Figure 51. Le Corbusier: Marseilles, Unité d’Habitation, 1946-52, section of three storeys
At Chandigarh in India, where Le Corbusier had the general responsibility for planning the entire new capital of the State of Punjab and of building the principal public monuments, only one or two were by the mid fifties finished; the rest of the city was the work of other architects, principally Pierre Jeanneret and the English firm of Maxwell Fry and his wife Jane Drew. The High Courts of Justice,[[502]] built by Le Corbusier in 1952-6, are even more sculptural than the Unité at Marseilles. A continuous umbrella-like shell-vault of concrete rises high above the roofs of the court-rooms to allow the free passage of air. Supporting this are great rounded piers that merge into the concave surfaces over them, almost like the structural elements of the Casa Milá, but here of monumental scale. On the west side deep box-crates, with brilliant painted colours on their soffits like those on the sun-breaks of the Unité, keep the sun off the glazed walls of the court-rooms and provide that three-dimensional play first exploited on the Ministry in Rio.
The long slab of the Secretariat at Chandigarh, also of 1952-6, with its very varied pattern of sun-breaks, is less novel than the High Courts; but other work of the mid fifties at Ahmedabad should not be ignored (see Chapter [25]). However, Le Corbusier’s most extraordinary late building is in France, not India, and therefore considerably more accessible. Architects and laymen alike have been consistently impressed by the intense emotionalism of his church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, Hte-Saône,[[503]] built in 1950-5. Whether this church will ever have as much influence as the Unité has already had remains debatable because of its very special character. But it certainly made even more evident than the High Courts the fact that Le Corbusier in the fifties was moving in almost the opposite direction from that in which he led in the twenties.
In an exaggerated phrase Le Corbusier described his early houses as machines à habiter; but Notre-Dame-du-Haut is more like an enormous piece of sculpture than a ‘machine for praying-in’ (Plate [167]). He who once drove architecture towards the mechanistic, the precise, and the volumetric, now provides the exemplar of a new mode so plastic as almost to be naturalistic in the way of Gaudí’s blocks of flats of fifty years earlier. The walls and roof are rough, indeed almost brutal, in finish, and so massive and solid that the interior of the church at certain times of the day seems positively ill-lit by the tiny deep-sunk windows that irregularly penetrate the side walls. In place of an aesthetic expression emulating the impersonal results of engineers’ calculations, there is here a freehand quality comparable to the spontaneity of the sculptor. Moreover, where the overtones of his characteristic buildings of the twenties were wholly of the present, this arouses deep prehistoric atavisms—and quite intentionally. Whether the High Courts at Chandigarh and the church at Ronchamp evidence a deep split in modern architecture or represent rather a major turning point is still far from clear. Only a few have yet succeeded in following with any distinction the line of development they appear to open (see Chapter [25] and [Epilogue]).
The later work of the German leaders arouses no such difficult critical problems as does Le Corbusier’s; yet it has also ranged sometimes in directions not altogether to be expected from their best-known work of the twenties. Their careers, moreover, suffered a harsher break because of the political tribulations of their homeland than Le Corbusier suffered from the economic tribulations of France. In 1930 Mies became Director of the Bauhaus, remaining until it was closed by Hitler in 1933. Although he won a competition for the Reichsbank in Berlin as late as that year, he was allowed to do no work under the Nazis, and so he settled in the United States in 1938 after a preliminary visit the previous year.
As has been noted, Mendelsohn and Gropius, on leaving Germany in 1933, settled first in England, and both did significant work there—if not especially significant for their own careers, certainly so for the early stage of modern architecture in England. With his English partner Maxwell Fry, Gropius was responsible in 1935-7 for the Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire; this set a new pace for school design in England in the post-war years, perhaps the best in the world. Mendelsohn, with Chermayeff, built in 1934-5 the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on the Sussex coast. In the main this is a rather conventional example of the new architecture; but it has a semicircular glazed stair-tower that recalls the more lyrical quality of his best earlier work such as the Schocken department stores.
From England Mendelsohn moved on to Israel, where a large Government Hospital by him at Haifa and the Medical Centre of the Hadassah University in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus, both of 1936-8, show a most skilful adaptation of the international European canons to a hotter climate and a different cultural tradition, somewhat as is the case with the Ministry at Rio. Only with the onset of the war in 1941 did Mendelsohn settle in America. There his Maimonides Hospital in San Francisco of 1946-50 and synagogues and Jewish community centres in Cleveland (1946-52), St Louis (1946-50), Grand Rapids (1948-52), and St Paul (1950-4) continued to illustrate his very personal command of the commonly accepted elements of the new architecture, with the inclusion here and there of anomalous features that seem to belong to a much earlier period of his career.
Gropius proceeded directly from England to America in 1937, having been called by Dean Joseph Hudnut of the Graduate School of Design to be Professor of Architecture at Harvard University. He became Chairman of the Architecture Department the following year, which position he retained until 1953. As has already been said, his major contribution to architecture in America has been as an educator. However, he built, in partnership with Breuer, whom he had brought to Harvard, several houses, including his own at Lincoln, Mass., and also a housing development at New Kensington, Penna., in the years 1938-41. These are, on the whole, no more successful than much of his work of the late twenties in Germany, despite an intelligent effort to adapt a European mode to American building methods, particularly as regards the use of wood, both structurally and for sheathing. This turning away, on Gropius’s part, from ferro-concrete and rendered surfaces is parallel to Le Corbusier’s somewhat earlier reversion to the use of local and traditional materials. The houses that Breuer designed after he parted from Gropius have considerably more intrinsic interest; as is perhaps natural in the work of a younger man, they show a more integral adjustment to the characteristic living habits and building methods of the New World. Two large-scale commissions, for the Unesco Building[[504]] in Paris (now nearly finished) and for the Bijenkorf Store in Rotterdam (1955-7), not to speak of the U.S. Embassy at The Hague, have brought him back to the European scene, but as an American rather than a Hungarian or German architect.
Gropius’s principal American work was all done after the war. It included by the mid fifties two schools at Attleborough, Mass., one of 1948 and one of 1954, and the Graduate Centre of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., of 1949-50. These were all three designed—as also the already-mentioned Athens Embassy, which is not yet completed—in association with the firm known as TAC (The Architects’ Collaborative), consisting of a group of younger architects, all but one educated at Yale University, formed in 1946. In the double quadrangle of buildings at Harvard, forming in itself almost a complete small college, the architecture of the twenties lived on with little change. Light-coloured brick replaced stucco for the walls, however, and there is a certain rather inhibited use of curves in plan and of angular relationships in detail reflecting ideas that had entered the new architecture only in the thirties. The Attleborough schools are less pretentious and altogether more successful, improving upon Gropius and Fry’s Impington College of the thirties in England in various ways. After his retirement as professor, Gropius and TAC became increasingly active, and he continued to present his well-known architectural doctrines in lectures, articles, and books.[[505]]
Coming to the United States a year later than Gropius, Mies also found his greatest opportunity there, and almost at once. In 1939 he was commissioned to design the entire new group of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was moving to the south side of Chicago. In this scheme, which is of urbanistic scale and extent, a classic, indeed an almost academic, order prevails throughout (Figure [52]). The buildings that he was able to execute, two during the war in 1942-4, many more after 1945, have a comparably classic serenity. But they also express with relentless logic the character of their predominantly steel-skeleton construction. In them Mies almost revived architectural detail by the precision and the elaboration of his handling of the elements of metal structure. As at Gropius’s Graduate Centre, light-coloured brick replaces stucco for the solid wall panels. The severe patterns of the black-painted metalwork are organized with something of the purity of Mondrian’s canvases of the twenties yet with a dominating symmetry. This is true also of the interior planning of the individual buildings. However, the latest, Crown Hall, housing the architectural school, completed in 1956, is unsubdivided on the principal floor, and thus represents the most extreme statement of his later ideals, both structurally and in its planning.