Factories are still more likely to be designed by engineers than by architects; but the contribution of engineers to their design is by no means always standardized and monotonous. Particularly in those countries where the lack of steel encourages the use of ferro-concrete, engineers were devising notably imaginative solutions to the problems of space-coverage and lighting. The Spanish-born engineer Candela in Mexico worked with ferro-concrete vaults in industrial construction with the casual ease and ad hoc ingenuity of a twelfth-century Frenchman building in stone; yet his church of Nuestra Señora de los Milagros of 1953-5 gave the impression of being a reversion to Expressionism, despite the unassailable mathematical and structural logic of the hyperbolic paraboloid forms of its ‘ruled surfaces’. The Italian-born José Delpini, in such factories as his S.I.T. Spinning Shed of 1949-50 at Pilar in Argentina, easily rivalled the work of the leading modern architects of Argentina in the distinction as in the scale of his buildings. The Danish-born Ore Arup in England, working with the Architects Co-Partnership on the artificial rubber factory at Bryn Mawr in Wales, provided one of the most notable large-scale buildings in post-war Great Britain, and deserves much of the credit for it. To return to the work of architects, it should be noted that in England, where most post-war industrial building was rather modest in size, the power-stations of Farmer & Dark, culminating in that of 1955-7 at Marchwood, have a grandeur of scale and a logic of partially open design that ordinary factories can almost never rival.
Industrial building, still at the frontier of architecture despite the great contribution it has made to more general developments since the English mills of the 1790s, was notably international in its twentieth-century standards and its achievements. The leading industrial firms, such as Albert Kahn, Inc., and that of Frankland Dark were asked to build in many parts of the world, for the traditions of the old-established technologies are of especial value in such work. The continued existence of cultural empires, so to call them, is still made manifest when English firms build power-houses and factories in the Middle and Far East. James Cubitt & Partners[[542]] completed in Rangoon in 1955, for example, a pharmaceutical plant that was probably the largest post-war factory of architectural interest to be built by an English firm, just as their Technical College at Kumasi in Ghana built at the same time was a more considerable example of a mid-twentieth-century university city than England had yet seen.
The provision of housing by organs of the State had come to be recognized almost everywhere as an essential social service, quite as modern architects always insisted that it should be. Le Corbusier’s Unité at Marseilles is doubtless the most striking single example of the tall structures, slabs or ‘point-blocks’, which were increasingly the characteristic form of such housing, but the most notable general programmes of production were still found in England, in certain Latin American countries, and in Denmark and Sweden. The pressure of population-growth and the need for rebuilding after war-time destruction motivated such programmes almost everywhere, but in several countries notable otherwise for the high standard of their current architecture—the United States and Italy, for example—the results were disappointing indeed. A strong social tradition of public housing, moreover, as in Holland, even with the precedent there of the notably fine work of thirty and forty years ago, seemed then to be no guarantee of continued excellence in this field. Although the rising popularity of housing in tall structures is still balanced in England by a strong attachment to small houses built in pairs or in terraces, such as comprise the greater part of the New Towns, English achievement in this field on the whole exceeded that of most other countries in the ten years after the war, both in quantity and in quality. The post-war pace was set by the Churchill Gardens of A. J. Philip Powell (b. 1921) and his partner Hidalgo Moya in Pimlico, London, for which the Westminster Borough Council was the client. For over a decade the planning and building of this vast urban project went forward towards completion with rising standards of design and finish. Perhaps the finest single block is De Quincey House, with its ingenious section of duplexes approached by access galleries. But the Architect’s Department of the London County Council, under the successive leadership of Robert Matthew (b. 1906) and of Sir Leslie Martin (b. 1908), in the last seven years equalled and perhaps exceeded in quality, as many times over in quantity, the achievement of Powell & Moya. Whether on urban sites, such as that at Loughborough Road in South London (Plate [186B]), or on more open sites, as at the Ackroydon estate in Putney or at Roehampton, by the combination of tall blocks, some square in plan, some slab-like, with ranges of lower blocks of maisonettes and terraces of houses the L.C.C. has provided—piecemeal at least—examples of mid-twentieth-century urbanism more impressive than anything the New Towns yet offered. A provincial English example of comparable excellence is the Tile Hill Estate outside Coventry by the Borough Architect’s Office.
The forty-eight slabs of the Cerro Piloto development of 1955 built by the Banco Obrero, the Venezuelan public housing corporation, and designed by Guido Bermudez (b. 1925), rising against the mountains outside Caracas more than rival in extent and in scale the English examples. And in the Cerro Grande blocks of flats there, built in 1953-5, Bermudez rivalled the ingenuity of Powell & Moya and the L.C.C. in the use of duplexes. Interesting for the mixture of types—tall slabs, lower blocks of flats, and houses—is the Centro Urbano Presidente Juarez in Mexico City by Mario Pani (b. 1901); the handsome colours used here were chosen by the painter Carlos Mérida. But the most exemplary of the Latin American estates is Pedregulho outside Rio de Janeiro begun in 1948 by Affonso Eduardo Reidy (b. 1909). Here the tall serpentine block at the rear is entered at middle level from the hill slope, a scheme suggested by certain of Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties for North Africa, and various community buildings provide something of New Town character in the development, as does a range of low blocks with shops at their base in the Tile Hill Estate at Coventry. Most notable is Reidy’s school at Pedregulho with its murals of azulejos—glazed tiles—by Cándido Portinari and its characteristic repertory of the architectural forms of the Cariocan School. Of that Reidy, a member of the original group who designed and built the Ministry of Education, was as much one of the founders as Oscar Niemeyer.
In the mid twentieth century, however, it is England that leads in school design and construction even more definitely than in the design of tall housing blocks. In particular, the Hertfordshire County Architect’s Office under C. H. Aslin (1893-1959) developed a system of construction using a light-metal skeleton and prefabricated concrete slabs of very great technical interest. Not all the Hertfordshire schools are designed in the County Architect’s Office, however, and some of the best were by private architects, such as the Architects’ Co-partnership and James Cubitt & Partners (Plate [186A]). The new architecture has been more widely and successfully used for schools than for most other types of buildings. Outside England those of Donald Barthelmé in Texas, such as his Elementary School at West Columbia of 1952, and by Ernest J. Kump (b. 1911) in California may be especially noted, although they represent no such concerted programme of design and construction as has spread in England from Hertfordshire to other parts of the country. Outright ‘traditional’ schools are rare anywhere today.
In church architecture the post-war situation was rather different. Although Perret and Wright, Moser and Böhm, among the older generation of modern architects, all built notable churches, until Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp the international leaders of the next generation were rarely called on to design them; and from Oud’s church of the late twenties at Oud Mathenesse through Mies’s Chapel of 1950 at the Illinois Institute of Technology it seemed that the extreme rationalism of these men made it difficult if not impossible for them to provide ecclesiastical edifices which differed in any expressive way from meeting-halls. Something was said earlier of the more emotional concrete-vaulted church architecture of Böhm and the line of related advance in the last two decades from the semi-traditional, somewhat Gothic or Baroque, effects of the twenties to work of completely original character. Niemeyer’s São Francisco at Pampulha (Plate [190C]), completed in 1943, was one of the buildings that early established his reputation as one of the most imaginative architects of his generation anywhere in the world. Soon Latin American churches as different as Candela’s Nuestra Señora de los Milagros in Mexico City and the unvaulted Beato Martín Porres at Cataño outside San Juan in Puerto Rico by Henry Klumb (b. 1905), a pupil of Wright, were illustrating a wider range of possibilities; while Juvenal Moya’s Nuestra Señora de Fatimá and his chapel at the Ginnásio Moderno in Bogotá, the one of 1953-4, the other of 1954-5, followed—with considerable vulgarization—the more lyrical line of Niemeyer’s São Francisco.
Less operatic, but doubtless better adapted to Protestant use, are the churches in the American Northwest by Belluschi, notably the First Presbyterian of 1951 at Cottage Grove in Oregon. Various Swiss churches, some Catholic but more of them Protestant, followed also in this line, to which such earlier-mentioned churches as Moser’s Sankt Antonius in Basel of 1927 and the elder Saarinen’s Christ Lutheran, Minneapolis, of 1948 belong (Plate [157B]). The younger Saarinen’s silo-like circular chapel of red brick at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of 1954-5, however, reverted to something much more emotional. There is great ingenuity in the handling of the lighting, which streams down from above over a screen by Harry Bertoia and also penetrates more subtly round the edges of the low-arched base through the water of a surrounding moat.
Johnson’s synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., of 1955-6, while severe in its general character, uses coloured glass in slots between the vertical slabs with which the visible steel frame is filled and also a curved awning-like ceiling of plaster to warm and enrich the basically Miesian paradigm. Accessories by the sculptor Ibrahim Lassaw also play an important part in the interior; while the oval domed entrance vestibule is an element of almost Baroque formal interest despite its ascetic simplicity of execution. Thus, two Mies disciples have offered in their ecclesiastical work correctives to the classroom-like coldness of his own chapel in Chicago.
Such large-scale constructions as factories and tall housing blocks, together with skyscrapers, represent the new architecture’s preoccupation with building problems that the nineteenth century had already essayed, but of which the development was not carried to its logical extremes, either technically or architecturally, before the present period. Curiously enough, in the provision of new edifices to serve the needs of transportation, the nineteenth century in its middle decades was rather more successful in bringing the railway station to quite early maturity than was the twentieth century with the airport. One of the largest and finest post-war buildings of Italy is the Rome railway station (Plate [183B]), and within a few years the active campaign of modernizing and rebuilding stations in Italy was notably reflected in other European countries. But airports had still to find so satisfactory an expression, partly because the expansion of traffic everywhere made them inadequate almost before they were completed. Too often the necessity for continual extension has destroyed such integrity of conception as the architects were able to give them in the first place. Some of the world’s busiest, such as Idlewild near New York and Midway near Chicago, were through the nineteen fifties near-shambles beside which century-old railway stations appeared as masterpieces of up-to-date organization! Here, as in many other fields of contemporary building, there seem to be two main lines of approach, but not properly to be distinguished as ‘rational’ versus ‘emotional’, since both are almost entirely dependent on the structural solutions chosen. Of the first sort a relatively early example (which now carries only local traffic and has therefore not had to be expanded), the Santos Dumont Airport by the Roberto brothers begun in 1938 and largely completed after 1944 at the bay’s edge in downtown Rio de Janeiro, remains one of the best; for it is compactly planned, clear and direct in design, and elegant in the choice of materials and the use of colour. The San Juan Airport completed in 1955 by Torro, Ferrer & Torregrossa[[543]] in Puerto Rico is larger and somewhat less refined in detail, but an excellent example of planning in terms of circulation. The vast London Airport by Gibberd was still incomplete.
Two other airports of much the same date, the very large one at St Louis by Minoru Yamasaki (b. 1912) and Joseph W. Leinweber, and the small one by Pani and his partner Enrique del Moral at Acapulco, used concrete shell vaults with very dramatic effect. It would seem that the ‘classic’ stage of airport design, reached in railway stations between 1845 and 1855, was only beginning in the late fifties, and its climax may well lie many years ahead.