Modernist Architecture — Positive Bases

The spatiotemporal properties of architecture that were developed by experiments in abstract art reached their highest expression in the work of Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy.  Stepping back from our analysis of this development, however, we may witness a crucial conjuncture between the realm of abstract art and the other major positive basis for the existence of modernist architecture — industrialism (and more specifically, the machine). This conjuncture occurred on two levels. At one level, leading avant-garde artists and architects began to draw inspiration from the monumental improvements in both factory production and machine technologies, seeing in these an ideal of economy and efficiency.  On another level, however, the research into the abstract time of capitalism undertaken by the Futurists through their representation of kinetic dynamism and motion was advanced in a more systematic and precise form by the advocates of Taylorism, whose time-and-motion studies of labor established the foundation for scientific management in industry. Taylorism, as a science of the mechanics of movement and a means for the optimization of productivity, exerted huge influence over the modernists in architecture.  Moreover, the broader cult of the machine and of the engineer in particular provided the avant-garde with a positive image for the spirit of their age. The traditionalists, who remained lost studying the annals of architectural history and reproducing its forms, were thus blind to the most obvious feature of the modern epoch — industrialization.

Frank Baldwin’s Pin-Wheel Machine (1905)

Fernand Léger’s Mechanical Elements (1926)

Several of the artists affiliated with the movements of abstract painting we already discussed began, during the early 1920s, to grant aesthetic legitimacy to the machine. The Futurist Severini, for example, wrote in 1922 that “[t]he precision of machines, their rhythm and their brutality, have no doubt led us to adopt a new form of realism.”[1] Even more emphatically, the former Cubist and Purist painter Fernand Léger authored an essay on “The Machine Aesthetic” in 1924. In this piece, he discovered the implicit connection between the abstract, geometric spatiality of capitalism and the form of the machine: “Modern man lives more and more in a preponderantly geometric order,” he explained.  “All man-made mechanical and industrial creation is dependent on geometric forces.”[2] Léger further asserted that the new form of “mechanical beauty” called into question the representational values of traditionalist aesthetics.[3] The inherent link the machine held with the medium of architecture was not lost on him, either: “What I have to discuss…is a new architectural order: the architecture of mechanization.”[4] Even those abstract painters who denied the aesthetic quality of the machine or works of engineering, like Malevich[5] or Ozenfant,[6] often admitted that the formal and geometric simplicity of mechanical objects was pleasing. “A mechanical object can in certain cases affect us, because manufactured forms are geometric, and we respond to geometry,” asserted Ozenfant. “[I]ntuitively geometry communicates to us a feeling that some higher dispensation is being subserved, which thus becomes a pleasure of the mind, and a feeling that we are satisfying the laws that govern our being.”[7] In nearly every quarter of avant-garde art, the subject of “mechanization” was discussed.[8] Perhaps the most philosophically refined affirmation of the aesthetic value of the modern machine came from Kurt Ewald, in his 1926 article on “The Beauty of Machines.” Ewald was confident enough in his claims to invoke that quintessential aesthetician, Immanuel Kant, writing that “most modern machines arouse in us that feeling that Kant regards as the criterion of ‘beauty.’ A good modern machine is thus an object of the highest aesthetic value.”[9]

Gio Colucci’s “Bonheur du monde III Etching” (1929)

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936)

The architects, who had lagged behind the artists when it came to understanding the new spatiotemporal dimension of modernity, were by contrast much quicker to realize the import of modern machine technologies. Indeed, beginning with Wright’s essay on “The Art and Craft of the Machine” in 1901, architects recognized the time in which they were living as “the machine age.”[10] This moniker, taken up with great gusto by men like Le Corbusier,[11] became so pervasive that Reyner Banham would title his groundbreaking study of this classical phase of avant-garde architecture Theory and Design in the First Machine Age.[12] In Le Corbusier’s estimation, the machine had fundamentally reshaped the very Weltgeist of modernity: “The machine, a modern phenomenon, is bringing about a reformation of the spirit across the world.”[13]

Mechanized 19th-Century Factory

Man and the Machine

But on what grounds could Le Corbusier seriously maintain that this was the case? Machinery had arguably existed for millennia prior to the twentieth century, in more or less rudimentary forms.  The extent to which a machine is distinguished from any normal, manual tool seems to reside only in the degree of its complexity or automatism.  Of course, this would tend into increase cumulatively in proportion with the rate at which the knowledge of engineering was improved.  But at what point could this purely quantitative increase shift over to engender a qualitative change? It was Marx who perhaps located this distinction with the most precision.  “A system of machinery,” wrote Marx, “whether it is based simply on the cooperation of similar machines…or on a combination of different machines,…constitutes in itself a vast automaton as soon as it is driven by a self-acting prime mover.”[14]  This is accomplished as soon as there is constituted “[a]n organized system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic center.”[15]  It is at this point that the machinery of the era of the nineteenth century, the period of heavy industry, came to embody a qualitatively different kind of object than the more primitive machinery that preceded it.

Farman Goliath (1920) — Biplane featured in Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture

RMS Aquitania — Featured in Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture

Voisin C5 Torpedo-Sport — Featured in Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture (1923)

“A house is a machine for living in,” Le Corbusier famously declared in his Toward an Architecture.[16]  Rejecting the “suffocating routine” of architectural eclecticism, he contrasted the remarkable innovations that had taken place in the field of mechanical technologies, measuring architecture against the trailblazing examples of modern ocean liners, aircraft, and automobiles.[17]  A similar method of argumentation was adopted by Ginzburg in his contemporaneous Style and Epoch,[18] and was later ratified in succinct form by Behrendt: “An architecture that is to be a living component of our time and a true expression of our new sense of life…cannot be essentially different than our machines, our mechanical devices, our airplanes, and our automobiles.”[19]  Adolf Behne outlined the various ways in which the modernists understood the machine as a technical ideal for their own building projects.[20]  He also noted avant-garde architecture’s unique connection with “machine aesthetics,” unknown in earlier ages.[21]  But it was perhaps Ginzburg who spelled out the relationship between the modernist ideal of the machine and its implications for the new architecture most eloquently, collapsing the traditional distinction between the mechanic and the organic:

One of the fundamental characteristics of the machine as an independent organism is its extraordinarily well-defined and precise organization. Indeed, a more distinctly organized phenomenon can hardly be found in nature or in the products of human effort.  There is no part or element of the machine that does not occupy a particular place, position, or role in the overall scheme and that is not the product of absolute necessity.  There is not and cannot be anything in the machine that is superfluous, accidental, or “decorative” in the sense conventionally applied to habitation.  Nothing can be either added to or taken from it without disrupting the whole.

[…]

The machine demands of the constructor an extraordinarily precise expression of concept, a clearly realizable goal, and an ability to articulate a scheme into separate elements related to one another by an indestructible chain of interdependence, with each element constituting an independent organism that clearly manifests the function for which it was made and to which all its aspects are subordinated.[22]

Caproni Triplane — Featured in Moisei Ginzburg’s Style and Epoch (1923)

HMS Dreadnought — Featured in Moisei Ginzburg’s Style and Epoch

As with Léger and Ozenfant, Ginzburg claimed that the machine achieves a new sort of beauty peculiar to the modern age, although he asserted that this owed to its utilitarian rather than its geometric character.[23]  Taking up the same line of reasoning as Severini had in his article on “Machinery,” Ginzburg also stressed the importance of the dynamic qualities of the machine.  “The motion of the machine is characterized by what for us is an extremely important feature, which stems from its basic properties,” wrote Ginzburg.  “A given machine is the consequence of movement in a particular direction and of a particular character and purpose…[T]he distinguishing feature of the machine’s dynamic properties is [thus] an actively manifested, characteristic direction of movement.”[24]  The abstract temporal elements of capitalism were thus addressed in the streamlining of architectural spaces for optimum functionality, maximizing output while minimizing input.[25]  Gerrit Rietveld, the great Dutch architect, recalled in 1932 the way that the machine’s influence on the formal quality of architecture also became relevant to the question of living in these spaces: “The appearance of machines…contributed a great deal towards turning the form-question into a life-question.  Machines, which had already had an opportunity in the quest for honesty, found in the new style the straight-lined and simple forms that were appropriate for mass-production.”[26]

J.J.P. Oud’s Mathenesse Housing Estate, Rotterdam (1920)

Mart Stam’s Serial Housing at the Stuttgart Weissenhof Exhibition (1927)

Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret’s Serial Duplexes for the Loucher Laws (1929)

The standardization, mass-production, and overall industrialization of architectural construction was thus one of the avant-garde’s foremost preoccupations.  While the rest of Europe was embroiled in World War I, J.J.P. Oud, appointed city builder of Rotterdam in Holland, had 3,000 standardized dwellings constructed in order to combat the town’s housing crisis.[27]  Oud, who had already strongly endorsed the implementation of the machine in modern art,[28] became one of the earliest spokesmen for the standardization of architecture in his 1918 article, “Architecture and Standardization in Mass Construction.”  Emphasizing the strongly social aspect of housing construction,[29] Oud advocated the creation of standard types of buildings: “The design of standard types of buildings will bring back the proportions and rhythms of a town which are so lacking in the present-day townscape.”[30]  Gropius took Oud’s suggestion one step further, adding that beyond more general standard housing units, even the individual parts of different structures could be standardized and thereafter used interchangeably.  In this respect, the house would begin to approximate the modern machine even more closely.  “Dwellings must be designed in such a way that justified individual requirements derived from the family size or the type of profession of the family head can be suitably and flexibly fulfilled,” wrote Gropius in his 1924 work, “The Housing Industry.”  “The organization must therefore aim first of all at standardizing and mass-producing not entire houses, but only their component parts which can then be assembled into various types of houses, in the same way as in modern machine design certain internationally standardized parts are interchangeably used for different machines.”[31]  In this way, houses could still be somewhat individualized for their residents.  Gropius further insisted that standardization would in no way diminish the aesthetic quality of residential housing.[32]  Although he would a year later warn that “standardization cannot resolve an architectural difficulty,”[33] Le Corbusier stated his substantial agreement with Gropius in his own 1924 piece on “Mass-Produced Housing”: “Mass production demands a search for standards.  Standards lead to perfection.”[34]  Like Oud and Gropius, Le Corbusier felt that the overall stylistic unity brought about by standardized building elements would not only be more economically viable, but would also lead to a more harmonious overall urban aesthetic.[35]  This would be achieved by the broader industrialization of architecture as a whole:

[S]lowly, construction sites will adapt to industrialization; the introduction of mechanization in construction work will lead to the general acceptance of standard elements; even the design of houses will alter, under the sway of the new economics; the standard elements will provide unity of detail, and unity of detail is an indispensable requirement of architectural beauty.  Then our towns will lose that appearance of chaos which blights them at the moment.  Order will reign and new networks of streets, more immense and with a wealth of architectural solutions will present us with magnificent sights.[36]

Henry Ford’s Automobile Assembly Line (1913)

Images from Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Grossstadtarchitektur (1928)

The push for standardized building did not take place exclusively in Western Europe, of course.  Wright, the original proponent of the mechanization of architecture, authored an essay in 1927 entitled “Standardization, the Soul of the Machine.”  It was the second part of his series “In the Cause of Architecture.”  In it, Wright asserted: “Standardization should have the same place [as the poetic feeling of the artist-weaver] in the fabric we are weaving which we call civilization…This principle of standardization has now as its tool or body — the Machine.  An ideal tool compared to which all that has gone before is as nothing.”[37]  The Soviet avant-garde, for its part, fiercely promoted the standardization of building.  It would go so far as to create a “commission for the standardization of housing construction” in 1929.[38]  But already in Modern Architecture’s inaugural issue, the Constructivist builder Arkadii Mordvinov argued for the necessity of “new materials, the latest constructions, the standardization of types of housing and individual elements, the mechanization of building-production [stroiproizvodstva], etc.”[39]  This was elevated into the journal’s official doctrine two years later in the “Resolutions in the Proceedings of the Ideological Section of OSA,” the outcome of the group’s first international conference.[40]

Machinery Section at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Galerie des Machines, Paris 1889

For the international modernists, such measures of industrialization in architecture would only bring building practices up to speed with the rest of society.  All of Western society had undergone the massive (sometimes even apocalyptic) transition from simple manufacturing to large-scale industry over the course of the nineteenth century, and most now stood on the brink of developing finance capital.[41]  Marx’s argument, regarding the advent of complex machine operations and the factory system sparking the revolution in industry[42] was recognized by Giedion as a “fundamental event” in the history of modern architecture: “The Industrial Revolution, the abrupt increase in production brought about during the eighteenth century by the introduction of the factory system and the machine, changed the whole appearance of the world…Its effect upon thought and feeling was so profound that even today we cannot estimate how deeply it has penetrated into man’s very nature.”[43]  The fundamental changes that industrialism wrought in the sphere of commodity production reshaped the very world man lived in, replacing handicraft objects with serially-produced and standardized goods.  Even the clothes men wore were made according to predetermined sizes and norms.

Time and Motion Study by Taylorist Frank Gilbreth (1913)

Time and Motion Study by Taylorist Frank Gilbreth (1913)

One facet of modern industrialism that caught the imagination of the modernists was a fairly recent development.  The industrial practice of Taylorism, first theorized in the progenitor’s 1903 book Shop Management and given more systematic form a decade later in his Principles of Scientific Management, was a major source of inspiration for the architectural avant-garde.  Stated broadly, the premise of scientific management was “the development of each [worker] to his state of maximum efficiency.”[44]  As was alluded to earlier in passing, part of Taylor’s approach to optimizing worker efficiency involved the conducting of scientific “time and motion” studies.[45]  This form of analysis can be seen as mirroring, in a more rigorous manner, the artistic attempts of the Futurists to capture the dynamics of movement and kinetics.  On an even deeper level, it can be understood as a further extension and refinement of the regime of abstract time that already held sway under capitalism.[46]  The Gilbreths’ invention of chronocyclegraph techniques[47] in order to meet “the necessity of recording unit times,…the need for including time study with motion study” so as to “record the [labor] motions used”[48] — this advanced the mode of abstract time calculation to almost an exact science.  This had obvious implications for the increased efficiency and productivity of labor.

Time and Motion Study by Taylorist Frank Gilbreth (1913)

Time-Saving Frankfurt Kitchen (1929)

Undertones of mechanization[49] and standardization[50]could be found throughout Taylor’s prescribed system.[51]  This held an obvious appeal for the modernist architects.  Moreover, their respect for Taylor may have also been enhanced by his 1905 Treatise on Concrete: Plain and Reinforced, co-written with Sanford Thompson (although they only recommended the use of concrete in limited contexts).[52]  Translated into architectural terms, Taylorism meant a more efficient process for the production of housing and the standardization of component parts for buildings.  With respect to its research into the economy of motion, it further meant designing spaces that would facilitate movement and the execution of domestic responsibilities in the timeliest possible manner.  Staircases, floor layouts, better arrangement of kitchen space and appliances (Schütte-Lihotsky’s so-called “rationalized kitchens” in Frankfurt) — all of these central concerns of avant-garde architecture could in some sense be traced to the influence of Taylorism.  Le Corbusier, to take just one example, was explicit in his appreciation of the scientific management of industry.  “I found myself in industry,” he wrote.  “A factory.  Machines.  Taylorism, cost prices, maturities, balance-sheets.”[53]  Karel Teige, while he deplored Taylorist methods as they were practiced under capitalism,[54] echoing Lenin,[55] he nevertheless credited Taylor’s rationalization of labor with the later industrialization of architecture.[56]