veredes, arquitectura y divulgación VADo1 Los Inicios | Page 99

ISSN 2659-9139 e-ISSN 2659-9198 | Junio 2019 | 01.VAD
It is also possible to say that it really was but it lasted only a blink. Among
the many characters and protagonists of this long story, there is a key one
in this process who must be taken into account from the beginning but
whose relevance did not diminish but grew as time passed. That is the fi-
gure of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, one of the two curators of the exhibition.
He was the one who first started the critical review of the International
Style in his article in 1951 for Architectural Record and, in a way that was
the kick off of the survival of a term which probably would had vanished
in a few decades.
Even the anecdotic diagram by Charles Jencks gave us an important clue
about the survival of the International Style. On the one hand, it was
placed (by mistake?) close to the CIAM and the TEAM X, being the first a
consequence or partial outcome of the International Style as most of its
members where part of both events; and the second, the Dubrovnik born
group led by the Smithsons, Aldo van Eyck and so on, their avengers, con-
fronted with the old by then masters of modern architecture who were
revenged in Otterlo. On the other hand, the Neo International Style as main
tag sharing space with Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
and Belluschi, winners of the battle for the American corporative architec-
ture in the 50s and 60s by making a pragmatic and bureaucratic, following
the Jencks’ terminology, use of it turning the International Style into an
official and institutional grand scale theme for architecture moving from
the smaller scales of the 1932 exhibition and the mostly domestic spaces.
This is when the International Style probably wins the battle for its sur-
vival through the history and, although sometimes ignored by historians
as we have seen, it becomes a major issue that transcends the history of
the exhibition and its little disputes about contents and intrigues, to blend
into modern architecture as the curators, the sponsors and the MoMA
itself always wanted to be, in a winning celebration of the forms and the
modern superficialities against the social, ethical and political compo-
nents, which are left abandoned in favour of the market forces and the
representation of a new monumentality of the power of corporations and
institutions.
The exhibition was, like it or not, a partial story of a particular moment
and, above all, was again a history of names and authors, as the Pevsner
and later Giedion’s histories were; that is to say, the history of individual
architects more than the possibility of a universal style, regardless what
the curators tried to defend and his attempt to create an international
homogeneous style, something that, as María Teresa Muñoz said, never
was, and which probably only represented the cubic buildings of ortho-
gonal forms and smooth and white walls where horizontal window were
trimmed in the fashion of the fenêtre en longueur of le Corbusier. None-
theless, historians and probably the still associated mythology to most of
the participants, have achieved the impossible, making the unfortunate
term to survive through history almost one hundred years, until today.
FRANCISCO JAVIER CASAS COBO. The Survival of the International Style in the History of Architecture. pp. 90-101
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