Rethinking Global Modernism

Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial

Vikramaditya Prakash, Maristella Casciato, Daniel E. Coslett, Vikramaditya Prakash, Maristella Casciato, Daniel E. Coslett

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471632
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Architecture
• Categoria: History of Architecture

This anthology collects developing scholarship that outlines a new decentred history of global modernism in architecture using postcolonial and other related theoretical frameworks.

By both revisiting the canons of modernism and seeking to decolonize and globalize those canons, the volume explores what a genuinely "global" history of architectural modernism might begin to look like. Its chapters explore the historiography and weaknesses of modernism's normative interpretations and propose alternatives to them. The collection offers essays that interrogate transnationalism in new ways, reconsiders the agency of the subaltern and the roles played by infrastructures, materials, and global institutions in propagating a diversity of modernisms internationally. Issues such as colonial modernism, architectural pedagogy, cultural imperialism, and spirituality are engaged.

With essays from both established scholars and up-and-coming researchers, this is an important reference for a new understanding of this crucial and developing topic.

Part I

Critiques of normative modernist narratives

2
“Weak” modernism

Managing the threat of Brazil’s modern architecture at MoMA

Patricio del Real

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120209-4

Exhibitions are tools of canon formation, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has effectively wielded them to establish a dominant narrative on international modernism. MoMA, the architecture department of which was established in 1932 and is one of the world’s oldest, has had unprecedented leverage in forging the twentieth-century modernist canon by weaving together art and architecture into a normative aesthetic discourse. Early on, its curators mined, accumulated, collected, and consumed an expansive artistic and architectural geography to broadcast assertive cultural statements. Among these was the groundbreaking 1943 exhibition Brazil Builds, which along with its parallel publication, set the stage to overtly re-open architecture’s modern canon to geographies beyond Europe and the United States; revitalizing the promise of the 1932 foundational Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, which gave birth to MoMA’s architecture department and had neglected works in Latin America.¹ At MoMA, thematic and national surveys played a critical role in identifying “masterworks” to be woven into the museum’s narrative of aesthetic excellence and modern values.² The identification and celebration of key architecture works were part of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design’s (A&D) curatorial agenda to evidence the consolidation and influence of the styles of European modern masters identified in 1932: Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, and Walter Gropius. The Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, closely identified with the Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, fit this profile. Best known for his monumental buildings in Brasília, today Niemeyer is part of the modernist canon—despite the fact that MoMA has yet to bestow him the “honor” of a solo show and has rarely exhibited his work outside the “Latin American” regional context.

As self-appointed arbiter of international modernism, MoMA sought to police the development of modern architecture worldwide. Brazil’s modern architecture surprised MoMA. This unexpected development emerged as a challenge to the narrative of the “International Style” first advanced by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, and Alfred Barr as a complement to the 1932 MoMA exhibition and forced the department of architecture to “look south.” The museum’s management of the cultural and aesthetic values of Brazil’s modern architecture in the early postwar era alerts us to the challenges posed by global modernism to the hegemonic Western cultural and racial order of modernity and to the responses by cultural institutions, such as MoMA, that set the terms of inclusion into global modernity.

Brazil took international architecture culture by storm with the unveiling of its national pavilion in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in collaboration with Paul Lester Wiener with such “purity and style that makes it close to breath taking.”³ Critics swooned over the pavilion’s openness and subtle curves. MoMA took notice, incorporating models of the pavilion and the now-famed Ministry of Education and Health building in its architecture collection. The impulse to “anoint” Niemeyer at MoMA had existed before Brazil Builds. His powerful work in Pampulha confirmed the initial enthusiastic assessment on the lyrical free-form geometries. Several of his buildings in this urban development outside the city of Belo Horizonte were included in the 1943 exhibition along with the New York pavilion. Thanks to Brazil Builds, Niemeyer emerged as the leader of a promising group of young (and not-so-young) architects in what, at times, was called the Carioca school of modern architecture.⁴ In Pampulha, the young Niemeyer had declared his personal style and independence from both Costa and Le Corbusier, experimenting with complete liberty in the art of building. There, he showed a vital spontaneous energy that broke all academic prejudices and cultural taboos. Niemeyer apprenticed with Le Corbusier in 1936, when the latter spent a month in Rio de Janeiro lecturing, developing the project for the University City, consulting on the Ministry building, and seeking work. Niemeyer also embraced the many teachings of Costa, who saw great promise in “Oscar,” and was well versed in Brazil’s multifaceted cultural renewal. Niemeyer fused these experiences in Pampulha. Collaborating with artists and engineers and with landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, he launched a new style and sensibility of architectural modernism, celebrated for its expressive formal language, decisive technical experiments in reinforced-concrete construction, and confidence in paradigms of Brazilian culture.⁵ The world took notice. In 1947, he became part of the United Nations design team, the most important postwar project of the time, consolidating his position as an international figure.⁶ Niemeyer was forty years old.

The MoMA contributed much to Niemeyer’s meteoric rise, fanning the flames, and was thrilled by the international reception of Brazil’s modern architecture after the much-acclaimed 1943 Brazil Builds exhibition. So why did its A&D department “demote” the model of the Brazilian pavilion in 1947, sending this key work from the architecture collection to the museum’s education department? There is no clear answer, yet this move serves as an entry point to explore the place and value of Niemeyer’s work and Brazil’s modern architecture at MoMA and in the North Atlantic postwar cultural imaginary.

At MoMA, Brazil’s modern architecture was enlisted to manage the ensuing postwar aesthetic chaos as part of a crusade against the technological and sociological compulsion that, thanks to the war and reconstruction efforts, had overtaken the art of building. Modernist aesthetics was a point of entry into the world; at stake were a worldview and socio-cultural order galvanized by postwar politics. Fears of “cross-fertilizations,” underwritten by cultural and racial imaginaries, emerged in architecture culture as the processes of decolonization, European reconstruction, and communist expansion reorganized the world. In the United States, the mounting critique of MoMA’s “International Style” narrative—spearheaded by US critic and intellectual Lewis Mumford—captured these anxieties. Mumford posited the single-family home, his example of which he termed “Bay Region Style,” as the key site of the revolt against MoMA, thereby bringing developments in the West Coast of the United States into the heated debate.⁷ With dynamic regional centers across the United States testing the vitality, validity, and cultural appropriateness of the styles of the modern “masters,” the museum had to decisively act. And who better than Philip Johnson, who, in 1946, had returned to MoMA and officially took charge of its A&D department in 1949 to lead the charge. The museum needed to “take an active part in the maintenance of high standards of current architecture,” Johnson told MoMA’s Junior Council. Modern architecture, he stressed, “is definite enough today for canons to be set up. From the mass of contemporary materials the Museum must try to pick the best.”⁸ Exhibitions served this purpose. Such curatorial endeavors served to map the state of and thinking on modern architecture, singling out examples of aesthetic value. They publicized both modern architecture and the museum’s endeavors to shape modern culture and worked with MoMA’s own publicity machine and its prolific Department of Circulating Exhibitions reaching a national and international public.⁹

The museum and its department of architecture articulated a culture of aesthetic excellence through a careful selection and discursive celebration, both textual and visual, that had since 1932 anointed key architects and works. These examples of excellence circulated beyond the museum through a myriad of journals to educate and cultivate US public taste. An opportunity to “pick the best” came with Niemeyer, who, in 1948, designed a house in California for Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine.¹⁰ The Tremaines had “enormous admiration” for his work and desired “an example of it right at home.”¹¹ Being one of the “world’s top architects” involved in the United Nations, Niemeyer had become a household name thanks to popular magazines like Time.¹² He was no longer a “local” architect, then practicing beyond his home country on both coasts of the United States. An exhibition of Niemeyer’s California design, which included a garden by Burle Marx, seemed de rigueur. It would appeal to many, continue MoMA’s investment in Brazilian modernism, and forge new alliances with US merchants of culture, like the Tremaines, who sought to direct architectural modernism by flexing their corporate muscle.¹³

The Tremaine House project activated forms from Pampulha; being the next step in modernism’s development by bringing together the organic curves of both Niemeyer and Burle Marx to the United States. It is no minor detail that a modernist home was at the center of it all and that Niemeyer had designed a home for California living, Mumford’s professed site of anti–International Style rebellion. Niemeyer’s project advanced questions of cultural appropriateness and a modern architecture “truly indigenous to our culture,” as Mumford demanded, not absent of anxieties over the vitality of such cultural cross-fertilizations. Could Carioca living be transplanted to California? The project was pregnant with possibilities, and MoMA pounced at the opportunity with the 1949 exhibition From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer, 1929–1949 (Figure 2.1). At MoMA, the Tremaine House project became a signpost of the evolution of Brazilian modernism that both praised and contained its creative energies under the guidance of European masters. Ten years after the Brazilian pavilion emerged in 1939 as a magnificent example of the purity of the modern style and a declaration of independence by Brazil’s modern architects, the symbolic power of Brazilian modernism was domesticated to revitalize the obsolete narrative of the International Style and secure a modernist canon of European works.

Niemeyer at MoMA

Organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock with Peter Blake, From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer, 1929–1949 juxtaposed the former’s canonical Ville Savoye (1929–31) with his Brazilian pupil’s 1948 Tremaine House project. Visitors encountered the model of the iconic Parisian villa—used in the seminal 1932 Modern Architecture show—on a pedestal, next to redrawn plans of the house framed on the wall alongside Le Corbusier’s 1920 purist Still Life oil painting. Opposite were five framed original drawings and a model on a pedestal of Niemeyer’s project (Figure 2.2). Mediating these works was Jean (Hans) Arp’s 1938–39 wood relief sculpture, juxtaposed with two designs by Brazilian landscape architect Burle Marx (Figure 2.3). As putative father of the International Style, Hitchcock inserted Niemeyer and Burle Marx in its lineage. The exhibition framed the Brazilians’ works within the painterly experiments initiated by purism in the 1920s and th...