“Modern Architecture: An Exhibition in the Galleries of the Museum: March 30 to April 22”

AboutMuseum bulletin essay by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's director introducing a traveling exhibition, circulated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on the "International Style" of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and J. J. P. Oud. Kimball frames the exhibition as the culmination of a lineage he says he first traced in a 1917 general history of architecture back to two Chicago architects: Louis Sullivan, whose Wainwright Building was the first fully realized artistic solution to the steel-frame skyscraper, and Sullivan's "spiritual heir" Frank Lloyd Wright. He notes Wright's earlier European reception (a sumptuous German publication of his work in 1912, the 1916 Imperial Hotel commission in Tokyo) against his belated American recognition only after 1928, and distinguishes Wright's romantic, site-responsive individualism from the more standardized, purely rationalist ambitions of the younger International Style modernists represented in the show, while praising the exhibition's attention to modern housing reform.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0891-3609%28193204%2927%3A148%3C131%3AMAAEIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23