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JEAN LOUIS COHEN: This period, the 1920s and the 1930s, is extremely interesting precisely because two movements merge and join at some point. One movement is more of an architectural. The other one is social reform.
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JANE COPLAND: Social reform had long been a European vision. However, it took the aftershock of the First World War, the destruction, the homeless, and the unemployed, to determine new social strategies.
The priority was for low-cost housing that could be built quickly and efficiently. The architects of the modern movement were well aware of these urgent needs. They dreamed of creating a new world, a modern world shaped by modern architecture.
HUBERT JAN HENKET: One tried to set up a totally new society. And one tried to do that for urban design and architecture. And what one tried was to create a society where-- it was an egalitarian society-- where basically, the working part of society, the labels, were raised to a much higher level, to a sort of middle class level, so that basically everybody would be equal, and will be happy in its new society.
FRITZ NEUMEYER: So it's a new world that the architect was trying to bring about. With new building types, building for a new society, of course, that has changed from a monarchy to a Republican system. And having a different client, of course, it is now the social Democratic government, the Republican, the city government. Which meant that, of course, the architecture itself had to address these conditions in a different way than the traditional architecture did before.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: They had in common this projection, this contempt, for historical or under-stagic strategies. They also shared the belief in the possibility of building a fairly new city, a city which would have broken with the slums, with the density, and with problems of a city.
HUBERT JAN HENKET: People begin to understand that by the use of science and technology, one can create one's own life. And one is not dependent on gault any longer, or all sorts of outside things. So one could create an objective society and world in which man has control over its total environment around him.
JANE COPLAND: The Pioneers, the fathers of modern architecture, experimented with new materials and simplified forms in a bid to liberate architecture from its traditional confines. In America, Frank Lloyd Wright opened the box of the closed building of the 19th century. He introduced fluidity of space and connected his buildings with nature.
Adolf Loos argued for architecture unhindered by decorative ornament. As early as 1910, his plain cubic-shaped houses were built in Vienna. The French architect, Auguste Perret, became one of the first to exploit the advantages of reinforced concrete in frame construction. And in Germany, Peter Behrens made important breakthroughs in structures, combining glass, steel, and concrete.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: In the years 1910, 1912, architects, like Peter Behrens in Berlin, and other architects throughout Europe, begin to celebrate the virtues of the modern machine.
And these machines will convey the notion that modern architecture had to be efficient. Houses were to become the machine every day, according to Le Corbusier, machines to live in.
JANE COPLAND: The tools of the modern architects were new materials and new technologies. In this new machine age architecture, sanitation and electricity are no longer ignored. Plumbing and energy systems become architectural elements in their own right. Load-bearing materials, such as steel and concrete, introduced more freedom and flexibility in the design. The use of sliding walls and sheet glass welcome the air, the light, and the outside landscape into the building.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: Modern architects took the factory as a model as early as 1910, when Walter Gropius published an article on American industrial buildings. And took tailorized factories or modern factories in America, as a model.
PETER HAHN: Gropius was a man very future-oriented, very optimistic. He always tried to settle the Bauhaus as a movement of people, which was struggling together for a better life of their time. Two of the key pieces of modern architecture have been designed by Walter Gropius. One of them is the Fagus Factory of 1911. And the other one is the Bauhaus building, designed here for Dessau in 1925.
JANE COPLAND: The Bauhaus School was founded in Weimar in 1919. Seven years later, it moved to Dessau, to a purpose built complex designed by Walter Gropius, which encapsulates the modern style. Innovative, not only in design, the school brought fresh and revolutionary methods of teaching.
Gropius believed that the craftsmen lacked the imagination to solve artistic problems, and the artist did not possess the skills to run a workshop. But together they could create the building of the future. Each of the workshops, was therefore, headed by two masters, a master of form and a master of craft.
The masters were leading artists of the time, Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, and Gropius himself. Workshops included metalwork, carpentry, weaving, graphics, pottery, stained glass, and furniture design. In a community atmosphere, masters and students work together to create a new spirit in design.
FRITZ NEUMEYER: One of the key, I would say, demands of the concept and changes in the concept, was that modern art should unite art and life. So to overcome the gap between art and life. That the artist was no longer seen as someone who was working for an individual, but who was responsible for the whole life, for everything. And that the artist himself understood, at the best, as a sort of engineer of life, that contributed something valuable to the society to change the society through art.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: Architects in France, architects in other parts of Europe, architects in Russia, in all these countries, were often integrated in broader movements. They were sharing concerns with painters, with sculptors, with writers, with moviemakers, of the expressionist and objective tradition in Germany. Of the constructivist movement in Russia. People connected with purists and other post- Cubist movements in France. The people connected with the style in Holland.
HUBERT JAN HENKET: There was and there wasn't a connection between the steel and the modern movement. They were both looking for a new society. But the steel was much more geared to an aesthetic approach. So try to solve this new idea via art. Whereas the modern movement basically tried to solve it in a totally different way, which was by creating environments via science and technology, and not via art.
A man like Rietveld was more or less in the middle because the Red and Blue Chair, for example, and the Schroder House, have become the icons of the steel. Whereas Rietveld, further on in his life, felt much more related to the modern movement, to trying to solve things in a much more functional way, rather than in an aesthetic way.
FRITZ NEUMEYER: The Functionalists turn it upside down. They started at the other end of the problem. With the function, what amount of money a client would have, and what his needs are. And then, in the process of designing, the form would result from that.
WESSEL DE JONGE: What is particularly nice about the Sonneveld House is that the fittings in that house are mostly industrial. So for these designs, they use exactly the same building products as they did in their social housing. So it was not a matter of luxury. It was a matter of efficiency, functionality.
An example of the architecture that dealt with the technology as a main issue is, for instance, Van der Vlugt, the designer for the Van Nella factories in Rotterdam.
HUBERT JAN HENKET: Special about the Van Nelle Factory is that it represents basically everything the modern movement stood for, and that is give form to things being ordinary. So the third thing that is important is that it's a factory. Because one tried to find new forms of factories.
The second that is important is that Van der Vlugt tried to create an environment in which one could produce basically everything. So it's a very neutral space, where there is an enormous amount of flexibility. And if you look at the modern movement, that function was very important, and therefore change of function was important as well, because you were not building for eternity any longer.
You had to think about flexibility, about being able to change buildings. And that is what he's done. Another thing that is important is the way he uses the latest ideas about building technology into that building. So therefore, he tried to use as little material as possible, and to use materials and constructions to their fullest.
WESSEL DE JONGE: The main issue of the whole factory was to create a pleasant atmosphere for the workers. Enough daylight. Enough fresh air. And for them, it was great to work there. If you got a job there, that was the thing to do.
Also in the sanatorium of Zonnestraal, you'll find this whole idea of atmosphere, of fresh air, et cetera, is a very important issue.
HUBERT JAN HENKET: Zonnestraal, to basically every Dutch architect, is the most important building in the world, because there you can see that with as little material as possible, that Duiker made the biggest spans, the biggest cantilevers. And it becomes a very transparent, very beautiful, a very clear building.
WESSEL DE JONGE: Duiker was one of the architects who was inspired by technology, you could say. Engineer's art was his credo. If you read his articles, you read a lot about, for instance, forms in nature. For instance, shells, that if you look at a shell, there's a minimum of material used to make this form. And this was a kind of parallel for him, for his architecture. And if you look at these buildings quite closely, you see that the structure is as light as possible, using as little concrete as possible.
And this was not only a matter of material, or only a matter of money. For him it was like a spiritual inspiration. And he compared this to the works of Bach, to the medieval cathedrals, and even to the theories of Einstein.
HUBERT JAN HENKET: What was important in this country, more than other countries was to eliminate the limitation between the inside and the outside. So, let's say, the spatial concepts were much more developed into that way than, for example, with Le Corbusier, where you get a much more sort of and closed approach.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: Le Corbusier was a highly egocentric and quite brilliant person. He was a writer. He was a painter. He will later become a sculpture in the 1940s. And he was, first of all, an architect, a builder, and a maker of architectural ideas.
JANE COPLAND: Swiss-born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, is probably the most important and influential of all modern architects. He gave the modern movement its first manifesto with his book, Vers une architecture. He was to become the image of the modern architect, someone who had understanding of politics, public relations, industry, design, and the arts.
Le Corbusier design some of the most significant prototypes of the modern movement and became absorbed with the idea of the city of tomorrow, planned in a spirit of geometry, construction, and synthesis. But little of his avante-garde designs were to be realized. Instead, most of his work was in small scale villas, not homes for the masses, but for the chosen few, the wealthy.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: Le Corbusier had met Amédée Ozenfant in 1915, 1916, through the offices of Auguste Perret. In 1918, they published together a manifesto called Aprés le cubisme. And in 1920 they started publishing the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau. Two years later, Ozenfant bought a tiny plot in Paris, close to apartment Savoye in the 14th arrondissement and asked Le Corbusier to design for himself an apartment and studio.
Above the apartment Le Corbusier designed what he wants to call a cube flight lit by very big windows and covered by north light roofs, using-- in a way of the language, of the vernacular-- industrial buildings, spreading then around Paris. The year after 1923, Le Corbusier built for a man, for whom he and Ozenfant were busy collecting paintings, for Basel banker, Raoul La Roche, a house and an art gallery in the west of Paris.
The Villa La Roche is important because it embodies the first use at a real scale of the notion developed by Le Corbusier, a notion of the so-called promenade architecturale. The picturesque parkours through which the visitor, or the inhabitant of the building, is able of finding his way through contrast of spaces, a contrast of views, a contrast of spatial experiences.
In the Villa La Roche, for instance, the contrast between the vertical hole at the ground levels and the diagonal, the parkours of the ramp leading through the painting collections of La Roche.
In 1929, Le Corbusier and his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, with whom he was working, built the Villa Savoye in the west of Paris, 30 kilometers from the city. Pure crystal of modernist in the Corbusien version. Built on pilotis with ribbon windows circling the building. A patio. And a ramp connecting all these elements.
The Villa Savoye is a perfect embodiment of the ideal of the machine. A machine that lands in that case on green grass, in an almost perfect idyllic rural environment.
CATHERINE COOKE: The question of the influence of Europe on Russia, and Russia on Europe, is a very interesting phenomenon because it's very much a two-way process. From the west, one sees, in particular, Corbusier. Desperate for work, at a time when he had very little, only a few houses to build in France. Looking to the Soviet Union as the place where he could build big buildings. And he, of course, won the Tsentrosoyuz competition in the late '20s that took him out to Russia.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: The Russians will see him as the very image of the new man. So someone capable of bridging the gap between the sciences, the arts, architecture, the city. Someone capable of addressing politics, as well as culture.
JANE COPLAND: Le Corbusier was not alone in seeking work in Russia, a country where Lenin's proposals were for social reconstruction and political education of the proletariat. There were factories, power stations, cooperatives, and workers clubs to be built.
The most powerful, in terms of ideology, were the constructivists, who believed that architecture could not only reorganize society, but actually shape social consciousness. It was architecture that suited a lean war-starved economy, where the major priority was to develop a heavy industry.
CATHERINE COOKE: One of the first buildings, or building complex, that the West was aware of in avant-garde Russia was the Electro-Technical Institute complex, on the edge of Moscow. This was an extraordinary complex. A very beautiful, modernist, ribbon window, very Corbusien buildings for this front line, really, symbolically important research institute in the Soviet economy.
One of the ways in which Russian modernism is most easily distinguished, perhaps from Western, is in the building types that they address. One has, for example, the strange situation in which a planetarium is one of the key new building types. Because a planetarium was a kind of temple for proving to the proletariat that there was no god in the sky. So something which in the West was entertainment, had a major ideological function in Russia.
The Workers Club is, of course, another very famous new type, which was seen as a way of bringing the workers together, partly entertaining them at the same time. Educating them often in literacy, but more importantly, in political aspirations for their class. They were to some extent a gathering point that replaced the church.
Then one has social housing, which has a much more ideological edge in Russia than, for example, in Frankfurt. One of the most important buildings-- that still remains and in its time-- was certainly the Narkomfin Housing Building designed by the constructivists. This building was a demonstration of their ideas about housing as an instrument of changing the way people lived, and therefore, their consciousness, and was very influential on Corbusier.
The whole idea of this scissors section, with a common corridor, that emerged in his unité, and indeed the idea of the unité, as a building which contained communal services, came very much from this idea of the dom kommuna in Russia.
JANE COPLAND: Ideology, social responsibility. The cornerstones of the modern movement. A movement which by the end of the 1920s had come of age and made its promised impact on the skyline. New shapes in industry, massive housing developments, model estates, convenient, affordable homes. A new standard of living. Concrete reality, literally.
To some, it was a harsh uncompromising reality, by no means a thing of beauty. Was this really utopia? The spread of modernism throughout Europe would tell.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: One can say that modern architects hated the city. In a way, they wanted to get rid of the traditional city, of the density, they subscribed to the principle of the garden city movement created in Britain at the end of the 19th century. So the housing developments built in the outskirts of cities were disconnected from the central city, and were built as islands, as Utopian areas where absolutely new rules in terms of housing, but also in terms of services, were used.
FRITZ NEUMEYER: The settlements were quarters, were achievable flats, you know, low rent. So the building task post organizational problem, which was low-cost housing, the financial system, low budget, the application of high standards of production.
The other problem was the problem of it was an artistic problem, or also an urbanistic problem. And of course, architects responded different to these problems.
Mies van der Rohe's settlement in the Afrikanische strase I think is an outstanding example for demonstrating how the architectural problem has changed because it's a building that is absolutely naked, you could say, it's as simple as possible. And it's only the rhythm of the openings and the base that articulate something like, a facade. And it's the repetition of the same element that creates a very strong abstract image like, let's say, a Malevich or a Mondrian painting, and which is totally different from what a facade of an apartment building in Berlin looked like so far.
Another brilliant example, I would say, given by the architect Bruno Taut, who was a master in developing an artistic language on this minimalistic base. With the color of the facades. With the spaces between the slabs. With the frames of windows and doors. And by just shifting a bit the volumes at the end of a line or something to create a tension, to create some sort of subtle complexity, though you never have the impression of a mechanic repetition of one and the same element forever.
JANE COPLAND: Among the architects who combined modern ideas with social ideology was Ernst May in his Frankfurt settlements. Opponents dubbed them inhuman.
In Berlin, the Siemens Corporation engaged leading architects to build the Siemensstadt settlement for its workers. Walter Gropius designed long standardized blocks of flats built a factory made units, dismissing individual notion.
Otto Bartning suggested a repetitive and monotonous facade in his building, known as the whiplash.
The organic approach was offered by Hugo Haring, where each function within the house influenced the outward architectural form.
While Hans Scharoun adopted features of the ocean liner and designed rounded roof shapes and balconies.
Other settlements were soon appearing across Europe.
HUBERT JAN HENKET: In Holland, social housing has always been a very important thing in the 20th century. Again, to alleviate the living conditions of the working class.
WESSEL DE JONGE: One of the most important examples of social housing in that period is Bergpolder Flats in Rotterdam. In a way it is a prototype of the galleried high rise for workers and was one of the first time that such a building would be fitted with an elevator, for instance.
Oud was a very important architect in those years too. He was the city architect for Rotterdam. And as such, he designed a large amount of social housing areas and schemes in that city. And one I particularly like is the Kiefhoek.
WYTZE PATIJN: Oud was, as a young architect, very busy with social housing in the Netherlands, and especially in Rotterdam. And Kiefhoek was his main project.
JANE COPLAND: The efficient compact design of the flats at the Kiefhoek estate is a model of minimal existence, entirely functional. Intended for the working class family, each unit is just four meters wide, by seven in depth. Cleverly centered around a space-saving spiral staircase.
Oud's first design included a shower, but after fierce debate, the city council voted it too luxurious a facility for a working class dwelling.
The sense of light and air created by Oud was, for its time, a novel feature.
WYTZE PATIJN: Oud composed to help Kiefhoek with a simple unit, but he did it on a special way. He made the blocks not of composing with a row, a simple row, but he composed the block as a whole entity with the yellow frames. And at the end, sometimes he makes a balcony to end the symmetry. And that's a very classical way of dealing with architects. So I always say that Oud is not a real, pure, rational functionalist. He's with one leg in the 19th century, and with the other leg he's in the 20th century.
Weissenhof is more an experiment with the type, with the unit. So we composed the block on a very special and complex way. You can say it's more an experiment as the Kiefhoek.
KARIN KIRSCH: [SPEAKING GERMAN]
JANE COPLAND: Other prominent European architects built at the Weissenhof exhibition. The Dutch man, Mart Stam, presented a row of three terraced houses finished in blue.
Peter Behrens' flats included a balcony, a concept designed to combat tuberculosis.
Walter Gropius showed his concern with efficiency of construction by using prefabricated materials.
Controversy surrounded the Weissenhof exhibition from the outset. Traditionalists produced a postcard depicting it as a primitive Arab village. For today's architects, the Weissenhof is a place not of ridicule, but of pilgrimage.
VLADIMIR SLAPETA: The Baba Estate was, of course, inspired by the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart and it was built five years later. But we couldn't find here such general support of the city, as in Stuttgart. So that they have not houses as manifestos, as the Baba Estate, but houses after normal dialogue between architect and client.
The ideology of Czech functions was not so strict left, as in Moscow, and not so connected with the social democracy, as in Berlin. It was more or less middle class culture, which played the leading role in the whole movement.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: In Central Europe, in Czechoslovakia in particular, a new culture emerged because Czechoslovakia was a new country, and in a way it identified itself to modern architecture, and architecture became, so to say, the national style of emerging Czechoslovakia.
VLADIMIR SLAPETA: And so in modern architecture one, and everything was built in the spirit of new start, beginning from small houses, from estates, to public buildings, and even to the synagogue, designed by Otto Eisler, to a Russian Orthodox church and to Catholic church.
The Brno Fair was one part of this strategy to build this city as a center of industry and economy. So in 1924, was organized a international competition for the Brno Fair. Josef Kalous has built this huge parabolic palace of industry and trade.
Smaller parabolas have been built by younger architects from Prague and Brno. The exhibition tower was designed by Bohumír Cermák. The whole exhibition fair was open 1928 in occasion of 10th anniversary of Czechoslovakia state.
JANE COPLAND: In the late '20s, as modernism was bringing minimalist living to Europe, two architects brought existence maximum to Czechoslovakia. In Brno, Mies van der Rohe designed the Villa Tugendhat. Simple geometric forms. Clever quality details. Chrome columns. Ebony and onyx dividing walls. Huge windows. Built for a wealthy client, this was an unusual project in a country where more modest villas were the norm.
Adolf Loos, a native of Brno, was building in a similar vein in Prague. The Villa Müller is an example of well-worked out aesthetics. The exterior, pure in design, unhindered by decoration. The interior, rich in materials and craftsmanship.
In Paris, private houses were the most common form in which the modern architects built. There, art-oriented and innovative patrons were the major clients for this architecture.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: The modern movement begins in France in the years that followed World War I, through the work of a series of Parisian-based architects, people like Le Corbusier, Mallet-Stevens, Andre Lurcat, Pierre Chareau.
You Lurcat started to build a series of artist houses called the Villa Seurat in the 14th arrondissement. Incorporating ideas and forms taken from-- this style-- taken from Adolf Loos. Lurcat was truly to give form to one of the first very complex statements about modern architecture in Paris, shaping a vision of what the new city could be.
Two years after the completion of Lurcat's Villa Seurat, Mallet-Stevens answers in a way to do a very similar program with the Rue Mallet-Stevens, a cluster of houses for artists, like the sculptors, Jan and Joel Martel. And other buildings in which Mallet-Stevens will use forms borrowed from the experiments of their style and combine [? Silinger's ?] cubes, other forms, in a fairly striking combination of volume.
Pierre Chareau is mostly known through his Maison de Verre, built inside [INAUDIBLE] courtyard. The Maison de Verre, in a way, illustrates a fairly different approach to modern architecture. An architecture based on moving elements, on the celebration of [INAUDIBLE], on the use of transparency, and of a development of machine aesthetics that Le Corbusier had promoted in his early 1920s writings.
JANE COPLAND: The main clients for this architecture were wealthy patrons. However, some enlightened public commissioners saw modern architecture as a means to social reform.
This Open Air School is one of many projects commissioned by Andre Sellier, Mayor of Suresnes. In order to give working class children the opportunity of a healthy environment, the classrooms were designed with glass partitions that could open to sunlit courtyards.
Another of Sellier's commissions was a series of low-cost garden city projects. Most famous is La Butte Rouge, just outside Paris. Based largely on the principles used so successfully in the German and Dutch settlements, it was a brilliant example of landscape architecture and subtlety of detail.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: Besides Le Corbusier, Lurcat, Mallet-Stevens, Paris, in a way, was a city open in the margins of the major public production. Public production was not open to avant-garde architects, but people like Zelinsky, like Lubetkin, who later immigrated to Great Britain.
JOHN ALLAN: 1929, Berthold Lubetkin joined with John Ginsberg to produce the apartment block, number 25, Avenue de Versailles, which is the most extraordinarily accomplished building for a first exercise, for a young architect, who at that stage was still under 30.
In 1932, he arrived in England at a time when modern architecture could probably have been numbered in less than 10 buildings. Perhaps Lubetkin's best known work is the Penguin Pool, that celebrated little sculpture at London Zoo, which contains all sorts of extremely interesting technical and formal propositions. And also gave the mass British public, I suppose, its first hands-on experience of modern architecture.
Apart from that, his best known work is certainly the two blocks of flats, High Points, one and two, in Highgate, in north London. Now these two buildings certainly put modern architecture in England on the international map. They were large. They were a demonstration at full scale of the new idea of apartment lifestyle in the city. And they really can be considered, alongside two other schemes of the mid '30s.
The Isokon Flats in Hampstead by Wells Coates. Which was a very interesting exercise in minimum flat planning. A gallery access block. Technically, I don't think, so refined as Highpoint, but interesting also for its association with the large number of emigres who arrived in England from the mid '30s onwards. Gropius stayed there, as did Marcel Breuer and Moholy-Nagy.
And thirdly, the block of flats, or the scheme of flats, known as Kensal House in Notting Hill, in west London, which was designed by Maxwell Fry with the housing consultant, Elizabeth Denby. And it looked very much more closely at the idea of the social unit, the low rental apartment block for families in need. Very tightly planned. Technically, not all that accomplished, but socially, extremely interesting. And planned alongside a nursery school, which they were able to fit onto the site.
And these three schemes do represent very well the interest that modern architects were applying to the idea of apartment living, high rise living, in dense urban environment.
JEAN LOUIS COHEN: In Italy, the fascist regime wanted to capture the interest and the collaboration of the new generations, and subscribe to a new culture, deriving from futurist and from local innovative trends in architecture and the arts. And so in the early 1930s, with the Florence Station competition and other opportunities, Mussolini and the modernist-oriented leaders of a fascist regime pushed the new ideas in modern architecture. And this led to a highly important and interesting building, like for instance, Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio in Como.
ENRICO MANTERO: [SPEAKING ITALIAN]
JANE COPLAND: By the mid '30s, modern architecture was a force to be reckoned with in Europe. But other forces were at work. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany. And though the fascists embraced modernism wholeheartedly, the Nazis were to prove such violent opponents, that many leading architects were forced to flee as refugees.
They carried with them the seeds of the modern movement, spreading modernism across the world. And though their dreams remained unchanged, their work was to be known by a new name, the international style.
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