In 1933 utopian visions for future skyscraper cities were disintegrating in the wake of the global financial collapse of 1929. The exhibition was conceived at a time when the skyscraper was under threat as a sustainable type. The primary goal of these efforts was to "naturalize" the International Style for the United States by providing it with American origins, linking it to capitalism rather than socialist movements in Europe, and by arguing that its representative architectural type was not social housing but the skyscraper. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the museum mounted further exhibitions and employed increasingly sophisticated media including publications, radio, and even film, to promote what they saw as formal parallels between the tall office buildings of late-nineteenth-century Chicago and the International Style.
Starting with a modest exhibition, “Early Modern Architecture: Chicago 1870–1910,” curated in 1933 by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, MoMA positioned the early Chicago skyscraper as a formal object worthy of aesthetic consideration not just an innovative and sophisticated technological object, but one of the nation’s greatest artistic achievements. The museum’s promotion of a group of buildings and architects categorized under the heading “Chicago School” was influenced by the writing of avant-garde architects and critics in Europe, and was closely tied to parallel efforts to promote the so-called “International Style,” a depoliticized version of the modern style beginning to appear in Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
Included in an anthology of essays about Chicago architecture and its influence, this essay focuses on the role played by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in creating and disseminating the idea of the “Chicago School of Architecture” to its influential audience during the 1930s.
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