[477]. In this connexion Schumacher’s school-building programme for Hamburg, initiated considerably earlier, is also significant.
[478]. See Le Corbusier, Une maison—un palais, Paris, 1928.
[479]. As building activity increased in Russia in the late twenties there was considerable experimentation, mostly along Constructivist lines, and a growing acceptance of the new architecture of the western world. This continued into the early thirties. But the competition for the Palace of the Soviets of 1931, to which Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as Poelzig and Mendelsohn were among the over two hundred architects who contributed projects, represented a major turning point. This was won by the Soviet architect B. M. Iofan (b. 1891) with a very monumental scheme designed in a variant of that megalomaniac mode of scraped classicism which had been popular for large-scale architecture in Germany under the Second Reich and which returned to favour in 1933 under the Third Reich, just after Iofan’s scheme triumphed. By 1937 this relatively severe project had been elaborated by Iofan and his collaborators W. G. Helfreich and V. A. Schouko until it rose—and to the same tremendous height as the Empire State Building in New York—like a telescopic wedding-cake, terminating in a statue of Stalin a third as tall as the whole structure below.
Henceforth the ‘scraping’ of Classical forms ceased and Stalinist architecture in general aimed at an elaboration that was at once Baroque and Victorian in its coarse exuberance and in its illiterate use of academic clichés all but forgotten in the western world. During the later Stalinist period official Soviet criticism decried the modern architecture of the western world as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois formalism’.
Since the end of that period the denunciation of its characteristic architecture by Soviet leaders implies some return towards the contact with advanced western ideas which was evident in the twenties and early thirties. For the production of the Stalinist period, which would rate anywhere else as very low-grade ‘traditional’ architecture, see Dreissig Jahre sowjetische Architektur in der RSFSR, Leipzig, 1950.
[480]. More than rivalling Gropius’s housing in its extent was that carried out by Ernst May (b. 1887) for the city of Frankfort at this same time.
[481]. Gropius and Meyer first used a smooth rendered surfacing on a theatre at Jena that they remodelled in 1922; this was not otherwise very significant, except that no trace of Expressionist influence, still strong in work of the year before, remained. As will appear shortly, Mies van der Rohe proposed to use brick in a design for a country house in 1922; and all the private houses he built in the twenties are of that material, though his housing blocks at Berlin and Stuttgart were rendered.
[482]. Although Mies is not, as his second name van der Rohe might suggest, Dutch, he has always been an admirer of Berlage, and his very high standards for brickwork derive from his knowledge of Dutch building, both old and new, acquired during the year spent in The Hague designing the Kröller house.
[483]. Much of Le Corbusier’s prolific writing of the twenties has already been mentioned in the text and earlier notes; for Gropius’s, see Cook, R. V., A Bibliography: Walter Gropius, 1919-1950, Chicago [1951].
[484]. For example, the German translation of Vers une architecture appeared in 1926; the English translation in 1927 in both English and American editions. Of Urbanisme, the American edition is of 1927, the English of 1929, and the German of 1929 also. Mies wrote, in effect, nothing at all.