CONTEXT ESSAY MODERN MOVEMENT in MARYLAND Year One
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CONTEXT ESSAY MODERN MOVEMENT IN MARYLAND Year One TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION page 3 1.1 Purpose of this essay 1.2 Chronology 1.3 Working definitions: Modernity and Modernization, and Modernism 1.4 Thesis 1.5 Common Wisdom and Re-evaluation of Modern Movement Architecture 1.6 Historical scope / Inclusions and Exclusions 1.7 Geographic sectors SECTION 2: CONTEXTS OF THE EARLY MODERN MOVEMENT IN MARYLAND page 12 2.1 Maryland’s initial social and economic modernization 2.2 The Weight of Tradition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 2.2.1 Social and cultural foundations 2.2.2 Maryland’s Architectural Milieu 2.2.3 A Multi-Faceted Revivalism 2.3 Modern American architecture comes of age 2.3.1 The canonical historiography of Modernism 2.3.2 Evolution during the 1930s 2.3.3 Influential Geography of American Modernism in the 1930s SECTION 3: MARYLAND’S EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE page 24 3.1 Greenbelt 3.2 The 1938 Competition for Goucher College 3.3 Modern Buildings For Industry 3.4 First manifestations of Maryland’s “everyday modernism” SECTION 4: WORLD WAR II page 32 4.1 Non Defense-Related State Modernization Efforts 4.2 The Impact of the Defense Emergency 4.2.1 Military Bases 4.2.2 Heavy Industry 4.2.3 Defense Housing 4.2.4 Middle River 4.3 Setting the Stage for Postwar Modernization SECTION 5: THE BABY AND BUILDING BOOM YEARS c.1947-c.1965 page 37 5.1 Prosperity, Suburbanization, and the accelerated pace of Maryland's Structural modernization 5.1.1 Spectacular demographic, economic, and suburban growth 5.1.2 Politics, Bureaucracy, Technocracy, and Planning 5.1.3 The state's Postwar Modernization Campaigns: Transportation, Education, Health, and Housing 5.2 The embrace of Mid-Century Modernism 5.2.1 New International and national trends MoMoMa context essay, I. Gournay, page 1 5.2.2 Professional and popular acceptance of Modernity 5.3 A new Cast of Characters 5.3.1 Public and private clients 5.3.2 Architects 5.4 Urban Renewal in Downtown Baltimore 5.4.1 Public housing 5.4.2 The Charles Center 5.5 The Suburban Building Boom: Principal Building Types 5.5.1 Residential programs: architect-designed houses, housing estates, and garden apartments 5.5.2 Schools, parks and recreation 5.5.3 Public Services 5.5.4 Places of Religious and Civic Assembly 5.5.5 Shopping centers, corporate office parks and light industry SECTION 6: MODERNISM IN TRANSITION, 1965-1972 page TK 6.1 Social Upheavals 6.2 New Planning Policies and Patterns of Development 6.3 Modernism at the Crossroads 6.4 The Broadening Palette of Modernist Expression: New Building Activity 6.4.1 Public Education 6.4.2 Suburban Office Complexes 6.4.3 Maryland's Catholic Churches 6.5 Breakthrough in Residential Community Planning: Columbia WORKS CITED page TK MoMoMa context essay, I. Gournay, page 2 SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY The development of the Modern Movement in Maryland illustrates well the complexity of the Movement internationally: its range of pure and hybrid expressions, the interactions between design solutions and society, and its internal reassessment and change over time. In Maryland, the Movement unfolded in close relation to four kinds of modernization campaigns, which we will outline in section 1.4 below. Understanding the Modern Movement in the Free State, then, requires learning about the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts within which architects, planners, builders, landscape architects, and their clients designed modernist components of the built environment. Knowledge of the historical contexts will also enable preservationists to make informed decisions regarding the value of Modern Movement buildings and sites. This essay will set out those contexts in detail by focusing on the following questions: What major themes of development best characterize Maryland’s Modern Movement resources? What were the economic, political, cultural and social currents of modernization in Maryland and how did they shape the built environment in different parts of the state? Which major factors pertaining to planning and architectural history does one need to take into account in order to understand the origins and evolution of the Modern Movement in Maryland? Which scholarship and research on the Modern Movement can help us better understand what happened in Maryland? What types of resources best exemplify the Movement’s expression in Maryland and its impact on ordinary citizens of the State? 1.2 CHRONOLOGY Modern architecture was slow to take root in Maryland.1 Indeed, Marylanders might be characterized as culturally conservative overall in their preference for a regional architecture derived from the State’s colonial past. (Hill 1984, 202) This can be seen in the choice of Georgian Revival architecture for many official buildings, e.g., Government House, the University of Maryland College Park campus, and countless residential subdivisions across the state. Nonetheless, the Modern Movement began to assert itself after 1930. By analyzing our research—our resource database, biblio-biographies, windshield surveys, and interviews with architects and scholars—we discern four distinct periods in the development of modern architecture and planning in the state. 1930-1940. Before 1940, the state’s significant contributions to the historiography of the Modern Movement were limited to the planning and design of Greenbelt, the competition for Goucher College, and Albert Kahn’s Glenn Martin Aircraft Factory Buildings B and C in Middle River. In addition, a few houses, schools, and commercial structures manifested a willingness on the part of a handful of local designers to depart from traditional regional forms and Art Déco applied ornamentation. The Modern Movement in Maryland grew in close connection with politically sponsored modernization efforts and, during the 1930s, with the exception of Federal programs, economic and political conditions simply could not support extensive modernization. 1940-1946. During the Second World War, the technical and stylistic modernization of the built environment around industrial sites and military bases was a significant milestone in the development of Maryland’s modern architecture, though it has been little studied previously. Progressively planned, rapidly built defense worker housing estates sprang up at key industrial installations and a new generation of designers was introduced to “modernity” by working in various government agencies. 1 The close of the first phase of European modernism, 1930, after which the movement shifted due to internal critiques, marks the beginning of the Modern Movement in Maryland. MoMoMa context essay, I. Gournay, page 3 1947-1965. After the war, modernism blossomed in the most urbanized sections of the state and in the burgeoning middle-class subdivisions of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It shaped public housing and urban renewal policies in downtown Baltimore. Out-of-state designers of international stature received influential “prestige” commissions, while national firms also exercised their expertise, especially in the industrial and retail fields. Based either in the Baltimore or Washington regions, highly competent practitioners contributed to the shaping of fast-growing suburbs, creating schools, churches and synagogues, shopping centers, small commercial buildings, and a modern residential vernacular. Many of these local firms achieved great originality and design excellence; a number of them received national recognition, and others deserve to be re-evaluated. 1965-1972. The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed major social, functional and stylistic transformations. Modern architecture entered a period of transition and some of Maryland’s public and large commercial buildings reflected national trends, e.g. the new mannerism, brutalism, and theatrical minimalism. The broadening palette of modernist expression was also evident in new building types, e.g. day care centers, building campaigns for community and state colleges, suburban office complexes and campuses, and religious commissions, particularly Roman Catholic churches and schools. This late period of modernism also featured breakthroughs in residential community planning, the largest and best known being James Rouse’s Columbia. Some important examples of the Modern Movement in Maryland have been demolished or disfigured, but many highly significant structures remain extant and substantially unaltered. This essay will provide an overview of these cultural resources, embedded in a narrative that provides the historical context necessary to evaluate their importance. 1.3 WORKING DEFINITIONS: MODERNIZATION, MODERNITY, AND MODERNISM What was the Modern Movement? How can we best understand the social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances that helped to give the Movement its distinctive forms, internationally, nationally, and in the State of Maryland? The concepts of modernization, modernity, and modernism form a heuristic triad explaining the different dimensions of the transformations of the built environment that were encompassed in the Modern Movement. (Gournay & Vanlaethem 7) The concept of STRUCTURAL MODERNIZATION denotes the concurrent systemic and organizational processes by which Western societies transformed their economies and societies and adopted modern ways of producing and living. The key components were industrialization, technological innovation, individualization, cultural differentiation, urbanization, bureaucratization, rationalization, and the growth of a consumer economy. These