Page 27 - Studio International - March 1968

By 1932 Henry Russel Hitchcock was able to refer to 'the colours' (Oud's phrase) on details of the Hook of Holland
International Style' in modern architecture. The contri- housing. Both Oud and Le Corbusier employ sculptural
bution of De Stijl to this new style is the second way in concepts of volume, whilst Gropius and Mies are closer
which ideas germinated in De Stijl enter the main- to Rietveld's use of space divided by planes.
stream of European thinking. Hitchcock singled out Oud, Both Oud and Rietveld became less dogmatic during
Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe as the the 1920s. In 1927 Rietveld produced a tubular chair
International Style's earliest exponents. (Breuer's first of 1925 had been followed by a cantilever
Mention has been made of the impact of De Stijl on version by Mies van der Rohe in 1926). Rietveld also
Gropius and Mies as it was Van Doesburg who carried produced a one-piece moulded chair. He had become
its theories abroad to them. The work of Le Corbusier at more concerned with the function of the chair and the
the Stuttgart exhibition of 1927 with its coloured walls of properties of different materials than the expression in
blue, brown, pink and white, envisages a unity of paint- three dimensions of neo-plasticism. In 1928 he became
ing and architecture not totally dissimilar from that a founder-member of the Congres Internationaux
achieved by Rietveld at the Schroder House or Oud in d'Architecture Moderne (C.I.A.M.) and part and par-
his Unie Café facade. Oud left De Stijl in 1921 having cel of the striving for an international style.
become housing architect to the city of Rotterdam in In 1931 in England a group called MARS (Modern
1918. Consequently it is largely Oud's post-De Stijl work Architectural Research Group) was founded. It had con-
Below that is of importance to the International Style: 'I have nexions with C.I.A.M. and included Gropius, Cher-
Rietveld become convinced that I had to be after "something mayeff, Lubetkin, Moholy-Nagy and Breuer, as well as
Black chair 1924 else". That I was working on a more or less limited form- Leslie Martin, Maxwell Fry and Wells Coates. Of the
wood problem whilst in truth I was seeking for a problem of De Stijl architects Oud was particularly respected in
Centraal Museum, Utrecht
universal life. At that moment my work turned on corre- England. His views on 'Architecture and the Future'
sponding lines to another direction and I left De Stijl.' appeared in The Studio in 1928, followed in 1931 by an
Top right
Walter Gropius What Oud turned to was low-cost housing. He proved article on 'The £213 House' (also in The Studio). It was
Hanging lamp, designed in in his Hook of Holland Estate of 1924-7 and his Kief- Oud's handling of low-cost housing which the English
the Bauhaus 1923 hoeck Estate of 1925-30 that low-cost housing could be found of particular interest, and although for Oud its
adventurous and uncompromisingly modern, embody his roots lay within the social applications of De Stijl, it was
Bottom right social principles, and remain cheap. His row houses at not a point of view specifically adopted from De Stijl
M. Breuer
chair, designed in the the 1927 Stuttgart exhibition retain the block-like simpli- which reached England. Gropius and Le Corbusier after
Bauhaus 1922 city of his De Stijl work, and he employed 'Mondrian all had both been concerned with low-cost housing; city
planning had been a concern of Le Corbusier's since his
plan for a city of three million inhabitants in 1922.
However, the architectural writings that appear in
Circle, 1937, a book edited by Leslie Martin, Ben Nichol-
son and Naum Gabo, when English art and architecture
was at its closest to contemporary continental ideas, show
a certain debt to neo-plasticism, underlined by the
presence of Mondrian. Sartoris speaks of the choice
between using 'the neo-plastic method' of applying colour
to architecture and 'the dynamic method'. From the
start of De Stijl, anonymity had been of prime importance
and remained an important element of the International
Style in England in the late thirties. J. M. Richards
speaks in Circle of anonymity as a release:
`One of the things that the potential new tradition of
natural anonymity that we see again on the horizon can
do is to release us at last from the irrelevances of archi-
tectural "self-expression" and the confusion of idea that
accompanies it.'
Maxwell Fry, speaking of 'balanced tension', equally
owes a debt to neo-plasticism and De Stijl:
`Somewhere between gross waste and perilous dexterity
there is a state of balanced tension arrived at in the archi-
tect by intuition, the result of a mysterious juncture of
mind and body. This selection finally involves the
architect in the whole fabric of society and binds him
with life, for it cannot be made unless he understands the
whole with the part, or at least the implications of the
whole with the part, which is the immediate concern of
his selection.' q