Note 454 — CHAPTER 22 THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH

To those historians of modern architecture who find its relevant prehistory largely in the technical developments of the previous century and a half, the Fagus Factory is the more important; to those who accept that the architecture of the mid twentieth century had aesthetic as well as technical roots, the special ‘classicism’ of Mies’s project, like Wright’s contact with the American ‘Academic Tradition’ of the nineties, seems perhaps at least as important. The thesis of the late Emil Kaufmann, adumbrated in a series of books from his Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier of 1931 to his posthumous Architecture in the Age of Reason of 1955, stresses—indeed overstresses—the relevance of the theories and projects of the revolutionary architects of the late eighteenth century to the new architecture of the twentieth century. If it ever becomes possible to subsume historically under a single rubric the ‘traditional’ and the ‘advanced’ architecture of the first quarter of the twentieth century, the ‘classicism’ and ‘academicism’ of Wright, Wagner, Mies, and Le Corbusier as well as of Perret and Behrens will prove as significant as the technical feats of those architects who erected the last great railway stations in these years and the tallest skyscrapers. Lest the issue seem a simple dichotomy, Mies’s respect for Berlage’s structuralism should also be remembered at this point; as also the Expressionism which influenced both Gropius and Mies after the First World War, not to speak of Wright’s ‘Baroque’ phase of 1914-24.