poster

Academy of the Refused: Patronage and Propaganda Networks of the International Style in New York, 1930-1935

M. David Samson

  
Biography

M. David Samson was educated at the University of Chicago and obtained a doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 1988. He held a 1987 fellowship at the Institute for North American Studies at the (West) Berlin Free University, and a 1990 fellowship at the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University. He is Associate Professor of Art History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has been at WPI since 1991, and teaches and advises in the fields of art history, the history of architecture, American cultural history, the history of industrial design, and historic preservation. He has written extensively on the world of American architecture between 1910 and 1960, and his study of German-American dialogues in architecture's Modern Movement is in preparation. An essay by Dr. Samson on post-World War II college architecture appeared in the April 2006 Campus Architecture supplement of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
 

Abstract

The idea that modern architecture was an "International Style" was first offered by a group of young critics and historians in New York around 1930. Its members were citizens of overlapping and mutually reinforcing social or intellectual communities. They are seen to advantage in the exhibition of "Rejected Architects" mounted by Philip Johnson in 1931. Central to the communities was the belief that their members were outsiders to their elite social class. Diagramming the "International Style" group as overlapping "spaces" of artistic advocacy avoids the ambiguities encountered when historians apply exclusively biographical models to this group, or attempt narratives of its "impact" on architectural production. The model of a system of mutually reinforcing social and intellectual communities exposes the "International Style" group's commonalities with patrons and educators in architecture, and its tangential but productive relation to that part of American architecture culture concerned with technology and society.