THE FAILURE OP VICTORIAN ARCHITECTS
them (Hoiabird and Roche: Marquette Building, 1894). If a period
style was still used for external detail it usually was Richardson's
severely plain American Romanesque. As against this American
priority in the appreciative use of steel, France was the first country
to design in a genuine concrete character. (A. de Baudot: St. Jean
de Montmartre, begun 1894, and buildings of c. 1900-5 by Tony
Gamier, born 1869, and Auguste Ferret, born 1873).
Then, between 1905 and 1914, Germany became the most im-
portant country. Here the liaison of design and architecture was
most successful. Peter Behrens (1868-1938) designed factories and
their products. The Werkbund was founded to be a meeting-place
of progressive manufacturers, architects and designers. And while
in the United States and France the pioneers remained solitary, in
Germany, twenty years ago, .a style independent of the past had
been accepted by quite a large public. In 1914, Walter Gropius (born
1883) showed the world, at an exhibition in Cologne, a factory so
completely of to-day in every detail that it might be mis-dated by
anybody (pi. ov). It had a flat roof, again the general stress on
horizontals, and two staircases entirely encased in curved glass so
that the skeleton and the interior workings were proudly exposed.
It will at once be recognised that in this motif as in the floating
ground plan of Wright (and later on of Le Corbusier), and as
incidentally also in the fantastic American highways intersections
with wide areas given up to nothing but traffic bands on different
levels, the eternal passion of the West for spatial movement once
more expresses itself.
So by 1914 the leading architects of the younger generation had
courageously broken with the past and accepted the machine-age in
all its implications: new materials, new processes, new forms, new
problems. Of these the most important is symbolised to an extent
that probably future civilisations will find as obscure as we find
Avebury Circle and the Kennet Avenue, by the American traffic
crossings just mentioned: namely the problem of modern town-
planning. It has been said before that one of the greatest changes
brought about by the Industrial Revolution was the sudden growth
of cities. To cope with this, architects should have concentrated on
the adequate housing of the vast new working-class populations
of these cities and on the planning of adequate routes of traffic for
the worker to get to his job and back every day. But they were
interested in facades and nothing else; and so in a way were muni-
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