The Most Appropriate Style: The Development of Modern American Architecture

Following the establishment of the International Style in America in the 1930's, the years from 1893 to 1933 came to be seen as ones of unrelieved architectural retrogression. It became a cliche that the 1893 Chicago Fair buried an early American initiative toward modernism in skyscraper design and cast a pall of insipid eclecticism over American architecture for forty years. It is the conventional assumption that at the end of this period American architecture was delivered by the intervention of European avant-garde ideas. The American architectural writing of this period, however, reveals that such advanced notions as functionalism and the expression of structure were intensely debated during these years by the very architects and critics who have long been considered reactionaries. The European modernist insistence that "style" was irrelevant to an architecture entirely redefined was foreign to thinking in America, where eclecticism remained vital, as did the conception of style as a distinctive decorative or formal treatment of surface. Therefore, when modernism appeared in America, it was regarded as one more style; when Hitchcock and Johnson analyzed European modernist forms they described them as "The International Style." It is the thesis of this study that contrary to the conventional view, American architectural thought and practice between 1893 and 1933 gradually reconciled anomalous ideas and unprecedented phenomena with traditional attitudes and expectations. Evidence for this interpretation is to be found in both theory and practice: in writing as well as in the variety of styles applied to the skyscraper, the uniquely American architectural form. American architects were thus prepared to assimilate European modernism as a style. At the same time, a distinctive American variant of modernism--the skyscraper style--was developed by the fusion of eclecticism and the International Style.