By the early thirties the new architecture was by no means restricted to France, Germany, and Holland, the countries where it had originated. Yet, with the possible exception of Alvar Aalto (b. 1898) in Finland, no other leader of the calibre of the early four had appeared up to that time. The building of 1928-9 at Turku for the newspaper Turun Sanomat was Aalto’s first mature work to be completed. In this the plastic handling of the concrete piers[[487]] in the interior introduced a new and personal note of architectural expression in a frankly industrial setting. His Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Paimio of 1929-33 rivalled the Bauhaus in size, if not perhaps in complexity, and was almost the first[[488]] major demonstration of the special applicability of the new architecture to hospitals. The City Library at Viipuri, designed as early as 1927 but not finished until 1935, was a more original example of the new architecture. In particular, the lecture hall there, with its acoustic ceiling of irregularly wavy section made up of strips of wood, was strikingly novel.
In the United States the Lovell house in Los Angeles opened in 1929 the American career of Richard J. Neutra (b. 1892), an Austrian who had worked briefly with Wright. In this house, with its cantilevers, its broad areas of glass, and its volumetric composition, Neutra showed the completeness with which he had already rejected the broad Wrightian road and accepted the more restricted aspirations of the newer architecture of Europe. Never, perhaps, have Wright’s ideals and those of the next generation appeared so sharply opposed as at just this time, moreover. But Neutra’s mature work began only considerably later than this.
In 1930-2 the tallest of all skyscrapers, the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, was rising in New York; this was a shaped tower in the local tradition although devoid of reminiscent stylistic detail. In these same years, however, a well-established ‘traditional’ architect, George Howe (1886-1954),[[489]] in association with a Swiss, William E. Lescaze (b. 1896), who had been a pupil of Karl Moser, returned to the Sullivanian slab in designing the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (Plate #169:pl169). Moreover, they treated their slab along the lines that the leading European exponents of the new architecture had adumbrated in the previous ten years. It would be a score of years before other skyscrapers of such significant and distinguished design were built in American cities (see Chapter 25).
In Sweden E. G. Asplund (1885-1940), whose architecture had hitherto been of a ‘Neo-Neo-Classic’ order, extremely crisp and refined but definitely reminiscent,[[490]] turned to the new architecture of Le Corbusier and Gropius just before he completed the Central Library of Stockholm (Plate [176A]), a building first projected in 1921 but not opened until 1928 (see Chapter [24]). For the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, of which he had entire charge, Asplund was soon designing an extensive and elegantly varied range of pavilions that exploited to the full the possibilities of the new architecture. In Denmark Kay Fisker (b. 1893) underwent a somewhat less drastic conversion at much the same time.
These years also saw the beginning of the English career of Berthold Lubetkin[[491]] (b. 1901), a Russian who had settled in England in 1930 after working for some time in France. His early Gorilla House at the Regent’s Park Zoo in London was soon outshone by the smaller, but much more remarkable, Penguin Pool there of 1933-5, which is almost a piece of Constructivist sculpture (Plate [172B]). In 1933-5 also, the tall block of middle-class flats, Highpoint I at Highgate outside London, was erected by the Tecton group, of which Lubetkin was the leading spirit. With its fine hill-top site overlooking Hampstead Heath, this cruciform tower rivalled Le Corbusier’s Clarté block in Geneva of 1930-2 in interest and in quality. Almost equally impressive, and like Highpoint hardly rivalled by comparable work in London since, is the Peter Jones Department Store in Sloane Square, designed in 1935 by William Crabtree.[[492]] Already in 1933 Mendelsohn had settled in England, practising there for a few years in partnership with Serge Chermayeff (b. 1900) before moving on to Israel in 1936. From 1934 to 1937 Gropius was in England working with E. Maxwell Fry (b. 1899); Marcel Breuer (b. 1902), a Hungarian pupil of Gropius from the Bauhaus, was also in England working with F. R. S. Yorke (1906-62). By the mid thirties Connell, Ward & Lucas,[[493]] Wells Coates (1895-1958), and Frederick Gibberd (b. 1908) were also well started on their careers.[[494]]
In Italy, where the projects of an architect associated with Futurism,[[495]] Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916), before his death in the First World War had offered a remarkable premonition of the new architecture of the twenties, a fresh talent at least comparable in interest and individuality to Lubetkin’s appeared on the scene in these years. The Casa del Fascio at Como of 1932-6 by Giuseppe Terragni (1904-43) is almost as original as Aalto’s Viipuri Library but very different (Plate [172A]). In its use of fine marbles and in its innate classicism it recalls Mies, yet it is as Mediterranean in spirit as his work is Northern. Unfortunately, like Sant’Elia before him, Terragni was killed in the Second World War that followed within a few years after the start of his career. However, the firm of Luigi Figini (b. 1903) and Gino Pollini (b. 1903), who continue to be leaders of Italian modern architecture, also made their first mark at this time with the ‘Artist’s House’ that they showed at the Fifth Triennale in Milan in 1933. This was similarly calm and Latin in its handling of the ‘international’ vocabulary of form.
The Florence railway station, built in 1934-6 by Giovanni Michelucci (b. 1891) and five associated architects, also deserves mention. Michelucci is not to be compared with Terragni or Figini & Pollini, but his station was stylistically the most advanced in the world when it was built. Moreover, like the Casa del Fascio in Como, it offers notable evidence of the support the Fascist regime was still giving to architettura razionale at a time when both in Germany and in Russia other authoritarian regimes were denouncing the International Style. The Termini Station in Rome (Plate [183B]) was begun even earlier from the designs of Angiolo Mazzoni. It owes its distinguished reputation as the finest station of the twentieth century, however, to the new project of Eugenio Montuori (b. 1907) and his associates, prepared in 1947 and finally carried to effective completion in 1951 (see Chapter [25]).
Yet for all the increasingly wide spread of the new architecture by the mid thirties, Le Corbusier and two Germans retained their international position of leadership despite economic depression in France and Hitlerian exile from Germany. If the amount of their executed work was much reduced—in the case of Mies for several years to nil—the geographical range of their activities was now much extended. Today, for example, Le Corbusier’s work is to be found from La Plata in Argentina to Chandigarh in India; he was also a consultant on two of the largest and most striking buildings in the New World built just before and just after the Second World War, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio (Plate [171]) and the United Nations Secretariat[[496]] in New York.
Gropius and Mies, settling in America in the late thirties, became figures of crucial importance in the reform of American architectural education[[497]] as well as being increasingly productive as architects since the war. At Harvard University[[498]] and at the Illinois Institute of Technology, respectively, they set a pace for several American architects who later became leading educators, such as Howe at Yale and W. W. Wurster (b. 1895) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California. Mendelsohn, still very much of an individualist, but with a notable international reputation based on what he had built in England and in Israel as well as on his earlier work of the twenties in Germany, practised in America from after the war down to his death.
This extension of the field of activity and the direct influence of the European leaders further emphasized the universal character of the new architecture. Today American architects, such as the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,[[499]] working as far from home as Turkey, or Edward D. Stone (b. 1902), building on three continents, provide almost the most characteristic later examples of what—and in their cases most critics would agree—is not improperly called the International Style. The American Embassies in Copenhagen and in Stockholm, and the flats for embassy personnel at Neuilly and at Boulogne outside Paris, all by Rapson[[500]] & Van de Gracht, are perhaps the most distinguished examples of American work abroad of the 1950s.