Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

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 machine production was not the point, it was just the most effective way to produce the panels at a reasonable cost. Indeed Guimard’s panels were not standard-issue productions, but were carefully designed by him, and then produced in limited quantities as necessary for his building designs (but no one else’s). Indeed one of the ways in which Guimard’s designs for the Métro are interesting is that, despite their striking originality, they are all virtually the same, and clearly the entrances to the underground transport system were imagined as a ‘type’, rather than as unique individual creations. While Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe made it clear that they were interested in developing new types of dwelling, and steel-framed buildings, one associates Guimard’s idiosyncratic forms less readily with a rationalist programme of building production. Nevertheless it is plain that these buildings were as efficient and as rational as the transport system they led down to, even though that is not what the building expresses.

_{21. Métro entrance surrounds, Paris, France (1899–1905); architect: Hector Guimard (1867–1942). The first line of the Paris Métro opened on 19 July 1900, and from the outset was entered by way of the portals that Hector Guimard designed for them as a young man — he was 32 years old when he was given the commission. He had visited Brussels and seen Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (1892), which had translated the fashionable Art Nouveau style into architecture. In the Métro stations, Guimard translated the style into prefabricated cast iron, and the portals would appear in their neighbourhoods with great rapidity, so that they seemed to have erupted from under ground overnight. Some of the portals had glass canopies, others did not, but they used standardized parts. There was an outcry in the press when these buildings appeared, and after the vogue for the Art Nouveau had passed, the portals were removed rather than repaired. Between 1927 and 1962 all but two of the original stations were dismantled, the remaining ones being at the Porte Dauphine and Abbesses. Many of them have now been replaced with reproductions.}