstract composition, the handling of the subordinate features of the Kiefhoek church is masterly, refining and—as it were—domesticating various adjuncts of an almost industrial order such as had earlier provided a good part of the varied visual interest of Gropius’s Fagus Factory. But the main auditorium block is so box-like that it holds its place among the rows of houses only by its size, offering no expression whatsoever of its special purpose—it could as easily be a garage. A far more notable exemplar of the new architecture, still about the finest twentieth-century building in Holland, is the van Nelle Factory outside Rotterdam built in 1927-8 by the firm of J. A. Brinkman (1902-49) and L. C. van der Vlugt (b. 1894) but probably designed by Stam (Plate [163A]). The Dutch firm of B. Bijvoet (b. 1889) and Johannes Duiker (1890-1935) should also be mentioned for their admirable work of the twenties, starting with several Wrightian houses of 1924 at Kijkduin, but soon quite as advanced as Oud’s or Rietveld’s.

The conditions of the twenties—or more precisely the particular conditions under which the new architects had to work and, to a large extent, even seemed satisfied to work—restricted their scope rather considerably. In France the usual clients, often American rather than French, sought houses that were avant-garde and related ideologically to the painting of the Cubists and Post-Cubists. Towards the utilitarian field of low-cost housing the new architects everywhere felt a special responsibility; in Germany and Holland they readily found major opportunities for official employment at such work. Their intense concern with the aesthetic potentialities of engineering gave them a special sympathy for industrial building, but major opportunities such as the van Nelle Factory were very rare. Gropius’s Bauhaus, a large and complex structure serving a cultural purpose, and the Barcelona Pavilion, an edifice with almost no other purpose than to be beautiful, were important exceptions in a range of production characterized by a surprising international consistency of type as well as of character.

Yet the hands of the various individual architects are, in fact, never difficult to distinguish and, from this time onwards, the paths of the four early leaders began definitely to diverge. It was chiefly the work of late-comers, of whom there were in the twenties large numbers only in Germany, that tended towards monotony and anonymity. Not since the early years of the nineteenth century, when Romantic Classicism at the hands of a second generation reached a comparable clarity of stylistic definition, had there been such a rigid and humbly accepted architectural discipline. However, certain men, such as Mendelsohn and Dudok, retained in their practice of the new architecture strong traces of earlier idiosyncrasies. Much of their work lacks therefore the purity and the assured mastery of the four initiators. But Mendelsohn’s Schocken Department Stores, built in several German cities in the late twenties—at Nuremberg and Stuttgart in 1926-7, at Chemnitz in 1928—and his Petersdorf Store at Breslau in 1927 are certainly superior in interest and in vitality to the new city houses and suburban villas in France; not to speak of the housing estates in Germany that were being produced in such considerable quantity by the end of the decade by architects who were literalistic adherents of the new architecture. The work of such designers showed all the naive enthusiasm, the subjection to discipline, and the doctrinaire characteristics of the activity of new converts in any field.

But when, in his Columbus Haus of 1929-31 in Berlin, Mendelsohn finally accepted a comparable discipline he was able to retain most of his earlier vitality. Here he produced a really paradigmatic commercial building—almost a small skyscraper—such as none of the four leaders ever had the opportunity of carrying to execution in the twenties. Much the same can be said for a considerably later ‘baby skyscraper’, Dudok’s Erasmus Huis of 1939-40 in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam. This is still, after the van Nelle Factory, one of the best buildings in Rotterdam, despite all the post-war reconstruction there (see Chapter [25]).

As the new architecture spread to other countries around 1930 it was naturally the lowest common denominator of its potentialities that became most widely evident. However, at just this point an international depression supervened; the building boom, with which the rise of the new architecture had been at best but coincidentally associated, soon ground to a standstill. In Germany in the early thirties, moreover, as also in Russia and considerably later and less rigidly in Italy, an authoritarian regime proscribed the new architecture. Leaders like Gropius, Mies, and Mendelsohn left the country and the new architecture was in abeyance there until after Hitler’s fall.

CHAPTER 23
LATER WORK OF THE LEADERS OF THE SECOND GENERATION

Historians, whether of politics or the arts, should ideally stand at some distance from their subjects thanks to remoteness in time; in lieu of that, remoteness in space sometimes serves the same purpose. However, this historian has now reached the point at which he entered the scene; he must write, as statesmen who write history are often forced to do, of events concerning which he has first-hand knowledge—and hence, alas, first-hand prejudices. Architects, the real actors in architectural history, often write as well as build; since Vitruvius there have been many whose fame depends as much on their books as on their buildings, not least several of the men with whom Part Three of this book has dealt. But those who write about architecture as historians and critics without being active builders, who merely explain, select, and illustrate the significant work of their own day or even of the past—particularly the immediate past—are to some extent minor actors on the scene also. They cannot, therefore, be merely neutral observers, reporting without parti pris the ideas and the achievements of others, however hard they may try to maintain their objectivity.

To have written the only monograph on Wright to appear in French, to have provided the first account in English of the new architecture, to have published a book on the work of Oud in the late twenties, modest as these contributions were, are all actions indicating an early commitment on the part of this author. The preparation in 1931 with Philip Johnson of the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, in which Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, and Mies were signalized as the leaders of the new architecture, and the publication—also with Philip Johnson—of the book called The International Style[[486]] at that time were even more definite and controversial acts of participation in the dialectic of architectural development in this century.

If it seems necessary to mention these publications here and not merely to refer to them in the Notes or list them in the Bibliography, it is in no spirit of boastfulness but rather of apology. From this point on the ideal objectivity of the historian, attempting disinterestedly to piece the past together from a study of its extant monuments and from relevant contemporary documents, is inevitably coloured, if not cancelled out, by the subjectivity of the critic writing of events he knew at first hand. Concerning them, of course, his present opinions have no more real historical validity than those he held and published nearer the time when the events occurred. With this proviso the canvas may now be somewhat broadened.