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The International Style
Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, with a new foreword by Philip Johnson
W, W. Norton & Company, $27.50, 260 pp. Living Machines E. Michael Jones Ignatius Press, $11.95,136 pp. Late last year, while prowling in a Catholic bookstore, my eye was caught by a book title-E. Michael Jones's Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology. The book seemed to have a promising thesis: that the dream of a new architecture promulgated by modernist architects in Europe after World War I was founded on a complete and rather stupid disrespect for tradition, particularly that of the integrity of the family. Now here, I thought, were a daring author and publisher and a provocative argument: that architectural Modernism has been not just an aesthetic failure-how boring it often looks-but an ethical one. I confess to being tired of art history that is unfailingly even-handed and detached, and here I caught the scent of blood. However, as I guess I should have expected, the book turns out to be really rather wonky-too bad because the argument, if it were made in a subtle, knowing way, could, I think, be thoughtprovoking and important.
The story of what critic Nikolaus Pevsner christened the "Modern Movement" goes back to just before World War I. Between about 1912 and 1927 a new look in leading-edge design appeared which has reshaped the way our century lives and our material environment looks. "[T]here exists today a modern style as original, as consistent, as logical, and as widely distributed as any in the past," wrote Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, heralding the landmark 1932 exhibition called The International Style. The principal book under review here is a new edition of the one that was written to accompany that show. The authors were a pair of young, overprivileged, and rather preachy and aesthetic friends of Barr's who went on to distinguished careers, Hitchcock as a scholar and Johnson as an architect (he is still alive and making a mark). The book was designed to expose "backward" Americans to the radically stripped, futuristic architecture built in Europe and some corners of America in the preceding decade. The authors' heroes were J.J.P. Oud of Holland;...