Karel Teige: To New Architecture
Machine. Lamennais claimed that all arts stem from architecture, specifically from the temple, which was its symbol, as the spiritual focal point of life. Today we could rightly say that all artistic creation depends on architecture as a constructive art, simply on the science of construction, whose axis is the machine. Artistic architecture, carried in the spirit of outdated aesthetic concepts, alive from the superstition of the artistic industry, infected by artistic, historicizing, or pseudomodern decorativeism, is suppressed in the new century by the rule of the machine. The machine, as Elie Faure points out, is the only purely constructed form amidst the chaotic and nonsensical bric-a-brac of plastic shapes. From the constructions of modern industry, modern mechanical aesthetics develops in accordance with the evolution of modern sensibility and is indicative for architects as well as for other artists. In industrial constructions, in technical, utilitarian architecture, and from machine production, the first types of a new style were born.
Style. A common phrase that we live in a style-less era is disproved by a simple glance at the world. Style is constantly created before our eyes not from aesthetic manifestos, from studio atmospheres, but from collective, often anonymous, purposeful, and disciplined labor of workers and technicians; from technical enterprises, driven by the conditions of the day and the thought of future development, a world of new forms is born in the furnace of industry, and the countless and multifarious beauty of the world is not created only by artists, but essentially by the entire ensemble of civilized humanity. A unity has been reached between culture and civilization, both of which owe their flourishing to machines. We are witnesses to the birth of new forms and realities that have no parallels in the past (industrial art, reinforced concrete structures, cars, airplanes, radio telegraphy, cinema, photography, linotype) — and thus we can speak here of a modern style, which is characterized by even more pregnant lofty uniformity than antiquity or Gothic.
Engineering architecture. In the 19th century, with the collapse of the manufactory, the type of artistic craftsman became extinct due to social conditions; in place of individual, manual labor, the machine takes over, until finally Taylorism makes even the worker a machine. The artistic and constructive side of architecture separates, to the ruin of the first. The artist-architect becomes an industrial decoration designer and facade artist. While the building engineer, hand in hand with other technical inventors, dictates by purpose, with ultimate economy and utilizing all civilizational achievements, constructs utilitarian industrial buildings from new, non-classical materials (concrete, iron, glass), traditional architects stand face to face with nothingness when the engineer-constructor intervenes directly into the center of life. By inventing new constructions, new spaces, solving new layout dispositions, he has almost unconsciously reached unprecedented, interesting compositions of masses, to the wonderful plasticity of geometric volumes. Undoubtedly beautiful industrial buildings evoke a manly atmosphere.
It seems appropriate to answer the question of whether the mentioned engineering buildings and industrial products are works of art. It is certain that they stand entirely outside the historical "stylistic" canon and outside the formal doctrines of architecture of the 19th century. Their authors were engaged in solving concrete tasks and not in formal play or aesthetic speculations. The form, which is the sign of art, was not their goal, but rather a result, or even a byproduct of their work. And yet one can say that these buildings are works of art, because they contain a number, that is order, on which all art stands. If the word art comes from the verb u m ě t i, one cannot deny this designation to realities whose a r t i f i c i a l p e r f e c t i o n is fully demonstrated. The harmonious, nobly cold beauty crowns the success of the precise solution of the problem. The lesson for the architect is: one must renounce outdated artistic concepts; the interest in practical perfection should overcome individual artistic vanity. We have witnessed the total destruction of artistic romanticism and have reached the predominance of sharp intellect, which is the only guarantee of salvation and the health of the world.
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, a man of grand civilizational work, a genius engineer and inventor, a splendid prototype of a truly modern architect, a man of iron, the creator of amazing viaducts, whose bold and light constructions carry express trains over rivers and valleys, and the builder of the famous Paris Tower, where elevators raise a person almost to the clouds. What the pyramids are to ancient architecture, the Eiffel Tower is to modern architecture. The pyramids were tombs. Eiffel's works are architecture of utility and life. The realization of this genius engineer is more significant for modern building art than the work of architects who could do nothing but mask facades for 120 years. His life's work is the Eiffel Tower, a miracle of contemporary technology, built in collaboration with M. Koechlin, E. Nougier, and architect Sauvestre, despite protests of sentimentality, fearing the defacement of Paris. It has become a dignified monument to its creator. An entertainment enterprise and simultaneously an important radio telegraphic and meteorological station, this observation tower, now the property of the city of Paris, has become the object of admiration in modern painting and poetry. Its iron beauty is a symbol of the modern constructive spirit.
Predecessors of new architecture. Overcoming the architectural decline of the past century was made possible by the correct understanding of the life situation, production, economic and social conditions. As a result, a turn away from historicism had to occur. The creation of new forms, corresponding to the needs of our life, is required. Great social transformations always give birth to new forms. need — purpose — construction, determines according to Semper creation. New purposes and new forms of social life give rise to new tasks. Consequential spirits see the need for a radical change in the concept of the residential house and a revision of its layout. Engineers have created shelters for machines — for a person who has nowhere to lay his head, it is the duty of new architects to build a dignified dwelling.
At the end of the century, Van de Velde writes "Laikova kázání", which is a manifesto of newer thinking. He already speaks here of the engineering form, which is the purest embodiment of objectivity, and roughly draws its aesthetics. He points out that it is appropriate to look at a machine with the same eyes as at the Parthenon. Émile Zola, who raised the imperative demand: "Entre de son temps" (Manet's desire for contemporaneity), describes "the delicate and enormous elegance of the locomotive with big wheels, connected by metal arms. Its chest is broad, its sides elongated and powerful; all that logic and all that certainty, which make up the supreme beauty of metallic beings, precision and strength". Maurice Maeterlinck writes about the beauty of the car. At the beginning of the century, there is already talk of the unrecognized beauty of the engine, crane, ship. A return begins to reasonable, simple, purposeful construction; W a g n e r lays the foundations of a new architecture. Architectural hygiene and aesthetic disinfection. Ornamentalism is stigmatized by L o o s as a crime. It is understood that all the difference between constructive and decorative architecture lies in the fact that the former is architecture and the latter is not. B e h r e n s and G r o p i u s in Germany and P e r r e t o v é in France are at work.
Auguste and Gustave Perret. The work of the Perret brothers marks a stage in the development of modern architecture. To the iron architecture of the 19th century, which created the Machinery Gallery at the World's Fair in 1889, the Eiffel Tower and viaducts, with which the bewildered era often did not know what to do architecturally, is added the architecture of reinforced concrete, whose masters are the Perret brothers. Pillared buildings, with minimally dimensioned beams, seemingly fragile constructive skeletons, wall fillings from light material, right-angled rhythm of divisions determine the character of the new architecture, which, despite using new materials and relying on the most modern technical achievements, can still exert a grandeur and monumentality that was characteristic of the most famous buildings in history. The constructive courage of the Middle Ages, of Gothic, is here amplified. Just as the cathedral in Chartres or Sainte Chapelle in Paris, so the basilica in Raincy is a pillar building, without massive walls, with a whole facade of windows. And the harmonious tone of antiquity lines through modern proportions. Beauty lies not in decoration, but in the essence of architecture, in the rhythm and harmony of arrangements, in the proportions of construction.
The residential building with 7 stories on Franklin Street (1903) is exemplary solved in layout. It is without an internal courtyard, whose suppression is emphatically required by the Perrets, as small light wells of tall buildings are indeed a pitiful chasm without light and air. In its place, an indentation of just 12 m² is created in the facade opening to the park, thus gaining direct lighting for the apartments. The entire architectural disposition of the exterior logically follows from the polygonal layout. The Ponthieu garages (1905-06) thoroughly take advantage of the situation: on both sides of the three-story body, equipped with suspended bridges and elevators, are located stalls oriented diagonally toward the entrance. The facade is bare: glass and concrete columns. The Champs Elysées theater is a chef d'oeuvre. Its layouts are truly monumental, consistently denying walls, pillars without bases and capitals drawn from the ground to the roofs, the dome suspended by a light iron structure. This "most beautiful theater in the world" signifies an incredible architectural advancement, in comparison to the Paris Opera, where almost unlimited financial resources were available. The novelty and daring of the construction and architectural conception astonish. The light marble skin of the facade, whose main motif is two massive pylons, does not mask the clear and bold skeleton of the building. Only decorative accessories, as well as Bourdelle's reliefs, are not entirely in accordance with the serious and strict beauty of the whole. Moreover, the Perrets, born as genius constructors, did not place greater emphasis on them. The docks in Casablanca (1916) with fragile concrete arches and the studios of the H. Esders department store (1919) are further progress in constructive solutions. The broad, bright hall under a glass roof is spanned by enormous concrete beams, on whose tops all the pressure from the roof is shifted. The basilica in Raincy (1922), Notre Dame de la Marne, modernizes the layout of early basilicas. The rectangular nave is framed by load-bearing pillars, isolated and very slender, pushed inward, so that it allows the creation of a whole wall of windows from gridded concrete; the high tower, too, rests only on slender concrete pillars. The subtlety of the construction evokes in the observer a recollection of San Vitale in Ravenna, a technical marvel of early Christian architecture.
For the Perret brothers and with them for all modern constructive architecture, the stone age of construction is over: we live in a concrete age. Correctly understood Americanism. Strict economy. Architecture of necessity. What if here and there some decorative details pay tribute to the fashion of the time; it would be unnecessary to reproach A. and G. Perret for German influences. What is important is that architecture is built with absolute consistency on the only correct basis, on a technical basis, that it is strongly defined as building art (or possibly also industrial art) and not as decorative, applied art. A new style is growing on a technical basis. Its products are typified — they are characterized by uniformity, just as transatlantic ships and cathedrals.
America. In the 1890s, a new type of house emerges in America: the skyscraper. Skyscrapers arise in the Business District of Chicago, narrowly bounded by Lake Michigan, railway stations, and the Chicago River, due to a lack of space, which this quartier is turned into even with increasing bustle. Soon, tall buildings also arise where not due to the need to save space, but the practical necessity of technical and economic concentration decides upon this type of house. Thus, skyscrapers are not a solution born from a generous plan and unified vision of urban construction and are rarely integrated organically into a unified framework of the urban plan. They remain somewhat strong architectural individuals, not submitting to the whole of the city. Yet American skyscrapers are an important architectural event: a trial of the capabilities of modern constructions and the invention of a new type of house. In their construction, as often happens elsewhere, the architect did not understand the engineer. Living off memories of historical styles from Europe, most frequently the Renaissance but also Gothic, of course in the depraved examples that were rampant in the 19th century in Europe, the American architect masks, denies, and ignores the bold construction. The horrific Gothic destroys the monumental effect of the highest building in the world, Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building.
The skyscraper is a new type of house that urban construction methods must account for. To some extent, it is already a standard today. An attempt at standardizing family residential homes is also made in America: it is the work of F. L. Wright. — Wright, the architect, and the engineers who built the skyscrapers (not their mindlessly historical architects) bring fertile lessons to European architectural work. Modern Dutch architecture (J. J. P. Oud and others) receives an impulse from Wright. In France, based on American experiences (seeking the standards of the house and the order of the modern metropolis), Le Corbusier emerges. In England and Germany, after the war, there began to be considerations about the advantages of using the American type of house — the skyscraper. In England, this issue arose from commercial reasons; in Germany, there arrived aesthetic speculation of modern architects. English architects ultimately decided against the skyscraper. Modern German architects even conceive skyscrapers as residential buildings, which is not economical given the current construction practices. In Germany, numerous competitions were organized, which, however, did not bring much new technically and constructively, they followed American models, of which the best is still the so-called steel cage construction. However, the American layout of the skyscraper can no longer be considered exemplary today; its internal courtyards, a relic from the common multi-story city house, are unsuitable, inadequate, and especially in the case of fire, incredibly dangerous. In Germany, a star-shaped layout has been created, oriented from the core outward to the perimeter. Only here does the attempt become tangible to layout the skyscraper as a new type of building. In this direction, notable yet overly bold are proposals by Hans Soeder, Mies v. d. Rohe, and Poelzig. From an aesthetic standpoint, there is a culmination of the revolution in the proportions of the city: the new scale is Eiffel Tower.
Le Corbusier. In Europe, ravaged by the world and civil war, the need for reconstruction arises. To construct presupposes technical thinking. Technical thinking operates without speculative considerations of art. The new spirit is the spirit of construction, as declared in its program "L'Esprit Nouveau", whose main collaborator is Le Corbusier.
The emergence and realization of new architectural forms cannot be thought of independently from social transformations. Out of commercial necessity, with the lack of planning characteristic of the capitalist regime, modern urban Chaos was born. Without connection to the urban construction concept, the skyscraper emerged. The projects of logically thinking urbanists are mostly condemned to remain on paper, not because modern industry, which can erect a house in three days, mass-produced, just like it produces about 10,000 Ford cars a day, is not prepared for deliveries, but because its production organization limits and possibly even paralyzes its creative possibilities. For the first time in history, we are witnessing an unusual situation that must not last, lest civilization suffer even more terrible catastrophes than those of war. Today we see a reversed relationship between the machine and man. Man is ruled by the machine. The strict, masculine, chaste, and eminently apostolic book of Le Corbusier "V e r s u n e a r c h i t e c t u r e" primarily deserves to clarify the situation. Logical, factual, and documented reflections (only the last chapter of the book: "Architecture or Revolution" unfortunately 'suffers from some logical flaws, confusing causes with consequences) have a convincing power; the entire book has a mission of great moral and social importance. By once again pointing out the beauty, modernity, and usefulness of the technical form, Le Corbusier formulates in words and images the modern architectural aesthetics, namely the aesthetics of the engineer. He is too much of a Frenchman (although he is reproached from the conservative side for 'conceiving in the German spirit) to deny the traditional foundation, the classic harmony, and not to invoke examples from history. But he is too consciously modern, that is, a real person, to grant aesthetic speculation a dogmatically absolute validity: the straight line and cube, which are his basic elements, are not his necessary schemes and he rightly shows the beauty of technical products that are characterized by mathematical, elastic curves. An article on s e r i a l h o u s e s is the catechism of the modern apartment: for Le Corbusier, the house is a living machine. From serial houses he transitions to the synthetic problem of the modern metropolis; to the problems of urbanism.
Le Corbusier's work is a sign of the dawn of an architectural epoch.
Style. A common phrase that we live in a style-less era is disproved by a simple glance at the world. Style is constantly created before our eyes not from aesthetic manifestos, from studio atmospheres, but from collective, often anonymous, purposeful, and disciplined labor of workers and technicians; from technical enterprises, driven by the conditions of the day and the thought of future development, a world of new forms is born in the furnace of industry, and the countless and multifarious beauty of the world is not created only by artists, but essentially by the entire ensemble of civilized humanity. A unity has been reached between culture and civilization, both of which owe their flourishing to machines. We are witnesses to the birth of new forms and realities that have no parallels in the past (industrial art, reinforced concrete structures, cars, airplanes, radio telegraphy, cinema, photography, linotype) — and thus we can speak here of a modern style, which is characterized by even more pregnant lofty uniformity than antiquity or Gothic.
Engineering architecture. In the 19th century, with the collapse of the manufactory, the type of artistic craftsman became extinct due to social conditions; in place of individual, manual labor, the machine takes over, until finally Taylorism makes even the worker a machine. The artistic and constructive side of architecture separates, to the ruin of the first. The artist-architect becomes an industrial decoration designer and facade artist. While the building engineer, hand in hand with other technical inventors, dictates by purpose, with ultimate economy and utilizing all civilizational achievements, constructs utilitarian industrial buildings from new, non-classical materials (concrete, iron, glass), traditional architects stand face to face with nothingness when the engineer-constructor intervenes directly into the center of life. By inventing new constructions, new spaces, solving new layout dispositions, he has almost unconsciously reached unprecedented, interesting compositions of masses, to the wonderful plasticity of geometric volumes. Undoubtedly beautiful industrial buildings evoke a manly atmosphere.
It seems appropriate to answer the question of whether the mentioned engineering buildings and industrial products are works of art. It is certain that they stand entirely outside the historical "stylistic" canon and outside the formal doctrines of architecture of the 19th century. Their authors were engaged in solving concrete tasks and not in formal play or aesthetic speculations. The form, which is the sign of art, was not their goal, but rather a result, or even a byproduct of their work. And yet one can say that these buildings are works of art, because they contain a number, that is order, on which all art stands. If the word art comes from the verb u m ě t i, one cannot deny this designation to realities whose a r t i f i c i a l p e r f e c t i o n is fully demonstrated. The harmonious, nobly cold beauty crowns the success of the precise solution of the problem. The lesson for the architect is: one must renounce outdated artistic concepts; the interest in practical perfection should overcome individual artistic vanity. We have witnessed the total destruction of artistic romanticism and have reached the predominance of sharp intellect, which is the only guarantee of salvation and the health of the world.
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, a man of grand civilizational work, a genius engineer and inventor, a splendid prototype of a truly modern architect, a man of iron, the creator of amazing viaducts, whose bold and light constructions carry express trains over rivers and valleys, and the builder of the famous Paris Tower, where elevators raise a person almost to the clouds. What the pyramids are to ancient architecture, the Eiffel Tower is to modern architecture. The pyramids were tombs. Eiffel's works are architecture of utility and life. The realization of this genius engineer is more significant for modern building art than the work of architects who could do nothing but mask facades for 120 years. His life's work is the Eiffel Tower, a miracle of contemporary technology, built in collaboration with M. Koechlin, E. Nougier, and architect Sauvestre, despite protests of sentimentality, fearing the defacement of Paris. It has become a dignified monument to its creator. An entertainment enterprise and simultaneously an important radio telegraphic and meteorological station, this observation tower, now the property of the city of Paris, has become the object of admiration in modern painting and poetry. Its iron beauty is a symbol of the modern constructive spirit.
Predecessors of new architecture. Overcoming the architectural decline of the past century was made possible by the correct understanding of the life situation, production, economic and social conditions. As a result, a turn away from historicism had to occur. The creation of new forms, corresponding to the needs of our life, is required. Great social transformations always give birth to new forms. need — purpose — construction, determines according to Semper creation. New purposes and new forms of social life give rise to new tasks. Consequential spirits see the need for a radical change in the concept of the residential house and a revision of its layout. Engineers have created shelters for machines — for a person who has nowhere to lay his head, it is the duty of new architects to build a dignified dwelling.
At the end of the century, Van de Velde writes "Laikova kázání", which is a manifesto of newer thinking. He already speaks here of the engineering form, which is the purest embodiment of objectivity, and roughly draws its aesthetics. He points out that it is appropriate to look at a machine with the same eyes as at the Parthenon. Émile Zola, who raised the imperative demand: "Entre de son temps" (Manet's desire for contemporaneity), describes "the delicate and enormous elegance of the locomotive with big wheels, connected by metal arms. Its chest is broad, its sides elongated and powerful; all that logic and all that certainty, which make up the supreme beauty of metallic beings, precision and strength". Maurice Maeterlinck writes about the beauty of the car. At the beginning of the century, there is already talk of the unrecognized beauty of the engine, crane, ship. A return begins to reasonable, simple, purposeful construction; W a g n e r lays the foundations of a new architecture. Architectural hygiene and aesthetic disinfection. Ornamentalism is stigmatized by L o o s as a crime. It is understood that all the difference between constructive and decorative architecture lies in the fact that the former is architecture and the latter is not. B e h r e n s and G r o p i u s in Germany and P e r r e t o v é in France are at work.
Auguste and Gustave Perret. The work of the Perret brothers marks a stage in the development of modern architecture. To the iron architecture of the 19th century, which created the Machinery Gallery at the World's Fair in 1889, the Eiffel Tower and viaducts, with which the bewildered era often did not know what to do architecturally, is added the architecture of reinforced concrete, whose masters are the Perret brothers. Pillared buildings, with minimally dimensioned beams, seemingly fragile constructive skeletons, wall fillings from light material, right-angled rhythm of divisions determine the character of the new architecture, which, despite using new materials and relying on the most modern technical achievements, can still exert a grandeur and monumentality that was characteristic of the most famous buildings in history. The constructive courage of the Middle Ages, of Gothic, is here amplified. Just as the cathedral in Chartres or Sainte Chapelle in Paris, so the basilica in Raincy is a pillar building, without massive walls, with a whole facade of windows. And the harmonious tone of antiquity lines through modern proportions. Beauty lies not in decoration, but in the essence of architecture, in the rhythm and harmony of arrangements, in the proportions of construction.
The residential building with 7 stories on Franklin Street (1903) is exemplary solved in layout. It is without an internal courtyard, whose suppression is emphatically required by the Perrets, as small light wells of tall buildings are indeed a pitiful chasm without light and air. In its place, an indentation of just 12 m² is created in the facade opening to the park, thus gaining direct lighting for the apartments. The entire architectural disposition of the exterior logically follows from the polygonal layout. The Ponthieu garages (1905-06) thoroughly take advantage of the situation: on both sides of the three-story body, equipped with suspended bridges and elevators, are located stalls oriented diagonally toward the entrance. The facade is bare: glass and concrete columns. The Champs Elysées theater is a chef d'oeuvre. Its layouts are truly monumental, consistently denying walls, pillars without bases and capitals drawn from the ground to the roofs, the dome suspended by a light iron structure. This "most beautiful theater in the world" signifies an incredible architectural advancement, in comparison to the Paris Opera, where almost unlimited financial resources were available. The novelty and daring of the construction and architectural conception astonish. The light marble skin of the facade, whose main motif is two massive pylons, does not mask the clear and bold skeleton of the building. Only decorative accessories, as well as Bourdelle's reliefs, are not entirely in accordance with the serious and strict beauty of the whole. Moreover, the Perrets, born as genius constructors, did not place greater emphasis on them. The docks in Casablanca (1916) with fragile concrete arches and the studios of the H. Esders department store (1919) are further progress in constructive solutions. The broad, bright hall under a glass roof is spanned by enormous concrete beams, on whose tops all the pressure from the roof is shifted. The basilica in Raincy (1922), Notre Dame de la Marne, modernizes the layout of early basilicas. The rectangular nave is framed by load-bearing pillars, isolated and very slender, pushed inward, so that it allows the creation of a whole wall of windows from gridded concrete; the high tower, too, rests only on slender concrete pillars. The subtlety of the construction evokes in the observer a recollection of San Vitale in Ravenna, a technical marvel of early Christian architecture.
For the Perret brothers and with them for all modern constructive architecture, the stone age of construction is over: we live in a concrete age. Correctly understood Americanism. Strict economy. Architecture of necessity. What if here and there some decorative details pay tribute to the fashion of the time; it would be unnecessary to reproach A. and G. Perret for German influences. What is important is that architecture is built with absolute consistency on the only correct basis, on a technical basis, that it is strongly defined as building art (or possibly also industrial art) and not as decorative, applied art. A new style is growing on a technical basis. Its products are typified — they are characterized by uniformity, just as transatlantic ships and cathedrals.
America. In the 1890s, a new type of house emerges in America: the skyscraper. Skyscrapers arise in the Business District of Chicago, narrowly bounded by Lake Michigan, railway stations, and the Chicago River, due to a lack of space, which this quartier is turned into even with increasing bustle. Soon, tall buildings also arise where not due to the need to save space, but the practical necessity of technical and economic concentration decides upon this type of house. Thus, skyscrapers are not a solution born from a generous plan and unified vision of urban construction and are rarely integrated organically into a unified framework of the urban plan. They remain somewhat strong architectural individuals, not submitting to the whole of the city. Yet American skyscrapers are an important architectural event: a trial of the capabilities of modern constructions and the invention of a new type of house. In their construction, as often happens elsewhere, the architect did not understand the engineer. Living off memories of historical styles from Europe, most frequently the Renaissance but also Gothic, of course in the depraved examples that were rampant in the 19th century in Europe, the American architect masks, denies, and ignores the bold construction. The horrific Gothic destroys the monumental effect of the highest building in the world, Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building.
The skyscraper is a new type of house that urban construction methods must account for. To some extent, it is already a standard today. An attempt at standardizing family residential homes is also made in America: it is the work of F. L. Wright. — Wright, the architect, and the engineers who built the skyscrapers (not their mindlessly historical architects) bring fertile lessons to European architectural work. Modern Dutch architecture (J. J. P. Oud and others) receives an impulse from Wright. In France, based on American experiences (seeking the standards of the house and the order of the modern metropolis), Le Corbusier emerges. In England and Germany, after the war, there began to be considerations about the advantages of using the American type of house — the skyscraper. In England, this issue arose from commercial reasons; in Germany, there arrived aesthetic speculation of modern architects. English architects ultimately decided against the skyscraper. Modern German architects even conceive skyscrapers as residential buildings, which is not economical given the current construction practices. In Germany, numerous competitions were organized, which, however, did not bring much new technically and constructively, they followed American models, of which the best is still the so-called steel cage construction. However, the American layout of the skyscraper can no longer be considered exemplary today; its internal courtyards, a relic from the common multi-story city house, are unsuitable, inadequate, and especially in the case of fire, incredibly dangerous. In Germany, a star-shaped layout has been created, oriented from the core outward to the perimeter. Only here does the attempt become tangible to layout the skyscraper as a new type of building. In this direction, notable yet overly bold are proposals by Hans Soeder, Mies v. d. Rohe, and Poelzig. From an aesthetic standpoint, there is a culmination of the revolution in the proportions of the city: the new scale is Eiffel Tower.
Le Corbusier. In Europe, ravaged by the world and civil war, the need for reconstruction arises. To construct presupposes technical thinking. Technical thinking operates without speculative considerations of art. The new spirit is the spirit of construction, as declared in its program "L'Esprit Nouveau", whose main collaborator is Le Corbusier.
The emergence and realization of new architectural forms cannot be thought of independently from social transformations. Out of commercial necessity, with the lack of planning characteristic of the capitalist regime, modern urban Chaos was born. Without connection to the urban construction concept, the skyscraper emerged. The projects of logically thinking urbanists are mostly condemned to remain on paper, not because modern industry, which can erect a house in three days, mass-produced, just like it produces about 10,000 Ford cars a day, is not prepared for deliveries, but because its production organization limits and possibly even paralyzes its creative possibilities. For the first time in history, we are witnessing an unusual situation that must not last, lest civilization suffer even more terrible catastrophes than those of war. Today we see a reversed relationship between the machine and man. Man is ruled by the machine. The strict, masculine, chaste, and eminently apostolic book of Le Corbusier "V e r s u n e a r c h i t e c t u r e" primarily deserves to clarify the situation. Logical, factual, and documented reflections (only the last chapter of the book: "Architecture or Revolution" unfortunately 'suffers from some logical flaws, confusing causes with consequences) have a convincing power; the entire book has a mission of great moral and social importance. By once again pointing out the beauty, modernity, and usefulness of the technical form, Le Corbusier formulates in words and images the modern architectural aesthetics, namely the aesthetics of the engineer. He is too much of a Frenchman (although he is reproached from the conservative side for 'conceiving in the German spirit) to deny the traditional foundation, the classic harmony, and not to invoke examples from history. But he is too consciously modern, that is, a real person, to grant aesthetic speculation a dogmatically absolute validity: the straight line and cube, which are his basic elements, are not his necessary schemes and he rightly shows the beauty of technical products that are characterized by mathematical, elastic curves. An article on s e r i a l h o u s e s is the catechism of the modern apartment: for Le Corbusier, the house is a living machine. From serial houses he transitions to the synthetic problem of the modern metropolis; to the problems of urbanism.
Le Corbusier's work is a sign of the dawn of an architectural epoch.
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