In Search of Modern Architecture: A Tribute to Henry-Russell Hitchcock

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0262192098

These twenty-one original essays were written to honor a scholar who has transformed the study and teaching of architectural history in the United States. The scope of Henry-Russell Hitchcock's interests is uniquely grand and our present comprehension of Western architecture would be unthinkable without his books, articles, exhibitions, and lectures. Vincent Scully, George Collins, John Coolidge, Mark Girouard, William Jordy, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., Neil Levine, and Henry Millon are among the contributors to this book, all of whom are noted architectural historians who have either collaborated with Hitchcock or studied under him. Their essays are grouped in a chronological-topical framework that parallels Hitchcock's own major concerns and publications and they range from studies of architects Soane, Richardson, Le Corbusier, Gaudi, Wright, McKim, Mead and White, to discussions of Egyptian revivalism, and Long Island resort architecture. Introductory chapters on Hitchcock are followed by essays grouped in three parts: The Age of Romanticism: Rationalism, Revivalism, and Eclecticism, 1740-1900; American Architecture to 1900: Romanticism and Reintegration; and Twentieth-Century Architecture: The New Tradition and the New Pioneers. From Modern Architecture, Romanticism and Reintegration, his first book, through Early Victorian Architecture, and Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in the Pelican Series, to his recent publications on German Renaissance architecture and related topics, Hitchcock has demonstrated that architectural history is essential to humanistic understanding. Moreover, like his European colleagues Wittkower, Pevsner, and Summerson, Hitchcock has been a constant influence on the course of architectural practice. With Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson he launched the "International Style" in modernism and paved the way for Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. His interest in vernacular architecture bore fruit in Vincent Scully's Shingle Style, providing much of the impetus for postmodernism. Hitchcock's monograph on Frank Lloyd Wright remains the cornerstone of all research on this brilliant architect. And Hitchcock was founder and has remained a mainstay of the Society of Architectural Historians. Helen Searing is Professor of Art at Smith College. An Architectural History Foundation book.