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Modernism in the 1930s. Europe and the Americas.
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Modernism in the 1930s Europe and the Americas
During the 1930s, modernism and its practices were disseminated widely in the western world. This was due in part to the fact that architects and clients often felt that modernism responded to the needs of post-WWI social and economic circumstances. Often the introduction of modernism was accomplished by governmental agencies who commissioned new buildings to house social and economic programs. The spread of modernism was also accomplished by increased attention to its accomplishments. One of the most important ways that such attention was given was an exhibit held by the then new Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932. Modern Architecture: International Exhibition was a show researched and organized by two architectural historians: Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Their fundamental position was that modernism had coalesced into an identifiable and international expression by 1922 and that it was clear by 1932 that this was the style of the new age.
Hitchcock and Johnson posited that there had been an early period of preparation for the advent of modernism. This early period was characterized by qualities still representative of the 19th century and earlier traditions of European architecture. It was evidenced in the work of such designers as Peter Behrens, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. This early formative period, they argued, was followed by the great modernists: Gropius, Breuer, LeCorbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, George Howe, William Lescaze, and others whose designs followed the general principles laid out by the Bauhaus and by LeCorbusier in his writings. Hitchcock and Johnson further argued that the new modern style was international and could not be mistaken for idiosyncratic personal expressions. It consisted of several identifiable qualities, including volumetricity, asymmetry, a sense of machine production, the absence of applied ornament, and a clear interest in functionalism.
The argument put forth by Hitchcock and Johnson gained many adherents in the United States where a debate had been waged for over ten years about the definition of modernism. There was no general agreement about what should be considered authentically modern; and for many people, the definition offered by the exhibit at the MOMA was a relief. It seemed plausible. Finally, modernism also spread during the 1930s because of the oppression suffered by modern artists and architects under National Socialism in Germany. The Bauhaus had suffered political criticism in the 1920s in Weimar. It continued to be the object of political assault after it moved to Dessau. In 1930, the Bauhaus moved to Berlin and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became the director. However, despite the efforts of the Bauhaus to be viewed as an art academy with no political ambitions, the Nazis finally closed it. Most of the faculty left Germany and settled elsewhere. Gropius became the head of the Graduate School of Design at Havard; and Mies founded IIT in Chicago.
In Italy, the “Gruppo 7” organized itself in 1926. Its members included Luigi Figini, Guido Frette, Sebastiano Larco, Gino p;ollini, Carlo Enrico Rava, Giuseppe Terragni, and Ubaldo Catagnoli (later replaced by Adalberto Libera). They intended to create an “architettura Razionale” (rational architecture) and their early work clearly reflected the influence of the Bauhaus, Russian constructivism, the modernism of other European countries along with memories of Futurism. Probably the most important of all the modernists working in Italy in the 1930s was Giuseppe Terragni. Admiring the new modernism of northern Europe, he worked to preserve a certain classical figuration within the matrix of new building techniques and abstract form. He admired LeCorbusier more than any of the other modernists and felt an affinity for Corbu’s ingrained love of the classical tradition. This made Terragni particularly well suited to create an architectural setting for Fascism’s program of propaganda and mythology.
Casa del Fascio (Headquarters of the Fascist Party), Como, Italy,1932-36
In his design for the local headquarters of the Fascist party, Terragni referred to Mussolin’s definition of the Fascism as “a glasshouse into which everyone can peer.” His metaphor for this is found in his redefinition of the grid on the façade as a clearly articulated between support, opening and enclosure. The Corbusian sources of this are abundant, but the building also recalls a classical palazzo in its clearly described proportions and its conversion of a central cortile into a public meeting space reflective of the adjacent outdoor piazza. The Casa del Fascio is full of contradictory and productive tensions. For example, the façade is both symmetrical and asymmetrical. It is both open frame and closed volume. The building is self-contained but projects a strong axial relationship between internal space and the surrounding urban space. It is both fragile and strong.
One of Terragni’s most interesting projects is his design for a monument to the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The building was to be called the “Danteum” and would have stood near the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine in the Forum, a monument to the continuity of classical culture and the renewed empire of the fascist dictator Mussolini. It was to contain a Dante study center as well as serve as a commemorative structure. The building was based on Dante’s great poem The Divine Comedy in which Dante visits the three realms of Paradise, Purgatory, and Inferno. Spaces representing these three stages of the Divine Comedy were arranged processionally and each had a different mood or character based on formal elements of walls and cylindrical columns on a complicated proportional system. The complexity was based on a relationship between the Golden Section, the dimensions of the Basilica of Maxentius, and a symbolic numerology devised by Terragni.
Danteum project, 1938, by Giuseppe Terragni with Pietro Lingeri
Terragni’s design was further involved with his ideas about the origins of architecture and what he perceived to be archetypal forms (cylinders, rectangles), archetypal relationships (rows, grids), basic types (free-standing columns, porticoes, hypostyles) and institutional typologies (temple, palace). The building thus amalgamates sources as remote as Egyptian temple design (hypostyle halls), the vocabulary of modern architecture, the abstract qualities of modern painting, and elements of the nearby Roman buildings. The Danteum and, for that matter, much of Terragni’s other work suggests that modernism--even European modernism with sympathies for Bauhaus and Corbusian ideas--was not always based on liberal viewpoints but could serve just as easily a conservative fascist regime handsomely. Is this due to Terragni’s talents as a designer or to an inherent flexibility within the modernist style?
Purgatory Paradise Inferno
If Terragni’s work represents the sublime end of the spectrum of conservative architecture in the early 20th century, the architecture commissioned by and produced for the Nazi regime in Germany represents the banal. When Hitler first came to power, he used Paul Ludwig Troost as his architect. Troost and Hitler both admired Karl Friedrich Schinkel and shared other views about the need for an updated classicism to express the values of the German Volk and the Nazi myth of Arianism. When Troost died in 1934, he was succeeded by Albert Speer who was more theatrical and interested in quick effect and rhetorical power. His designs for individual monuments were usually conceived in over-simplified and over-scaled classicism. His concepts for a new Berlin were as megalomaniacal as Hitler’s. His most successful design was probably his use of 1,000 airplane headlights to create a “cathedral of light” for a rally at the Zeppelin Field in Nuremburg in 1934.
German Pavilion, International Exposition, Paris, by Albert Speer, 1937
Great hall with Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, by Albert Speer, 1937-43
