From Papworth’s ‘Cottage Orné’ (Plate [122A]) to the slabs of Loughborough Road (Plate [186B])—’model’ dwellings both; from the Bank of England to Thyssen Haus (Plate [191]), both housing business as it was never housed before the period with which this book deals; from Baltimore Cathedral (Plate [5]) to Notre-Dame-du-Haut (Plate [167]), the range of notable achievement recorded in this book is not readily outranked in variety by any other hundred-and-fifty-year period in the history of the western world. As to the absolute quality of that achievement, as distinguished from what may be called the ‘plot’-interest of various relatively coherent developments continuing over the last century and a half, it requires a very catholic taste indeed even to pretend to pronounce. The ‘revivals’ of the nineteenth century and the ‘traditionalism’ of the twentieth century accepted the dangerous challenge of meeting the earlier past on its own ground, and this in itself is enough to reduce the absolute value of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century production. Yet there were renaissances long before there were revivals; and at almost any given moment of the past most production has been the equivalent in stylistic retardation of the traditional architecture of the twentieth century. If one must have originality, these hundred and fifty years have not lacked it, from Ledoux and Soane to Gaudí and Wright. Of the hundreds of names mentioned in these twenty-five chapters there are few doubtless equal to Bramante or to Bernini, but how many were there in the preceding hundred and fifty years? while the variety of approach represented, from a Schinkel to a Le Corbusier, from a Butterfield to a Mies, is hardly to be equalled in any comparable period of history. Above all, this is the stage of architectural history that lies between the unhallowed present and the hallowed past, between the cultural certainties—if they were so certain—of the eighteenth century and the cultural anxieties of the present. What we are we can only hope to understand by exploring the immediate ancestry of our own present. Only revivalists could afford to denigrate and ignore all that lay between them and some ‘golden age’ they sought to emulate. The future must build upon the foundations—so very various, so often nearly contradictory—of the architecture of the last hundred and fifty years.

EPILOGUE

The five years since the original edition of this book appeared have seen a building boom throughout the western world such as has rarely been equalled in other post-war periods; nor has this boom been confined to those countries of Europe and the Americas with which this account has chiefly been concerned. These have also been years of continuing—indeed increasing—uncertainty in architectural doctrine. As might have been expected, various tendencies already touched on in the preceding chapter—both positive (although often apparently reactionary) tendencies towards greater individuality, and negative or, at least in the present context, conservative tendencies towards somewhat tired repetition of pre-war clichés—have not only continued but become much stronger. The tonality of the over-all picture of current architectural production has by now definitely changed. That relative balance between what may, at their best, be called the Miesian and the Corbusian, still maintained almost everywhere in the mid fifties, had by the early sixties been upset. In hindsight, for example, it must now seem that such mature and established architects as the Finnish Alvar Aalto and the American Louis Kahn were inadequately treated in previous chapters—not to speak of such still older men whose activity has continued or been renewed as the Germans Hans Scharoun and the late Rudolf Schwarz. Various new names call for attention also: the Dutchman Aldo van Eyck, for example, the Norwegian Sverre Fehn, the Japanese Tange and Maekawa, the Italian Viganò, and the English firm of Stirling & Gowan, to mention but a few that were all but unknown internationally in the mid fifties whose work is now of rising consequence.

For all the evidences of change, it is almost as difficult as it was five years ago to isolate the common denominator of the new tendencies except in negative terms. It is still easier to be explicit about what architects are moving away from—what they are rejecting—than whither they are headed. Any attempt in a few words to describe positively the present architectural climate faces the difficulty that only in certain extreme works are novel architectural ideals and ideas wholly dominant; while by no means all the current building that does not follow in the newer directions, either by older architects such as Mies himself or by those who have stayed faithful to his canons—whether intentionally or by default of any alternative allegiance—can yet be dismissed as merely vulgar, provincial, or retardataire.

The rejection of the advanced doctrines of the 1920s and 1930s has rarely been total. The assumption of some writers, moreover, that there has yet been any serious and concerted return to Beaux-Arts or other pre-modern standards is, as regards the attitude of most mature architects—even those who actually have such backgrounds—still something of an exaggeration. On the other hand, the current sensibilities to which architects such as Aalto and Kahn, at least, have been successfully appealing—and in Aalto’s case for some twenty-five years already—are certainly very different from the sensibilities that once responded to the crisp geometries, the smooth surfaces, the glass walls, and the minimal detailing of the Bauhaus (Plate [161A]), the Savoye house (Plate [159]), and the Barcelona Pavilion (Plate [165A]). ‘Neo-Brutalism’, or brutalismo, is as dangerous a term to use indiscriminately as any other critical catchword that has been prematurely popularized. But it does suggest, at least by a play upon words in several languages, a current climate of taste which favours béton brut—naked concrete—and rough, usually rather dark-coloured, materials. Bricks, pre-cast slabs with a coarse aggregate in relief, or even stone masonry of rubble or quarry-faced granite, with rather heavy trim of raw or varnished wood and wrought iron, are widely preferred to the slicker, more highly finished elements that are the natural product of the increasing industrialization of the building crafts. But this is literally superficial.

Associated with the notable shift of preference as regards the texture of the skin, so to say, of buildings there has been a comparable rise of interest in broken silhouettes, uneven skylines, masses that are articulated rather than unified, and expressive exposure of individual structural elements, themselves often sculptural rather than mechanistic in character. This has affected in varying degree the work of almost all architects from the most Corbusian to the most Miesian. Windows, moreover, tend to be fewer and smaller, and their shapes are very likely to be vertical rather than horizontal, slots instead of ribbons. So also plans now emphasize the particularity of various internal functions and over-all organization tends towards additive compilation of contiguous spatial units, in some cases equal or modular, in others disparate in both size and shape. All this would once have been disapproved by most critics as under-studied, not to say amateurish, before Aalto’s mature work became a major international influence ([Plates 173B] and [182A]). There is surely some reflection of the painting and the sculpture of the past decade, even perhaps of its most advanced music, in the apparent intention to suggest freehand improvisation and randomness in an art whose works, however their designing may have been initiated, are necessarily in the end products of relatively long periods of preparatory study and of complex collaborative execution.

Yet to hazard such statements as these, even though they have long applied to much of the work of Aalto and are now true in varying degree of the production of architects as different in many basic ways as the Frenchman Guillaume Gillet or the Italian Franco Albini, is to be reminded of the prevalence of another kind of interest in more elaborate effects of detail—often denigrated as merely decorative—that is being exploited not only by such well-established architects as the Americans Edward Stone or Minoru Yamasaki, on the one hand, and by the German Egon Eiermann, on the other—otherwise quite opposed as a result of their very different training, experience, and personal dispositions—but by many others from Latin America to Asia and Africa.

Perhaps it may be said in very simple terms that what is widely recognized as the newest architecture has two aspects, one exaggeratedly masculine, the other almost daintily feminine. Both are in some cases to be found illustrated, in a curious kind of rhythmic alternation, by successive works of the same architect; both contrast with the neutral severity of the architecture of the immediately preceding period. Yet both clearly have their half-admitted precedents in the varied and even contradictory work over many decades of Frank Lloyd Wright and that of the Expressionists forty years and more ago.

Even if it could be accepted, for the moment, that these two tendencies represent the whole story, few would be impartial enough to admit that they are equally characteristic of the more serious architectural production of the present. Thanks to a revival of near-Puritanical asceticism in some quarters, sharply contrasting with the readiness in others to beguile with somewhat saccharine ‘beauty’, the more masculine aspect has been presented as superior morally and even as more ‘advanced’; for there are still those ready, as in the 1920s and 1930s, to plead near-Hegelian necessities for one or another direction in which architecture may be moving, necessities that are often in patent opposition to the actual pressures from the aesthetically neutral realm of technology.