Miss Oahlll THE ETROPOLITAN NEWS USEUM OF ART FOR M RELEASE Tuesday, June 9, 1959 FIFTH AYE.at 82 STREET • NEW YORK TR 9-5500 Press View: Monday, June 8, 2-4:30 p.m.
FORM GIVERS AT MID-CENTURY TO SHOW WORK OF MAJOR ARCHITECTS
A comprehensive exhibition defining the role played by thirteen leading
architects of our time, FORM GIVERS AT MID-CENTURY, will be seen during the summer
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where it will open on June 9. The exhibition
was organized by Cranston Jones, Associate Editor, Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine,
prepared by The American Federation of Arts and sponsored by Time.
FORM GIVERS AT MID-CENTURY, which was introduced in an abridged form at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary
Convention of The American Federation of Arts, will be on view at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art through September 6. During a two-year tour of the United States
it will also be shown in Boston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Richmond, Chicago,
Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and elsewhere.
Significant form has been achieved and can be judged; new problems both of
forms and function now loom on the horizon. The world of architecture is a ferment
of achievement and new creative solutions. Behind this exhibition is the real
ization that architecture -- whether it is "the great spirit" as conceived by
Frank Lloyd Wright, or a cultural confluence of technology and artistic factors --
has reached a stage of high fulfillment within the United States.
The American Federation of Arts asked Time , as its contribution to A F A's
50th Anniversary, to sponsor this exhibition and to assist in assembling material
that v/ould convey the achievements of architecture at mid-century. Among the
architects and buildings to be featured are:
(more) Form Givers at Mid-Century--2
R. Buckminster Fuller The Union Tank Car Company Round-House, Baton Rouge, La., 1958
Walter Gropius The United States Embassy at Athens, Greece, 1960
Wallace K. Harrison First Presbyterian Church, Stamford, Conn., 1958
Philip C. Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, Conn., 1949
Eero Saarinen T. W. A. Terminal, Idlewild, 1959-1960
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Banque Lambert, Brussels, 1960
Edward D. Stone The United States Embassy at New Delhi, India, 1958-1959
UNESCO Secretariat, Paris, 1958-1959 Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, Bernard Zehrfuss
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe House of Seagram, New York City, 1958-1959
Frank Lloyd Wright
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 1959
Works by Louis Sullivan, as an early pioneer, Richard Neutra, Alvar Aalto and
Le Corbusier are also shown.
The exhibition focuses primarily on one major work by each of the featured architects and includes models, both color and black-and-white photographs and small
drawings in plan and elevation, accompanied by appropriate and brief text. Around
the featured buildings are grouped relevant previous designs which serve to
elucidate the main work and place it in historical perspective. Actual materials,
such as glass, grilles, bronze mullions, concrete bricks and other elements used in construction are included.
Architect Pietro Belluschi, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Trustee of The American Federation
of Arts, has written the preface for the exhibition catalog. The exhibition was
designed by Gyorgy Kepes, Professor of Visual Design at M. I. T. and author of
The New Landscape in Art and Science and The Language of Vision. ono..