Kate Wagner at The Nation:
In the beginning, there were seemingly infinite natural resources and the violent consolidation of one-third of a continent under a single flag. In the middle, there was air conditioning.
What separates the history of architecture in the United States from that of Europe is essentially a matter of scale, speed, and spectacle. Europe may have invented the petite bourgeoisie (which America arguably perfected), Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, and the International Style, but it was also a place of castles and borders, princes and bureaucracy. The US, meanwhile, played fast and loose and big. This is, after all, where Mies van der Rohe—who once designed a memorial to the fallen socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—became a friend of the dynastic family behind the Seagram liquor fortune. It’s the place that made Walter Gropius, stripped by the war of his Weimar-era tenderness, dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.