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 two articles in Architectural Record in 1928, and more elaborately 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. Lectures by the instructor develop this argument with reference to a diverse group of architects—some well-known and others less familiar.