Figure 52. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe:
Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1939-41, general plan
Mies also built houses and several tall blocks of flats in and near Chicago and, with Philip Johnson (b. 1906), a New York skyscraper at 375 Park Avenue for the Seagram Company in 1956-8 (Plate [192]). His completely glazed Farnsworth house near Plano, Ill., designed in 1946 and built in 1950,[[506]] is a cage of white-painted welded steel raised above the river valley in which it is set and walled partly with great sheets of plate glass, partly with metal screening. The floor is a continuous plane of travertine from which broad travertine steps descend to an open travertine terrace. Planned about a central core in which are placed the fireplace, the bathrooms, and the heater, the interior space is completely unified, the different functional areas being separated only by cupboards that do not rise to the ceiling (Figure [53]). Even more than Crown Hall, this house represents the purest and most extreme statement of aesthetic purpose in one particular direction that the new architecture has yet produced—a direction which is, of course, in total opposition to the increasingly complex plastic effects sought in these same years by Le Corbusier. It is, nevertheless, quite as remote from the stucco boxes characteristic of the twenties and even more remote from Mies’s own brick houses of that period.
A similarly ascetic luxury is also evident in Mies’s blocks of flats at 845-860 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago of 1949-51 (Plate [170]). There he seemed to have arrived, not imitatively but by force of parallel logic, at something very close to the skyscrapers that Sullivan designed in the nineties (Plate [119]). Mies’s structural piers, carried down to the ground as free-standing elements just as they are below the Farnsworth house, give the dominant bay rhythm, their structural steelwork being sheathed here first in protective concrete and then in black-painted metal. Between the piers continuous I-shaped beams along the mullion lines stiffen the wall screens which are otherwise entirely of glass held in bright aluminium frames; they also provide a subsidiary rhythm, quite as Sullivan’s mullions sometimes did in the eighties and nineties.
Figure 53. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Plano, Ill., Dr Edith Farnsworth House, 1950, plan
Identical in shape, rectangular slabs both, the two blocks were set close together and at right angles to one another. This placing gave a minimum of overlap as regards the lake view and a minimum of overlook as regards the privacy of the apartments. The relationship also creates from these very simple shapes a notable variety of effects in perspective. The visual interest is enhanced especially by the fact that the projecting I-beams, when seen at a sharp angle, give the illusion that one wall of each block is solid; the other wall, being seen head on or nearly so, appears completely open between the structural piers and the mullions. Four more nearly identical apartment blocks[[507]] have risen in Chicago from Mies’s designs since, the Esplanade Apartments beside the first two towers, and two farther to the north, not to speak of those in Detroit and Newark.
After his arrival in America Mies was not merely for fifteen years the architect of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s buildings, he soon became head of its Department of Architecture also, a post he retained until he retired in 1955. Less articulate than Gropius and occupying a less important academic post, Mies’s influence specifically as an educator has been considerably less. On the other hand, the general influence of his work in America in the late forties and fifties has been far greater. The ‘Miesian’ became almost a sub-school of the new architecture not only in the United States but in several other countries: to Mies not only younger men but also many established practitioners owed the specific direction of much of their post-war work (see Chapter [25]).
Just before the Second World War broke out Oud, in 1938, recovered his health sufficiently to undertake a large commission, the Shell Building in The Hague, completed in the course of the next four years. In Holland there had been in the thirties a strong reaction against the new architecture led by M. J. Granpré-Molière (b. 1883) and the graduates of his school at Delft. Granpré-Molière urged a return, if not to the outright ‘traditional’, at least to a semi-traditionalism that was not without some similarity to what Hitler was sponsoring in Germany. In response to this challenge Oud set out to show how the new architecture, still considered by many in Holland to be too stark and mechanistic, could be humanized. To return from stucco to brick, in this case a thin glazed white brick such as Dudok was using at this same time with great success on his quite conventionally ‘International Style’ Erasmus Huis office building in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam,[[508]] was merely to emulate the rejection of stucco in this decade by the French and German leaders in favour of more permanent, if also more traditional, walling materials, such as marble, rubble, brick, and even wood. But Oud’s attempt to revive ornament and the elaborate symmetry and near-academic complications of his over-all design of the Shell Building had little appeal outside Holland. In the small Esveha office building of 1952 near the railway station in Rotterdam and the much larger Vrijzinnige Christelijk Lyceum at 131 Goudsbloemlaan in The Hague of 1953-6 Oud returned to something much closer to the norms of the new architecture elsewhere. But the day of his great international influence has long been over despite the belated prestige which is still his in Holland.[[509]]
Like several of the preceding chapters dealing with the architects of the first modern generation, this has brought some aspects of our story down nearly to the present. In so doing, the specifically modern architecture of the twentieth century has been largely accounted for; the picture will be rounded out later by offering a synoptic view of the international scene at the mid century (see Chapter [25] and [Epilogue]). But first it is necessary to discuss the architecture that was not modern which was produced in the first four decades of this century. Historicism,[[510]] that is reminiscence of past styles, endemic throughout the nineteenth century, lived on. It is considered polite to call such architecture ‘traditional’, over-favourably weighted rather than accurate though the term may be. Clearly a traditional architecture that produced a ‘Gothic’ skyscraper like Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (Plate [178]) or vast ‘Classical’ railway stations like the two in New York (Plate [177B]) was not unduly restricted by revivalistic canons. Clearly also this sort of architecture cannot be ignored historically, since it produced some of the largest, most prominent, and most carefully studied buildings and groups of buildings of the first third of this century. Moreover, in many countries traditionalism gave way to modern design only after the Second World War; while the authoritarian regimes of Europe in varying degree returned to its sanctions in the thirties, just as it was generally losing ground elsewhere in the western world.