The early 20th century saw the birth of Modernist architecture. It brought with it a central architectural movement that in turn birthed off-shoots of its own. A figure often seen as the defining face of this movement is Le Corbusier, whose 1923 treatise Toward an Architecture was influential to his Modernist contemporaries – a manifesto including the phrase “a house is a machine for living in” where good architecture would have to be intrinsically linked to function and the demands of industry.
In searching for design precedents where function and form have a harmonious relationship, transportation became, for Modernist groups of architects, a key source of inspiration. Cars for the likes of Le Corbusier became an obsession, with him seeing the automobile as an indisputable symbol of modernity. Another form of transportation, however, had an arguably even bigger impact. The ocean liner – long-haul passenger ships – becoming icons of exemplary design for a so-called “architecture of the new age”
It is easy to see why. Ocean liners at the turn of the 20th century were feats of engineering, large vessels that had the complicated task of combining long seafaring journeys with a comfortable experience for their passengers. The more expensive trips were on these passenger ocean liners, the more sophisticated their designs got, piquing the interest of architects who sought to translate their streamlined shapes, pipe railings and chic interiors to architectural developments on land.
This adoption of the ‘ocean liner aesthetic’ in certain Modernist structures is made even more interesting when one dissects the societal backdrop that enveloped these buildings. It is a complicated discussion, because the ocean liner, with its extravagant interior design and association with the journeys of the rich, being able to serve as a vessel for further symbolising a building as that of the ‘elite’. The first-floor salon of Le Corbusier’s formative Parisian Villa Savoye was deliberately designed to mimic the feel and appearance of the upper deck of an ocean liner. The white tubular railing that wraps around the curved staircase further adds to this effect. Villa Savoye, similar to many of Le Corbusier’s early works, was a project for a wealthy client.
The ocean liner as a symbol of opulence was distilled by Le Corbusier into un-cluttered spaces and the removal of gaudy interiors, but ultimately still functioned as a symbol of wealth in a new “machine age”
Another architect connected to France – Jean Prouvé – also looked to the nautical language of ships to develop his own strain of Modernism. His 1950s prefabricated Maisons Tropicales were prototype structures made from folded sheet steel and aluminium. The ocean liner inspiration had a muted presence in the design, only showing itself in circular perforations of the exterior wall – a reference to a ship’s portholes. Although the nature of the design meant that it was, in effect, a makeshift structure, it would still function as a symbol of luxury, as the houses were designed for French officials stationed in France’s West African colonies. It’s an apt representation of the limitations of some Modernist lines of thought.
A new age of mechanisation, ostensibly billed as a tool for reducing social ills and cultivating a more equal society, resulted in Jean Prouvé simply repackaging an emblem associated with wealth – the ocean liner porthole – not for a radical client, but instead for the existing status quo of French colonial authorities. The ocean liners of old had a tiered system, where the distinctions between classes were immediately apparent in the design and space allocated for wealthy passengers versus the less-expensive classes. Prouvé’s Maisons Tropicales, while striving to harmonise African indigeneity with modern construction methods, were still perceptibly structures that sought to themselves as homes for Europeans – distinguishing themselves from the vernacular architecture built by Africans in France’s West African colonies.
There does exist an example that has sought, and has succeeded, to turn the Modernist appeal of the ocean liner into a structure that seeks to democratise. The De La Warr Pavilion in the South Coast of England is, stylistically, a clear homage to the grand age of ocean liners, designed by Enrich Mendelsohn, who had fled Hitlers Germany, and Russian architect Serge Chermayeff.
Steel and concrete made up the skeleton of the pavilion, with large glass windows and cantilevered balconies derived from the appearance of large sea vessels. From its inception, however, the building was not envisioned as an elite club, but instead as a ‘People’s Palace’. The Mayor – a proponent of socialist thinking – propagated that the building would act as a democratic social enterprise, a cultural centre easily accessible for the wider public. It was able to thrive as a premier entertainment venue, laying the groundwork for the Southbank Centre in London.
As Modernist architects sought to escape the boundaries of the architecture of antiquity, the ocean liner was a sensible illustration of progress, modernity, and the power of technology. With this illustration, some architects simply used the ocean liner as a purely stylistic symbol, a continuation of the ocean liner as a marker of affluence. For some Modernist buildings, however, the ocean liner was a stylistic choice in only a superficial sense – where the complicated hierarchies of the passenger ocean liner were done away in favour of a more egalitarian, accessible structure.
