Architecture

by Henry-Russell Hitchcock

The medievalizing currents of the nineteenth century link up with many aspects of the advanced architecture of the early twentieth century. This aftermath, often vital and creative in the fields of theory and of craftsmanship with architects as different as the English Voysey and the Spanish Gaudí, likewise shades down through various levels of decreasing stylization to a literal revivalism that is still in the Victorian tradition, but more in line with that tradition’s early or Puginian phase or its latest Bodleian phase than with the Butterfieldian phase of the 1850s and 1860s.

Both on the Classical and on the Gothic side of the fence, however, there have been a few twentieth-century traditional architects whose personal stylization of borrowed forms was almost as extreme as that of the High Victorians. In their work, intense individualism and limited respect for the canons of ‘taste’ and ‘restraint’ offer real points of contact with the brashness of such modern architects of the first generation as Wright and de Klerk. This is in contrast to the other line of traditionalist integrity in the handling of materials that was solidly based on Gothic Revival standards of revived hand-craftsmanship, one of the truly positive values contributed to the next generation by such architects as Richardson in America and Webb in England. The two lines could also in some milieus combine to produce, particularly in Scandinavia, some of the most impressive works of the early twentieth century. Such an outline, blurred and overlapping in its rubrics, can do little more than suggest some of the principal later channels of the architectural currents which were carried over from the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century.

There is still hardly a country in the world where buildings of traditional design are not being erected; but whatever vitality twentieth-century traditional architecture retained as late as the second and even the third decade of the century had departed by the fourth. Post-mortems on traditional architecture have been many—and often premature. The causes of death are still disputable, but the fact of dissolution is by now generally accepted. Yet the last years of traditional architecture were not completely senile. However much the youthful vitality of the newer architecture attracts sympathy and attention, as late as 1930 its impact on building production was in most countries a very limited one. It is fortunate, therefore, that not all the traditional architecture of the years 1900-30 need be dismissed with scorn, even if the standards by which it must be judged remain those of the nineteenth rather than of the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century ended, as we have seen earlier, with a surge of innovation (see Chapters 14, 15, and 16). Looking forward from the late nineties, a prophet might well have assumed that a new architecture would surely arise just beyond the turn of the century; yet within a few years a general reaction set in which took somewhat different forms in various parts of the western world. As has already been noted, there were almost everywhere strong links with the earlier Academic Reaction of the eighties against the bold and brash ‘high styles’ of the mid century; indeed, it may be said that the traditional architecture of the new century was in general both a continuance and a resurgence of that reaction. In most European countries, although not in England and America, the academic architecture of the late nineteenth century had represented little more than a resurgence or a continuance of certain aspects of decadent Romantic Classicism. Seeking a loftier pedigree, however, conservative architects often claimed that they were returning to traditions that had existed down to less than a century before their own day, quite as various reformers from Pugin to Voysey claimed they were renewing a link with one or another earlier period.

Relatively valid as this might still have been for certain aspects of the Queen Anne in England and the Colonial Revival in America, or for the parallel return to eighteenth-century modes in various Continental countries towards the end of the century, this theory had already run into serious difficulties long before 1900. A church might hope to be plausibly Gothic, but a railway station could only be Victorian Gothic; a skyscraper could not even be as Gothic as that. Moreover, the tide of eclecticism that had been rising since the mid eighteenth century was not turned back; for both the reaction of the 1880s and the later reaction of the early 1900s represented chiefly a rejection of earlier nineteenth-century innovations, especially of novel sorts of detail, rather than positive programmes of exclusive revival.

It is possible, at least for individual countries, to make statements concerning what occurred in the field of traditional design between the 1890s and the 1930s that are not wholly without significance. Of Holland it may be said, negatively, that no reaction of consequence towards the traditional occurred before the mid thirties. In Germany the boundary line between what was traditional and what was modern was always fairly vague; yet evidence of a return to stylistic reminiscence after the earliest years of the century is to be found even in the work of leaders of the first generation of modern architects such as Olbrich and Behrens (see Chapter [20]). Farther to the North in Denmark and Sweden, the Copenhagen Town Hall of 1892-1902 (Plate [173A]) by Martin Nyrop (1849-1923) and the contemporary post offices and fire stations in Stockholm and Malmö by Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1940) resemble Berlage’s Exchange in Amsterdam in their haunting parallelism to the Richardsonian of the eighties in America and even, to some extent, to the Shavian of the seventies in England. It is true that Absalons Gaard, built in 1901-2 by Vilhelm Fischer (1868-1914) in the square in front of Nyrop’s Town Hall, and even more notably the nearby Palace Hotel of 1907-10 by Anton Rosen (1859-1928), developed the freer implications of Nyrop’s manner with an almost Dutch verve. But more characteristically there followed in Scandinavia from about 1900, as elsewhere rather earlier, a programme of tasteful emulation of local versions of the Baroque and then, from shortly after 1910 in Denmark and a decade later in Sweden, an even more programmatic revival of Romantic Classicism.

In the Scandinavian development from 1890 to 1930 there is therefore a sort of ‘plot’ or recognizable sequence of phases despite their overlappings. What has been called ‘National Romanticism’, rooted in the cultural climate of the eighties, had a briefer span in Denmark than in Sweden. Nyrop’s Town Hall, begun in 1892, although in fact hardly more traditional than Berlage’s Amsterdam Exchange, introduced the mode, and the Stockholm Town Hall (Plate [174A] and [B]) by Ragnar Östberg (1866-1945), completed thirty years later, brought it to a close. But its dominion in Denmark was never exclusive. Although the Custom House of 1897 at Aarhus by Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) with its picturesque high roofs and corner towers belongs to the mode, his Aarhus Theatre of 1898-1900 and his City Library there of 1898-1902 do not. Externally, the theatre is in the main of Early Renaissance design, although with considerable eclecticism in the detail; on the other hand, the library is even less traditional than Nyrop’s Town Hall. Both, moreover, have extremely rich plaster decoration inside that may not improperly be called Art Nouveau.

Wahlman’s Engelbrekt Church of 1904-14 in Stockholm, mentioned earlier as an exception to the general dominance of tradition in Scandinavia in these decades, and the Grundvig Church in Copenhagen (Plate [175B]) by P. W. Jensen Klint (1853-1930), originally designed in 1913 and completed finally in 1926, are both closely related to the earlier National Romanticism of the eighties and nineties. By the time the latter was designed, however, this phase had for some years been superseded by a sort of Neo-Baroque still also very nationalistic in its choice of precedents and very romantic in their handling. Sometimes, however, this mode approached eighteenth-century revivalism of the sort that flourished in England and America. For example, the Marselisberg Slot, built by Kampmann for the Danish Crown Prince at Aarhus in 1899-1902, is the precise Danish equivalent of the best Neo-Georgian houses of the period in England and America.

Monuments such as the Masthugg Church (Plate [175A]) of 1910-14 in Göteborg by Sigfrid Ericson (b. 1874) or the Högalid Church of 1916-23 in Stockholm by Ivar Tengbom (b. 1878) are hardly recognizable as Neo-Baroque to non-Swedish eyes, for they are composed with a sense of visual drama quite equal to Wahlman’s and very stylized in all their detailing. Ericson’s, in particular, has much in common with the American Shingle Style, although that was rarely used for churches and never for big ones of stone or brick construction.

In much secular Swedish work in the Neo-Baroque mode, such as the very typical ASEA Building of 1916-19 in Västeros by Erik Hahr (1869-1944), bold asymmetrical massing and onion-domed towers reflect the romanticism of the churches and also recall early stages of the revived Queen Anne in England in the seventies. Danish taste in the second decade of the century was much more severe than Swedish, as in fact it had always been, and the characteristic low-cost housing blocks in Copenhagen of this period, such as those of 1914 in the Amagertorv by Hansen & Hygom, are, so to say, only Neo-Baroque round the edges.