Page 19 - Studio International - September October 1975

is the whole mass of the building which
does so, not any of its details.
Loos was not entirely consistent, but
his attack was symptomatic, and was
echoed by other writers. The
sociologist Georg Simmel, for instance,
writing in the same year as Loos, in 1908,
▪ suggested that ornament, being related to
the individuation of objects, may subsist
in craft, but is out of place in industrial
production, and must in any case be
identified with the greatest possible
`generalization' since style and elegance
depend on the lack of individuality.
Within a matter of months of the
▪ publication of that fateful essay on
Ornament and Crime, Loos's arch-
enemy was commissioned to design a
theatre in Paris. This theatre was to be
an epic building. Van de Velde recounts
the story in circumstantial detail. But,
of course, he did not finish it : the
' original project was modified by
Auguste Perret, who had been invited as
a concrete expert, and ended by ousting
Van de Velde as Van de Velde had
ousted the previous architect, Roger
Bouvard. The men who had maintained
their part in the building, however,
through the three architects' regimes
were the painter Maurice Denis,
Cézanne's pupil, who had been
commissioned from the outset of the
whole enterprise to paint the
auditorium ceiling (and acted as its
impresario), and the sculptor, Antoine A & G Perret
Theatre des Champs-Elysées 1911-13
Bourdelle, who was to do the panels on The façade
the façade and the decorations of the
foyer. The decorative continuity, which
had been Van de Velde's main
preoccupation, was broken by Perret.
For the flowing art nouveau lines,
for the broken and coruscating surfaces,
he substituted a smooth, severe, clipped,
'French-classical' manner, much more to
the taste of the committee which had
originally commissioned the theatre
than Van de Velde's decorations; it was
also more to the taste of Bourdelle and
Denis. And it marks a break in
European taste from which there was no
going back.
Perret, of course, had used ornament
before, in the elaborate flower-design
ceramic facing of his own flats in the
Avenue Franklin, which was done in
1902/3; there, he already declared his
independence of the current Art
Nouveau linearities, his faith in a new
material, reinforced concrete. He used it
as a skeleton, inducing a modular
severity which he chose to interpret in a
`classical' fashion. But the abundant use
of sculpture and painting in the
Théâtre des Champs Elysées was not
something he normally favoured; here it
was part of the commission, and
Bourdelle and Denis were there before
him. He was to work with Denis again
on the church of Our Lady at Raincy,
done in 1922/3, where Denis was
responsible for the coloured windows
which fill the panels between the shorn
and elongated classical colonettes. A & G Perret
Although he went on designing churches Theatre des Champs-Elysées 1911-13
based on the Raincy idea, this was the Auditorium and stage
only other time he willingly
collaborated with an artist of importance.
`That which is beautiful does not need
decoration, since it decorates,' he used to