veredes, arquitectura y divulgación VADo1 Los Inicios | Página 96

VAD. 01 | Junio 2019 | ISSN 2659-9139 e-ISSN 2659-9198
Curtis will also agree with the rectification of Hitchcock about the future
of modern architecture and, in particular, he writes that “no single tag
such as the “International Style” will do justice to the range and depth
of modern architecture produced between the wars” 9 meaning that of
course the limited expectations of an univocal modern architecture style
were overcome in the period in between wars, not to mention in the fo-
llowing decades. For Curtis, a less dogmatic view of previous approaches
of modernity to the machinist and new versions of the primitive and the
vernacular did the job.
9 Ibid, 16.
10 Ibid, 257-273.
The book also offers a complete chapter 10 on the “the international Style,
the individual talent ant the myth of functionalism” where he discusses
extensively the impact of the so called International Style after admitting
that there were so many works with so many features in common that the
book and the exhibition immediately jumped in to institutionalize a real
worldwide production and a feeling which was in the air but, in hands of
Hitchcock and Johnson, achieved a historical peak and a greater meaning.
Nonetheless, Curtis reflected the criticism and the difficulties they faced
through giving voice to others such as Frank Lloyd Wright and his challen-
ging inclusion, that we outlined and discussed briefly earlier, and others
like Rudolf Schindler, who wrote a letter to Philip Johnson before the ope-
ning of the exposition, complaining about the lack of creative architectu-
re in pursuit of concentrating all attempts around the narrowness of the
International Style.
The International Style in the contemporariness
11 Montaner i Martorell, Josep Maria.
Después del movimiento moderno:
arquitectura de la segunda mitad
del siglo XX (Barcelona: Gustavo
Gili, Barcelona, 1999), 7.
12 Ockman, Joan, Architecture Culture
1943-68. A Documentary Anthology
(New York: Columbia Books of
Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993), 137.
13 The article “The International Style
Twenty Years Later” was published
in February 1951 in Architectural
Record. It is no mistake the title (20
years later) as Henry-Russell Hit-
chcock explains in the article that
the book was prepared by 1931 but
published in 1932 at the same time
as the exhibition at MoMA.
96
Josep María Montaner is one of the most clarifying authors in order to
support our initial thesis of a singular blending between modern architec-
ture and International Style throughout history. In his book 11 Después del
Movimiento Moderno (1993), his breakdown of the second half of the 20th
century starts going back to the period between 1930 and 1945 in which
he analyses in one small chapter the International Style, all of if embed-
ded in a larger epigraph that reaches out 1965 just before the postmo-
dernism. Montaner, similarly to Ernesto Nathan Rogers when the Italian
becomes the director of the journal Casabella, adding continuitḠnames
the period between 1930 and 1965 “Continuity or crisis” in an attempt to
explain how modern architecture was debating whereas they should con-
tinue evolving from history or this should be completely neglected. What
is interesting for us is how Montaner reflects on, first, “modern architec-
ture, “International Style” and the “second generation of Modern Move-
ment” in a time linear sequence in which it can be deferred that modern
architecture is presented as International Style in the MoMA exhibition
to be further developed into this second generation (and even a third
later if we take Philip Drew’s interpretation of this evolution of modern
architecture). It is clear for Montaner that he prefers the continuity to the
mere crisis and rupture although he underlines how modern architects
will react to the simplicity of the International Style in the same way as
others have already done.
From the same year as Montaner’s book is Joan Ockman’s anthology 12
Architecture Culture 1943-68, which includes the already mentioned article
by Henry-Russell Hitchcock in which the co-curator or the International
Style exhibition reviews the accompanying book published twenty years
before. 13
FRANCISCO JAVIER CASAS COBO. The Survival of the International Style in the History of Architecture. pp. 90-101