veredes, arquitectura y divulgación VADo1 Los Inicios | Page 91

ISSN 2659-9139 e-ISSN 2659-9198 | Junio 2019 | 01.VAD
It is undeniable that even nowadays, ninety years after the exhibition hos-
ted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932 with the name “The
International Style: architecture since 1922”, architects and even more
students around the world tend to identify the International Style with
a kind of architecture which still is particularly modern and part of our
contemporariness.
The confusion is both in terms of the materialization but also from a his-
toriographical point of view and this paper aims to find the reasons why
this, for some, not very fortunate label, has survived for almost one cen-
tury going through all kind of reviews and people revisiting the event and
the architecture linked to the momentum which, again, lasted for so long.
Even more, there is a clear connection between International Style and
Modern Movement, and therefore with modernism in architecture and
modernity to a larger extent, which raises the question of its relevancy
today as part of the uncompleted project of the modernity as Jürgen Ha-
bermas posed.
The paper will also try to demonstrate the relevancy of the discussion
after such a long time and how contemporary authors are still discussing
the impact and repercussion of the International Style in our recent His-
tory of Modern Architecture.
International Style:
originally an exhibition, a catalogue and a book
To achieve all the previous objectives, we should have a look to the exhi-
bition itself, which took place in 1932 and was featured as an exposition
plus a book plus a catalogue, being the three formats all different in con-
tent. The aim of the exhibition was to introduce the architecture of the
European modern movement in America, as part of a universal phenome-
non whose curators, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and the
MoMA itself as the hosting institution, tried to present to the American
public as a worldwide movement of architecture with all the advantages
of modernity, the connections with technology and lack of bonds with the
history and the past styles, hence, as the architecture of the future for all
countries in the world.
Probably, the biggest mistake is embedded in the title itself. Presenting a
new architecture uprooted in the past in two words, being one of them
“style”, was not a lucky decision. Still, the curators had a bigger challenge
from the very beginning which was how to wrap a predominantly Euro-
pean architecture in a nice package which was really International and,
therefore, balanced with American architects of that time. The challenge
was not easy to achieve and the final success of the exhibition relied so-
mehow in that inclusion which was handled by the curators with some
difficulties. That was clear for the Board of the museum and consequently
the members of the board imposed a representation of American archi-
tects equal to the European one.
In order to disclose some aspects about the setting of the exhibition, a
special issue of Progressive Architecture published in 1982 is more than
revealing. Helen Searing, Richard Guy Wilson and Robert A. Stern reflect
on the exhibition in its 50 years anniversary, which is meaningful to prove
the relevancy of the exhibition some five decades after.
FRANCISCO JAVIER CASAS COBO. The Survival of the International Style in the History of Architecture. pp. 90-101
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