Modern, Moderne, and Modernistic: Le Corbusier, Thomas Wallis and the Problem of Art Deco

Abstract

Whether or not they felt it was a good thing, by the 1930s most English architectural critics agreed that Le Corbusier was probably the best-known figure in the modern architectural movement. Some had visited his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and many had read Frederick Etchell’s English translations of his Towards a New Architecture (1927) and The City of Tomorrow (1929).²

The 1925 exhibition covered the Esplanade of the Invalides and the banks of the Seine from Concorde to Alma with constructions of plaster. Plaster was king, and there was an astonishing display of fancy and foliate ornament. The exhibition left behind some ‘1925 Yearbooks’ which spread the style all over Paris and the rest of France. We had undertaken to put up a Pavillon of L’Esprit Nouveau which would indissolubly link the equipment of the home (furniture) to architecture (the space inhabited, the dwelling), and to town-planning (the conditions of life of a society). In the face of mass difficulties—without a penny—we had put up the Esprit Nouveau Pavillon, built ‘for real’ [ … ]. It stayed intact throughout the following winter, while as soon as the autumn of 1925 set in the plaster palaces started crumbling [ … ].

Le Corbusier, The Decorative Arts of Today, 1925, xiii-xv.

At the risk of being criticized, I will go further and say that a little money wisely spent in the incorporation of some form of decoration, especially colour, is not money wasted.

Thomas Wallis, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1933, 307.

The modern movement in architecture has developed rapidly in this country during the last few years. By this I do not refer to the increase of modernistic garages, or the moderne dance halls and amusement palaces of our seaside resorts. Whilst at first glance these ‘imitations’ may seem to point to a growing interest in contemporary design, on closer observation it becomes clear that they are not only misguided effort but even a positive danger. It should be said at once that the appeal of the ‘modernistic’ is the spurious appeal of surface decoration: yet another manifestation of that passion for ‘façade’ which dragged its life through the nineteenth century and which now presents itself in its most heterogeneous form.

(John) Leslie Martin, Circle International Survey of Constructive Art, 1937, 215.¹