ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that the modernism as canonized by the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 International Style exhibition in New York City emerged from a global context rich with opportunities to exchange techniques and ideas about building design, engineering, and city planning. In 1932 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City produced an exhibition of contemporary architecture from fifteen countries. Internationalism and Pan-Americanism evolved in the context of a highly competitive global economy to serve the interests of member nation states. The Pan-American Congress of Architecture first convened almost a decade before the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), which remained relatively unknown and based in Europe until after publication of the Athens Charter, a documentation of the 1933 Congress proceedings, in 1943. In the 1940s, TVA dams powered uranium enrichment at the Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and a major increase in wartime production of aluminum for aircraft construction.