“The Role of Architecture in Future Civilization”

AboutWartime essay surveying the history of American architectural eclecticism from the Greek Revival through the "Imperial Façade" of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, arguing that the brief functionalist "Chicago school" breakthrough led by Louis Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright around 1890 was submerged by a new wave of Beaux-Arts eclecticism before resurfacing after World War I in dialogue with European functionalism (Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany) and American engineering works such as bridges, dams, and industrial plants. Zucker proposes that postwar architecture must move beyond both the aesthetic and the merely technical/functionalist paradigms of the previous century toward a "social functionalism" responsive to new patterns of collective postwar life, arguing that Sullivan's and Wright's early example, though initially eclipsed by eclecticism, anticipated this eventual synthesis of technical, social, and artistic considerations.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%281944%293%3A9%2F10%3C30%3ATROAIF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T