We walked towards the snorting beasts and lovingly touched their glowing chest. I stretched myself out in my car like a corpse in a coffin, but immediately came back to life behind the wheel, the guillotine threatening my stomach. The raging broom of madness tore us away from ourselves and drove us through the streets, worn out and deep like riverbeds. This passage from the Futurism manifesto by Filippo Marinetti of 20 February 1909 sings the love for speed and means of transport. We can consider this manifesto as the start of modernism.
The Jahrbuch Deutschen Werkbund of 1914 was about der Verkehr. It contains many photos of boats, aeroplanes, trains and cars, including the bodywork of a car by Ernest Neumann.
Le Corbusier presented the relationship between cars and architecture very clearly in his series of articles Vers une architecture of 1920–1921.
Le Corbusier had a Voisin C7 from 1927 onwards. Gabriel Voisin was originally an aircraft builder in a suburb of Paris, but started producing cars in 1919. Le Corbusier ostentatiously placed his car in the foreground of the photos of his houses, which appeared in the important architectural magazines. Below some photos of the Villa Stein-de-Monzie in Garches.
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Where Le Corbusier used his car in the foreground to give his creations the extra label of being modern, the firm Mercedes used Le Corbusier’s double house at the Weissenhof in Stuttgart as a background for the same purpose. The photo was taken in 1928. The car was a Mercedes Benz 200 Cabriolet. The mannequin was Elsbeth Böklen, with short hair and fashionable clothing.
Other architects used the same procedure for the publication of photos of their creations, among them Victor Bourgeois for the house for Jean Mondalt, built in 1927.
Below a photo of the Minerva AH Faux Cabriolet of 1929 by architect Léon Stynen for his house Verstrepen of 1927. The photo appeared in the magazines La Cité, De Bouwgids and Bâtir.
Gerrit Rietveld built in 1927 a garage with chauffeur’s house for Van der Vuurst de Vries.
Another iconic building is the Villa Müller (1928–1930) by architect Adolf Loos. Here a view of the front and the rear façade.
