But there would have been no El Panamá Hotel in Panama (1950) by Stone, no Istanbul Hilton Hotel (1954) by the Skidmore firm, and no such foreign building programme by the United States Government as was responsible for the executed embassies by Rapson & Van de Gracht of the early fifties and the ones since built by Eero Saarinen in London and Oslo, by Gropius and TAC in Athens, by Stone in New Delhi, and by Breuer in The Hague but for the pioneering of the Europeans, nor did that pioneering cease in the thirties. Only in Oud’s case, because of a serious indisposition that removed him from practice for many years after 1930, was the œuvre effectively complete with the twenties; and even he is now quite active again. In the case of both Le Corbusier and Mies, if not of Gropius, their largest commissions came only after the Second World War. Their influence in the 1950s was still as great as around 1930, in Mies’s case considerably greater. The mid twentieth century had come to accept stylistic continuity in a way that the nineteenth century, was never able to do once the tradition of Romantic Classicism finally wore out. The often adventurous late work of these men, now become elder statesmen of modern architecture, fortunately counter-balanced to some extent those more rigid interpretations of the discipline they founded, interpretations that recurrently threatened after the late twenties to become academic and frozen in one country or another.
Many of the more characteristic demands of Le Corbusier’s aesthetic canon, as it had been announced in his projects of the early twenties and adumbrated in the succession of houses that led up to the Savoye house of 1929-30—including restrictions docilely accepted almost everywhere by advanced architects in the late twenties—were already ignored in the buildings he himself designed in the early thirties. The house that he built for Hélène de Mandrot at Le Pradet in Provence in 193O-1 is raised on no pilotis but sits firmly on a terrace; and its walls, where solid, are of rough, uncoursed rubble. Quiet and rectangular, with no lyrically curved elements and little painted colour, this house accepts the surrounding landscape as Wright’s had always done. Le Corbusier seemed here almost to be avowing a respect for local materials and humble village craftsmanship such as is associated with Voysey and his English contemporaries of a generation earlier that would certainly have been anathema to him in the twenties. On the other hand, the penthouse that he built in 1931 for Carlos de Beistegui on top of a block of flats on the Champs Élysées in Paris was all of plate glass and white marble. This had something of the glittering elegance of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion of two years earlier, where the polished marbles, once so brilliantly exploited by Loos, were first brought back after a decade of restriction to ascetic and impermanent surfaces of painted stucco.
The Salvation Army Building which Le Corbusier erected in 1931-2 in the Rue Cantagrel in Paris is more in line with the canon of the twenties. Unfortunately the original curtain-wall is now cut up by projecting sun-breaks added in a post-war refurbishing by Le Corbusier’s former partner Pierre Jeanneret. The Maison Clarté block of flats of 1930-2 in Geneva is almost as completely glass-walled.
It was most notably the Swiss Hostel at the Cité Universitaire in Paris, designed in 1930 and built in 1931-2, which introduced various quite new elements of plan and design that Le Corbusier would develop much further after the Second World War (Plate [165B]). The pilotis he used in the twenties were thin and round, rather like Perret’s columns, though without their facets and capitals; but here a double row of heavy piers of a complex moulded section carries a dormitory block that is boldly cantilevered out from them both front and back. The rubble masonry of the Mandrot house was used here once more for a tall unbroken wall of irregularly curved plan at the rear of the building; the textured and tonal surface of this wall and its effect of solidity contrasts both with the exposed concrete of the structural elements and with the smooth areas of thin stone plaquage on the upper walls. Curves in Le Corbusier’s earlier work were almost always confined within a bounding rectangle and never made of massive materials; yet they lost none of their elegance in being handled in this bolder and more organic way. This is closely related to his later paintings, of which the mural in the common room here provides a major example.
The international depression closed in even more completely on France in the early thirties than it did elsewhere, and there was no subsequent revival of building activity such as other countries experienced in the years preceding the Second World War. Le Corbusier’s activities were therefore more and more confined to projects, most of them for commissions outside France. However, a small block of flats, very similar to the Maison Clarté in Geneva, was built at 24 Avenue Nungesser et Coli on the western edge of Paris in 1933. The most interesting portion of this is the architect’s own penthouse on top; there, like another Soane, he experimented at small scale with a variety of vault-topped spaces.
In a modest house at 49 Avenue du Chesnay in Vaucresson of 1935 there are no more curves in plan than in the Mandrot house, but segmental concrete vaults cover the rectangular bays of which the plan is made up. Moreover, as if to underline Le Corbusier’s return towards nature after his earlier devotion to the abstract and the mechanistic, grass grows over their crowns to provide insulation. The exposed frame of the concrete structure, where not filled with glass brick, has panels of coursed rubble.
Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties often included new ideas that others exploited even before he was able to do so himself in executed work. For example, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio de Janeiro, on which he was a consultant only, designed in 1937 and completed in 1942 by Lúcio Costa (b. 1902), Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1907), and a group of others, the great building which opened so brilliantly the story of the new architecture in Brazil (Plate [171]), included on the west front the projecting sun-breaks he had first proposed in 1933 for certain tall buildings intended to be erected in Algiers. Such sun-breaks soon became characteristic of mid-century architecture in all countries where the sun’s heat and glare offered a major problem—in Asia and Africa as much as in South America. By this device the all-glass wall, favourite large-scale theme of the new architecture since Mies’s early skyscraper projects, received a much-needed functional correction. As often before, a real (or supposed) practical need encouraged the satisfaction of overt or covert aesthetic aspirations; for sun-breaks very much enhance the three-dimensional interest of large façades, substituting for the slick planar effects characteristic of the twenties a more articulated sort of surface treatment related to, but independent of, the expression of skeleton structure. Sun-breaks even came to be used where they are hardly needed, quite as has been the case with various other clichés of modern architecture.
Since the war three major works of Le Corbusier, in the estimation of many critics his masterpieces, have carried much further the sculptural tendencies of his architecture of the thirties. One of these, the block of flats called the Unité d’Habitation,[[501]] far out the Boulevard Michelet in Marseilles, which was first projected in 1946 and finally completed in 1952, has various other points of interest, however. The Unité realizes on a large scale Le Corbusier’s ideas for the mass-dwelling, providing a single tall slab large enough to house a complete community and including, half-way up, a storey intended to be entirely occupied by shops, as well as other communal facilities on the roof (Plate #166:pl166). An ingenious section allows two-storey living-rooms for all the flats and also permits the use of a skip-stop lift system (Figure [51]). The framework in front of the walls provides sun protection for the tall living-room windows and also shallow balconies for each flat both front and back.
Like the Swiss Hostel, the Unité is carried on central supports arranged in a double row. These are much more massively sculptural than the earlier ones in Paris, and almost anthropomorphically expressive of weight-bearing. All the poured concrete surfaces are left rough as they came from the forms, and the prefabricated members of the outer sun-break system have an exposed pebble aggregate. Everything is bold and masculine, even coarse, indicating a complete turnabout in Le Corbusier’s understanding of the essential ‘nature’—itself a rather Wrightian concept—of concrete. On the roof an abstract landscape of sculptural forms plays counterpoint to the superb backdrop of mountains. One cannot help remembering the roof of Gaudí’s Casa Milá in Barcelona (Plate [137A]); there are even some glazed tiles set in the concrete to provide notes of ‘permanent polychrome’. Yet the window in the entrance-hall at the base of the slab is quite Neoplasticist in the pattern of its subdivisions and the use of coloured glass; while painted colour of the boldest sort, by no means restricted to the primaries, is used on the sides of the sun-breaks, though not on any of the outer surfaces. Thus has Le Corbusier’s later architecture been enriched by a sort of eclecticism quite remote from his Purist aesthetic of the twenties.
