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Though he lectured at Princeton in 1929, reporters could find no one in New York last week to translate J. J. P. Oud's initials. Born in Holland in 1890. he became a disciple, at a distance, of Wisconsin's Frank Lloyd Wright. His own style developed slowly. In 1928 he published a number of Cubist projects for workmen's houses which won him an appointment as City Architect of Rotterdam. He is responsible for Rotterdam's Spangen and Tuschendijken municipal housing development and numerous private houses. Critics find him the most refined and conscientious of the workers in the International Style.
Walter Gropius, 49, was born in Alsace but moved to Berlin before he was 20. He fought through the War. afterwards became director of the Grand Ducal Art School at Weimar that developed into the famed Bauhaus at Dessau. The severe Dessau Bauhaus with its horizontal ribbons of windows has been called the cradle of the International Style. In Dessau, too, he showed what he could do in the field of low cost municipal housing.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe worked in the same office with Walter Gropius as a young man. Two years ago he followed Gropius as director of the Bauhaus. Unlike copious Gropius, who has designed innumerable buildings, van der Rohe has actually built little—possibly because of his fondness for luxurious building materials : interior walls of onyx, silk curtains 75 feet long, etc. etc.
Models and plans of all four of the apostles were shown at the Modern Museum last week and with them the work of several of their U. S. disciples: Howe & Lescaze, Richard J. Neutra. Bowman Bros., and the recent convert Raymond Hood. Of particular interest were a Howe & Lescaze model of an ideal tenement, built on stilts to save the cost of cellar excavating; and Raymond Hood's elaborate model of a 21-story apartment tower for the country, designed to occupy the centre of a large co-operative garden.
An elaborately illustrated catalog of the exhibition, discussing the U. S. housing problem, the principles of the International Style, has been prepared by Lewis Mumford, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr.
Palace Builder
The Architectural League opened a one man show of the work of that gusty craftsman, Joseph Urban. It was more than a tribute. One dollar admission was charged for the benefit of the 1,700 unemployed draughtsmen.*