Contenido

La exposición Modern Architecture: International Exhibition se desarrolló del 9 de febrero al 23 de marzo de 1932, en el Museo de Arte Moderno (MoMA), en el Edificio Heckscher "Crown Building (Manhattan)") en la Quinta Avenida y la Calle 56 de Nueva York.[18]​ Más allá de un vestíbulo y una oficina, la exposición se dividió en seis salas: la sección «Arquitectos modernos» comenzó en la sala de entrada, presentando un modelo del desarrollo de viviendas de la calle Chrystie-Forsyth de William Lescaze en Nueva York. Desde allí, los visitantes se trasladaron a la céntrica Sala A, que presenta un modelo de un desarrollo de viviendas de media altura para Evanston "Evanston (Illinois)"), Illinois, realizado por los hermanos arquitectos de Chicago Monroe Bengt Bowman") e Irving Bowman"),[19]​ así como un modelo y fotografías de Walter Gropius. Edificio Bauhaus en Dessau. En el espacio de exposición más grande, la Sala C, se encontraban obras de Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud y Frank Lloyd Wright (incluido un proyecto para una casa en Mesa en Denver, 1932). La Sala B era una sección titulada «Vivienda», que presentaba «la necesidad de un nuevo entorno doméstico», tal como la había identificado el historiador y crítico Lewis Mumford. En la Sala D había obras de Raymond Hood (incluida «Apartment Tower in the Country» y el edificio McGraw-Hill) y Richard Neutra. En la Sala E había una sección titulada «El alcance de la arquitectura moderna», agregada en el último minuto,[20]​ que incluía las obras de treinta y siete arquitectos modernos de quince países que se decía que estaban influenciados por las obras de los europeos de la década de 1920. Entre estas obras se mostró el edificio de oficinas del periódico Turun Sanomat de Alvar Aalto en Turku, Finlandia.

Después de una exposición de seis semanas en la ciudad de Nueva York, la exposición realizó una gira por los EE. UU. (la primera «exposición itinerante» de arquitectura en los EE. UU.) durante seis años.[21]​.

Curators

MoMA director Alfred H. Barr hired architectural historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson[20] to curate the museum's first architectural exhibition. The three toured Europe together in 1929. The three also discussed Hitchcock's book on modern art. In December 1930 the first written proposal for an exhibition of the "new architecture" was drawn up, but the first draft of the book was not complete until some months later.

Publications

The 1932 exhibition gave rise to two publications by Hitchcock and Johnson:

Prior to the 1932 exhibition and book, Hitchcock had addressed the themes of modern architecture in his 1929 book Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration.

According to Terence Riley&action=edit&redlink=1 "Terence Riley (curator) (not yet written)"): "Ironically, the (exhibition) catalog and, to some extent, the book The International Style, published at the same time as the exhibition, have supplanted the actual historical event."[24]​.

Definition

The Hitchcock and Johnson exhibition catalog identified three principles of style: volume of space (as opposed to mass and solidity), regularity, and flexibility.[22]

Hitchcock and Johnson identified three principles: the expression of volume rather than mass, the emphasis on balance rather than preconceived symmetry, and the expulsion of applied ornament.

Common characteristics of the International Style include: a radical simplification of form, the rejection of ornament, and the adoption of glass, steel, and concrete as preferred materials. Furthermore, the transparency of buildings, construction (called honest expression of structure) and the acceptance of industrialized mass production techniques contributed to the design philosophy of the International Style. Finally, the international architect used machine aesthetics and logical design decisions that led to supporting the building's function to create buildings that went beyond historicism. The ideals of the style are commonly summarized in three mottos: "ornament is a crime, truth for materials"), form follows function; and Le Corbusier's description: "A house is a machine for living."[25][26]​.

Notable omissions

The exhibition excluded other contemporary styles that explored the limits of architecture at the time, including: art deco; German Expressionism, for example the works of Hermann Finsterlin; and the organicist movement, popularized in the work of Antoni Gaudí. As a result of the 1932 exhibition, the principles of the International Style were endorsed, while other styles were classified as less significant.

In 1922, the competition for Eliel Saarinen's Tribune Tower and its famous second place gave a taste of what was to come, although Hitchcock and Johnson would not have accepted these works as representative of the "international style." Similarly, Johnson, writing about Joseph Urban's recently completed New School of Social Research in New York, stated: "In the New School we have an anomaly in a building which is supposed to have an architectural style based on the development of the plan from the function and façade of the plan but which is formally and pretentiously conceived as a Renaissance palace. Urban's admiration for the New Style is more complete than his understanding.

The work of Californian architect Rudolph Schindler was not part of the exhibition, although Schindler had begged Hitchcock and Johnson to be included.[27] Then, "for more than 20 years, Schindler had intermittently launched a series of spirited and cantankerous exchanges with the museum."[28]

The gradual rise of the Nazi regime in Weimar Germany in the 1930s and the Nazis' rejection of modern architecture meant that an entire generation of avant-garde architects, many of them Jewish, were forced to leave continental Europe. Some, like Mendelsohn, found refuge in England, while a considerable number of Jewish architects headed to Palestine and others to the United States. However, American anti-communist policy after the war and Philip Johnson's influential rejection of functionalism "Functionalism (architecture)") have tended to mask the fact that many of the important architects, including those who contributed to the original Weissenhof project, fled to the Soviet Union. This group also tended to be much more concerned with functionalism and its social agenda. Bruno Taut, Mart Stam, the second director of the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, Ernst May and other important figures of the International Style went to the Soviet Union in 1930 to undertake enormous, ambitious and idealistic urban planning projects, building entire cities from scratch. In 1936, when Stalin ordered them to leave the country, many of these architects became stateless and sought refuge elsewhere; for example, Ernst May moved to Kenya[29]​.

The White City of Tel Aviv is a collection of more than 4,000 buildings built in the International style in the 1930s. Many Jewish architects who studied at the German Bauhaus school designed important buildings here. A large proportion of the buildings built in the International style can be found in the area planned by Patrick Geddes, north of the main historic commercial center of Tel Aviv. World Heritage Site, describing the city as "a synthesis of outstanding importance of the various trends of the Modern Movement in architecture and urbanism of the early 20th century."[32] In 1996, the White City of Tel Aviv was listed as an endangered site by the World Monuments Fund.[33]

The residential area of Södra Ängby") in western Stockholm, Sweden, combined an international or functionalist style "Functionalism (architecture)") with garden city ideals. With over 500 buildings, most of them designed by Edvin Engström, it remains the largest coherent functionalist or "international style" "Villa (residence)") villa area in Sweden and possibly the world, and is still well preserved over half a century after its construction in 1933. 40 and protected as national cultural heritage").

Zlín is a city in the Czech Republic that was completely rebuilt in the 1930s according to the principles of functionalism "Functionalism (architecture)"). At that time the city was the headquarters of the Bata Shoes company "Bata (company)") and Tomáš Bata began a complex reconstruction of the city inspired by functionalism and the garden city movement. The Tomas Bata Memorial") is the most valuable monument of functionalism in the Zlín region. It is a modern paraphrase of the constructions of the High Gothic period: the support system and stained glass windows and the skeleton made of reinforced concrete and glass.

With the rise of Nazism, several key European modern architects fled to the United States. When Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer fled Germany, they both arrived at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in an excellent position to extend their influence and promote the Bauhaus as the primary source of architectural modernism. When Mies fled in 1938, he first fled to England, but upon emigrating to the United States he went to Chicago, founded the Second Chicago School at the IIT, and solidified his reputation as a prototype of the modern architect.

After World War II, the International Style matured; Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum "HOK (architecture firm)") (later renamed HOK "HOK (architecture firm)") and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) refined the corporate practice and it became the dominant approach for decades in the United States and Canada. Beginning with the initial technical and formal inventions of 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, its most famous examples include the United Nations headquarters, the Lever House, the Seagram Building in New York City, and the United States Air Force Academy campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as well as the Toronto-Dominion Center in Toronto. More examples can be found in mid-century institutional buildings throughout North America and "corporate architecture" spread from there, especially to Europe.

In Canada, this period coincided with a major construction boom and few restrictions on massive construction projects. International style skyscrapers came to dominate many of Canada's major cities, especially Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton (Ontario), and Toronto. While these glass boxes were at first unique and interesting, the idea soon caught on to the point of becoming ubiquitous. A typical example is the development of the so-called Place de Ville"), a conglomerate of three glass skyscrapers in downtown Ottawa, where the plans of real estate developer Robert Campeau") of the mid-1960s and early 1970s were developed, in the words of historian Robert W. Collier, "blunt and abrasive, not well liked at City Hall", did not take into account existing city plans, "built with contempt for the city existing and by the city's responsibilities in the key areas of transportation and land use[34] Architects tried to give new twists to this type of towers, such as that of Toronto City Hall by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. By the late 1970s a backlash against modernism was occurring: leading anti-modernists such as Jane Jacobs and George Baird were partly based in Toronto.

The typical international style skyscraper or "corporate architecture" usually consists of the following:.

In 2000, UNESCO proclaimed the University City of Caracas, in Caracas, Venezuela, as a World Heritage Site, describing it as "a masterpiece of urban planning, architecture and modern art, created by the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and a group of distinguished avant-garde artists."

In June 2007, UNESCO proclaimed the University City "University City (National Autonomous University of Mexico)") of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City, a World Heritage Site for its relevance and contribution to the international style movement. It was designed in the late 1940s and built in the mid-1950s based on a master plan created by architect Enrique del Moral. His original idea was enriched by other students, professors and various professionals from various disciplines. The university is home to murals by Diego Rivera, Juan O'Gorman and others. The university also has the Olympic Stadium (1968). In his early years of practice, Pritzker Prize winner and Mexican architect Luis Barragán designed buildings in the International style. But then it evolved into a more traditional local architecture. Other notable Mexican architects of the International Style or modern era are Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Augusto H. Álvarez, Mario Pani, Federico Mariscal, Vladimir Kaspé, Enrique del Moral, Juan Sordo Madaleno, Max Cetto, among many others.

In Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer proposed a more organic and sensual international style.[35] He designed the political landmarks (seat of the three state powers) of the new and planned capital Brasilia. The city's master plan was proposed by Lúcio Costa.

In 1930, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: "Human homes should not be like boxes, burning in the sun, nor should we outrage the Machine by trying to make homes too complementary to the Machinery."[36]

In Elizabeth Gordon's 1953 essay, "The Threat to the Next America," she criticized the style as impractical, citing many cases in which "glass houses" are too hot in summer and too cold in winter, empty, take away private space, lack beauty, and are generally unlivable. Additionally, she accused proponents of the style of robbing people of their sense of beauty and therefore covertly promoting a society totalitarian.[37]​.

In 1966, architect Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,[38] essentially a book-length critique of the International Style. Architectural historian Vincent Scully considered Venturi's book "probably the most important writing on the creation of architecture since Le Corbusier's *Towards an Architecture."[39]

American author Tom Wolfe wrote a book-length review, From the Bauhaus to Our Home), portraying the style as elitist.

It has been said that one of the supposed strengths of the International Style is that design solutions were indifferent to location, site and climate; the solutions were supposed to be universally applicable; the style made no reference to local history or the national vernacular. This was soon identified as one of the main weaknesses of the style.[40]​.

In 2006, Hugh Pearman), the British architecture critic for The Times, observed that those who use this style today are simply "another species of revivalists", highlighting the irony.[41]​ The negative reaction to internationalist modernism has been linked to public antipathy towards general development.[42][43]​.

In the preface to the fourth edition of his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History (2007), Kenneth Frampton argued that there had been a "worrying Eurocentric bias" in histories of modern architecture. This "Eurocentrism" included the United States.[44]​.

Contenido

La exposición Modern Architecture: International Exhibition se desarrolló del 9 de febrero al 23 de marzo de 1932, en el Museo de Arte Moderno (MoMA), en el Edificio Heckscher "Crown Building (Manhattan)") en la Quinta Avenida y la Calle 56 de Nueva York.[18]​ Más allá de un vestíbulo y una oficina, la exposición se dividió en seis salas: la sección «Arquitectos modernos» comenzó en la sala de entrada, presentando un modelo del desarrollo de viviendas de la calle Chrystie-Forsyth de William Lescaze en Nueva York. Desde allí, los visitantes se trasladaron a la céntrica Sala A, que presenta un modelo de un desarrollo de viviendas de media altura para Evanston "Evanston (Illinois)"), Illinois, realizado por los hermanos arquitectos de Chicago Monroe Bengt Bowman") e Irving Bowman"),[19]​ así como un modelo y fotografías de Walter Gropius. Edificio Bauhaus en Dessau. En el espacio de exposición más grande, la Sala C, se encontraban obras de Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud y Frank Lloyd Wright (incluido un proyecto para una casa en Mesa en Denver, 1932). La Sala B era una sección titulada «Vivienda», que presentaba «la necesidad de un nuevo entorno doméstico», tal como la había identificado el historiador y crítico Lewis Mumford. En la Sala D había obras de Raymond Hood (incluida «Apartment Tower in the Country» y el edificio McGraw-Hill) y Richard Neutra. En la Sala E había una sección titulada «El alcance de la arquitectura moderna», agregada en el último minuto,[20]​ que incluía las obras de treinta y siete arquitectos modernos de quince países que se decía que estaban influenciados por las obras de los europeos de la década de 1920. Entre estas obras se mostró el edificio de oficinas del periódico Turun Sanomat de Alvar Aalto en Turku, Finlandia.

Después de una exposición de seis semanas en la ciudad de Nueva York, la exposición realizó una gira por los EE. UU. (la primera «exposición itinerante» de arquitectura en los EE. UU.) durante seis años.[21]​.

Curators

MoMA director Alfred H. Barr hired architectural historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson[20] to curate the museum's first architectural exhibition. The three toured Europe together in 1929. The three also discussed Hitchcock's book on modern art. In December 1930 the first written proposal for an exhibition of the "new architecture" was drawn up, but the first draft of the book was not complete until some months later.

Publications

The 1932 exhibition gave rise to two publications by Hitchcock and Johnson:

Prior to the 1932 exhibition and book, Hitchcock had addressed the themes of modern architecture in his 1929 book Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration.

According to Terence Riley&action=edit&redlink=1 "Terence Riley (curator) (not yet written)"): "Ironically, the (exhibition) catalog and, to some extent, the book The International Style, published at the same time as the exhibition, have supplanted the actual historical event."[24]​.

Definition

The Hitchcock and Johnson exhibition catalog identified three principles of style: volume of space (as opposed to mass and solidity), regularity, and flexibility.[22]

Hitchcock and Johnson identified three principles: the expression of volume rather than mass, the emphasis on balance rather than preconceived symmetry, and the expulsion of applied ornament.

Common characteristics of the International Style include: a radical simplification of form, the rejection of ornament, and the adoption of glass, steel, and concrete as preferred materials. Furthermore, the transparency of buildings, construction (called honest expression of structure) and the acceptance of industrialized mass production techniques contributed to the design philosophy of the International Style. Finally, the international architect used machine aesthetics and logical design decisions that led to supporting the building's function to create buildings that went beyond historicism. The ideals of the style are commonly summarized in three mottos: "ornament is a crime, truth for materials"), form follows function; and Le Corbusier's description: "A house is a machine for living."[25][26]​.

Notable omissions

The exhibition excluded other contemporary styles that explored the limits of architecture at the time, including: art deco; German Expressionism, for example the works of Hermann Finsterlin; and the organicist movement, popularized in the work of Antoni Gaudí. As a result of the 1932 exhibition, the principles of the International Style were endorsed, while other styles were classified as less significant.

In 1922, the competition for Eliel Saarinen's Tribune Tower and its famous second place gave a taste of what was to come, although Hitchcock and Johnson would not have accepted these works as representative of the "international style." Similarly, Johnson, writing about Joseph Urban's recently completed New School of Social Research in New York, stated: "In the New School we have an anomaly in a building which is supposed to have an architectural style based on the development of the plan from the function and façade of the plan but which is formally and pretentiously conceived as a Renaissance palace. Urban's admiration for the New Style is more complete than his understanding.

The work of Californian architect Rudolph Schindler was not part of the exhibition, although Schindler had begged Hitchcock and Johnson to be included.[27] Then, "for more than 20 years, Schindler had intermittently launched a series of spirited and cantankerous exchanges with the museum."[28]

The gradual rise of the Nazi regime in Weimar Germany in the 1930s and the Nazis' rejection of modern architecture meant that an entire generation of avant-garde architects, many of them Jewish, were forced to leave continental Europe. Some, like Mendelsohn, found refuge in England, while a considerable number of Jewish architects headed to Palestine and others to the United States. However, American anti-communist policy after the war and Philip Johnson's influential rejection of functionalism "Functionalism (architecture)") have tended to mask the fact that many of the important architects, including those who contributed to the original Weissenhof project, fled to the Soviet Union. This group also tended to be much more concerned with functionalism and its social agenda. Bruno Taut, Mart Stam, the second director of the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, Ernst May and other important figures of the International Style went to the Soviet Union in 1930 to undertake enormous, ambitious and idealistic urban planning projects, building entire cities from scratch. In 1936, when Stalin ordered them to leave the country, many of these architects became stateless and sought refuge elsewhere; for example, Ernst May moved to Kenya[29]​.

The White City of Tel Aviv is a collection of more than 4,000 buildings built in the International style in the 1930s. Many Jewish architects who studied at the German Bauhaus school designed important buildings here. A large proportion of the buildings built in the International style can be found in the area planned by Patrick Geddes, north of the main historic commercial center of Tel Aviv. World Heritage Site, describing the city as "a synthesis of outstanding importance of the various trends of the Modern Movement in architecture and urbanism of the early 20th century."[32] In 1996, the White City of Tel Aviv was listed as an endangered site by the World Monuments Fund.[33]

The residential area of Södra Ängby") in western Stockholm, Sweden, combined an international or functionalist style "Functionalism (architecture)") with garden city ideals. With over 500 buildings, most of them designed by Edvin Engström, it remains the largest coherent functionalist or "international style" "Villa (residence)") villa area in Sweden and possibly the world, and is still well preserved over half a century after its construction in 1933. 40 and protected as national cultural heritage").

Zlín is a city in the Czech Republic that was completely rebuilt in the 1930s according to the principles of functionalism "Functionalism (architecture)"). At that time the city was the headquarters of the Bata Shoes company "Bata (company)") and Tomáš Bata began a complex reconstruction of the city inspired by functionalism and the garden city movement. The Tomas Bata Memorial") is the most valuable monument of functionalism in the Zlín region. It is a modern paraphrase of the constructions of the High Gothic period: the support system and stained glass windows and the skeleton made of reinforced concrete and glass.

With the rise of Nazism, several key European modern architects fled to the United States. When Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer fled Germany, they both arrived at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in an excellent position to extend their influence and promote the Bauhaus as the primary source of architectural modernism. When Mies fled in 1938, he first fled to England, but upon emigrating to the United States he went to Chicago, founded the Second Chicago School at the IIT, and solidified his reputation as a prototype of the modern architect.

After World War II, the International Style matured; Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum "HOK (architecture firm)") (later renamed HOK "HOK (architecture firm)") and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) refined the corporate practice and it became the dominant approach for decades in the United States and Canada. Beginning with the initial technical and formal inventions of 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, its most famous examples include the United Nations headquarters, the Lever House, the Seagram Building in New York City, and the United States Air Force Academy campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as well as the Toronto-Dominion Center in Toronto. More examples can be found in mid-century institutional buildings throughout North America and "corporate architecture" spread from there, especially to Europe.

In Canada, this period coincided with a major construction boom and few restrictions on massive construction projects. International style skyscrapers came to dominate many of Canada's major cities, especially Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton (Ontario), and Toronto. While these glass boxes were at first unique and interesting, the idea soon caught on to the point of becoming ubiquitous. A typical example is the development of the so-called Place de Ville"), a conglomerate of three glass skyscrapers in downtown Ottawa, where the plans of real estate developer Robert Campeau") of the mid-1960s and early 1970s were developed, in the words of historian Robert W. Collier, "blunt and abrasive, not well liked at City Hall", did not take into account existing city plans, "built with contempt for the city existing and by the city's responsibilities in the key areas of transportation and land use[34] Architects tried to give new twists to this type of towers, such as that of Toronto City Hall by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. By the late 1970s a backlash against modernism was occurring: leading anti-modernists such as Jane Jacobs and George Baird were partly based in Toronto.

The typical international style skyscraper or "corporate architecture" usually consists of the following:.

In 2000, UNESCO proclaimed the University City of Caracas, in Caracas, Venezuela, as a World Heritage Site, describing it as "a masterpiece of urban planning, architecture and modern art, created by the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and a group of distinguished avant-garde artists."

In June 2007, UNESCO proclaimed the University City "University City (National Autonomous University of Mexico)") of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City, a World Heritage Site for its relevance and contribution to the international style movement. It was designed in the late 1940s and built in the mid-1950s based on a master plan created by architect Enrique del Moral. His original idea was enriched by other students, professors and various professionals from various disciplines. The university is home to murals by Diego Rivera, Juan O'Gorman and others. The university also has the Olympic Stadium (1968). In his early years of practice, Pritzker Prize winner and Mexican architect Luis Barragán designed buildings in the International style. But then it evolved into a more traditional local architecture. Other notable Mexican architects of the International Style or modern era are Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Augusto H. Álvarez, Mario Pani, Federico Mariscal, Vladimir Kaspé, Enrique del Moral, Juan Sordo Madaleno, Max Cetto, among many others.

In Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer proposed a more organic and sensual international style.[35] He designed the political landmarks (seat of the three state powers) of the new and planned capital Brasilia. The city's master plan was proposed by Lúcio Costa.

In 1930, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: "Human homes should not be like boxes, burning in the sun, nor should we outrage the Machine by trying to make homes too complementary to the Machinery."[36]

In Elizabeth Gordon's 1953 essay, "The Threat to the Next America," she criticized the style as impractical, citing many cases in which "glass houses" are too hot in summer and too cold in winter, empty, take away private space, lack beauty, and are generally unlivable. Additionally, she accused proponents of the style of robbing people of their sense of beauty and therefore covertly promoting a society totalitarian.[37]​.

In 1966, architect Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,[38] essentially a book-length critique of the International Style. Architectural historian Vincent Scully considered Venturi's book "probably the most important writing on the creation of architecture since Le Corbusier's *Towards an Architecture."[39]

American author Tom Wolfe wrote a book-length review, From the Bauhaus to Our Home), portraying the style as elitist.

It has been said that one of the supposed strengths of the International Style is that design solutions were indifferent to location, site and climate; the solutions were supposed to be universally applicable; the style made no reference to local history or the national vernacular. This was soon identified as one of the main weaknesses of the style.[40]​.

In 2006, Hugh Pearman), the British architecture critic for The Times, observed that those who use this style today are simply "another species of revivalists", highlighting the irony.[41]​ The negative reaction to internationalist modernism has been linked to public antipathy towards general development.[42][43]​.

In the preface to the fourth edition of his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History (2007), Kenneth Frampton argued that there had been a "worrying Eurocentric bias" in histories of modern architecture. This "Eurocentrism" included the United States.[44]​.