Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” (Exhibition

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Columbia University GSAPP 1992 spring events poster.

15 Columbia University GSAPP, spring events poster, 1992.

A resistance operation

FIGURE 2. Plan of Exhibition 15/1992, as reconstructed by Terence Riley, 2015.

By understanding Exhibition 15/1992 as media criticism, the curator’s position as an archaeologist, rather than a director, appears visible. Riley reduced his own voice and presented the identical documents to speak by themselves. This operation reverberates Foucault’s method of history production borrowed from the work of archaeology: instead of treating the documents as an inert material—a silent yet decipherable trace—through which men can speak of an event, it deploys a mass elements of documents to generate multiple possible discourses.16

Thus, it is unsurprising that the effort spent to reenact Exhibition 15/1932 was rigorous. More than 2,500 documents from various archives at MoMA and other sources were studied to reconstruct the curatorial process and the original installation. Eleven models were recreated and

16 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon Book, 1972), 7.

displayed in a similar gesture to the inaugural exhibition. All the photographs were reproduced from the MoMA’s archival negatives by using their actual scale in the exhibition as the point of reference, yet were half-sized because of logistical reason. Moreover, the faithful reproduction was devoted not only for its exhibition’s content but also for its spatial organization.17

A close look to the materialization of Exhibition 15/1992 would therefore at once provide a substantial understanding on the materialization of Exhibition 15/1932. This reenactment provided the chance for audience to counter their mediated memories on Exhibition 15/1932, and therefore eliminated the distance between the exhibition as represented by the media and the immediate present, between the meanings projected by the actors and the conceptions conceived by the audience.

At the same time, it might also give a hint of what obfuscated the exhibition. What becomes clear right away is Philip Johnson’s intention as the director of the exhibition to make the narrative in a popular way through its display attitude. The critical position of the exhibition on the International Style, as shown in the varieties of the three sections of the exhibition, was quite diverse in its typologies, samples, authors, scales, and sociocultural dimensions. The style’s internationality was represented not only via the usual modern architecture suspects, but also through diversities from many countries. In Section One: Modern Architects, ten architects were displayed as the protagonists—six from United States and four from Europe. Johnson tried to gather as diverse typologies as he could from these architects. Section Two: The Extent of

17 Columbia University GSAPP Archives, “Sixtieth Anniversary Reprise of Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Landmark Exhibition to Feature Icons of the International Style,” 1992.

Modern Architecture exhibited 40 country-based projects. There were 15 countries in total, including projects from Japan, Russia, and Czechoslovakia. Section Three: Housing, showcased housing projects on urban scale. The first section was spread through the whole rooms, meanwhile the second and third section stayed at one room each.

However, most part of the exhibition, except the third section which contained some critical texts, was photographic. Drawings were mostly printed smaller than the photographs. Models were also dominant, but the surrounding photographs around the wall seemed to ask more attention from the eye. This visual gesture might contribute to the reduction of the curators’ critical position.

FIGURE 3. Exhibition 15/1932, MoMA (left) and Exhibition 15/1992, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery (right).

Yet, how the conceptions of the exhibition and the style were diverged from its actual standing should also be read beyond the exhibition itself. It should not be taken as singularly produced, as its production was codified through multiple forms of operative documents.

The exhibition, produced under an authoritative institution on modern art, served as the legitimization of the canon. The catalogue, under the same title with the exhibition, extended the exhibition by containing scrupulously written texts on the exhibited architects and a critical essay by Lewis Mumford on housing. Another book, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, published in the same year, took the role as the manifesto of the style by proclaiming its three principles: architecture as volume, concerning regularity, and the avoidance of applied decoration. The symposium, held on February 19, 1932, presented different names, including

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, co-curator of the exhibition, who was in charge in explaining the

International Style; George Howe, one of the architect in display, who was asked to present the topic “Why I Turned from Conservative to Modern Architecture”; and Lewis Mumford, the unofficial curator of the housing section, who was assigned to speak on the architect’s responsibility in housing. The original proposal even shows that a worldwide open competition of a school building for students and young architects were planned,18 however was cancelled later, probably because of the lack of time or exhibition space.19

Media coverage played another significant role in the dissemination of the International Style. A well-planned strategy was applied in approaching the media, to the extent of suggesting its editorial. For instance, a document called “Suggested Publicity Stories on Architectural

Exhibition,” lists 14 themes that could be written about the exhibition.20 The exhibition’s preview invitation included press representative from dozens of news company such as New York Times,

18 Ibid. 19 Riley, The International Style, 28. 20 “Suggested Publicity Stories on Architectural Exhibition,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 15.3, December 4, 1931.

New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Evening Post, New York Sun, Country Home,

Good Housekeeping, Charm, and different kinds of magazines listed under 6 categories: architecture and building magazines; general magazines; landscape gardening; mechanical and engineering; metal and metal trades; and paint, painting and decorating.21 There are at least thirteen official press releases published by MoMA for the exhibition alone.

Those various modes of productive cycle to broadcast the International Style were engaged by the curators. Hitchcock is right then, when he writes that even though the avant-gardists such as

Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius produced a similar concerted program for a new architecture,

“it is still by no means necessary to conclude that the ‘International Style’ should be considered the only proper pattern or program for modern architecture.”22

Therefore, if the exhibition and the style were saturated by the media, it was not just an after-effect. Since its inception, the International Style was designated to be a media project. This aggressive gesture towards publicity was also shared by Johnson’s contemporaries such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier whose works were displayed in the main room of Exhibition

15/1932. The modern avant-gardists, as observed by Colomina, were not just self-referential; they are, instead, involved in dissemination cycles by engaging mass media as their site of production. Colomina however suggested that the gallery systems in architectural discourse, by the time she wrote the piece in the Nineties, was a recent phenomenon that we hardly grasped its

21 The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 15.3, January 29, 1932. 22 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The International Style 20 Years After,” in The International Style, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 242.

meaning.23 Exhibition 15/1932 tells the otherwise; the gallery system as an active producer of architectural discourse has been visible since the birth of International Style.

The reenactment undid those media influences by bringing the documents back to speak. It resounds Hal Foster conception of postmodernism of resistance, which in its operation seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo, as opposed to the postmodernism of reaction which intends to repudiate the former and to celebrate the latter. Interestingly, Foster mentions that the condemnation of the International Style, to the extent that it was regarded entirely as a cultural mistake and was responded by presenting the pre- and postmodern elements, fits to the latter, a “false normativity” where its application would lead to another resurrection of a master narrative.24 Riley’s position, on the otherwise, belongs to the former, the postmodernism of resistance. It is a counter practice to critically deconstruct the established master narrative and to produce the heterogeneity of texts, by employing the total reenactment as its main strategy.

Mediating reenactment

My tone has been generous to the Exhibition 15/1992 and to the reenactment as a postmodern operation. However, the practice of Exhibition 15/1992 also showed that reenactment as a practice of media criticism also bears other concerns in its own place which should be readdressed.

23 Colomina, “Introduction: on Architecture, Production, and Reproduction,” 17. 24 Foster, “Postmodernism: a Preface,” xi-xii

First, the way the reenactor himself reconstruct the show in inescapably mediated. For instance, to restage Exhibition 15/1932, Riley had to rely on photographs of the exhibition. No original plan or other projection drawings for the exhibition remained. Some issues, then, were faced by him. He could not perfectly reconstruct the room where Section Two: The Extent of Modern

Architecture and some part of Section One: Modern Architects, especially on the works of

Raymond Hood and Richard Neutra, were displayed, as there was no photograph of the room. In the plan drawing of the reconstruction, the room was drawn in dark shade. The black and white nature of the old photographs also forced the reconstructed models to lose the color information of the original models. The models were remade with pale-colored woods and the re-exhibition became monochrome.

FIGURE 4. Plan of Exhibition 15/1932, as reconstructed by Terence Riley, 1992.

Moreover, to count on photographs as an objective document to refer is problematic as well. The

denotative status of photograph, as Roland Barthes explains, always carries the potentiality to be

imposed with a connoted message.25 The photographer and commissioner could project their desire by choosing, composing, and constructing the objects and also its appearance in print, such as its point of view, saturation, brightness, contrast, reflection, etc. The situation becomes much more complex when a photograph is circulated through many different media, as more actors are involved in its production.

A similar reenactment of modern architecture might provide some insight. In 1986, Barcelona

Pavilion, which was demolished in 1930, was reenacted twice in two different gestures. First, it was reenacted by Rem Koolhaas in Milan Triennale. He restaged the Barcelona Pavilion, which was always presented as lifeless and puritan, by making an indoor installation corresponding with the original pavilion yet with a bended plan. He further infused the installation with physical human activities to impose different meanings to the established narrative. While this reenactment provides other kind of method, an authoritative and artistic one, in approaching reenactment which should be interesting to be discussed, it is the second reenactment of the pavilion which becomes my interest: the reconstruction of Barcelona Pavilion in its previous site by Ignasi de Solà-Morales.

This reenactment bears many similarities with Exhibition 15/1992. The reenacted objects are both modern architecture landmarks which were exposed so often in different media and the reenactments relied on remaining photographs as the evidence. But, which photographs?

25 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 196-199.

A photograph of Barcelona Pavilion from 1929 published by Berliner Bild-Bericht, showing the

Kolbe figure in reflecting pond, has been reproduced and reinterpreted in different ways. The

photograph has inspired Robin Evans to write that the different materials of the floor and the

ceiling created an optical symmetry as an effect of the different brightness. Yet, this material

difference does not appeared in Johnson’s monograph on Mies. The same photograph, which is

used in the cover, was edited; the ceiling part was painted with white brush. Meanwhile, Wolf

Tegethoff uses the same photograph to explain the blurred boundaries between nature and

architecture; however, as he cropped and enlarged the image, the photograph acquired more

grains and therefore became more supportive to his theory. Another twist is shown by an

identical colored photograph of the reenacted pavilion, which displays a contrast color between

the trees and the wall, another contra evidence of Tegethoff’s proposition, yet which could not be

observed from his usage of the black and white photograph.26 The question becomes clear: how

far can the reenactment rely on photographs as evidence to reenact the object?

The second concern, is that the reenactment itself can not escape from the media environment

that surrounds its existence. The reenactment will still have to deal with the existing systems of

production, dissemination, distribution, and consumption cycles. Consequently, it adds another

layer of experience to people who perceives the reenactment through its mediated form of

representations.

26 George Godds, “Body in Pieces: Desiring the Barcelona Pavilion,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 39, (Spring 2001), 175-178.

The risk of the media effects is apparent in the post coverage of the Exhibition 15/1992 in newspapers and magazines. Many of the writings use the same photographs of The McGraw-Hill

Building, New York, designed by Raymond Hood and J. Andre Fouilhoux, which was included in the press release package from the organizer. This choice of image, was inevitably a projection of the curator’s desire, probably because of its location in New York and its invisibility in the previous narrative of the International Style. But, it also shows how much media apparatuses such as press release package can influence the mediated forms of the reenactment. Also, in this transmission of information, one can also get it wrong: the caption of the McGraw-Hill Building photograph in The Weekend Review is incorrectly attributed as a design by Philip Johnson.27

As a practice of reenactment, Exhibition 15/1992 has shown its capacity to confront an established historical narrative and to manifest into media criticism. This practice is linked to the media debate in architectural discourse that arose at that time. The modern content that it employs should not be read as a mere nostalgic act or as a defense on modern architecture, as it embraces a critical stance as media criticism within its postmodern operation. However, the exhibition also shows that the practice of reenactment can never escape from the media environment in order to reenact and to mediate its reenactment. In its arduous effort to eliminate the distance for the audience who experience the reenactment directly, it contains the risk of multiplying layers of information and interpretation for other audience who perceives the reenactment through its mediated forms.

27 Susan Wyndham, “And They Said It Wouldn’t Last…” The Weekend Review, April 11-12, 1992.

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