Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [46]
became mainstream among architects during the middle part of the 20th century. The architecture of the generation before them is particularly interesting, because people then were trying to reinvent architecture without it having settled into the path that became orthodox modernism, from which point everyone seemed to reach a consensus about how things should be done. Le Corbusier’s masterstroke was to claim that the machine had taken over from the traditional craftsman, and that therefore mass-produced objects were legitimate style-icons. At the Paris Exposition of 1925, he designed a little pavilion, ‘le pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau’ (the New Spirit) – named after the journal l’Esprit Nouveau in which Le Corbusier published his manifesto-like writings. The pavilion was supposed to be a prototype apartment for a vast city composed of many such units, stacked up into towers. He furnished it with mass produced furniture, along with Cubist-influenced paintings that he had painted himself. If it looks rather plain and routine now, then that is a measure of the influence it has had. It stood in marked contrast with the most sustained efforts of the previous generation, such as Victor Horta and Hector Guimard, who developed the Art Nouveau style, based on plant forms. Horta’s work in particular involved painstaking craftsmanship – the elaborate swirling shapes sometimes looked as if a building and its furniture had softened and slumped, and sometimes seemed to be sending out tendrils of fresh growth. Timber and stone did not naturally come in the right shapes, which had to be carved, so Horta and the people who worked in his studio made plaster models of the novel forms, and then they were copied by the joiners and masons working on the building. This was an expensive process, so Horta’s version of the Art Nouveau was initially only for the super-rich who could afford it – the aristocracy in the then-new Belgian state, who wanted to patronize a new architecture as a Belgian national style. Hector Guimard is best known for the entrances that he designed for the Paris Métro, which have droopily heavy-looking flower heads, with dull red lights that glow mysteriously. They seem to beckon the traveller into a dreamworld, rather than into an efficient transport system, but in their fabrication they were highly rational and depended not on individual craftsmanship but on repeated castings in iron from moulds. The imagery may look soporific, but the means of production was efficient.
This use of mass-production methods in architecture will have helped to prepare the way for Le Corbusier’s exhibition of mass-produced furniture, but in the avant-garde circles in which Le Corbusier moved another crucial influence would have been the provocateur Marcel Duchamp’s practice of exhibiting ready-made objects of mass manufacture in an art-gallery setting. He started doing it in 1914, with a rather striking bottle-drying rack, but the most famous of his ‘readymades’ was the white ceramic urinal that he exhibited with the title Fountain in 1917. Today the most startling thing about the sculpture is the date, 1917, and the tabloid press is still shocked when contemporary artists do rather similar things, now securely within the fold of the art establishment. Duchamp’s urinal, or ‘fountain’, has an architectural counterpart in a prominently placed white ceramic wash-basin, in the hallway of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye of 1928, where it seems to have some ritual significance, as if it is a holy water stoup. The mass-produced object is in each case used for its sculptural effect, and its unconventional positioning makes it gestural. It is clearly no accident that it has appeared there, but it makes no common sense. One is invited to see it as a gesture belonging to the realm of art and high culture, rather than to the lowly realm of practical utility, in which each object originated. It was part of the point of these objects that they were mass-produced and impersonal, cultivating a machine aesthetic, whereas with Guimard’s decorative panels the