THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE: ARCHITECTURE SINCE 1922
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. and Philip Johnson
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. and Philip Johnson: THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE: ARCHITECTURE SINCE 1922. New York: W. W. Norton, 1932. First edition. Quarto. Basket weave brick red cloth stamped in gilt and black. 240 pp. 156 black and white photographs and plans. Red spine cloth sunned. Spine crown and heel rounded with slightest fraying. Front pastedown with faint and unobtrusive period bookseller stamp. A very good copy of this influential volume.
7.75 x 9.5 hardcover book with 240 pages and 156 black and white photographs and plans of the early modern and avant garde movements. Classic book design by Werner Helmer with magnificently engraved and printed plates. Preface by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Includes work by Alvar Aalto, Uno Ahren, Aizpurua, Josef Albers, Erik Gunnar Asplund, Hans Borkowsky, Marcel Breuer, J. A. Brinkman, Erik Bryggman, Alfred Clauss, Le Corbusier [Charles- Edouard Jeanneret], George Daub, Karl Egender, L. Eisenlohr, Otto Eisler, Joseph Emberton, Luigi Figini, J. Andre Fouilhoux, Albert Frey, Bohuslav Fuchs, Walter Gropius, Max Ernst Haefeli, Otto Haesler, Hans Hofmann, Raymond Hood, George Howe, Albert Howell Jr., Pierre Jeanneret, Adolf Kellermuller, A. Lawrence Kocher, H. L. De Koninck, Josef Kranz, Ludvik Kysela, Labayen, J. W. Lehr, William Lescaze, Andre Lurcat, Sven Markelius, Erich Mendelsohn, Theodor Merrill, Ludwig mies van der Rohe, Werner Moser, Alfred Muller, Richard Neutra, J. J. P. Oud, Oscar Pfennig, Gino Pollino, Lilly Reich, R. W. Reichel, Jan Ruhtenberg, Hans Scharoun, Hans Schmidt, Karl Schneider, Mart Stam, Adolf Steger, Oscar Stonorov, Eskil Sundahl, McKendree A. Tucker, L. C. Van Der Vlugt, Karl Volker, Lois Welzenbacher, Mamoru Yamada and Josef Zizler.
“The International Style: Architecture Since 1922” predates the Modern Architecture International Exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art from February 10 to March 23, 1932, and is regarded as the most influential work of architectural criticism and history of the 20th century. Its authors argue that architects of the 1910s and 1920s abandoned the imitative “styles” of the nineteenth century in favor of designs prompted by the vision of the individual architect.
Hitchcock and Johnson suggest that this experiment produced, by the early 1930s, a distinct style, as sound and deserving of respect as some of the most revered styles of the past, including classical, Gothic, renaissance, and baroque. Examples of this new style accompanied the original text in the form of blueprints and designs and are reproduced in this book. "The International Style" was written to record the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1932, and it identified, categorized and expanded upon characteristics common to Modernism across the world and its stylistic aspects.
The aim of Hitchcock and Johnson was to define a style that would encapsulate this modern architecture, and they did this by the inclusion of specific architects. Hitchcock is considered the founder of modern architectural history and his co-author Johnson became an icon of the modern movement, as well as one of its most celebrated and questionable figures.
The 1920s and 1930s saw the birth of modernism in the United States, a new aesthetic, based on the principles of the Bauhaus in Germany: its merging of architecture with fine and applied arts; and rational, functional design devoid of ornament and without reference to historical styles. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the then 27-year-old founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, and 23-year-old Philip Johnson, director of its architecture department, were the visionary young proponents of the modern approach.
Shortly after meeting at Wellesley College, where Barr taught art history, and as Johnson finished his studies in philosophy at Harvard, they set out on a path that would transform the museum world and change the course of design in America. The Museum of Modern Art opened just over a week after the stock market crash of 1929. In the depths of the Depression, using as their laboratories both MoMA and their own apartments in New York City, Barr and Johnson experimented with new ideas in museum ideology, extending the scope beyond painting and sculpture to include architecture, photography, graphic design, furniture, industrial design, and film; with exhibitions of ordinary, machine-made objects (including ball bearings and kitchenware) elevated to art by their elegant design; and with installations in dramatically lit galleries with smooth, white walls.
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.
In the 1932 MoMA catalog Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, Philip Johnson identified three formal principles of the new modern style: an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity); a rejection of symmetry; and rejection of applied decoration.