WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MODERN ARCHITECTURE?
A SYMPOSIUM AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Spring 1948
The Museum of Modern Art: WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MODERN ARCHITECTURE? A SYMPOSIUM AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. Museum of Modern Art, 1948. First edition [The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring 1948]. Slim quarto. Stapled self wrappers. 24 pp. 8 black and white illustrations. Wrappers uniformly toned, otherwise a nearly fine copy.
7.25 x 9.25 staple-bound booklet with 24 pages and 8 black-and-white text illustrations: A symposium for architects was held in the Auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art on the evening of February 11, 1948. The discussion was based on an excerpt from the Skyline by Lewis Mumford in The New Yorker, October 11, 1947. The speakers [transcribed] include Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Gropius, George Nelson, Ralph T. Walker, Christopher Tunnard, Frederick Gutheim, Marcel Breuer, Peter Blake, Gerhard Kallmann, Talbot Hamlin, Lewis Mumford plus there's a section of written comments by Carl Koch, Lewis Mumford and Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Mumford and Barr add afterthoughts included at the end of the booklet to sort out some of their differences over the direction of architecture and the nature of their work. Remarks are thoughtful and quite genuine and humorous. Walker says architects are too resentful of criticism. Tunnard jokes that he deduces from Johnson's remarks that he (Tunnard) is a member of the "gold-plated plumbing school" of architects, Blake reacts to Mumford's complaint about the "mechanical rigorists" among architects. The speakers are top-notch and their good-humor is on display.
Terence Riley noted that the early tastemakers at the Museum of Modern Art understood their job was to separate "the wheat from the chaff." Few people rose to that challenge with more vigor than Philip Johnson, the young head of the Department of Architecture and Design. Alfred Barr’s insistence on including Architecture and Design as a fully functioning department within MoMA was a radical curatorial departure, which seems only obvious today.
Philip Johnson's 1928 visit to the Bauhaus Dessau sparked Johnson's imagination and solidified his role as a proselytizer for the European avant-garde architecture. "We were proud to be avant-gardists; we wore our enthusiasm as a badge of honor that distinguished us as culturally superior to those around us." Johnson said.
From this plateau of cultural superiority, Johnson and his MoMA collaborators Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock eventually labeled this architecture “The International Style.” The rest is history.