ABSTRACT
The concept of the exhibition, the painstaking selection of material from forgotten and neglected archives, the application of rigorous research and a knowing eye, must be credited to Arthur Drexler, the director of the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design; his achievement is an impressive one. The Museum of Modern Art’s major fall exhibition, “The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” is clearly meant as an object lesson to architects and a question raiser for everyone. Modern architecture has reached that same point of strained invention within what appear increasingly to be the crippling restrictions of functionalism. Modern architecture since the Bauhaus has based its claims not just on purity of form but on purity of art and soul and societal mission. The terms “modernism” and “post-modernism” have been used in other disciplines besides architecture, including political history and literary and art criticism.
