Modernist America
Eight architects, from the 1880s to the 1990s. Houses, towers, museums and assemblies, filed by approach and read against the European modern movement. Notes, drawings and photographs, one folder per architect.
Houses and halls built before the International Style had a name. Low roofs, local stone, rooms that open to the ground outside. Plans drawn from the site and from the way a family lives in it, worked out on prairies and coastal hills long before the style had a manifesto.
Buildings shaped as objects, worked out in paper and wood models before any elevation was drawn. Curved metal, broken volumes and cheap materials used on purpose. Architecture that asks to be walked around and argued with, and that is rarely read at a single glance from the street.
Libraries, museums, assemblies and government centers. Heavy walls, exact geometry and daylight admitted in measured doses. Institutions given a permanent shape and meant to carry civic weight for a century or more, with ornament removed and mass, proportion and light left to do the work.
Work rooted in one landscape and its building habits. Adobe, stucco, terracotta and local stone used beside steel frames and concrete. A bridge between nineteenth-century craft and the modern plan: buildings that answer to climate, material and history before they answer to style.