CHAPTER 25
ARCHITECTURE AT THE MID CENTURY
To describe the state of architecture in the late forties and early fifties, before and after the mid-point of this century, is far more difficult than to sketch its condition a hundred and fifty years earlier, as the first chapter of this book attempted. The western world was enormously larger in geographical extent, vastly more populous, and as a result very much more productive of buildings of all types and at all levels of quality. Many of the types most important in the twentieth century—big business buildings, low-cost public housing, facilities for transportation such as bus stations and airports—did not exist in 1800. These difficulties are objective and merely imply that the sampling of executed work must be relatively much more limited. But the very limited selection provided here is inevitably influenced by subjective criteria. The activity of two generations of historians writing on the architecture of the early nineteenth century has produced something approaching a consensus of opinion as to what is and what is not important or characteristic in that period. There remains, of course, much to be discovered concerning building in the decades around 1800, particularly as interest rises in the technical aspects of the story; yet the engineers[[534]] are unlikely ever to force the Soanes and the Schinkels out of the centre of the picture: moreover, men like Latrobe and Mills were themselves as much engineers as architects.
Already, in carrying the story of the production of the leading architects of the first and second generations of modern architecture down to the mid fifties, a certain emphasis has been given to their work in the production of the last decades. The decisions as to what to include in rounding out the picture are critical ones hardly comparable to the relatively objective historical process of selection that controls in the First and Second Parts of this book. The very extent in time of what should be considered ‘the present’ is a subjective matter. I have known American architectural students whose present was so limited that they had never heard of Perret! To anyone under thirty the effective present will hardly extend backward more than five or ten years. To keep this chapter still more or less historical I have saved consideration of the years since the later fifties for an [Epilogue].
In most countries of the western world the Second World War occasioned a hiatus in construction that lasted nearly a full decade from the slowing down that came with Munich in the late thirties to the general revival of building activity in the late forties. There is therefore a real lack of continuity between pre-war and post-war building except in those countries that remained neutral. But just as the break in the continuity of building production around 1800 resulting from the Napoleonic Wars was a limited, not an absolute, phenomenon, since the truly revolutionary developments in architecture preceded rather than followed its onset, so there was in the last post-war period very little to be recognized at first that had not had its beginnings well before 1939.
The perspective of the war seemed somehow to flatten out some of the architectural episodes deemed to be significant in the mid thirties, not alone the Nazi and late Fascist reaction but such minor symptoms of dissatisfaction with the general line that architectural development had taken internationally since the early twenties as the rise of the Bay Region School[[535]] in America and of the New Empiricism in Europe. Historians are still rather uncertain how much weight to give to these matters. Once they lost the topicality of current events they seemed no more and no less significant than the rather similar critical flurries that came later concerning the ‘New Brutalism’ and ‘Neo-Liberty’.[[536]] Such flurries cannot be entirely ignored;[[537]] yet the general emendation of the rigid doctrines of the ‘International Style’ was more strikingly illustrated by the continued high esteem of Wright’s latest productions and, a fortiori, by the warm critical reception of Le Corbusier’s remarkable church at Ronchamp than by any of the buildings that illustrated the schismatic reactions of the decade of the thirties. The accepted definitions of modern architecture had undoubtedly become very much looser than they were a generation earlier, partly as a result of various abortive attempts at more thoroughgoing revolt. But the greatest individualists were, paradoxically, not young men[[538]] in their thirties, but older masters in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties.
The greatest change in the post-war architectural scene, a change that began gradually during the pre-war years, was the shift in the geographical pattern. No longer did France, Germany, and Holland occupy the centre of the stage. The rise of the United States to great prominence, continuing a development already begun in the 1870s, was not surprising. Far more surprising was the rise in the importance of Italy and Japan, not only because of their actual achievements, especially in concrete construction in both cases, but as major influences. This was presaged in Italy by the work of Terragni and of Figini & Pollini in the mid thirties and was hardly inhibited there by the ambiguities of the later Fascist attitude towards architecture just before the Second World War. The post-war British achievement was more canalized; yet it was of an autochthonous character which a long-term consideration of English architectural abilities and disabilities makes more intelligible than that flurry of new ideas, so largely of foreign origin, characterizing the mid thirties in England.
The Scandinavian countries retained their position of prominence but not pre-eminence in the international architectural scene. In contrast to their long-recognized virtues, some rather less relevant today than they once were, must be set the very different contribution of the Latin American countries, whose entry on the international scene all but post-dates the war. Production there was hardly worth mentioning a hundred and fifty years ago; by the late forties Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela were making a contribution on a par, in quantity and even in quality, with older and richer countries. Moreover, while the West was more and more losing political control of Africa and Asia, its cultural influence on those continents did not necessarily decline, indeed as regards architecture it probably increased. Modern architecture, originally developed to utilize to the full the most advanced technologies, was found to serve especially well also in areas where technology was least advanced. Indeed, the most characteristic building material of modern architecture, ferro-concrete, is often exploited most ingeniously in countries where materials are dear and labour cheap.
Not only did many outlying parts of the world import architects along with other technicians from the West; Asia, which lay almost entirely outside the field of western culture a century and a half ago, produced a great modern school in Japan. Various Dominions and dependencies—South Africa, Australia, Puerto Rico, for example—likewise began to have active groups of local practitioners operating in close consort of principle with those of Europe and North America.
With so wide a range of lively activity, no continent-by-continent, much less country-by-country, survey of modern architecture is possible in a single short chapter. Even allowing for all the enormous climatic and cultural differences that still affect architectural production, there was still sufficient identity of principle in architecture throughout most of the world to justify an international consideration of post-war achievement in terms of various building types, moving from the macrocosm down to the microcosm—from the whole city as a planned product of architectural design to the individual dwelling-house.