Fancy this: A certain young fellow growing up in Cleveland around World War I is the son of a wealthy lawyer and thus has things rather easy. For instance, he travels to school escorted by a governess in a limousine driven by a uniformed chauffeur.
At 18, the fellow receives a gift of Alcoa stock from his father and goes off to Harvard to study philosophy. As the once risky stock splits endlessly, the chap indulges himself in European travel and discovers the pleasures of being able to sustain a social and intellectual life that fits his personality perfectly.
By 1932, the still-young fellow named Philip Johnson has become enamored of architecture and so puts on a design exhibition at New York`s Museum of Modern Art. The show is called ”Modern Architecture-International
Exhibition.” It is easily the most important American design show of the 20th Century and has much to do with what cities of the world will look like by 1992.
If all this seems a bit labyrinthine-well, that is the nature of history, and architectural history is no exception.
But hold on, because the best guide anyone ever had for negotiating this maze has just become available thanks to Columbia University in New York. There, through May 2, is a new show re-creating the 1932 exhibition. Whether or not you are able to see it there or at one of the other venues to be announced, you absolutely must read the accompanying 224-page catalog, ”The International Style: Exhibition 15 and The Museum of Modern Art” by Terence Riley, (Rizzoli, $29.95), available at Rizzoli International and other architecture book stores.
The new show and catalog basically deal with three things:
– The way in which Johnson launched himself toward architectural fame by using his money, charm, chutzpah, social connections and what people used to call a mind like a steel trap.
– How the 1932 show under Johnson`s hand brought into order an array of architects who would never again experience quite the same academic or curatorial juxtaposition.
– How the exhibition literally led to the naming of the International Style, the less-is-more design method brought to perfection and turned into a powerful force by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his eventual legion of followers rooted in Chicago.
The present show at Columbia University was curated by Riley while he was director of the architectural galleries there and before he became MOMA`s architecture curator last October. Riley also wrote a 95-page essay for the catalog.
For the exhibition, Riley and his colleagues re-created the original show. It was difficult because most of the models had long been lost, as had plans and drawings of the old MOMA galleries. No record of the exhibition`s genesis had been kept, and no one had ever written a decent account of it.
Into this vacuum leaped Riley, who had access to MOMA`s archives of documents and photographs and the personal papers of Philip Johnson. (At age 85, Johnson is semi-retired, but still considered the dean of American architecture). Others whose help is acknowledged by Riley include Chicago scholar-author Franz Schulze, who is completing a definitive biography of Johnson.
Under Riley`s supervision, 11 models originally commissioned for the 1932 show were reconstructed by Columbia architecture students. Some 100 exhibit photographs and drawings showing the work of dozens of architects were reprinted from MOMA`s archival negatives.
The models represent work by Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond M. Hood, Monroe and Irving Bowman, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Richard J. Neutra, Howe & Lescaze, J.J.P. Oud and Otto Haesler. Many of them show buildings proposed but never built. Others include such renowned as Le Corbusier`s Villa Savoye in France and Mies` Tugendhat House in Czechoslovakia.
It is in some respects a disparate group rather oddly assembled, although that matches the rather mad way Johnson put it together.
In the summer of 1930, having graduated cum laude from Harvard, Johnson sailed for Europe. He took his Cord convertible with him, a flourish that matched a sense of class he still carries.
In Paris, Johnson met American art historian and friend Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The two of them went on a grand architectural sightseeing tour that covered new works in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, England and Czechoslovakia.
At this point, Johnson`s credentials sprang mostly from his Alcoa stock, an apartment in Manhattan and membership on MOMA`s Junior Advisory Committee. Yet his brilliance and a lust to be influential (which he has never lost)
served him well.
As Riley points out in his esssay, by the fall of 1930 Johnson and Hitchcock had seen more of the new architecture than any of their
contemporaries. Despite their youth, the two were in a unique position among American architectural critics.
The buildings they saw by Mies, Corbusier and others were lean, crisp, thin-planed structures of a sort that suddenly seemed to be springing up all over Europe as well as to a lesser degree in America. This was the
”International Style,” as Johnson and Hitchcock named it.
Under that title (which the two used at their MOMA show and as a book title), the style became almost a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The new stylistic cutting edge observed by Johnson and Hitchcock during the dead years of the Depression became dominant in the post-World War II boom period.
The MOMA show of 1932 was in effect an intellectual matrix even for architects who never saw it. Examine it and you find underpinnings of coincidence, fashion, and New York`s cultural clout as personified by Johnson. Riley fleshes out this scenario, and along the way comes up with nuggets I guarantee you have never seen in print before.
Philip Johnson`s father played an important role in the 1932 show, for example. The elder Johnson`s Alcoa connections and interest in new uses for aluminum apparently drew him toward design even before his son embraced it. In 1931, Homer Johnson got architect Richard Neutra to design an all-aluminum bus for mass production in Cleveland. He commissioned another firm to design a prototype filling station for the Standard Oil Co.
Homer Johnson served on the MOMA committee that oversaw the 1932 show curated by his son, and helped raise money for it. Riley speculates that his interest may have been parental as well as cultural, for he was skeptical about his son`s grasp of architecture. The elder Johnson died in 1960 at the age of 97.
Of architects represented in the show, perhaps none seem as obscure today as Monroe and Irving Bowman, architect-brothers who practiced together in Chicago until 1946, when Irving moved to Charleston, W. Va.
The Bowmans graduated from college just in time for the Depression, and much of their best work never got beyond the proposal stage. Steel-framed highrise apartments with sometimes undulating facades were their specialty. Images of these towers captured Johnson`s fancy.
In the 1932 exhibit catalog, MOMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. wrote that the Bowmans` ”concern with structural probity and frankness has led them very naturally to work in the International Style.” He predicted that the brothers` facility with steel construction might revolutionize certain phases of architecture within a few years.
That never happened, but the impressive unbuilt work of the Bowmans was rediscovered in 1976 when Stanley Tigerman and Stuart E. Cohen curated a Chicago show demonstrating the neglected pluralistic richness of the city`s design history.
Frank Lloyd Wright was represented in the 1932 exhibit, but almost as an afterthought. Johnson intended to have Lewis Mumford anchor a section of the show on housing, but the great critic-scholar played almost no part in it. Designers considered by Johnson but dropped included Norman Bel Geddes, whose later work included buildings at the 1933 and 1939 world`s fairs in Chicago and New York.
The 1932 show got some peculiar notices in the press, Riley observes. The Hartford Courant reported it as ”an exhibition of advanced housing models made of little pieces of metal, glass and wood.” Another writer made reference to ”Miss van der Rohe, famous German draftsman.”
After ladling out all of this rich architectural stew, Riley closes by analyzing the original show with the benefit of 1992 hindsight. He suggests that others re-evaluating the International Style of the post-World War II years pay attention to such influences as speculative real estate development, the ubiquity of the automobile and the corporate character of clients and architects.
To this, one might add the suggestion of employing a global perspective. Look-alike buildings by hack architects have in the last few decades made big city skylines practically indistinguishable whether one is in New York, Chicago, Houston, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo or Seoul.
