J-J. P. OUD
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr.
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr.: J-J. P. OUD. Paris: Editions Cahiers d'Art, 1931 [Les maítres de l'architecture d'aujourd'hui, vol. 2]. First edition [500 copies] Les Cahiers d'Architecture Contemporaine Vol. II. Text in French. Quarto. Perfect bound thick printed wrappers. [6] pp. text, photo portrait, and 45 pages of photo heliotype plates. Architectural historians’ bookplate to front endpaper. Wrappers lightly edgeworn. Binding glue loosened - easily reglued, with signatures still secure in textblock. A nearly fine copy.
8.75 x 11 softcover book with short introductory text followed by a full-page portrait and 44 pages of beautiful heliotypes of Oud's projects between 1915 and 1930. Important overview of the work of architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud [1980 - 1963], probably the foremost Dutch representative of modern functionalism. [Fanelli, 398; Sharp, 98; Placzek, III 333-335]
Includes photographs and/or plans for these projects:
- 1915: Project for a municipal bath house, unexecuted.
- 1917: House in Katwijk-aan-Zee (collaboration with Kamerlingh Onnes); House in Noordwijkerhout (collaboration with Theo van Doesburg); Project for a row of seaside houses, unexecuted.
- 1918: Spangen, Blocks I and V, Worker housing in Rotterdam.
- 1919: Spangen, Blocks VIII and IX. Projects for a factory and a bonded Warehouse, unexecuted.
- 1920 - 1921: Tuschendijken, Blocks I to IV and VI in Rotterdam.
- 1921: Project for a house in Berlin, unexecuted.
- 1922: Garden Village in Rotterdam at Oud-Mathenesse.
- 1923: Superintendent's office at Oud-Mathenesse, temporary.
- 1925: Cafe de Unie in Rotterdam.
- 1926: Project for Hotel Stiassni in Brno, Czechoslovakia, unexecuted. Competition project for Rotterdam Exchange, unexecuted.
- 1926 - 1927: Worker's Houses at the Hoek of Holland.
- 1927: Row of 5 houses, Weissenhof Housing Exposition, Stuttgart.
- 1927: Additions to the villa Allegonda at Katwijk-aan-Zee.
- 1928 - 1930: Kiefhoek Housing Development in Rotterdam.
In America Oud is perhaps best known for being lauded and adopted by the mainstream Modernist movement, then summarily kicked out on stylistic grounds. As of 1932, he was considered one of the four greatest modern architects (along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier), and was prominently featured in Hitchcock and Johnson's International Style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1945, when photographs of Oud's 1941 Shell Headquarters building in The Hague were published in America, the architectural press sarcastically condemned his use of ornament ("embroidery") as contrary to the spirit of Modernism.
In De Stijl, Vol. I, No. 3 (4), pp. 25-27: Oud wrote "Paradoxically, it may be said that the struggle of the modern artist is a struggle against feeling.
"The modern artist strives to attain the universal, while feeling (the subjective) leads to the particular.
"The subjective is the arbitrary, the unconscious, the relatively indeterminate, which can be sublimated through the conscious mind to relative determinateness. To this end, the subjective must be ordered by the conscious mind so that, in its relative determination, style is achieved.
"The aim of the modern artist is to carry out this organization and obtain this determinate style.
"If we understand by 'monumentality' the organized and controlled relationship of the subjective to the objective, it follows that, in a higher sense, the struggle of the modern artist will lead to a monumental style.
"Two principal trends may be distinguished in the effort to achieve style.
"The one is a technical and industrial trend, which may be called the positive trend, and which tries to give aesthetic expression to the products of technical skill.
"The second trend which, for purposes of comparison, may be called negative (although its manifestations are equally positive), is art, which tries by means of reduction (abstraction) to arrive at functionalism.
"The unity of these two trends is the essence of the new style.
"Great art stands in a causal relationship with the social striving of the age. The longing to make the individual subservient to the social is to be found in everyday life as well as in art, reflected in the need to organize individual elements into groups, associations, confederations, companies, trusts, monopolies, etc. This parallelism of intellectual and social striving which is a necessity for culture, forms the basis for style.
"In each period, the universal element in art has its own outward form, which is a reflection of three factors: spirit (seen as a unity of intuition and consciousness), material and method of production.
"Much has been written about the spirit of the modern work of art, but we shall have to give equal weight to the two other factors, material and method of production, for in order to give determinate plastic expression to the spirit, the means must first of all be made determinate and what means is more determinate and more of this age than the machine? Must the spirit be realized in this age by the hand or the machine? For the modern artist the future line of development must lead inevitably to the machine, although at first the tendency will be to regard this as heresy. Not only because the machine can give more determinate plastic expression than the hand, but also from the social point of view, from the economic standpoint, the machine is the best means of manufacturing products which will be of more benefit to the community than the art products of the present time, which reach only the wealthy individual.
"Where architecture has already long been achieving plastic expression through the machine (Wright), painting is being impelled inevitably towards the same plastic means and a unity in the pure expression of the spirit of the age is making a spontaneous appearance.
"It was the cardinal error of Ruskin and Morris that they brought the machine into disrepute by stigmatizing an impure use of it as its essence.
"As soon as the machine is used to imitate another method of production, a sin is committed against the factors which determine pure form (which, because it appears in purity, is always able to achieve aesthetic results) and it is committed not only against the method of production, but also against the spirit and the material.
"Impurity in art, as in religion, arises whenever the means are mistaken for the end. Thus painting was able to give representation without art; architecture, detail without art; religion, ceremony without belief; philosophy, pure reason without wisdom.
"The artist of the past thought too much in sham values. It can be said of the modern artist that he proceeds too much from the essence to be able to put on an external artistic display.
"That the pure application of the machine can lead to aesthetic results has already been proved by buildings, the aesthetically designed book (printed by machine), textile work, etc. Severini says of the spirit of the modern work of art: 'The precision, the rhythm, the brutality of machines and their movements have, without doubt, led us to a new realism which we can express without having to paint locomotives.
"Summarizing, we come to the conclusion (although this is for the future) that the two other form-determining factors can also be brought into harmony with the modern way of life and that the work of art will be produced by the machine, although with quite different materials, and the unique article, as we know it, will no longer exist."
Heliotype is a photographic process [similar to collotype] by which pictures can be printed in the same manner as lithographs, depending on the fact that a dried film of gelatine and bichromate of potash, when exposed to light, is afterwards insoluble in water, while the portion not so exposed swells when steeped.