SHELTER April 1938
A Correlating Medium For Housing Progress
Maxwell Levinson [Editor]
Maxwell Levinson [Editor]: SHELTER [A Correlating Medium For Housing Progress]. New York: Shelter Research, April 1938. [Volume 3, Number 2]. Slim quarto. Stapled, letterpressed stiff wrappers. 72 pp. Text and advertisements. Wrappers lightly worn along spine edge. Cover design by Alexi [sic] Brodovitch of a Walter Gropius house in Chelsea. Wrapper slightly rubbed and worn, but a very good or better copy.
9 x 12 vintage magazine with 72 pages devoted to dream and lie of Public Housing before World War II. Editorial Assistant: Eleanor Williams; Contributing Editors: Richard J. Neutra, Simon Breines, Maxwell Fry, Walter Gropius, P. Morton Shand, L. Moholy-Nagy, Frederick Kiesler, and Louis I. Kahn.
Contents:
- Letters: includes correspondence from Henry S. Churchill and others.
- Housing: A New Profession for Architects by Nathan Straus
- Symposium: Management of Public and Private Housing Developments. Individual essays on Lavanburg Homes by Abraham Goldfeld; Williamsburg Houses by Frank Dorman; Harlem River Houses by Roger Flood; and First Houses by Ann Dingledine.
- Walter Gropius by G. Holmes Perkins [with an introduction byHenry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. Fourteen-page article illustrated with 31 diagrams, renderings and photographs of Gropius’s work through 1936, including a complete list of works.
- Paris and Flushing: Sober Thoughts on Twentieth Century Expositions by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr.
- ” . . . one third of a nation . . .” and “Roofs for Forty Million” by Eleanor Williams. Four pages and eight photographs of WPA artwork by Miron Sokole, Moses Oley, Lena Garr, Chuzo Tamotzu, and John B. Flanagan.
- News in the Field
- Recent Books
- Federal Agencies Concerned with Housing (chart)
- Index to Advertisers
Wikipedia defines "Shelter magazine" as a publishing trade term used to indicate a segment of the U.S. magazine market, designating a periodical publication with an editorial focus on interior design, architecture, home furnishings, and often gardening. Among Design aficionados the term is frequently used in the pejorative sense. How times have changed.
Back in 1932, a progressive group of architects formed an umbrella group called Shelter Research devoted to "achieving an adequate public housing program for the American people." Shelter Research then proceeded to intermittingly publish their magazine 'Shelter [A Correlating Medium For Housing Progress]' over the next seven years.
The publishers boldly claimed "Shelter is the only publication in America solely devoted to modern architecture, the development of industrial housing and an adequate public housing program." They further stated that "Shelter does not concern itself with out-of-date issues, but only with those ideas which seek to fully utilize the products of technological advance."
Contributing Editors included Catherine Bauer, Maxwell Fry, Walter Gropius, P. Morton Shand, L. Moholy-Nagy and Frank Lloyd Wright. Each issue presented the newest progressive ideas in public and private dwelling, via exceptional [and uncredited] graphic design and typography.
"Shelter" clearly presented the Public Works Administration's agenda in both form and content. I don't think we will ever see its type again.
Born and educated in Germany, Walter Gropius (1883 – 1969) belongs to the select group of architects that massively influenced the international development of modern architecture. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.
American industrial, cultural and educational ambassadors were eager to embrace the refugees fleeing the coming storm in Europe. Joseph Hudnut invited Walter Gropius to join the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Association of Arts and Industries financed the New Bauahuas in Chicago under Moholy-Nagy, Josef and Anni Albers helped developed the experimental teachings at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, Mies van der Rohe assumed leadership of the Architecture program at the Armour Institute, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Alfred Barr and the Museum of Modern Art hosted art, architecture and design exhibitions devoted to the Bauhaus ideas.
The underlying idea Bauhaus formulated by Gropius, was to create a new unity of crafts, art and technology. The intention was to offer the right environment for the realization of the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art]. To achieve this goal, students needed a school with an interdisciplinary and international orientation. The Bauhaus curriculum offered a unique combination of research, teaching and practice that was unequalled by rival academies and schools of applied art. This educational paradigm was widely embraced by institutions in the United States trying to emerge from the depths of the Great Depression.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design is widely regarded as the cradle of American modern architecture. Professor Joseph Hudnut created the GSD by uniting the three formerly separate programs of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning in 1935. He got rid of antique statuary, replaced mullioned windows with plate glass, and hired Walter Gropius to head the architecture program.
During his tenure at Harvard—from 1937 to 1952—Gropius oversaw the end of the academic French Beaux-Arts method of educating architects. Gropius’s philosophy placed an emphasis on industrial materials and technology, functionality, collaboration among different professions, and a complete rejection of historical precedent.
Assisted by Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer, Gropius educated a generation of architects who radically altered the landscape of postwar America, including Edward Larrabee Barnes, Garrett Eckbo, Lawrence Halprin, Dan Kiley, Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, Edward Durell Stone, and many others.
Alexey Brodovitch (1898 – 1971) is a legend in graphic design: during his 25-year tenure as art director of Harper's Bazaar, he exerted tremendous influence on the direction of design and photography. A passionate teacher of graphic design, advocate of photography and collaborator with many prominent photographers, Brodovitch is often credited with having a major influence on the acceptance of European modernism in America. His use of assymetrical layouts, white space, and dynamic imagery changed the nature of magazine design. He was responsible for exposing everyday Americans to avant-garde artists by commissioning work from cutting-edge artists such as Cassandre, Dali, Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, etc.
Brodovitch played a crucial role in introducing into the United States a radically simplified, "modern" graphic design style forged in Europe in the 1920s from an amalgam of vanguard movements in art and design. Through his teaching, he created a generation of designers sympathetic to his belief in the primacy of visual freshness and immediacy. Fascinated with photography, he made it the backbone of modern magazine design, and he fostered the development of an expressionistic, almost primal style of picture-taking that became the dominant style of photographic practice in the 1950s.
He came to the United States in 1930 to start a department of advertising (later known as the Philadelphia College of Art). There he trained students in the fundamentals of European design, while embarking on numerous freelance illustration assignments in Philadelphia and New York. In 1934 Carmel Snow, the new editor of Harper's Bazaar, saw his design work and immediately hired him to be its art director. It was the beginning of a collaboration that was to revolutionize both fashion and magazine design, and that catapulted Bazaar past its arch-rival, Vogue.
Throughout his career, he continued to teach. His "Design Laboratory," which focused variously on illustration, graphic design and photography and provided a system of rigorous critiques for those who aspired to magazine work. As a teacher, Brodovitch was inspiring, though sometimes harsh and unrelenting. A student's worst offense was to present something Brodovitch found boring; at best, the hawk-faced Russian would pronounce a work "interesting." Despite his unbending manner and lack of explicit critical standards -- Brodovitch did not formulate a theory of design --many students under his tutelage discovered untapped creative reserves.