veredes, arquitectura y divulgación VADo1 Los Inicios | Page 95

ISSN 2659-9139 e-ISSN 2659-9198 | Junio 2019 | 01.VAD
The International Style in the eighties:
Frampton and Curtis
The disambiguation of the International Style and its dissolution in the
stream of modern architecture continues in the first critical history of mo-
dern architecture (1980) the one by Kenneth Frampton, who devotes one
entire chapter to “The International Style: theme and variations, 1925-
1965”. Interestingly, the third part of the book covers from 1925 to 1991,
connecting therefore the beginning of the chapter for International Style
with the present (by the time he published that edition in particular). The
reason why he starts in 1925 is very revealing and it is no other than at
that time, Rudolf Schindler, censorious with the exhibition, built the Beach
House for Dr. Lovell between 1925 and 1926. Needless to say that Schind-
ler was a former partner of Richard Neutra, who built the House in Griffith
Park in Los Angeles for the same client, Dr. Lovell, in 1927. 6
Once again, Frampton, like other authors, is critic with the International
Style which he tags as a fortunate expression related to a cubist trend in
architecture with great problems to be adapted to the different cultural
and climatic contexts, not to mention the lack of ideals and the construc-
tive problems.
6 This building is dated in 1929 in the
catalogue of the MoMA exhibition.
All of it is true but it is no less truth that how Frampton arranges the book
time-wise lead us to think that he is supporting the idea of an Internatio-
nal Style that, like it or not, is still part of the modern architecture as it
was defined, or has dissolved into it, drawing some very undefined and
blurred limits that now maybe are difficult to accept after all the criticism.
This parallelism and confusion between the works of the exhibition tag-
ged International Style and modern architecture can be also traced in Wi-
lliam Curtis’ book 7 Modern architecture since 1900 (1982) where the author
tackles the challenging task of answering the question of what modern
architecture is and, to achieve that, he manages to review the most im-
portant histories of architecture in the introduction to his own one.
Contrarily to other authors such as Alan Colquhoun where the relevance
of the International Style is almost despicable, very soon the term appears
in this introduction to his, on the other hand, more ambitious than Col-
quhoun’s in size, history of modern architecture. Even more, Curtis goes
to Hitchcock and Johnson’s 1932 book to quote how, for the first one,
Hitchcock
7 Curtis, William, Modern architec-
ture since 1900 (London: Phaidon,
1982), 11-17.
“was preoccupied with describing the visual features of the new ar-
chitecture”
and
“suggested in The International Style that modern architecture syn-
thesized classical qualities of proportion with Gothic attitudes to
structure” 8 ,
neglecting one more time the idea of a new style completely detached
from history, a goal that, anyway, not all the modern architects were pur-
suing whatsoever.
FRANCISCO JAVIER CASAS COBO. The Survival of the International Style in the History of Architecture. pp. 90-101
8 Ibid, 14.
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