avant-garde
A hundred years after its emergence, modernism proves to be the style of the last century. Its flourishing period lasted only fifteen years: from 1925 until the Second World War. It was an expression of the spirit of the age, although it lacked a well-thought-out system of ideas based on genuine socio-economic insight. The roots of modernism lay in expressionism, and sometimes even further back: in futurism in Italy, in ‘De Stijl’ in the Netherlands and in constructivism in Russia. All three were in search of a new design language and all three propagated an ideology — which proved utopian — that was meant to lead to a better world. They are three movements with manifestos, exhibitions, and fine plans and perspectives, but with few concrete buildings.
The poet Fillipo Martinelli (1876–1944) launched the manifesto of futurism in Paris in 1909, in which he expressed his hatred of tradition and his love of the dynamism of mechanisation. For futurist architecture we turn to the sketches of Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916), Mario Chiattone (1891–1957) and Virgilio Marchi (1895–1960). There are no actual futurist buildings.
In October 1917 the first issue of the magazine De Stijl appeared, containing a sketch by Jacobs Johannes Pieter Oud (1890-1963) for the boulevard in Scheveningen. In 1919 he made a design for a factory in Purmerend. It is a three-dimensional translation of the ‘new imagery’ of the painters Theo Van Doesburg (1883-1931) and Piet Mondrian (1883-1931): a composition of rectangles of all sorts of sizes, in the primary colours red, yellow and blue and the non-colours white, grey and black. The best-known realisation of ‘De Stijl’ is the Schröder House by Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) from 1924.
After the February Revolution of 1917, Russia experienced a turbulent but culturally innovative period. Abstract painting emerged around 1915 with Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) and his Suprematism. From 1919 onwards, El Lissitzky (1890-1941) created “proun” paintings featuring a floating composition of bar shapes of various sizes. Malevich’s “arkhitektoniks” from 1924 can be regarded as simplified models of buildings. One of the first architectural designs was that of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) from 1919 for a tower building for the Third International in Petrograd. This would be a third higher than the Eiffel Tower. The constructivist buildings were intended to represent processes and forms of modern technology, with spotlights, lifts, illuminated advertising and film projections.
expressionism
Expressionism was an important movement in the years 1910-1930. It was particularly prevalent in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Denmark, in the visual and performing arts and in architecture. Its agenda was socialist, romantic and sometimes utopian. Form prevailed over function and construction. The traditional approach allowed architects to expressively distort the volumes of buildings. This was made possible by invisible structures in reinforced concrete or steel. The most important façade material is brick, both for the plastic masses and for decoration. In October 1917 the first issue of the magazine De Stijl appeared, containing a sketch by Jacobs Johannes Pieter Oud (1890–1963) for the boulevard in Scheveningen. In 1919 he designed a factory in Purmerend. It is a three-dimensional translation of the ‘new imagery’ of the painters Theo Van Doesburg (1883–1931) and Piet Mondriaan (1883–1931): a composition of rectangles of all sizes, in the primary colours red, yellow and blue and the non-colours white, grey and black. The best-known realisation of ‘De Stijl’ is the Schröder House by Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964) from 1924.
The Amsterdam School arose when Michel De Klerk (1884–1923) and Piet Kramer (1881–1961) began working independently around 1910. The designs for the socialist housing association De Dageraad were produced between 1918 and 1920. The socialist alderman Floor Wibaut (1859–1936) countered the criticism that the façades were unnecessarily decorated and would betray extravagance. Features included curved shapes in the façades, windows with glass in elongated rectangles (the so-called ladder windows), steep roofs, and sometimes even vertical walls in roof tiles.
Technical innovations improved the lives of the somewhat wealthier public. In 1878 Thomas Edison (1847–1931) received a patent for the phonograph, a precursor of the gramophone, and in 1880 one for the light bulb. He improved the telephone. In 1925 a quarter of the dwellings in Berlin were electrified, in 1930 half of them. In 1920 Belgium had 26 radio sets. One could only listen to German and French stations. On 4 December 1926 the regional station ‘t Kerkske went on air and on 1 February 1931 the National Institute for Broadcasting. Those who could afford it acquired the new means of transport, the petrol-driven car, often with chauffeur. The Ford company mass-produced cars for the somewhat wider public, with the Model ‘T’ from 1908 to 1927, and the Model ‘A’ from 1927 to 1931. After the rapid technological development of the aeroplane during the First World War, postal and passenger transport began. In its history from 1873 to 1934 the Red Star Line transported almost three million emigrants to the United States by ship, most of them in third class. In the 1920s and 1930s the company shifted its main focus to organising cruises, among them the one that took Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and his wife around the world (2/12/1930–28/03/1931). The tram and the train were more democratic means of transport, among others for commuters. In 1913 most of the current Antwerp tramlines were already in use. Many household appliances that we now regard as indispensable came into use during the interwar period: the electric cooker, the mixer, the vacuum cleaner, the iron, and the sewing machine.
The Chilehaus in Hamburg, dating from 1922–1924 by architect Fritz Löger (1877–1949), shows a similar expression, but with corners instead of arches.
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Walter Gropius (1883–1969) said in his opening speech of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919: ‘Architects, sculptors, and painters, we must return to craftsmanship!’ Gropius wanted a pedagogical approach in which the werklehre, the artisanal execution, became just as important as the formlehre, the basic exercises. Gropius attracted innovative artists to the state school: Johannes Itten (1888–1967), Paul Klee (1879–1940), Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), and from December 1920 Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943). The Bauhaus experienced four expressionist years.
spirit of the age
After the horror of the war there were two main currents: a pessimistic one that fused on the eroding, often nationalist values, and an optimistic one that believed technology would propel humanity forward in the ‘course of nations’. The American dream became attainable for a larger group, regardless of their birth, although the old aristocracy did not regard the new businessmen as equals. Above all, the roaring twenties in the United States and the Stresemann Era (1923–1929) in the Weimar Republic were vibrant times.
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the international style: theory
Alfred Barr (1902–1981), the director of MoMA, had travelled in Europe with Philip Johnson (1906–2005) and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987) in 1930 and 1931. These culminated in the 1932 exhibition in New York: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. There was mainly work on view by Le Corbusier (1887–1965), by J. J. P. Oud, by Walter Gropius and by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). The book by Johnson and Hitchcock that accompanied the exhibition was entitled The International Style: Architecture since 1922, with which the name of this new style was coined. The authors explained its three characteristics. First, they emphasised the primacy of volume and space, which are bounded by flat planes, so that it seems as if no gravity is at work. ‘Architecture is conceived of as space and not as mass.’ ‘The ubiquitous plasterwork that still serves as a hallmark of the contemporary style has the aesthetic advantage that it forms a continuous even covering.’ ‘The second principle of the current style has to do with regularity. The supports of the skeleton construction are usually at equal distances so that the stresses are equal. […] Moreover, economic motives will prefer the use of standardised parts.’ As examples of this, the authors show photographs of the Van Nelle factory and of the Bauhaus in Dessau. As a third principle, the absence of decoration and the importance of well-designed and elegant details, such as the window profiles, the railings and the absence of a cornice, are propagated. The three principles are visual characteristics, without the genesis and functionality being explained.
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The greatest contribution of the United States to architecture, apart from Frank Lloyd Wright, was the Chicago School. At the end of the nineteenth century, through a modular, and thus regular, skeleton, the first high-rise buildings had become possible. The Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) made another characteristic of the international style clear, among other things when he discussed Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. ‘It is impossible to see the Villa Savoye from a single point. It is literally a construction in space-time. The volume of the house is hollowed out in all directions, from below and from above and from inside and from outside. At every point a section can be made which shows that the interior and exterior space interpenetrate one another inseparably.’
The theory of relativity of Albert Einstein takes place in what Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) in 1908 called space-time: ‘From now on, space and time by themselves are doomed to fade away gradually into shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will continue to exist as an independent reality.’ According to Giedion, axonometric projections show this idea most clearly.
Apart from those used by engineers, the earliest could be seen at two exhibitions in 1923. In August and September, an isometric drawing of Gropius’s office, made by the 23-year-old Herbert Bayer (1900–1985), was displayed at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In October and November, an axonometric drawing of Theo Van Doesburg’s Maison Particulière hung at the exhibition by ‘The architects of the De Stijl group’ in the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris. It was drawn by a young architect whom Van Doesburg had met at the Bauhaus: Cornelis van Eesteren (1897–1988). According to Van Doesburg, colour must help to dematerialise architecture.
The purest examples of modernism have a skeleton of columns and slabs, with walls of smoothly plastered planes and large areas of glass, set in slender steel profiles that lie in the plane of the façade. The roofs are flat and there are no cornices. The whole is asymmetrical, with elements of all sizes possibly occurring. Space flows uninterruptedly through the principal rooms inside, and from inside to outside.