Architectural exhibitions of New York and institutional transitions in modern American architecture

This dissertation looks into the institutional transitions of American architecture in the modern era, as reflected on and formulated in architectural exhibitions. Through the notion of architectural institution, the study approaches the history of the architecture by its general status and function in society. The key assumption here is that the institutional construct of architecture depends not only on the formation of an inner discipline but also on its interaction with the public sphere, both of which are reflected on the exhibition space, a discursive field open beyond the architectural community. After the establishment of architectural institution by the Beaux-Arts movement in the late nineteenth century, three organizations, all mainstream in the New York cultural society, held respective exhibitions of architecture that differed in choice of style, display techniques, and, most importantly, the underlying institutional form of architecture. First of these shows were the annual exhibitions held by the Architectural League of New York. Established in 1881 and granting an open membership to mural painters and sculptors, the League promoted through its galleries a Beaux-Arts ideal of architecture based on art, academism, and a close alliance with allied arts, in which the architect was established as a master artist. Later in the 1910s, when the social and material conditions of architecture was affected by machine production, engineering, and scientific management, the shows strived to absorb these changes within the accepted style of neo-classicism. The grandest of these shows was the “Exposition of Architecture and Allied Arts” in 1925, jointly held with the AIA at the Grand Central Palace. On the other hand, a different institutional cast was on display when architects were invited to arrange the 1929 version of the industrial design exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Entitled “The Architect and the Industrial Arts,” the show featured interior spaces fully furnished in exposition style, the prevailing fashion of the 1925 Paris Expo that brought about a change of taste in the American design community and market. When industrial design gained increasing significance in the saturated market, architects, answering the call pronounced by the Museum for the alliance between art and industry, utilized their sophisticated skills to serve the needs of the market. But the show also revealed the limits of the architects serving in the new milieu, as their custom-made designs was not in line with the ethos of mass production that was central to the social program of industrial design. However, the artistic aura that architecture had lost with this institutional re-formation was regained through the connoisseurship of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,” its first architectural show of 1932 which was accompanied by an even more influential publication The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, successfully inscribed the discipline to the institution of modern art. With its multi-departmental program, MoMA continued to present the discipline in the context of artistic and academic networks, and, although oppositional in style, restored the institutional characteristics established earlier by the Beaux-Arts movement.