[459]. See Note [[455]], supra.
[460]. See Note [[445]], supra. Also relevant is my book Painting towards Architecture, New York, 1948.
[461]. Several years earlier, possibly even before he actually joined De Stijl, Rietveld had designed and executed a remarkable ‘Red-Blue’ chair in which many aspects of the three-dimensional aesthetic of the group were already realized.
[462]. The first number is not dated and may have appeared in 1919.
[463]. See Bayer, H., and others, Bauhaus 1919-28, New York, 1938.
[464]. The mixed character of Bauhaus theory and production in the early years is well illustrated in Gropius, W., Staatliches Bauhaus, 1919-1923, Munich [1923].
[465]. The effect of van Doesburg’s visit to Germany remains controversial. Although Gropius denies, or at any rate minimizes, its importance to the Bauhaus group—and, indeed, personally disliked van Doesburg—critics and historians mostly believe the influence of Neoplasticism to have been at least as significant at this point as that of the Russian Constructivists. See Zevi, B., ‘L’Insegnamento critico di Theo van Doesburg’, Metron, VII (1951), 21-37.
It is not without significance that Gropius included in 1926 Oud’s Holländische Architektur in the series of Bauhausbücher which he edited. That certainly proves a special respect for the De Stijl-nurtured modern architecture of Holland at the time.
[466]. Like Le Corbusier’s window-walls, these horizontal strip-windows, usually called ‘ribbon-windows’ in English, can be traced back at least as far as Shaw’s work of the sixties, though all the intervening links are not yet clearly identified. Their analogy with ‘Chicago windows’ is closest and, indeed, Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott façades, with their wide windows crisply cut in the smooth terracotta wall-plane, are amazingly premonitory of the characteristic new window-banded façades of the twenties. Before this time window-strips were always subdivided by relatively heavy mullions in the plane of the wall, as in Voysey’s houses, or set behind ranges of colonnettes or other supports, as they were still in the clerestory of Wright’s Unity Church.
[467]. This special vision of America is well illustrated in books of the twenties by European architectural visitors; see Mendelsohn, E., Amerika. Bilderbuch eines Architekten, Berlin, 1926, and Neutra, R., Wie baut Amerika? Stuttgart, 1927.