Sanctioning Modernism

Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities

Edited by Vladimir Kulic, Timothy Parker, and Monica Penick; Introduction by Frederick Steiner

University of Texas Press

With new research on building programs in political, religious, and domestic settings in the United States and Europe, this collection of essays offers a fresh look at postwar modernism and the role that architecture played in constructing modern identities.

In the decades following World War II, modern architecture spread around the globe alongside increased modernization, urbanization, and postwar reconstruction—and it eventually won widespread acceptance. But as the limitations of conventional conceptions of modernism became apparent, modern architecture has come under increasing criticism. In this collection of essays, experienced and emerging scholars take a fresh look at postwar modern architecture by asking what it meant to be “modern,” what role modern architecture played in constructing modern identities, and who sanctioned (or was sanctioned by) modernism in architecture.

This volume presents focused case studies of modern architecture in three realms—political, religious, and domestic—that address our very essence as human beings. Several essays explore developments in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and document a modernist design culture that crossed political barriers, such as the Iron Curtain, more readily than previously imagined. Other essays investigate various efforts to reconcile the concerns of modernist architects with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian institutions. And a final group of essays looks at postwar homebuilding in the United States and demonstrates how malleable and contested the image of the American home was in the mid-twentieth century. These inquiries show the limits of canonical views of modern architecture and reveal instead how civic institutions, ecclesiastical traditions, individual consumers, and others sought to sanction the forms and ideas of modern architecture in the service of their respective claims or desires to be modern.

An original and significant contribution to the field of architectural/design history. . . . This volume [presents] material that is new to art historical investigation: in particular, studies of eastern European traditions in relation to modernism and to architecture under communism with the Cold War as an important backdrop and context. . . . . The volume questions as well as explores and expands [the more familiar canon of postwar architecture], helps the reader by alluding or directly referencing postmodernism, and allows for an overall reconsideration of assumptions that lead to a fuller and more pluralistic understanding of modern architectural and design history. David Raizman, Distinguished University Professor, Westphal College of of Media Arts and Design, Drexel University, and author of History of Modern Design and coeditor of Objects, Audiences, and Literature: Alternative Narratives in the History of Design

Vladimir Kulic is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale. He is the coauthor of Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia and the coeditor of Unfinished Modernizations—Between Utopia and Pragmatism: Architecture and Urban Planning in the Former Yugoslavia and the Successor States.

Timothy Parker is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Art at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont.

Monica Penick is Assistant Professor in Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Foreword

Frederick Steiner

Preface

Vladimir Kulić, Timothy Parker, and Monica Penick

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Writing History: Reflections on the Story of Midcentury Modern Architecture

Dennis P. Doordan

Part I. Modernism and the State

Introduction

Vladimir Kulić

1. Bucharest: The City Transfigured

Juliana Maxim