| Title |
Institutional Interpretation on MoMA's "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition"(1932) |
| Keywords |
Institution of Architecture ; Beaux-Arts System ; High Art ; Museum of Modern Art ; NY ; Modern Architecture: International Exhibition ; International Style |
| Abstract |
"Modern Architecture: International Exhibition," the 1932 show held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is commonly criticized for diminishing the Modern Movement to a set of aesthetic principles, but we should not neglect the institutional context of American architecture within which such reductive project prevailed. Since the 1910s, industrialization, mechanization, and restraints under World War I led to the rise of a technical, commercial approach to architecture that undermined the institutional form of architecture founded by the Beaux-Arts movement in the late nineteenth century. The MoMA show countered this tendency by projecting a unified formal principle, a link to the institution of fine art, and a professionalism in alliance with cultural elite, and ultimately paved way for the reformation of architectural education system. These were also what defined the institutional character of the Beaux-Arts movement, and although their choices of style were clearly at opposite ends, the MoMA project successfully filled the void left by the decline of the Beaux-Arts system - the absence of institutional construct for architecture as high-art. |