Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” (Exhibition

1 Modern Architecture, Once More In 1992, the historical show “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” (Exhibition 15/1932)1 was restaged in Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University, New York, partly as a commemoration of its 60 years anniversary but mostly as a critical reevaluation of the show which gave birth to the International Style. It was not simply an exhibition about the history of the exhibition. As written in the exhibition fact sheet produced by Columbia University as the organizer, the Exhibition 15/1932 would be “accurately recreated for the first time,” from its content to its display configuration.2 This unprecedented method in encountering an established historical narrative is claimed as a milestone in the history of American architectural theory and practice.3 Yet, this statement carries doubt. It evokes question of what relevance the reenacted content of modern architecture could bring in the much different context of time and discourse of the 1990s. At the same time, this method is problematic as it could be easily misinterpreted as an apologia for modern architecture or as a romanticization of history. How would a critical reevaluation can be produced through this complete redux? 1 The exhibition was held in the the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and was recorded in the archives as “Exhibition 15.” 2 Columbia University GSAPP, Exhibition Fact Sheet: The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art, 1992, 1. 3 Ibid. 2 I attempt to show that, on the contrary, Exhibition 15/1992 should be deliberately read within the context of media debate that was flourishing in architectural discourse during the Nineties. While its content deals with modern architecture, its operation acts more as a critical deconstruction of tradition—modern architecture, in this case—in order to open its closed system, a cultural strategy which Hal Foster defines as postmodern of resistance.4 This kind of operation, as displayed by Exhibition 15/1992, provides a strong potentiality in reconfiguring an established historical narrative which has been multi-layered by media effects. Yet, a warning should be made in advance: in its effort to counter media effects, the reenactment could not escape from the media environment that surrounds both the reenacted object and the reenactment itself. Modern content, postmodern context Surprisingly, instead of coming from related actors or institutions of the International Style, the idea to commemorate Exhibition 15/1932 was proposed by Columbia University, an institution which was often referred as part of the postmodern school and was leaded at that time by Bernard Tschumi, one of the prominent figure of architectural postmodernism. While by the end of the twentieth century, Exhibition 15/1932, held in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, was still respected as “the most famous American architectural show in this century”5 and as the “turning point in the history of American architecture,”6 the academic environment at that 4 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: a Preface,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), xi-xii. 5 Suzanne Stephens, “A Show About a Landmark Show,” New York Times, March 5, 1992; Paul Gapp, “Back to the Future,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1992; Susan Wyndham, “And they said it wouldn’t last…” The Weekend Review, April 11-12, 1992. 6 Brendan Gill, “1932,” The New Yorker, April 27,1992. 3 time had been much shifted. Modern architecture lost its grip as the dominant school and postmodern discourse aroused through many architectural theories and practices. The show inevitably brought up questions on the institution’s authority and the ideology it carried. A review in Art in America journal writes that the show, despite bringing a “you-were-almost-there experience” that would satisfy many people, ignored a pervasive element of poststructuralist thought at Columbia’s architecture school.7 Other review in New York Magazine writes in a more blatant tone, “Columbia has been a hotbed of deconstructivism in recent years, so there is special irony in its sponsorship of a show on work that is so totally alien to its own ideology.”8 There are, however, two viewpoints to observe the relevance of the exhibition. One way is to see it as the recurrence of context. This suggestion can be found in the catalogue of Exhibition 15/1992, where Terence Riley, the director of the exhibition describes the similarities of the cultural conditions between 1932 and 1992: worldwide economic instability, a severe housing crisis, and an architectural culture obsessed with simulation.9 But this answer remains incomplete, as it does not provide a strong explanation on the relevance of the accurate restaging. To say that the 1932 cultural conditions is contextual to the 1992 also implies that the exhibition provides contextual answer to the conditions, meanwhile technological advancement and urban forms at the least have changed substantially. 7 Joseph Giovannini, “Back to the Future,” Art in America, vol 80, no. 12 (December 1992): 59. 8 Carter Weisman, “The Modernists’ Revenge,” New York Magazine, March 23, 1992, 68. 9 Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art, (New York: Rizzoli International, 1992), 98. 4 Another way to see the show, which could provide a more critical stance, is to observe Exhibition 15/1992 as media criticism. This suggestion is implied in Riley’s fascination when he started to read the catalogue of Exhibition 15/1932 and the book The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, both were published in the year of the exhibition. He was amazed by the media effects which layered the exhibition: I realized that the book is more famous than the catalogue, is republished many times, and what became real right away is that the material in the catalogue is not the same as the material in the book. So I became wondering what really was in the exhibition. [...] The 1992 exhibition became like a kind of detective story to figure out what the exhibition was like and how it was similar to the book, how it was similar to the catalogue, but also how it was unique and difference.10 This intention, to clean up what was and what was not in the exhibition by reconstructing the “crime” scene, was resounded many times by Riley in different occasions. Albeit modern in content, the show’s primary concern, as seen in his statement, is to reconfigure the conceptions of the exhibition and the International Style that had been saturated and obfuscated by media effects. By taking this notion, the show becomes a remarkable turnaround. The reenactment logic, then, is valid as the Exhibition 15/1932 had turned into a myth. The 1932 exhibition’s existence had been taken for granted and was exchanged so often to the extent that everyone seemed to know what it was without really knowing what it was exhibiting.11 The relation between the exhibition and the label it attempted to advocate became much more distant 10 Riley, December 6, 2015. 11 Ibid. 5 as the International Style turned into main currency of modern architecture after the event. The associated meaning of the label kept changing as it was used to refer many buildings which were designed before or after the event but were not actually exhibited in it. For instance, Riley points out how Vincent Scully refers Mies’s Seagram Building (1958) in his 1985 essay by stating it as “International Style slab in its empty plaza.”12 After the World War II, the term somehow became equivalent to the steel-structured and glass-walled office blocks; meanwhile, in the Exhibition 15/1932, only one apartment building designed by Bowman Brothers might share some resemblance with this sort of glass and steel tower. As concluded by Riley, the conceptions of the International Style, including its degradation during postmodern discourse, were not necessarily related to the actual position of the curators as appeared in the exhibition.13 The attempt to untangle the media effects should be understood in accordance with the media debate in architectural theory and criticism which was flourishing at that time by academic figures such as Beatriz Colomina, Michael Hays, Manfredo Tafuri, and Mark Wigley. Architectureproduction, a seminal book on the subject of media discourse in architecture edited by Colomina, was published in 1988, just few years before Exhibition 15/1992. Colomina, in her introduction, points out how the cultural industries such as publications, journals, exhibitions, magazines, newspapers, catalogues, radio, and televisions manifest into arenas where architecture is continuously produced, marketed, distributed, and consumed in the age of mass reproduction, even since the era of modernism avant-garde.14 12 Riley, The International Style, 94. 13 Ibid., 98. 14 Beatriz Colomina, “Introduction: on Architecture, Production, and Reproduction,” in Architectureproduction, ed. Beatriz Colomina, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 10-23. 6 As an operation to deconstruct the complex relation within these media apparatuses, Exhibition 15/1992 is aligned with this expanding discourse, which might also had influencing the architecture school. A poster of 1992 spring events at Columbia University’s architecture school shows that at the same semester of Exhibition 15/1992, there were other lectures from Wigley and Jean Baudrillard.15 The former is involved heavily in the discussion of media discourse and deconstructivism. The latter, an important influence on postmodern discourse, writes about media effects which are producing different sets of relation between object and its copy, from a faithful one to a pure simulation. While those events are seemingly unrelated, this appearance more or less displays the happening discourse at the school which might share the same ground with the reenactment of Exhibition 15/1932. FIGURE 1.

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