ABSTRACT
By the early 1950s, the International Style was fighting a losing battle both at home and abroad. Johnson’s and Hitchcock’s triumphal pronouncements had been a far cry from reality. They take on a decidedly hollow ring when one takes a close look at their ‘Built in USA’ of 1952. Here one finds that only half the pro jects fit the definition of International Style. Among these were Mies’s Farnsworth House and Lake Shore Drive apartment houses, Eero Saarinen’s General Motors technical center, Marcel Breuer’s Caesar Cottage, Aalto’s Senior Dormitory, Gropius’s Harvard Graduate Center, Philip Johnson’s glass house in New Canaan, and Pietro Belluschi’s Equitable Savings and Loans building prominently displayed. But, in addition, among the buildings selected as International Style were buildings that have become classics of regional ism: Neutra’s Tremaine House, Paul Rudolph’s Healy House, Harwell Hamil ton Harris’s Johnson House, Lloyd Wright’s Wayfarer’s Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright’s house for Herbert Jacobs, Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s Opera Shed for Berkshire Music Center, and Paolo Soleri’s Desert House. What the book estab lished is very different from what it claimed to be the case: good pro jects carried out in the International Style were slim pickings. International Style architecture was not faring well at all. Public and professional sentiment at home had already massively turned against it by the time Built in USA was published, in 1952, and the main reason for this was, precisely, the UN building. As Jane Loeffler points out in The Architecture of Diplomacy, it was a pub lic relations disaster, and received massive negat ive cover age in the press. Lewis Mumford, for one, blasted it in the New Yorker of Decem ber 1952.1 Among the architects who followed suit and expressed dismay at the building were Rudolph Schindler, Bruce Goff, and Pietro Bel luschi.2 Paul Rudolph, in par ticu lar, condemned it for bringing ‘the so called International Style close to bankruptcy’.3
