progressist architects, USSR, 30's

1. Advanced Concept
Development
Week 4
The other branch

2. Mart Stam
(August 5, 1899, Purmerend -
February 21, 1986, Zürich)
Dutch architect, urban
planner, and furniture
designer. Stam was
extraordinarily well-
connected, and his career
intersects with important
moments in the history of
20th century European
architecture, and furniture
design.
The Bauhaus,
The Weissenhof Estate, the
"Van Nelle Factory",
modernist landmark building
in Rotterdam,
Buildings for Ernst May's
Weimar Frankfurt housing
project then to Russia with
the idealistic May Brigade,
Postwar reconstruction in
Germany.

3. CIAM
Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne

4. • was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959,
responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged around
the world by the most prominent architects of the time, with the
objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement
focusing in all the main domains of architecture (such as landscape,
urbanism, industrial design).
• The International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) was
founded in June 1928 by Le Corbusier, at the Chateau de la Sarraz in
Switzerland, by a group of 28 European architects organized, Hélène de Mandrot (owner of the
castle),
• CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to advance
the cause of "architecture as a social art".
• Other founder members included Karl Moser, Hendrik Berlage, Victor Bourgeois,
Pierre Chareau, Sven Markelius, Josef Frank, Gabriel Guevrekian, Max Ernst Haefeli, Hugo
Häring, Arnold Höchel, Huib Hoste, André Lurçat, Ernst May, Fernando García Mercadal,
Hannes Meyer, Werner M. Moser, Carlo Enrico Rava, Gerrit Rietveld, Alberto Sartoris,
Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam, Rudolf Steiger, Szymon Syrkus, Henri-Robert Von der Mühll, and
Juan de Zavala. The Soviet delegates were to be El Lissitzky, Nikolai Kolli and Moisei Ginzburg,
although at the Sarraz conference they were unable to obtain visas.
• Other later members included Alvar Aalto, Uno Åhrén, Louis Herman De Koninck (1929) and Fred
Forbát. In 1941, Harwell Hamilton Harris was chosen as secretary of the American branch of
CIAM, which was the Chapter for Relief and Post War Planning, founded in New York City.

5. Van Nelle factory
Rotterdam
Van der Vlugt
1929

7. The Weissenhof estate

8. The Weissenhof Estate is a housing estate built for fo the
Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927.
The twenty-one buildings vary slightly in form, consisting of terraced
and detached houses and apartment buildings, and display a strong
consistency of design. What they have in common are their
simplified facades, flat roofs used as terraces, window bands, open
plan interiors, and the high level of prefabrication which permitted
their erection in just five months. All but two of the entries were
white.

9. Of the original twenty-one
buildings, eleven survive as
of 2006.
Bombing damage during
World War II is responsible
for the complete loss of the
homes by Walter Gropius.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , J.P. Oud, Victor Bourgeois,
Adolf Gustav Schneck, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,
Walter Gropius, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Bruno Taut, Hans
Poelzig, Richard Döcker, Max Taut, Adolf Rading, Josef
Frank, Mart Stam, Peter Behrens, Hans Scharoun

11. After moving to Berlin, in 1926, Stam
devised a steel-tubing cantilever chair,
using lengths of standard gas pipe and
standard pipe joint fittings. Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe became aware of
Stam's work on the chair during
planning for the Weissenhof Siedlung
and mentioned it to Marcel Breuer at
the Bauhaus. This led almost
immediately to variations on the
cantilevered tubular-steel chair theme
by both Mies van der Rohe and Marcel
Breuer, and began an entire genre of
chair design. In the late 1920s, Breuer
and Stam were involved in a patent
lawsuit in German courts, both
claiming to be the inventor of the basic
cantilever chair design principle. Stam
won the lawsuit, and, since that time,
specific Breuer chair designs have
often been erroneously attributed to
Stam. In the United States, Breuer
assigned the rights to his designs to
Knoll, and for that reason it is possible
to find the identical chair attributed to
Stam in Europe and to Breuer in the
U.S.

12. Walter Gropius Hannes Meyer

13. Hannes Meyer was one of the most important architects of New
Architecture movement of the 1920s. During his brief term in office as the
second Bauhaus director, he gave the institution new impulses that had a
lasting influence on important aspects of the Bauhaus’s reception and
animated the topical debates. His theory, which emphasised the social
aspects of design, was widely criticised and poorly received.
In 1924, he joined the Basel group associated with the magazine ABC
Beiträge zum Bauen (ABC contributions to building). Mart Stam, El Lissitzky
and Hans Schmidt
Mart Stam had been his first choice, but Walter Gropius appointed Hannes
Meyer (presented by Stam) head of the Bauhaus architecture department
when it was finally established in April 1927. Meyer brought his radical
functionalist viewpoint he named, in 1929, Die neue Baulehre (the new way
to build). That architecture was an organizational task with no relationship to
aesthetics, that buildings should be low cost and designed to fulfill social
needs.
But he also brought political dissension and the growth of the Communist
student organization in the Bauhaus became a threat to the existence of the
school. Gropius together with the Lord Mayor of Dessau and Bauhaus
teachers ultimately pleaded to have Meyers fired in order to protect the
school from political repercussions. On 1st August 1930, Meyer was
dismissed.
His role in the Bauhaus has long been minimized. Especially Gropius
falsified Meyer's contribution until the end of his life. It is only recently that
Meyer's work is once again put into proper perspective.

14. • Appartement building
with balcony access
(Laubenganghaus)
1930/2006.

15. The history of balcony access houses reaches back to
the Middle Ages; they experienced a renaissance in the
social housing of the 1920s. The balcony access houses
are “real” Bauhaus buildings, since they originated in the
Bauhaus department of architecture founded in 1927 (as
opposed to the Bauhaus Building, the Masters’ Houses
and the Törten Estate, which were designed in Gropius’s
architectural office).

16. Meyer responded to his dismissal from
Bauhaus as early as 1930 by taking seven
students and a secretary to Moscow, forming
a group they called the "Left Column". This
was a parallel effort to the "May brigade".
Both groups worked on architectural and
urban planning projects guided by socialist-
utopian ideals… In the same year, he taught
at WASI, an academy for architecture and
civil engineering, in Moscow. In the following
years, he also acted as an advisor for urban
development projects at Giprogor, the
Russian Institute for Urban and Investment
Development. From 1932, he participated in
the Standardgor Project and was the director
of the scientific committee for residential and
public buildings at the academy of
architecture founded in 1934.
In the course of the Stalinist purges, The
Soviet Union dismissed all such foreigners in
1936 to which some of the Bauhaus’s
members, Meyer returned to Switzerland in
1936

17. three years later, in 1939, Hannes Meyer emigrated to
Mexico City where he was appointed by the Mexican
government as the director of the Institute for Urban
Development and Planning. For political reasons,
Hannes Meyer was dismissed from this post in 1941.
from 1942 through 1949. While in Mexico City he also
served as the director of Estampa Mexicana, (the
Popular Graphic Arts Workshop).
In 1942 he was with his friend the Italian photographer
Tina Modotti the night she died under mysterious
circumstances.

18. A lot of life in one person
Ernst May

20. The New Frankfurt
In the context of a housing shortage of the 1920’s Germany and a degree of
political instability, Ernst May assembled a powerful staff of progressive
architects and initiated a large-scale housing development program. May's
developments were remarkable for the time for being compact, semi-
independent, well-equipped with community elements like playgrounds,
schools, theatres, and common washing areas. For the sake of economy
and construction speed May used simplified, prefabricated forms. These
settlements are still marked by their functionality and the way they manifest
egalitarian ideals such as equal access to sunlight, air, and common areas.

22. Of these settlements the best known is probably Römerstadt, and
known as Zickzackhausen.
In 1926 May sent Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky to join him in
Frankfurt. Lihotsky was a kindred spirit and applied the same sort of
functional clarity to household problems, and so in Frankfurt, after
much analysis of work habits and footsteps, she developed the
prototype of the modern installed kitchen, and pursued her idea that
"housing is the organized implementation of living habits".
May's Frankfurt was a civic and critical success.

24. The Frankfurt Kitchen by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky for public housing
complexes, proving that good design could make a difference in the
lives of everyday people on a massive scale. Creating a family space
out of the kitchen was a radical idea in a culture where home kitchens
were considered work rooms hidden in basements. If you look closely,
you can see the inspiration for modern day standards that were
innovative when this kitchen was first designed.

27. May's Frankfurt was a civic and critical success. This has been
described as "one of the most remarkable city planning experiments
in the twentieth century". In two years May produced more than
5,000 building units, up to 15,000 units in five years, published his
own magazine and in 1929 won international attention at the
Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne.
This also brought him to the attention of the Soviet Union.

29. • In 1930 Stam became one of the 20
architects and urban planners organized
by Frankfurt city planner Ernst May who
traveled together to the Soviet Union to
create a string of new Stalinist cities,
including Magnitogorsk.
• The "May Brigade" included Austrian
architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, her
husband Wilhelm Schütte, Arthur Korn,
Erich Mauthner and Hans Schmidt. Stam
was there in February 1931 to participate
in the struggle to build rational worker
housing from the ground up, an effort
ultimately defeated by adverse weather,
corruption, and poor design decisions.
Stam moved to planning activities in
Makeyevka in Ukraine in 1932, then to
Orsk, with his friend Hans Schmidt (again)
and with Bauhaus student and future wife
Lotte Beese, then to the copper-mining
Soviet city of Balgash.
• Stam returned to the Netherlands in 1934.

32. In 1930 May took virtually his
entire Frankfurt staff to Russia.
May's Brigade amounted to a
task force of 17 people, including
Lihotsky and the Dutch Mart
Stam.
The promise of the "Socialist
paradise" was still fresh, and
May's Brigade and other groups
of western planners had the hope
of constructing entire cities.
The first was to be Magnitogorsk.
Although May's group is indeed
credited with building 20 cities in
three years, the reality was that
May found Magnitogorsk already
under construction and the town
site dominated by the mine.
Officials were indecisive, then
distrustful, corruption, delay and
mainly shortage of material
frustrated their efforts, and May
himself made misjudgments
about the climate.

33. With his own brigade of 30 Western specialists,
May designed more than 20 cities in less than 3 years.
The new cities composed by long rows of houses, build on
a German industrial concept could not fit the archaism of
soviet union. The antagonism between Soviet leaders and
European architects were pointing at the produced shapes
issued by the mechanization of the building industry
Magnitogorsk

35. May's contract expired in 1933

36. He went directly from the USSR to Tanganyika being unable
to return to Germany because of Nazism.
He started his own studio 1937 and finish to build his house
in 1939 in Nairobi. But he was interned in a British camp for
2 years during the war. He was released by British
authorities because of his abilities as city planner and
involve in the overall plan of the Capital, Kampala.
May’ Nairobi house

37. Ernst Udet
There was no question of May’s returning to Germany after Hitler took power in
early 1933. The architect was doubly damned by the Nazis: his mother was
Jewish, and his Marxist politics and Soviet sojourn caused him to be denounced
by Goebbels in a radio rant. May decided to emigrate not to the US (because he
was repelled by American commercialism) but to East Africa. This startled those
closest to him, who didn’t suspect that he had apparently gathered a highly
romanticized view of Africa from a popular book, Fremde Vögel über Afrika
(Strange Birds Over Africa), by Ernst Udet, a World War I flying ace who later
helped build the Nazi Luftwaffe (committed suicide in 1941)

38. It is noteworthy to notice his
interest to design for public
rather than private use only. In
the planning of Kampala, like a
garden city, he emphasized
the importance of recreational
facilities for the live of citizen,
considering the general social
situation.

40. He is thought to be one of the first modernist architect to
adopted a scientific approach toward climatic problem

41. Apartment building
Nairobi

42. Last project before he left back to Germany:
the Oceanic hotel, Mombasa completed only in 1957

44. Oceanic model 1953

45. The German government called him back
in 1953 to help the post war reconstruction
of many destroyed city; here Bremen.

46. Ernst May with plans for the development of Mainz, Germany, circa 1958

47. And Hamburg
where he died in
1970