Formal and Ideological Responses
In the 1890s, decorative artists began searching for unity in a novel approach to decoration. Art nouveau made its appearance at the Paris exhibition of 1900, giving a European reputation to the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. Retrospectively, Le Corbusier wrote a sarcastic comment:
A dazzling handful of those works was displayed in which nature, giving geometry time off for a rest cure, twists the life out of those building and craft materials which normally suffer from it. . . . People began then to talk about Decorative Art. And skirmishes broke out. . . . Houses were dreamed up with the rhythm of the living stem of wild clematis (Gallé). . . . Water, earth and sky, the Botanic Gardens and the Natural History Museum—they were all there to be explored with ineffable love for the creatures of the Good Lord. Ruskin had softened our hearts.[18]
Art Nouveau architecture gave a new formal expression to iron and cement construction, spreading a profusion of natural motifs in harmony with the severe structure of its buildings, or converting structural members into decoration, as in Hector Guimard's famous iron gates for the Paris Metro.
Furniture had been prominent in the development of Art Nouveau. Furniture is not only something that architects without building projects can design but also something that workers can hope to buy sooner than a house. Yet the furniture revealed where the movement was retrograde, for it required craft production. The more lasting design innovations moved soon, and resolutely, to purify forms in anticipation of mass production.[19] Architecture also began to move further away from decoration before the war: the design of furniture and household objects was in some cases a direct inspiration, but a strong impulse came both from fine arts and from the economics of industrial building. This double impulse pushed architects to look in geometric form for a symbolic reconciliation of their art with technology and science.
On the one hand, modern art was attempting on its own to come to terms with scientific discoveries.[20] With the rise of abstraction, visual artists based their work on "lines, planes, surfaces, volumes, the interpenetration of figures and geometric solids, in sum, on categories of pure visibility which until then had been considered especially relevant for architecture."[21] The experiments of the Russian supremacists, the cubists, and the De Stijl group in Holland suggested entirely new conceptions of space to architects, who were often members of the same avant-garde circles.
On the other hand, some architects had been looking for the "truth of building" in the styleless architectonics of industrial builders.[22] In 1908, the Viennese Adolf Loos, distilling his American experience of fifteen years before, castigated Europe's cultural "stragglers and marauders" in the famous pamphlet "Ornament and Crime." There was no need "to discover the style of our age," he proclaimed against the German Werkbund—the organization of artists, craftsmen, manufacturers, and intellectuals formed in 1907: "We already have the style of our age. . . . The evolution of culture
is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects. . . . Ornament is wasted labor power and hence wasted health."[23]
The German Werkbund, however, harbored advanced principles of design among its different factions. The architect and Prussian official Hermann Muthesius, one of the Werkbund's founders and its moving force, represented most coherently the nationalist and rationalizing vision of the prewar Werkbund. The central objectives were to raise the average quality of German products; to develop an aesthetically valid style for machine-produced goods; to insure industrial positions for artists, who would direct themselves to design prototypes (Typisierung ), as would architects, fully aware of the need for workers' housing; to rely on proportions and, in architecture, on the abstracted neoclassicism of Schinkel and Semper. In the words of one historian, "exactness, simplicity and regularity of form were seen not simply as functional requirements of the machine, but expressive and even symbolic desiderata, in themselves expressions of the power, economy and efficiency of modern social and economic organization; hence their value lay beyond the mode of execution."[24] The affinity of this section of the Werkbund with modern industry was supported by the presence of Peter Behrens among its founding members. Architect, graphic artist, and director of the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts, Behrens occupied from 1907 to 1914 the post of artistic director of the AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitats Gesellschaft) and was charged with the responsibility for redesigning "the company's buildings, products and publicity material, from the celebrated turbine hall [of 1909] right down to tiny publicity seals."[25]
Two principles, which we must keep distinct, fused in the modernist rejection of applied ornament. On the one hand, rationalization was invoked by Loos as a principle of industrial and economic efficiency, against the Werkbund's purified and classicizing notions of style. On the other hand, the rejection of ornament and the purification of forms was held to have moral connotations, a principle that aligned progressive architects with an artistic and ideological movement.
Because they represented Platonic solids and were easier to produce by machine, simple geometric forms and volumes made it possible to assimilate designed artifacts (including buildings) with machine production, hence technology, hence science. A new poetry of form thus signaled architects' ambitions to change their role from the embellishment of leisure to the equipment of production.
Purified form harmonized with the potential of the new industrial materials, especially glass. Together, form and materials opened the way toward
a new conception of built space. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright had not only formed, before the German Werkbund, the idea of transforming industry through art; by 1908, he had already carried to maturity principles of architectural composition that so impressed the Europeans.[26] His work was published and exhibited in Berlin in 1910 and 1911. Ludwig Hilberseimer, the uncompromising planner of the Bauhaus, remembers its effect:
This exhibition was a big event. It was surprising to observe how Wright, starting from the traditional house, had succeeded in creating something radically new. He was already at the point of perfecting what others were still looking for: his projects expressed and demonstrated a new sense of space. . . . It was as if someone had suddenly opened the shutters in a dark room, flooding it with air and light.[27]
The signs of a new architecture had therefore emerged before the war, not in the work of Wright only but in Holland, in the industrial architecture of Germany and Italy, in France, England, Austria, and Belgium. And, as is always the case with innovative architecture, there had also been more manifestoes and drawings than buildings of a revolutionary stamp.[28]
The experience of war and revolution was the dividing line between modern tendencies and a Modern Movement. The diverse tendencies did not coalesce into one after the war, as some histories would pretend, but the war imparted to the progressive architects born in the 1880s a new urgency and a new hope in their work. Like many of their generation, they were convinced that Europe had been given "a second chance." And architecture would necessarily occupy an important place in the new order.
In the revolutionary Berlin of 1919, the Work Council for Art proclaimed with the quasi-religious fervor of expressionism the need for a democratic art. Yet it was clear that utility would have to be a component in the artists' move toward "the people." The decisive role of architects in the Council (from Walter Gropius and the noted critic Adolf Behne, who directed it, to Bruno Taut, who chaired the architecture committee) insured recognition of architecture's primary ideological place:
Art and people must form a unity.
Art shall no longer be the enjoyment of the few but the life and happiness of the masses.
The aim is alliance of the arts under the wing of a great architecture.
Foreshadowing its architects' involvement with the democratic government, the Council advanced six preliminary demands. Demand 1 read,
"Recognition of the public character of all building activity, both State and private. . . . People's housing as a means of bringing all the arts to the people. Permanent experimental sites for testing and perfecting new architectural effects." Demands 2 to 4 asked for "the dissolution of the Academy of Arts, the Academy of Building and the Prussian Provincial Art Commission in their existing form"; freedom from all state interference in the new institutions and radical transformation of training in architecture, arts, and handicrafts and revitalization of the museums. The provocative fifth demand called for "destruction of artistically valueless monuments as well as of buildings whose artistic value is out of proportion to the value of their material, which could be put to other uses. Prevention of prematurely planned war memorials." The manifesto closed by demanding "a national centre to ensure the fostering of the arts."[29]
The next year was Le Corbusier's turn. Yet the tone of his series for L'Esprit nouveau, the journal he had founded, was different. First, Le Corbusier asserts, "It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: Architecture or Revolution. Then, he goes on to explain this surprising alternative:
If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts with regard to the houses and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the "House-Machine," the mass production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful. Beautiful also with all the animation that the artist's sensibility can add to severe and pure functioning elements. If existing property arrangements were changed, and they are changing, it would be possible to build. . . . The morality of industry has been transformed: big business is today a healthy and moral organism . . . we have Revolution in method and in the scale of the adventure. . . . There has been Revolution in methods of construction. . . . Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.[30]
Even though Le Corbusier implicitly addresses himself to industry rather than to the state, the texts of the period are consistent about the place of architecture. Their ideology is architecture, and it is married to a general confusion about the rationalization of production and the conciliation of class conflict. Architecture as ideology could admit opposite political tendencies, as long as the state was in favor of massive building programs and of the new forms that the architects took for proxies of truth, goodness, justice, and progress.
Before introducing the main protagonists of this movement in which architecture became ideology, we must consider what they had in common.
The first and most important thing that modernist architects shared was the experience of World War I. Certainly, the war had been different for the victors and the vanquished, for the countries that were battlefields and those that were not. Yet the war gave a tragic urgency to the rejection of the bourgeois past, animating the intellectuals' romantic identification with the revolutionary movements of postwar years.
The only total break with the past had been realized, so it seemed, by the Russian Revolution. During the 1920s the USSR hovered in the background of architectural modernism (especially for the Germans) as an open alternative to the restoration of the bourgeoisie and the frustrations of architects' hopes.[31]
From the first months of the war, the shortage of credit, materials, and labor had stopped civilian construction, exacerbating the already severe housing conditions faced by the poor. In Britain, rent control was introduced early, in 1915, and later in France and Germany. In Germany, where average rents had quadrupled since 1914, housing legislation was passed in the final months of the Reich and incorporated into the republican constitution of August 1919. The stage was set for the immense efforts in social housing of the Weimar Republic, a program hailed by contemporaries (and others since) as the foundation of modernist architecture.[32]
A second element that progressive architects shared was their prewar contacts with the avant-gardes. Fired by fervent belief in the transformative capacity of art, the contacts continued after the war, yielding in part to the more deliberate organization of new centers and new networks in the 1920s. The desire to help construct a new society and a new way of life transformed the former avant-gardists into artistes engagés .
Dutch architects, their country having been spared the devastation of the war, had continued working; many progressives among them had already passed from the avant-garde into the service of the government before the war. Later, the Scandinavian, the Austrian, and the German architects followed the same path to work in town planning and in the design of mass housing for democratic governments.
Last but not least, modernist architects had in common with other intellectuals of both the left and the right an ideological faith in technology and industrial rationalization that can be summed up by "the idea of technology as a social arbiter."[33] After the war, the belief required extra faith, for the demonstrated potency of modern industry would have to be turned from destructive to (literally) constructive use. The model for modernity came from America, symbolized by Taylorism and Fordism. Social democrats, with some confusion, saw in Frederick Taylor's ideas of scientific manage-
ment the means for overcoming scarcity through increased productivity and for submitting the capitalist entrepreneur to the objective dictates of "science." The capitalist would thus become an industrial expert, like his engineers, with no special rights of control attached to his property claims.
Rationalization seemed to promise architects an especially important role. The historian Mary Nolan has followed the concerted efforts of philanthropic and state agencies to "Taylorize" the housewife's work in Weimar Germany, but, she says, the "effort to create modern, scientific homes and efficient homemakers" was international. The decade of the 1920s saw the formation of a modern female working class and, in consequence, middle-class "reformist" efforts to create "a new woman," neither independent nor sexually liberated but capable of rationally organizing her home and her family.[34]
The Weimar architects, imagining everything, from the existenz minimum dwelling, to the kitchen as the housewife's laboratory, to the design of appliances no German working-class family could yet afford, were much ahead of Le Corbusier in realizing the "machine tool" house, which he only projected. In the general enthusiasm about rationalization, the way things looked was important. By proclaiming the unification of the life of work and the life of leisure under the sign of rationality and ever-increasing productivity, the appearance of houses and objects symbolized modern technology.
The rationalization of production along Taylorist lines promised an ever-expanding national product that could therefore bypass the need for income redistribution policies by the government. Conflicts would be resolved, in this technocratic dream, by an expert elite, to which progressive architects quite logically wanted to belong. The vision could appeal, the historian Charles Maier points out, to Italian fascists, German or Scandinavian social democrats, or even Lenin in Russia—the latter because the issue of class conflict supposedly had not been denied but decided. Analogously, both left- and right-wing artists in Germany could adopt the Neue Sachlichkeit (the new objectivity), pretending to have superseded the expressionism from which they still derived impetus and form.[35]
Maier interprets the shift toward Fordism in the late 1920s as the reinstatement of entrepreneurial power over technocratic ambitions. Extensive cartelization and centralization of the economy had been achieved, yet the domestic markets remained very narrow, precisely because no redistribution had taken place. In most European countries, industrialists feared the saturation of internal markets and the loss of competitiveness abroad. Fordism, to them, was not primarily a Model-T in every home but a way of
cutting labor costs and standardizing production. Ultimately, "rationalization in Europe . . . served a conservative business community seeking to exploit, first, the transition to overall non-inflationary monetary conditions, then the prosperous but increasingly saturated market of the later 1920s."[36]
Whether modernist architects had been able to realize part of their vast dreams or not, they remained close to the productive and technocratic vision of rationalization. By their choice of a style and by their conception of collective and individual dwellings, they hoped to influence—even more, to compel—the inhabitants' choice of a rational and a communal life. Modernist architects lived the change of architecture as a thoroughly objective and rational way to insure their place in a reconstructed social order. Almost inevitably, as the depression deepened and hope disappeared, they once again subconsciously took architectural aesthetics for a new social order and their own new vision as the only radically new form that had taken root in postwar society.