[503]. See Stirling, J., ‘Ronchamp’, Architectural Review, CXIX (1956), 155-61. The best coverage is in Le Corbusier, Œuvre complète, [VI, 1957], 16-43, however. See also Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp, New York, 1957.
[504]. In collaboration with the French architect B.-H. Zehrfuss and the Italian engineer Pierluigi Nervi.
[505]. For a late published statement of Gropius’s principles, see The Scope of Total Architecture, New York, 1955, London [1956], although there is little there not to be found already in his other writings of the last forty years. See also Note [[482]] to Chapter [22].
[506]. Curiously enough Philip Johnson’s glass house in New Canaan, Conn., which obviously derives in several ways from the Farnsworth house, was actually erected first, in 1949; but of course Mies’s plan and model of the Farnsworth house had already been published by Johnson in his book Mies van der Rohe in 1947.
[507]. Although their design follows closely that of the two blocks built in 1949-51, the construction is actually of ferro-concrete, not steel.
[508]. Thanks to the continuance in the early post-war years of the reaction of the thirties, the buildings at the south end of the Coolsingel appear to present a curious inversion of chronology. While Dudok’s Bijenkorf Department Store of 1929-30, now demolished to open the view to the harbour, was characteristic of the ambiguity of much of his work, this ‘baby skyscraper’ of 1939-40 and also the contiguous Exchange by J. F. Staal (1879-1940), designed in 1929 and built in the thirties, appear much more ‘modern’ to mid-century eyes than the first big banks and so forth rebuilt after the war—these look as if they had been designed at least a generation ago. But the wave of reaction soon ran its course; the Lijnbaan of 1953-4, a complete shopping street by van den Broek & Bakema running parallel to the Coolsingel, if not the new Bijenkorf by Breuer of 1955-7, was among the most advanced projects carried out anywhere in the mid fifties.
[509]. Oud’s prominent Resistance Monument on the Dam in Amsterdam opposite the Royal Palace, completed in 1956, is hardly a work of architecture but rather an enlarged pedestal and frame for sculpture. Such a commission and the honorary doctorate he received in 1955 from the University of Leiden none the less indicate the high respect he was receiving in Holland by that time.
[510]. See Note [[511]] to Chapter [24].