Parallel Moderns: Crosscurrents in European and American Architecture, 1880–1940

This seminar puts forward the argument that what many have accepted as the mutually exclusive discourses of tradition and innovation in the modern architecture of the first half of the twentieth century–respectively identified as the “New Tradition” and the “New Pioneers” by Henry-Russell Hitchcock in his Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929)—in fact share common genealogy and are integral to an understanding of modern architecture as a whole. The seminar explores in depth key architects working in the “New Tradition” and goes on to explore its impact for postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s. The possible emergence of a new synthesis of seeming opposites in the present is also considered. Limited enrollment.