In my previous post (Building #24) I described the early 20th-century architectural typology of ‘daylight factories’, connected as they were to Henry Ford’s vast automobile factory started in 1912 just outside Detroit.
This post will expand on the connection between these types of industrial building and the International Modernist movement that dominated architectural thinking after the First World War, and arguably still has a strong influence on buildings to this day. The main protagonists as I see them were the Swiss-born, adopted Frenchman Le Corbusier and the German-born, adopted American Walter Gropius (of Bauhaus fame).
Out of these two iconic architects I have a personal preference for Gropius. Perhaps this is because of my own germanic origins (see Building #1); more likely because I have more of an affinity with his design approach to buildings. His mentor was the less famous, but equally talented German architect Peter Behrens, initially associated with late 19th-century Jugendstil, Successionist and/or Art Nouveau architecture (for an example of this genre see Building #8). Behrens went on to design a highly interesting industrial building in Berlin in 1909 shown in the below picture (the AEG Turbine Factory, taken from an article about Behrens by Dr Elizabeth M. Merrill).
The hall had elements of a ‘daylight factory’ about it, but was in fact made of steel with concrete cladding on the outside to produce a monumental, monolithic effect. It was in fact another German pre-First World War industrial-type building, this time by Gropius, that played an arguably more significant part in the story of International Modernism. This was the Fagus factory’s office complex in Alfeld, seen in the below image (Deed - Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International - Creative Commons).
Again, this might well have matched the ‘daylight factory’ typology, but like Behren’s Turbine Factory it wasn’t constructed using reinforced concrete. The main architectural interest at the time (and still today) was the ‘hanging’ corner staircase on the right of the entrance, with its three storeys of continuous glazing on two sides.
But how does Le Corbusier fit into this particular story? It appears that he saw photographs of American industrial buildings, including ‘daylight factories’, that Gropius had published in a 1913 article. After the First World War, Le Corbusier borrowed and edited the same photographs to create images of Americana that suited his wider case for a new approach to a plainer, more geometric and industrial ‘modern’ architecture. He also referenced Gropius’s Fagus factory. International Modernism eventually became a dominant movement in global architecture. My post on Building #4 illustrated the contrast between plain and decorative approaches to the exteriors of buildings using a famous modernist villa by Le Corbusier, as well as an early US skyscraper.