ABSTRACT
While the contest between regionalism and International Style was taking place in the United States after World War II, the inter est in regionalism did not die out in Europe despite regionalism’s en tanglement with chauvinist and racist pol itics in Nazi Ger many and Vichy France before and during the war. On the contrary. In Ger many, in spite of the de-Nazification program and the efforts by the allies to promote ‘Bauhaus’ modern architecture, the respect for Heimat architects did not di min ish. While Schultze-Naumburg kept busy with his pub lications until his death in 1949, Paul Bonatz con tinued to design prestigious pastiche pro jects in Ankara and Addis Ababa until 1948, and Paul Schmitthenner produced an abundant body of work fusing Heimat and classical styles until the end of the 1960s. In France, there were still strong sympathies for regionalism, as the success of the writings of René Closier shows. But, as opposed to Ger many, where Heimat was still at the heart of regionalism, here the idea of regionalism went hand in hand with a warning against the pos sible effects, cultural and eco lo gical, of the excesses of industrialization and mass production needed for the post-World War II reconstruction. The overall tend ency was not to return to older forms of regionalism but to redefine and renew it. Among the leading architecture of the post-World War II period, not only did Le Corbusier’s have regionalist origins – his first pro jects were all in the regionalist mould, consistent with the Arts and Crafts school he attended in Chaux-le-Fond – but despite his periodic rhet orical denouncements of regionalism, his thinking remained deeply attached to the envir on mental and cultural par ticu larity of the regions he built in. Before the war, in 1933, he had designed a scheme for the Durand Housing Estate in Qued-Ouchaia, and in 1934 he proposed the urbanization of Nemours, a town in Algeria with a popu la tion of 50,000. Both schemes were driven by the re cog ni tion of the par ticu larity of the region, the site, and the ‘topography’. He called the Nemours pro ject ‘the new Casbah of Algiers made out of steel and cement’, and he asserted that the old casbah had better architecture than the co lo nial settlements. And in 1930, inspired by the rustic sheds he noticed in the often rain-drenched coun tryside overlooking the Pacific in Chile, he designed there the (unbuilt) Errazuris coun try residence,
with the vernacular roof made of two adjacent gables sloping inward toward the middle, perfectly adapted to heavy rainfall. In so doing, he inadvertently invented the so-called butterfly roof that was to become a craze in the architecture of the mid-century all over the world. Undoubtedly the first architect to pla gi ar ize it was the most inter esting. This was Antonin Raymond, and he did so in a regionalist spirit. In a remark able example of trans national aptness, he made the mental leap of adopting it for his own rustic coun try house in an equally rainy Japan in 1934. After the war, Le Corbusier conceived Roq and Rob (1948-1950), a low-profile hotel facility in the Mediterranean for ‘post-war’ people, which, in contrast to the aggression and arrogance of the Hilton Hotels, responded to the regional cultural and his tor ical envir on ment, recruiting spatial ideas from vernacular Mediterranean precedents. For Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier was too much of a technocratic globalist as well as International Style formalist. Aalto avoided any attachment to uni ver sal sys tems of architecture. Though a great admirer of classical architecture and culture, he never saw it as a canon; the same with modern architecture. Even prior to World War II, Aalto was not so pop ular among the propagandists of International Style, who had dismissed his regionalist approach as overly sub ject ive. As we have seen, Giedion was even to exclude him from his canon of modern architecture in Space, Time and Architecture on the grounds of his regionalism. Aalto’s concern with the identity of a site, mater ials, microclimate, and the way of life of a region was in conflict with mainstream globalist US architects. Neither did Aalto have much to do with the Scan din avian nationalist regionalism and its imitations of folk architecture, both strong tendencies in pre-war Finnish architecture. While respecting the idea of the region, across the dimensions referred to above, Aalto kept a crit ical distance, and remained a stranger to their bygone precedents, a stance that ultimately, as we mentioned in the beginning of this book, goes back to the crit ical philo sophy of the Enlightenment, and the writings of Immanuel Kant1 and the Frankfurt School.2
