Germany: Behrens & the Werkbund

Germany played the leading role in the development of the new architecture. Long before the war the Deutscher Werkbund had been formed in Germany. At that time such an outstanding leader as Peter Behrens was not a strange or isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, he already had a powerful backing in the Deutscher Werkbund, a body which formed a reservoir of the forces of progress and renewal. I well remember the animated discussion at the Werkbund’s public sessions during the Cologne Exhibition of 1914 which so many foreigners attended; and the publication of the first of the Werkbund’s well-known yearbooks at about the same time. It was in active collaboration in the latter that I gained my first comprehensive insight into the movement as a result of drawing up a sort of inventory of the existing state of architecture. Between 1912 and 1914, too, I designed my first two important buildings: the Fagus Factory at Alfeld, and the Office Building for the Cologne Exhibition, both of which clearly evince that emphasis on function which characterizes the new architecture. (61)

France: Auguste Perret

During this same prewar period Auguste Perret was the leading personality in France. The Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris, built in 1911-13, was designed by Perret in collaboration with the Belgian Van de Velde, who was then living in Weimar and working in close contact with the Deutscher Werkbund. Perret’s chief title to fame is his extraordinary constructive skill, which altogether surpasses his gifts as spatial designer. Although more engineer than architect, he indubitably belongs to the founders of modern architecture, for it was he who succeeded in freeing architecture from its ponderous monumentalism by his audacious and wholly unprecedented forms of construction. Yet this great pioneer for long remained a voice crying in the wilderness as far as France was concerned. (61)

Austria: Otto Wagner

In Austria, Otto Wagner had built his Post Office Savings Headquarters in Vienna at the tum of the century. Wagner dared to expose plain surfaces entirely free of decoration and moldings. Today, it is almost impossible for us to imagine what a revolution such a step implied. Simultaneously Adolph Loos, another Viennese, began writing those articles and books in which he set forth the fundamentals of the new architecture, and building that large shop in the Michaelplatz, immediately opposite the Hofburg in Vienna, which so inflamed the passions of a population accustomed to Baroque forms. (61-62)

U.S.: Louis Sullivan

Root built a brick skyscraper in Chicago in 1883. About the end of the century Sullivan–Frank Lloyd Wright’s far too little recognized master–constructed buildings of this type which are epoch.making, and also formulated architectural principles which contain the pith of the functional doctrines of today. We must not forget that it was Sullivan who wrote, “Form should follow function.” Intellectually speaking, he was more articulate in his ideas than Frank Lloyd Wright, who was later to inspire so many European architects in both a spatial and a structural sense. Later on, and more particularly in the postwar period, Frank Lloyd Wright began to manifest a growing attachment to romanticism in his lectures and articles that was in sharp contradiction to the European development of the new architecture. At the present moment the Americans have the most fully developed constructional technique of any nation in the world-as I had an opportunity of seeing for myself in the course of my investigations in the United States. But in spite of Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and a very highly developed technical organization, their artistic evolution has remained in abeyance. The intellectual and cultural background necessary for its preparation does not as yet exist. (62-63)

England: Housing, Planning and Raymond Unwin

England’s contribution has been confined to housing and town planning; but Sir Raymond Unwin’s ideas and the English garden cities have influenced the whole European housing movement. (64)

Gropius, Walter ( 1966 [1943]) Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Collier Books.