A Historical Legacy: Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Early Modernism

Common Knowledge, 2011

In this thesis I address the role of architectural history, criticism, and theory in the conception and practice of modernism between the early 1930s and the present. In the search for an authoritative modernity following the heterogeneous experiments of the avant-gardes in the first quarter of the 20 th century, historians played a decisive role in the definition of programs, forms, and styles, that might be seen to unify an apparently fragmented and linguistically fractured field, and, equally importantly, to provide authority in history for an architecture increasingly seen as detached from its past. Henry Russell Hitchcock's Romanticism and Reintegration (1929) and his later International Style (1932) with Philip Johnson, had attempted at once to trace the origins of modernism to the late eighteenth century picturesque and to consolidate the disparate manners of the early Twentieth Century within a single stylistic rubric modeled on the "international" Gothic of the 12th century. Emil Kaufmann, on the other hand, in his Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier of 1933, found the roots of a rationalist modernism in the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, a theme later to be developed by Colin Rowe. Pevsner's genealogy of the Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) from the Arts and Crafts revivals of the late nineteenth century to Gropius, had framed modernism within the terms of the German experience and according to functional principles. Sigfried Giedion, fresh from his study of the Baroque, his support of Le Corbusier, and his participation in CIAM, argued in his Space, Time and Architecture (1941) for an architecture of space-time fusion derived from the new physical concepts of the early Twentieth century, and later in Mechanization Takes Command for an architecture based on technological advances, setting the tone for the scientific progressivism of Reyner Banham. Each of these histories was clearly influenced by a certain partisanship towards a particular form of modernism-Hitchcock and Johnson's "white" style, Kaufmann and 9 Giedion's Corbusianism, Pevsner's support of Gropius-that, in the period after World War II, was regarded suspiciously by the next generation of historians, themselves critical of what were seen as the evident failure of the early modern movements to achieve their stated social or technical goals. Colin Rowe, studying with Wittkower, found solace in the work of Palladio for the apparent closure of Le Corbusier's modernism after the 1930s. Banham, studying with Pevsner, found that the Anglo-German prejudice and temporal limits to his study had left a gap to be filled-not only as between 1914 and 1930, but also substituting the Futurists for the Arts and Crafts movement as the "real" pioneers. Yet it is clear that Rowe and Banham, in their turn were writing history in an advocacy mode, the one with a sense of the inevitability of "mannerist" repetition, the other with an unbounded optimism in technological development. These new histories of modernism were quickly taken up by architects as authorization for their own practices and as reservoirs for references and sources. While Emil Kaufmann's Eighteenthcentury had found its admirers in architects as diverse as Philip Johnson and Aldo Rossi and Pevsner had inspired a whole group of "Victorianists" dedicated to the revival of Nineteenth Century styles and to "Townscape" as a way of envisioning urban renewal. Rowe, first as a Tutor at Liverpool, then as a professor in Texas, Cambridge, and Cornell, formed a circle including James Stirling, Robert Maxwell, and Alan Colquhoun, and was to influence whole generations of architects, first in Austin Texas, then in Cornell, New York. Banham, as a coordinator of the Independent Group, was first a supporter of the Smithsons, then, with technological enthusiasm, of Archigram and many other megastructural experimenters. The idea that the role of the historian was in some way to support contemporary practice, was to be challenged in the late 1960s by Manfredo Tafuri who castigated what he called "instrumental" or "operative" history in his Teorie e storia dell'architettura of 1968 in favor of generating a new architecture. In this sense, as it treats of many of those friends and colleagues that have touched my career at one moment or another, this thesis traces an unfinished intellectual autobiography.

The adage that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, 5 is complicated in the case of typology, which appeared the first time as enlightenment, the second time as modernism, and the third time as urban critique. Only in its fourth iteration as the marketing tool of anti-urban development has it fulfilled its destiny as tragi-comedy. 6

Organization Science, 2012

M ost category studies have focused on established categories with discrete boundaries. These studies not only beg the question of how a de novo category arises, but also upon what institutional material actors draw to create a de novo category. We examine the formation and theorization of the de novo category "modern architecture" between 1870 and 1975. Our study shows that the process of new category formation was driven by groups of architects with distinct clientele associated with institutional logics of commerce, state, religion, and family. These architects enacted different artifact codes for a building based on institutional logics associated with their specific mix of clients. "Modern architects" fought over what logics and artifact codes should guide "modern architecture." Modern functional architects espoused a logic of commerce enacted through a restricted artifact code of new materials in a building, whereas modern organic architects advocated transforming the profession's logic enacted through a flexible artifact code of mixing new and traditional materials in buildings. The conflict became a source of creative tension for modern architects that followed, who integrated aspects of both logics and materials in buildings, expanding the category boundary. Plural logics and category expansion resulted in multiple conflicting exemplars within "modern architecture" and enabled its adaptation to changing social forces and architectural interpretations for over 70 years.

In Theories and History of Architecture (1968) and in Project and Utopia (1973), the Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri identifies two cuts that establish modernity: 1st Brunelleschi's work in Florence in the 15th century. 2nd In architecture in the Age of Enlightenment and more particularly in the engravings of the Carceri of Piranesi, in which he agrees with Scully's interpretation. Tafuri's Marxist analysis sheds new light on the origins of modernity. Chicago at the end of the 19th century has a value as a testimony to the situation of architecture faced with capitalist urban modernity. Methodologically, however, Tafuri's approach is underpinned by the desire to show the gradual disappearance of architecture as an autonomous instance of intervention in urban space. By privileging the determination of architectural work through economic infrastructures, Tafuri comes to consider architecture as a pure ideological instance whose effectiveness is considerably reduced by the dominant context of new production relationships. Ultimately, it is around the postulate of the erasure of the architectural object in the modern era that a critical study of Tafuri's work can be made: is this trend inevitable? Is architecture condemned to immerse itself in the city in a fragmentary, neutral and reproducible form? What is meant by architecture of the pure sign? Tafuri's Marxist analysis sheds new light on the origins of modernity. Chicago at the end of the 19th century has a value as a testimony to the situation of architecture faced with capitalist urban modernity. Methodologically, however, Tafuri's approach is underpinned by the desire to show the gradual disappearance of architecture as an autonomous instance of intervention in urban space. By privileging the determination of architectural work through economic infrastructures, Tafuri comes to consider architecture as a pure ideological instance whose effectiveness is considerably reduced by the dominant context of new production relationships. Ultimately, it is around the postulate of the erasure of the architectural object in the modern era that a critical study of Tafuri's work can be made: is this trend inevitable? Is architecture condemned to immerse itself in the city in a fragmentary, neutral and reproducible form? What is meant by architecture of the pure sign? Tafuri's Marxist analysis sheds new light on the origins of modernity. Chicago at the end of the 19th century has a value as a testimony to the situation of architecture faced with capitalist urban modernity. Methodologically, however, Tafuri's approach is underpinned by the desire to show the gradual disappearance of architecture as an autonomous instance of intervention in urban space. By privileging the determination of architectural work through economic infrastructures, Tafuri comes to consider architecture as a pure ideological instance whose effectiveness is considerably reduced by the dominant context of new production relationships. Ultimately, it is around the postulate of the erasure of the architectural object in the modern era that a critical study of Tafuri's work can be made: is this trend inevitable? Is architecture condemned to immerse itself in the city in a fragmentary, neutral and reproducible form? What is meant by architecture of the pure sign? Historically, the fascination that America exerted on Europeans from the beginning of the 19th century can be explained by the fact that it is an ideology in itself, embodying the conjunction of the two scenes, that of the future and that of modernity. The current paradox, in the postmodern context, is the American rejection of modernity, as a whole, without an inventory having been made to restore to modernity as the "stage of the future" its archaic American part, which has little to do with European modernity. Thus, revisionist postmodernist historians and architect-theorists of architecture favor eclecticism in restored architecture as a positive value based on attributing commonly recognized meanings to architectural forms. They celebrate the period 1893-1938, which corresponds to the eclipse of modernity in the USA, between the two schools of Chicago, that of Sullivan and that of Mies van der Rohe. Revisionist history not only relativizes the contribution of the Chicago school, but the entire modernist scheme is called into question, starting with the discredit that all modernist historians cast on the Colombian Exhibition of 1893. For Giedion, for example, it appeared to be an aberration of history. According to Stuart Cohen, the architectural neo-classicism that was revived in 1893 was perfectly adapted to the American historical context of the time. In the reactionary rejection of modernity in its entirety by the revisionists, there is an iconoclastic will towards the glories of modernity, like Gropius but especially Mies van der Rohe.In conclusion, the idea of modernity appeared to some historians and theorists as an ideological one.

This idea of the universality of modernity in architecture, as in any other field, had to be put into perspective. For all that, the idea of modernity in architecture in the 19th century must be approached on both sides of the Atlantic, in a dialectical manner and aim to bring to light features of modernity, whether specific or not, rather than a monolithic and dogmatically defined modernity. In order to do this, it was necessary to avoid any teleological and linear vision of the idea of modernity between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 20th century. In this study, it is reasonable to speak of a proto-modernity in architecture and town planning that was born in France at the end of the 18th century, on the eve of the French Revolution and in the wake of the Enlightenment. After 1945, American leadership in the cultural sphere accompanied American hegemony in the economic, political, strategic and other fields. There is a match between the International Style and the triumphant American modernity: the graft has taken hold, inventories have no place as long as there is no questioning of this modernity. The situation changed rapidly and radically with the postmodern context as early as the 1970s. More recently, deconstructivism has emerged in the United States as a movement of refoundation, of questioning the presuppositions of modernity and postmodernity, as a project for resolving the urban chaos resulting from the impasses generated by both modernity and its avatar, postmodernity.

2015

Why reopen Panayotis Tournikiotis’ The Historiography of Modern Architecture? What for? There are two basic reasons for which Tournikiotis’ study is still a useful research tool after 25 years: first, for the historians he covers, it provides the reader with interesting references for further study; and, second, for the study of history and how it is written. In his last chapter, Tournikiotis tries to point out the lessons offered by his discussion on the histories. He emphasizes repeatedly how each history presents modern architecture and how each one tries to design the architecture of the present or even the future. Does this hold true for historiography as well? Is this book, as a discussion on nine different histories, projecting what historiography should be in the future? What is Tournikiotis’ real proposal? The aim of this study is to present how several authors have revisited the history and historiography of modern architecture after Tournikiotis’ dissertation (defended in 1988), especially after its publication in English in 1999. This essay has two main objectives: first, to reconsider the impact of Tournikiotis’ Historiography on further studies of the matter; and, second, to provide a bibliography, as complete as possible. The Historiography of Modern Architecture is a perfect manual for initiating students in the study of the histories of modern architecture. To try to ‘complete’ it, discussing what has been written since, seems like a small addition to what should be considered as a compulsory starting point for every study of architectural historiography.

March of 2011. Regrettably, the original version was too long for inclusion in the journal, and my inexperience at the time led me to shorten it rather than submitting it elsewhere. Given my continued -if rarely explicit-interest on the topic, here is the longer version, which, contrary to the published one, may read better or at least unpack some unintended hermetism. In the first part I attempt a summary of the book based on the author's arguments and terminology. In the Jorge Otero-Pailos, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University has written a history of architectural phenomenology. This is not a history of architecture and phenomenology but of an architectural movement that freely inspired by philosophical phenomenology surreptitiously provoked architectural postmodernism's "turn to history." This movement was not a unitary one but rather a "social assemblage" of authors, institutions, and networks, whose coherence and unity can be "only understood retrospectively." Given its elusive subject, the author employs a novel "polygraphic" (as opposed to monographic) method that aims at discovering and reconstructing its theme from disparate fragments. To give cohesiveness to this fragmentariness, the book is divided into four biographical chapters, each discussing one major "architectural phenomenologist" (Jean Labatut, Charles W. Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton), each providing an independent entry to the larger field of architectural phenomenology.