From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the Harvard Graduate School of
Design played a crucial role in shaping a new modern architecture and
the modern city. Architects, planners, teachers, and students from all
over the world looked to the new GSD, with its celebrated faculty and
curriculum, for the path to modern design. While the school's
significance is widely recognized by architectural historians, most
studies have concentrated on the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and his
transformation of Harvard's old Beaux-Arts School of Architecture into a
"Harvard-Bauhaus," a radically new school with a single outlook. In
Inventing American Modernism, Jill Pearlman argues that Gropius did not
effect these changes alone and, further, that the GSD was not merely an
offshoot of the Bauhaus. She offers a crucial missing piece to the
story--and to the history of modern architecture--by focusing on Joseph
Hudnut, the school's dean and founder.
After heading the architecture school at the University of Virginia, and
then at Columbia University, Hudnut created the GSD at Harvard in 1936,
before Gropius was appointed, and he headed the school until 1953, the
year after Gropius resigned. From the beginning, Hudnut gave the GSD its
modern pedagogical direction, and he continued to oversee its curriculum
and staffing for the next seventeen years. Although originally an
admirer of Gropius's work and theories, Hudnut came to clash with him
over the control of the direction of modern architecture and planning in
the United States Gropius won the battle, but Pearlman shows that, had
the GSD followed the path Hudnut wanted, modern architecture and the
modern city might well have been different.
In his role as public intellectual, Hudnut wielded an influence that
reached outside the university, distinguished by his encouraging people
to participate in the architectural and urbanistic matters that affected
their lives. A story involving European modernists such as Marcel
Breuer, Martin Wagner, and Christopher Tunnard, as well as a number of
other architects, city planners, and landscape architects, this book is
more than the study of a single school; it is a look at the origins of
modernism at a defining moment in the history of twentieth-century
architecture.
Published in association with the Center for American Places
