“Modern Architecture and Architectural Criticism in the U.S.A., 1929-1939”

AboutMark L. Peisch's brief conference-paper abstract asks why American architectural criticism failed to develop a body of clear, authoritative commentary during the crucial decade 1929-1939, comparable to the role played by critics such as Russell Sturgis and Montgomery Schuyler in preparing the public for Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright's late-nineteenth-century Chicago skyscraper innovations. Peisch surveys the era's leading architectural observers—Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson above all, along with Lewis Mumford, Thomas Tallmadge, and Talbot Hamlin—and argues their close personal involvement in promoting the International Style left them unable or unwilling to adopt a genuinely critical, detached perspective, leaving historians to draw instead on contemporary painting criticism to understand the architectural events of the period.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196503%2924%3A1%3C78%3AMAAACI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8