ABSTRACT
When did “modern” architecture become “contemporary” architecture? Although 1968 is often singled out as a turning point in the history of the twentieth century, as Jean-Louis Cohen did in The Future of Architecture, Since 1889, other historians push the transformation of twentieth-century modernity to an earlier moment.1 1959, for example, has been called “the year everything changed,” a claim historian Fred Kaplan has supported with a long list of that year’s many extraordinary events, which included the launching of the Soviet spacecraft, the approval of the birth control pill, the start of racial desegregation in the United States, and the sale of the rst business computer by IBM. It was the year, Kaplan argued, when “the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it-when the world as we now know it began to take form.”2 Although one must take exception with Kaplan’s hook, that 1959 was the year that everything changed, his description of the historical moment is an example of recent histories that recognize the 1950s, and not just the 1960s, as a time of momentous change.
