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Building a New Europe: Portraits of Modern Architects, Essays by George Nelson, 1935-1936
Architect, designer, and architectural critic, George Nelson (1908–1986) was a young and impressionable architect when he wrote a series of articles in 1935 and 1936 that eloquently introduced astonishing buildings and fascinating personalities from across the Atlantic to wider American audiences. Building a New Europe presents this important collection of writings together for the first time. The subjects of Nelson’s essays include figures both major (Mies van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier) and minor (Helweg-Moeller and Ivar Tengbom). All of these architects would soon be affected by World War II—they would be put out of work or seek new careers abroad. Nelson’s essays spark fascinating questions about the canon of modernism: how would circumstances in the pre-war years cause some architects to rise and others to fall?
Accompanied by a comprehensive introduction and a wide selection of archival photographs, many never before published, this unique study is a significant contribution to the history of modern architecture.
Accompanied by a comprehensive introduction and a wide selection of archival photographs, many never before published, this unique study is a significant contribution to the history of modern architecture.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published August 28, 2007
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January 22, 2023
In 1935 the American magazine “Pencil Points” commissioned these essays from the 24-year old newly-graduated George Nelson, who had won a travelling scholarship to Rome. They investigate, from Nelson’s particular viewpoint, how twelve Europeans “creating a new architecture” had achieved their successes.
Having succeeded in getting a meeting with Le Corbusier, who was on an unexpected visit to Rome, Nelson found him a “plain-looking man with no facial expression and thin hair” who talked “for hours” about air conditioning (more as cultural theory than practical technology) and whose ideas were “absolutely incapable of compromise.”
Meanwhile, under the supervision of Italy’s most powerful and most hated architect “his Excellency Marcello Piacentini” Mussolini was “virtually rebuilding Italy”. Piacentini’s outward charm concealed “a cold detachment and an inflexibility” that Nelson found unpleasant. Dismissing the International Style, Piacentini said Italy needed its own ”distinctly national modern architecture”. This “wily and utterly unscrupulous person”, who was nevertheless “a firm believer in a modern architecture of a distinctly Italian cast”, promoted many important practitioners, such as Gio Ponti. Ponti, a multi-skilled artist who had founded “Domus” in 1928. Thanks to Piacentini, who masterplanned Rome’s new university, Ponti was in the process of building the School of Mathematics, a brilliantly ambivalent reinterpretation of classical forms with an ingeniously modern section: three floors of raked lecture theatres stacked on top of each other.
Nelson identified “the best characteristics of Piacentini’s contemporary Italian architecture” in the work of another Piacentini protégé, Giuseppe Vaccaro. Although Vaccaro’s Naples Post Office (1929-36) seemed to him ”more than slightly decadent” its strong pure form, dressed in absolutely smooth precious marbles, is today a valued masterpiece of monumental urban architecture.
Travelling to London he interviewed Raymond McGrath, a “mild, agreeable” 33-year-old Australian who had arrived in 1926 to study “entertainment architecture“ at Clare College, Cambridge, where his tutor Mansfield Forbes invited him to redesign his Victorian house “Fenella”. Thanks to that commission McGrath met Wells Coates, Serge Chermayeff, and Amyas Connell. The four won a commission to design all 22 studios in the new BBC Broadcasting House, where they used radio technology and acoustics alone to demonstrate that “new materials, conceived of as utilitarian, had decorative possibilities”. At the time, McGrath was also building his Hill House , which was “circular in form, with a pie-shaped wedge taken out”.
Another important London group of architects was Tecton, who had just completed their penguin pool, gorilla house, and elephant house at London Zoo and were experiencing a “great disturbance” caused by their new flats at Highpoint 1. In an excellent essay on Walter Gropius (who had escaped to London to get away from the Nazis) Nelson asked him to respond to accusations that his theory of a machine-made architecture was “soulless”; Gropius replied - incontrovertibly - that ”throughout history standardisation has been a hallmark of all advanced societies”.
Moving on to Scandinavia, Nelson’s account of Bent Helweg-Moeller’s work in Denmark seems hasty and superficial, but when he arrived in Stockholm to interview Ivar Tengbom, his writing improved; he found Ragner Östberg’s Town Hall “a curious dark pile whose heavy ornaments of bright gold gleam with barbaric effulgence, the final expression of an architecture changing beyond recognition.” Tengbom was ”a de luxe architect of the expensive sort” whose neoclassical 1915 Enskilda Bank and 1920 Stockholm Concert Hall showed a proto-modern sensibility. The increasingly modern influence on his architecture culminated in the bold horizontality of his Esselte headquarters, just completed.
Nelson then went to Paris, where he met the talented Eugène Beaudouin, who had spent four years in Rome, had been to Persia to study Isfahan, and had just recently completed his brilliant open-air school at Suresnes, a tour-de-force that integrated architecture and landscape on the large urban scale.
When Nelson visited Mies van der Rohe in Berlin, Mies had just completed the Tugendhat House. Nelson reported that its design “reflects the personality and idiosyncrasies of the architect, his fondness for space and rich materials. The space flows, interrupted by an occasional partition, but is never enclosed. The feeling of movement this arrangement gives, and its ample vistas, are enormously stimulating.” In Berlin he also interviewed the young architect Wassily Luckhardt. At the time, the brothers Wassily and Hans Luckhardt were among Germany’s most promising architects; former colleagues of Bruno Taut and Gropius, they had completed a number of houses and were now working on larger projects: a multi-storey garage in Charlottenburg and an urban scheme for Alexanderplatz. But these projects had been blocked by the Nazis, ostensibly because of their “un-German” modernism - even as down in the street, Nelson observed (not knowing what was to come) throngs of brownshirts “dripping swastikas". He naïvely wondered "just what manner of reasoning led to the conclusion that what these architects were doing was un-German?”.
The situation of Germany under the Nazis was all the more confusing for Nelson since although Hitler had “repeatedly condemned modern architecture” Mies had just been appointed head of the architecture section of the German Academy. Thus the disgusted young graduate (who went on to become a world-famous industrial designer) had begun to discover how low even the best architects are sometimes prepared to go in order to further their careers. His essays, now republished with an informative introduction by Kurt W. Foster, are an intriguing and illuminating addition to what we know about those difficult years.
Having succeeded in getting a meeting with Le Corbusier, who was on an unexpected visit to Rome, Nelson found him a “plain-looking man with no facial expression and thin hair” who talked “for hours” about air conditioning (more as cultural theory than practical technology) and whose ideas were “absolutely incapable of compromise.”
Meanwhile, under the supervision of Italy’s most powerful and most hated architect “his Excellency Marcello Piacentini” Mussolini was “virtually rebuilding Italy”. Piacentini’s outward charm concealed “a cold detachment and an inflexibility” that Nelson found unpleasant. Dismissing the International Style, Piacentini said Italy needed its own ”distinctly national modern architecture”. This “wily and utterly unscrupulous person”, who was nevertheless “a firm believer in a modern architecture of a distinctly Italian cast”, promoted many important practitioners, such as Gio Ponti. Ponti, a multi-skilled artist who had founded “Domus” in 1928. Thanks to Piacentini, who masterplanned Rome’s new university, Ponti was in the process of building the School of Mathematics, a brilliantly ambivalent reinterpretation of classical forms with an ingeniously modern section: three floors of raked lecture theatres stacked on top of each other.
Nelson identified “the best characteristics of Piacentini’s contemporary Italian architecture” in the work of another Piacentini protégé, Giuseppe Vaccaro. Although Vaccaro’s Naples Post Office (1929-36) seemed to him ”more than slightly decadent” its strong pure form, dressed in absolutely smooth precious marbles, is today a valued masterpiece of monumental urban architecture.
Travelling to London he interviewed Raymond McGrath, a “mild, agreeable” 33-year-old Australian who had arrived in 1926 to study “entertainment architecture“ at Clare College, Cambridge, where his tutor Mansfield Forbes invited him to redesign his Victorian house “Fenella”. Thanks to that commission McGrath met Wells Coates, Serge Chermayeff, and Amyas Connell. The four won a commission to design all 22 studios in the new BBC Broadcasting House, where they used radio technology and acoustics alone to demonstrate that “new materials, conceived of as utilitarian, had decorative possibilities”. At the time, McGrath was also building his Hill House , which was “circular in form, with a pie-shaped wedge taken out”.
Another important London group of architects was Tecton, who had just completed their penguin pool, gorilla house, and elephant house at London Zoo and were experiencing a “great disturbance” caused by their new flats at Highpoint 1. In an excellent essay on Walter Gropius (who had escaped to London to get away from the Nazis) Nelson asked him to respond to accusations that his theory of a machine-made architecture was “soulless”; Gropius replied - incontrovertibly - that ”throughout history standardisation has been a hallmark of all advanced societies”.
Moving on to Scandinavia, Nelson’s account of Bent Helweg-Moeller’s work in Denmark seems hasty and superficial, but when he arrived in Stockholm to interview Ivar Tengbom, his writing improved; he found Ragner Östberg’s Town Hall “a curious dark pile whose heavy ornaments of bright gold gleam with barbaric effulgence, the final expression of an architecture changing beyond recognition.” Tengbom was ”a de luxe architect of the expensive sort” whose neoclassical 1915 Enskilda Bank and 1920 Stockholm Concert Hall showed a proto-modern sensibility. The increasingly modern influence on his architecture culminated in the bold horizontality of his Esselte headquarters, just completed.
Nelson then went to Paris, where he met the talented Eugène Beaudouin, who had spent four years in Rome, had been to Persia to study Isfahan, and had just recently completed his brilliant open-air school at Suresnes, a tour-de-force that integrated architecture and landscape on the large urban scale.
When Nelson visited Mies van der Rohe in Berlin, Mies had just completed the Tugendhat House. Nelson reported that its design “reflects the personality and idiosyncrasies of the architect, his fondness for space and rich materials. The space flows, interrupted by an occasional partition, but is never enclosed. The feeling of movement this arrangement gives, and its ample vistas, are enormously stimulating.” In Berlin he also interviewed the young architect Wassily Luckhardt. At the time, the brothers Wassily and Hans Luckhardt were among Germany’s most promising architects; former colleagues of Bruno Taut and Gropius, they had completed a number of houses and were now working on larger projects: a multi-storey garage in Charlottenburg and an urban scheme for Alexanderplatz. But these projects had been blocked by the Nazis, ostensibly because of their “un-German” modernism - even as down in the street, Nelson observed (not knowing what was to come) throngs of brownshirts “dripping swastikas". He naïvely wondered "just what manner of reasoning led to the conclusion that what these architects were doing was un-German?”.
The situation of Germany under the Nazis was all the more confusing for Nelson since although Hitler had “repeatedly condemned modern architecture” Mies had just been appointed head of the architecture section of the German Academy. Thus the disgusted young graduate (who went on to become a world-famous industrial designer) had begun to discover how low even the best architects are sometimes prepared to go in order to further their careers. His essays, now republished with an informative introduction by Kurt W. Foster, are an intriguing and illuminating addition to what we know about those difficult years.
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