veredes, arquitectura y divulgación VADo1 Los Inicios | 页面 94

VAD. 01 | Junio 2019 | ISSN 2659-9139 e-ISSN 2659-9198
Figura 1. Jencks´diagram.
History has luckily proven right the rectification of Hitchcock; we would be
speaking of a tedious, monotonous and very sad present otherwise. Al-
though always controversial and very personal, the work of Charles Jenc-
ks and, in particular, his unbounded and almost endless diagram of 1971,
depicts a very fragmented and infinitively varied 21 st century where soft
clouds and bubbles are connected to each other in a very suggestive but
chaotic way. However, a close up look to the document can give us new
clues to track the fate of the International Style in the History of Architec-
ture.
Jencks will place the International Style aligned with the temporal axis of
the 1950s, and the horizontal of idealist. It is of course very subjective
the way in which Jencks grouped names and labels and probably only
he can interpret why the horizontal lines belong to a few tags such as
logical, idealist, self-conscious, intuitive or activist. It could be accepted
to connect the International Style with some kind of idealism through its
European roots of the modern movement, something that nonetheless
other authors like Beatriz Colomina and Alan Colquhoun, that we will see
later, neglect. But for sure, temporally, it is a mistake as the International
Style, both the exhibition and the works showcased in it, happened at
least twenty years before.
There is another subtle nuance about International Style in Jencks’s dia-
gram which is how between 1960 and 1970, a Neo International Style is
presented with larger fonts in a shared space with the names of Mies,
SOM or Belluschi, among others, and the labels Bureaucratic and Pragma-
tic. Jencks is explicitly stating how the International Style became the lan-
guage of architecture for institutions and corporations proving by that the
success of the style in America and, in a way, how the exhibition achieved
its greater goals of the accommodation of the European modern move-
ment to the American taste.
94
FRANCISCO JAVIER CASAS COBO. The Survival of the International Style in the History of Architecture. pp. 90-101