Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Architecture, modernism and its discontents 9781350094147, 9781350094116, 9781350094123

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LIST OF IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4 Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6 Figure 1.7 Figure 1.8 Figure 1.9 Figure 1.10 Figure 1.11 Figure 1.12 Figure 1.13 Figure 1.14 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6 Figure 2.7 Figure 2.8 Figure 2.9

Courtesy of Anne Claussnitzer and Hattula Moholy-Nagy 12 Photo Hilde Heynen, 2018 13 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 14 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 16 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 16 Courtesy of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 19 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 20 Courtesy of Anne Claussnitzer 25 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 27 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 28 Courtesy of Anne Claussnitzer 34 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 40 Courtesy of Anne Claussnitzer 42 Courtesy of Anne Claussnitzer and Hattula Moholy-Nagy 43 Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo 56 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 59 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 62 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 62 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 63 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 64 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 65 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 66 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 67

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(a) Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy. (b) Plate 10 in Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 69 Plate 15 in Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 73 Courtesy of KU Leuven Library 78 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 79 (a) Photo Eva Koercher, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. (b) Photo Karl Teigen. Courtesy of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design 81 Alamy Stock Photo 81 (a) Photo Brad Herzog. Courtesy of Wellesley College Archives, Library & Technology Services. (b) Courtesy of Chicago Postcard Museum 82 Courtesy of Heidelberg University 92 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 94 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 95 Digital image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence 96 Photo Nico Jesse. Courtesy of Nederlands Fotomuseum 98 Photo Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo 99 Photo Willy Kiel. Courtesy of Berlin Landesarchiv F.Rep. 290 Nr 0054943 101 Creative Commons 102 Photo Karl-Heinz Schubert. Courtesy of Berlin Landesarchiv, F Rep. 290 Nr. 0083467 103 Photo Heinrich Heidersberger, 1955. Courtesy of Institut Heidersberger 108 Photo Roadmr. Creative Commons 110 Courtesy ArPDF, Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal 111 Photo Studios Jacky c. 1960. Courtesy Archivo Fotografia Urbana Proyecto Helicoide 112 Photo UCSC Special Collection. Courtesy Creole Petroleum Corporation 112 Photo Alfred Brandler. Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela (Figure 83, page 59) 113 Hilde Heynen, 2018 115 Photo Darren Bradley. Courtesy of OTTOarchive 116 Courtesy of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University 119 Courtesy of Pan Am Historical Foundation 120

LIST OF IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 3.20 Figure 3.21 Figure 3.22 Figure 3.23 Figure 3.24 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 4.9 Figure 4.10 Figure 4.11 Figure 4.12 Figure 4.13 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4

Courtesy of Archives of American Art 122 Photo G.E. Kidder Smith. Courtesy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology 123 Photo Joseph W. Molitor, 1963. Courtesy of Columbia University, Avery Archives 124 Photo Daniel Schwen, 2010. Creative Commons 125 Photo Gottscho-Schleisner Collection. Library of Congress 127 Courtesy ArPDF, Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal 136 Photo Ray Wilson. Alamy Stock Photo 138 Photo Tato Grasso, 2007. Creative Commons 138 Photo dpa picture alliance. Alamy Stock Photo 140 Photo Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, collection UCSC. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 143 Matrix of Man (Figure 103, page 114) 147 Matrix of Man (Figure 3, page 15) 149 Matrix of Man (Figure 16, page 27) 150 Matrix of Man (Figure 6B, page 19) (this reproduction is an Alamy Stock Photo) 151 Matrix of Man (Figure 99, page 110) 152 (a) Matrix of Man (Figure 120A, page 130). (b) Matrix of Man (Figure 120B, page 130) 153 Matrix of Man (Figure 276, page 275) 155 Images in Matrix of Man, page 71 160 Photo and information courtesy of Lee Cott 175 Photo Buford Pickens. Courtesy of TU Delft Library 181 Courtesy of Alderman Library, University of Virginia 184 Courtesy of Columbia University, Avery Library, George Collins Papers 186 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 189 Courtesy of Pratt Archives 197 Photo F. Levstic Jr., 1947. Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 209 Courtesy of Hattula Moholy-Nagy 212 Courtesy of gta Archives / ETH Zürich, CIAM 220 Creative Commons 223

LIST OF IMAGE CREDITS

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

his book has been a long time in the making. My interest in Sibyl MoholyNagy and her work started in the late 1990s, when I first visited the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, which holds copies of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s papers on microfilm. In 2001, shortly after 9/11, I was in New York where I visited the Pratt Institute in search of material on Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. At that time, I also spoke to several people who knew her. My investigations and interviews brought me to many different places: Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Chicago, Paris, Cambridge, Dresden and Reutlingen. Throughout these years I have received the help and support of many, many people, who invariably encouraged me to continue my research and to write this book. Most important was Hattula Moholy-Nagy, the daughter of László and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from where she manages the legacy of her father and – to a lesser extent – that of her mother. Hattula MoholyNagy gracefully received me in her home, not once, but twice, and was always very open and helpful. She gave me full access to her collections, provided highresolution images and shared her insights with me about the relationship between her parents and about the import of her mother’s work. Moreover, she has always been generous in granting copyrights for various publication purposes. She also introduced me to Anne Claussnitzer, the granddaughter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s sister, who is the curator of the family archive in Reutlingen, Germany. Anne Claussnitzer likewise opened her house and her collections to me, granting me access to many letters from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to her family in Germany – material that proved to be invaluable to my research. I thank both Hattula Moholy-Nagy and Anne Claussnitzer for their commitment to this project, and I hope that they will both be pleased with the outcome. I spent a crucial sabbatical year at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was a fellow in the class of 2008. Although it took somewhat longer for this book to materialize than I had promised in my application, I could not have achieved this outcome without that year of focused research. I likewise thank my home institute, the University

of Leuven, for granting me that sabbatical year and for supporting me also in other ways in this research. The Graham Foundation was helpful in providing a travel grant that facilitated my various trips to archives and other sources. The Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) likewise provided travel funds to various conferences where I presented parts of this material. I am grateful to the archivists at both the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, and the University of California in Santa Cruz, California, who promptly answered my queries and helped me in finding valuable material. Indirect support was given by the US Modernist Library website, which hosts digital copies of, among others, Progressive Architecture, Architectural Forum and the AIA Journal. The Digital Archives of Carnegie Mellon University contain digital copies of the periodical La Charette. It is a real gift to researchers that such collections are now so easily accessible. Through the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) and other networks, I have met many scholars who offered encouragement and intellectual companionship. I thank Gülsüm Baydar, Alice Friedman, Mary McLeod, Barbara Penner, Mary Pepcinski, Richard Plunz, Nancy Stieber, Despina Stratigakos and Gwendolyn Wright for their active engagement and their comments on various aspects of this work. André Loeckx has long been my sparring partner at the University of Leuven. He contributed to this book by challenging me to better contextualize MoholyNagy’s work and to more precisely formulate my own ideas. I am grateful to Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye, who were very keen on enlisting this book as the first in their new series Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture. There are many other people who provided, wittingly or unwittingly, an impetus to this work. Among them are Stan Anderson, Eve Blau, Meredith Clausen, Margaret Crawford, Katia Frey, Detlef Garz, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Catherine Ingraham, Carol Krinsky, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Joan Ockman, Eliana Perotti, Robin Schuldenfrei, Ronald Shiffman and Emma Teng. I hope they will recognize some traces of our exchanges in the pages that follow. While working on this material, I met many people who generously shared their memories of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy with me, sometimes in very short but often in more lengthy communications. I was able to interview Franz Altschuler, George Baird, Lee Cott, Lloyd Engelbrecht, Ulrich Franzen, Herbert Seymour Howard, Martin Hurtig, John Johansen, Theodore Liebman, Raymond Lifchez, Laurie Maurer, Allen Porter, Merry Renk, Nan Rosenthal, George Ranalli, Alan Sayles, Jeffrey Shorn and Sydney Starr. I received important material from Jay Kerstenbaum, librarian at Pratt Institute in 2001, from Susanne S. Frank and from Kitty Weese. I thank them all for the help they offered me. Lastly, I should mention the students and student assistants who did some of the groundwork along the way. Helena Vansteelant devoted her master’s thesis at the University of Leuven to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. She supplied many copies of articles, and also compiled the backbone of what would become the bibliography of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s

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work. This bibliography was later enriched and expanded on by Rachel Pollack and Maria Larsson, who were my student assistants at Radcliffe Institute. They both also contributed in other ways – transcribing interviews, locating relevant material and finding out where some of the people who I wanted to speak with were located. Sebastiaan Loosen, one of my doctoral students at the University of Leuven, has read the whole manuscript with an eagle eye. He discovered mistakes and repeatedly formulated very helpful suggestions, for which I am grateful.

Credits Some chapters in this book are based on earlier publications. Chapter 2 is an expanded and revised version of Hilde Heynen, ‘Anonymous architecture as counterimage: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s perspective on American vernacular’, The Journal of Architecture, 13, no. 4, (September 2008): 469–92. Chapter 4 builds upon Hilde Heynen, ‘“Matrix of Man”: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Neglected Histories’, Harvard Design Magazine, no. 16 (Winter/Spring 2002): 28–33, and on Hilde Heynen, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and the City as Matrix of Man’, in Viviana d'Auria, Bruno De Meulder, Kelly Shannon (eds), Human Settlements: Formulations and (re)Calibrations (Amsterdam: SUN, 2010), 38–43. Chapter 5 is an expanded and thoroughly revised version of Hilde Heynen, ‘Teaching as vocation: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at Pratt Institute’, in Dick Van Gameren and Dirk van den Heuvel (eds), Liber amicorum Max Risselada (Delft: Department of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, 2014), 68–77. The author thanks the editors and publishers of these works for granting permission to republish this material.

Note on archival sources The main sources for the material discussed in this book are the following:

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Papers of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy kept in the private collection of Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Ann Arbor, Michigan (HMN).

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Microfilm copies of the bulk of these papers, available at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC (‘Sibyl and László Moholy-Nagy papers, 1918–1971’), reels 944–949, reels 951–952 and reels 1005–1006. I refer in the notes to these microfilm reels as AAA000 – 000/000, with the latter figures indicating specific frames in

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

the microfilm reels. Occasionally I wasn’t able to retrieve the precise frame number(s) from my own copies, resulting in references containing just the number of the reel. ●

Archive of the families Strahl, Esche, Clauss, Pietzsch and Steuche, in the care the great-niece of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Anne Claussnitzer (AC), Reutlingen, Germany.

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The Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Collection at the University of California Santa Cruz, Special Collections and Archives (UCSC). This collection contains her teaching materials.

Other archives I consulted are the following: ●

Walter Gropius papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (for the correspondence between couples Walter/Ise Gropius and László/Sibyl Moholy-Nagy).

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Philip Johnson papers in the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (for the correspondence between Philip Johnson and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy).

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Papers of the Architectural League of New York at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.

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Peter Blake papers and Douglas Haskell papers at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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FOREWORD

T

he Modern Movement was a broad and multifaceted phenomenon that revolutionized the field of architecture. Throughout the twentieth century, and across political, cultural and climatic divides, modern architecture radically changed the everyday lives of millions of people. Yet, to this day, our knowledge of this sweeping and omnipresent occurrence remains largely limited to the names of a few famed designers. In spite of the growing research into the Modern Movement and its various actors, most publications still focus on a select list of grandmasters. This narrow view restrains our understanding of what the Modern Movement in architecture was, as it limits our insight into the breadth and complexity of the networks that underwrote it, and undercuts the possibility of a more holistic and fine-grained understanding of its worldwide impact on architectural culture and the built environment. The Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture book series seeks to address this dearth. It sheds light on those who played a pivotal role in propelling the Modern Movement, but who have, nonetheless, languished in the shadows of their better-known (and extensively published) canonical peers. Examining the works and ideas of this ‘shadow canon’, this book series does not aspire to canonize those to whom it offers a platform, but rather to contribute to the construction of a more detailed understanding of the different actors that propelled the Modern Movement across the globe, as well as the relationships that existed between these actors, and the ways in which they contributed to the proliferation, recalibration and transculturation of modern architecture. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, the protagonist of the first book to appear in this series, was an architectural critic, historian and educator. As such, she was part of (what is commonly considered) an ‘auxiliary’ group of professionals who support the ‘real’ work of architecture, which is done by architects and which – contrary to the achievements of these ‘auxiliary professionals’ – is written up in architectural historiographies. However, being part of these auxiliary classes is likely not the only reason why Moholy-Nagy has been marginalized for a very long time.

As this book points out, Moholy-Nagy’s lack of a formal architectural training, her gender, her sharp tongue/pen and her love for controversy certainly did not help either. She was fiercely critical of Bauhaus modernism, and in denouncing it, she not only made a few enemies but also lost some friends. Even so, her network was extensive and her writings and ideas on architecture, which are analysed in detail in the current volume, impressive, to say the least. As an architectural autodidact, she was a forceful voice in this (to-this-day) male-dominated discipline, and formulated strong alternatives to the crisis of modern architecture – a crisis that she helped precipitate. In her first book-length scholarly study, Moholy-Nagy urged practitioners to (instead) look at anonymous architecture. Her book Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (1957) rewrites the history of architecture based on an innovative methodology of surveys through North America which, she claims, made her see her adopted country in a new way: ‘I discovered a spontaneous building genius, now almost smothered by technological and speculative construction, which through its uninhibited originality seemed often superior to European folk architecture.’1 This experience offered Moholy-Nagy the foundation to develop a history of architecture that was not based on one style, approach or geographical area, but rather focused on how builders – across times and geographies – devised creative solutions to respond to specific issues of site, climate, materiality and craft. Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture took a cue from the Spontaneous Architecture (Architettura Spontanea) exhibition that was mounted in Milan in 1951 by a team of architects, including Enzo Cerutti, Giancarlo de Carlo and Giuseppe Samonà, and laid the groundwork for Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 publication Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture, a book based on the eponymous MoMA exhibition in New York. Like these two exhibitions that bookended her publication, Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture can be read as an attempt to expand agency in the field of architecture, from the exclusive prerogative of design professionals to a matter that belongs to a wider, and more inclusive, group of builders. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s scholarship can also be understood as an effort to correct the male-dominated and Euro-America-centric historiographies of modern architecture. In one of her best-known books, Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment (1968), she constructs a historical narrative that no longer foregrounds heroic male protagonists, but rather cities and their citizens. In Matrix of Man, the city appears not as a self-consciously designed monument, but as the result of continuous human efforts of self-creation that express society and its collective aspirations. Matrix of Man is highly topical in several respects. First, for its attempt to widen the perspective of the historiography of the urban environment. Matrix of Man describes a historical narrative that travels across four continents, and studies

FOREWORD

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urban phenomena in a comparative manner. The history presented in this book offers a vast panorama of urbanization, which demonstrates that while cities in different geographies may share certain personality traits, they are nonetheless shaped by specific social and cultural conditions. Taking the reader from Beijing to Brasilia, and from the Roman castra to Levittown, Moholy-Nagy’s book thus presaged the current interest in global history writing. Also the gendered view of the environment that is legible in Matrix of Man is highly relevant today. Like present-day eco-feminists, Moholy-Nagy saw the environment as a source of nurturing and identification, and even though she did not identify as a feminist herself, she held strong ideas about women’s role in society. Moholy-Nagy’s ideas about women’s role in society not only informed the revaluation of the entanglements between modernism, feminism and architecture, which is included in this book (Architecture, Modernism and its Discontents), but it also offers food for thought in the current #MeToo era. For all these reasons, there is no one better positioned to chronicle and critically examine Moholy-Nagy’s legacy than Professor Hilde Heynen. Following on from her landmark publication Architecture and Modernity: A Critique and her powerful contributions to the debate on women in architecture, this study has afforded Heynen the opportunity to combine her key interests in another pioneering publication. Heynen is an esteemed architectural educator and prominent woman’s voice in architecture and its historiography herself; the vigour, devotion and joy with which she has undertaken the task to offer a fair and nuanced appraisal of Moholy-Nagy’s contribution to the Modern Movement, as well as the disciplines of architecture and urban design in general, is legible from every page. Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye Series editors

Note 1 Papers of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, microfilm reel 948/0162-0165, frame 0163, Archives of

American Art.

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FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

The history of modern architecture is populated by characters that never made it to the front stages of its main narratives. Few figures stand out – it is the nature of history writing that it concentrates on telling the story through focusing on lead roles and major plot lines. And thus the history of the architecture of the Modern Movement, as told by Kenneth Frampton, Alan Colquhoun or William Curtis, unfolds as a series of chapters that deal with the life and work of modern architecture’s heroes (Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, etc.) and the movements they were a part of.1 Supporting roles are filled in by the heroes’ students, critics and followers; drama is provided by highlighting conflicts with more traditionally oriented architects, with fascist or other state powers, with a culturally backwards general public or with other, competing movements. It is well known that in this general narrative of modern architecture, few spots are cleared for women.2 Like in many other fields, women seemingly have been rather absent from the business of architecture in the twentieth century. That general impression has been somewhat corrected by the work of several feminist historians, who have filled in some gaps and who have dug out the contributions of women such as Eileen Gray, Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, Charlotte Perriand, Lilly Reich, Lina Bo Bardi and others.3 There is still much work to do, however. The focus on lead roles and major plot lines indeed leaves out many of the most interesting discussions and events that went on in the large networks of actors who together made up the field of architecture in the twentieth century. Zooming in on some of the secondary figures, or even on those in the background, helps to paint a more colourful and detailed picture, which brings to light the struggles and fissures that, in retrospect, were intrinsic to the story of modern architecture, even though they were not presented as such by its main historians. Such is the case of the life and work of the ‘group of lady-critics … who kept the US architectural establishment continually on the run during the 1950s and the 1960s’, as Reyner Banham put it in 1971.4 Among these lady-critics, Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) is now

getting her due through a biography and a film, while her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is as influential as ever.5 Ada Louise Huxtable (1921–2013) is still waiting in the wings, not yet the subject of an extensive study. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (1903–1971) – the third and, according to Banham, the ‘most formidable’ of his ‘lady-critics’ – is put centre stage in this book. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was born as Sibylle Pietzsch, in Loschwitz, near Dresden, the daughter of Werkbund architect Martin Pietzsch (1866–1961). While working in the film industry in Berlin in 1931, she met László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), the former Bauhaus master. She followed him to London and Chicago as his wife, the mother of his children and his collaborator. After his premature death, she started upon a scholarly career, publishing first his biography6 and later several other books on architecture.7 She also published many articles in periodicals such as Architectural Forum, Progressive Architecture, Bauwelt and Casabella. She thus was a major voice in the architectural culture of the 1950s and the 1960s. This study sets out to analyse the significance of the life and work of this remarkable woman. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was uniquely engaged with both modernity (the set of conditions that oppose tradition and propagate the values of the Enlightenment) and modernism (the cultural phenomenon encompassing artistic, literary and architectural movements that embrace modernity).8 She lived through troubled times when these ideas were at stake in bitterly fought battles between opposing forces in culture and in society. As a young girl and woman in Weimar, Germany, she faced the contradiction between her longing for modernity, freedom and emancipation, on the one hand, and the strict limitations her father imposed on her, on the other. As the wife and collaborator of László Moholy-Nagy, she was expected to provide him with the material and emotional support that was crucial for his modernist mission, all the while trying to carve out her own subjectivity as a writer. As a migrant, she participated in the avant-garde diaspora which brought many German modernists to the United States, necessitating a cultural and intellectual transformation process of which she was keenly aware. As a widow and a mother of young children, she struggled to establish her financial and professional independence in a post-war American culture that was far from sympathetic towards such endeavours. As a critic and historian, she was critically engaging with modernism in art and architecture, lacking the educational foundation to do so (because her father forbid her to go to university) but nevertheless managing to make a very credible job out of it and becoming an influential and respected scholar. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy embodied all these different faces of modern womanhood and modernism, arguably living a feminist life, fiercely working towards independence, without ever identifying herself as a feminist. Her life and work thus illustrate some of the puzzling and paradoxical aspects of the relation between modernism and feminism. It is indeed one of the aims of this book to delve somewhat deeper into the relation between modernism and feminism. How is it that equality between men

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and women is now routinely seen as one of the hallmarks of Western modernity while nevertheless feminism is only rarely considered a constitutive ingredient of modernism? If modernism is indeed an encompassing term indicating the tendencies and movements that support and embrace modernity, one would expect that feminism is part and parcel of modernism, since it is feminism that brought about the increasing equality between men and women. This logical equation, however, does not coincide with what is perceived as historical realities. The canon of modernism in literature and arts is firmly masculine, although there were many modernist women writers and artists – a paradox which has been addressed in literary studies and art history.9 In architecture, feminism seems to have been even less of a factor. There were many women students at the Bauhaus, but they were not allowed access to the highly regarded architectural course.10 Women’s liberation was invoked in the arguments about Existenz-minimum dwellings, but women’s agency was minimalized.11 Several mechanisms were at play that diminished women’s contribution to architecture’s practice and discourse.12 Modernism in architecture was thus most often masculinist and patriarchal and only marginally brushed shoulders with feminism.13 One is thus left with a puzzling paradox, which pervades the history of the twentieth century: the project of emancipation undertaken by modernism somehow did not necessarily include the emancipation of women. This book means to address this paradox, not in order to solve it entirely (that is an aim that will demand more, and more collective, efforts), but rather to show how it worked out in the life and work of this one exceptional woman. Another aim of this book is to add some further layers to the complicated history of modern architecture. The narrative of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s life and work acts as a prism to highlight the changing nature of modernism in its trajectory from Europe to America, from investment in social housing to identification with corporate culture. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was an astute witness of this transformation. Closely involved with the teachings of László Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago Institute of Design, she later remained faithful to his ideas about visual arts and design. She nevertheless became more and more critical of the Bauhaus legacy in the field of architecture. She was thus one of the early voices articulating doubts about the path modernist architecture was taking. She demystified the myths of the masters Mies, Le Corbusier and Gropius, criticizing them for their megalomania and for their lack of respect for the anonymous users and inhabitants of their buildings. She used her research of vernacular architecture and historical cities to point towards spatial and material qualities that were threatened by contemporary developments. In her critical readings of buildings by Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen and others, she often brought historical references into play for an acute assessment of their value for architectural and urban culture. She was often polemical and outspoken in her views, sometimes deliberately insulting, but rarely without cause. Her work thus offers a unique contribution which criticized and questioned the

INTRODUCTION

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heroic, masculinist version of modernism, bringing in not only a female voice but also feminine concerns about context and connectedness. In developing this work, I have relied most of all on archival resources, oral history and analysis of published materials. Most of the papers of Sibyl MoholyNagy are available on microfilm in the Archives of American Art in Washington. This collection contains personal papers and diaries, as well as letters, notes for lectures, published materials, and so forth. Some documents are with her daughter Hattula Moholy-Nagy in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and with her great-niece Anne Claussnitzer, in Reutlingen, Germany. Her teaching slides and many photographs are kept in the University of California, Santa Cruz. Some other materials, such as letters, are available in other archives. Together these materials provide a very rich source for research. Throughout the years that I have been occupied with this project, I have met several people who have personally known Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Especially, the interviews conducted with her daughter, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, have proved to be very relevant. Former students and colleagues were also very helpful in providing information and sharing their memories. As an intellectual biography, this book zooms in specifically on the published work of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, analysing and contextualizing her ideas against the background of dominant contemporary discourses on art and architecture. As might be expected, my analysis is theoretically informed by my earlier work on architecture and modernity,14 on architecture and gender15 and on architectural theory.16 The existing literature on Sibyl Moholy-Nagy is not very extensive. Thus far only one book publication is devoted to her. It is a book in German, based on a doctoral dissertation in the field of pedagogy and focusing mostly on its subject’s inner life and psychological development.17 Further secondary literature is limited to some articles from the 1970s,18 an introduction to a recently republished text from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy19 and my own writings.20 This intellectual biography consists, after the Introduction, of six chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Life trajectory’, contains the biographical narrative. It focuses on Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s family background, her personal relations and her professional network. The writing seeks a balance between known factual circumstances, contextual conditions and biographical interpretations that make the connection with her personal and professional writings. It tells the story of an intelligent and rebellious girl, who is trying to figure out how to become someone lastingly contributing to intellectual life and to culture. The path she took proved to be full of pitfalls and distractions, bringing her often to the brink of exhaustion, but ultimately culminating in her ability to combine the roles of artist widow, mother, scholar and teacher to satisfaction. Chapter 2, ‘Vernacular architecture and the uses of the past’, analyses how Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s passion for history informed her choice of scholarly topics and drove her criticism of modernist architecture. After she wrote the biography of her husband László, she gained credibility as an architectural historian by publishing

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a serious study of North American vernacular architecture. The chapter will highlight how this 1957 volume Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture was one of the first architectural books that explicitly focused upon vernacular architecture as a source of inspiration for contemporary practices. The chapter contextualizes this book within Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s broader aspiration to bring history back to architectural modernism. Chapter 3, ‘Modernism and the forces of history’, focuses on Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s writings about modernist art and architecture. Her identification with modernism was first of all an identification with László’s intellectual and artistic legacy. László Moholy-Nagy directed the Institute of Design in Chicago, one of the first schools in the United States where the design principles of the Bauhaus were relied upon to set up an innovative curriculum for artists and industrial designers. As his collaborator, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy had an intimate knowledge of his intellectual and artistic work. Her view on modernism in architecture was at first closely connected to that of Walter Gropius and Sigfried Giedion, who had been close friends of the couple. Increasingly, however, she came to criticize the focus on rationality and technology that was typical for many modernists. In her writings, she favoured Frank Lloyd Wright’s version of modernism, because of his respect for regional qualities of the landscape and for American traditions. She admired the architectural qualities of Le Corbusier’s work, but dismissed his city plans as overbearing and anti-human. She dipped her pen in vitriol every time she mentioned Mies, and was the first to attack Gropius about his design for the Pan Am building in New York. Her most respectful and admiring writings were reserved for those architects who imbued modernism with a sense of history and a sense of context. The modernism she wanted to become dominant was one in which technology and calculation would only be at the service of an architecture that was oriented towards urbanity and human identification, an architecture that would be creative and resourceful rather than narrowly driven by economic motives. Her passion for urbanity is explored in Chapter 4, ‘The great city and its civic culture’. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was very critical of modernism’s ideal of controlling the city through master planning. For her, the historic continuity of the city guaranteed freedom and flexibility for its inhabitants, and it should not be carelessly disrupted by new, ‘scientific’ ways of dealing with urban planning. In 1954, she had already declared her love for the city, when she wrote a statement for Architectural Record, entitled ‘Where the great city stands’.21 Her arguments against the anti-urban tendencies within modernism were taken a step further in Matrix of Man (1968), where she stressed the importance of landscape, regional climate, tradition, culture and form. She repeatedly referred to the city as a symbol of power but also of human aspiration and participation. The city for her was a generative force, capable of moulding people and civilizations, bringing forth creative energies and interconnectedness. This was generally not recognized, she found, by modern architects who favoured master planning and tended to dissolve the city.

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The vehicle that allowed Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to reach her full potential was teaching. Chapter 5, ‘Teaching as a vocation’, describes her rise as an increasingly distinguished lecturer, speaker and teacher, who made a lasting impact on many of her students. From 1951 to 1969, she taught at Pratt Institute in New York, where she became full professor in 1960, the first woman to do so. Her former students remember her with awe and admiration. She was a demanding but fair teacher, who made the curriculum at Pratt into one renowned for its thoroughness in architectural history. She was quite innovative in the set-up of her courses, covering not just the usual survey of European architectural history, but broadening and deepening the curriculum. She introduced students to the architectural legacy of other continents – especially Latin America, and made an explicit link between architectural and urban history, scheduling a graduate course on the ‘history of human settlements’. She thus gave a special twist to her teaching, identifying herself as a modernist, using modernist techniques such as collage and form association, but infusing this modernism with a sense of context and a sense of global history that was rare in its other modernist protagonists. The concluding chapter, Chapter 6, ‘A controversial figure’, reflects on how Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, through her teaching, lecturing, networking, researching and writing, contributed to the lively discourse on modernist architecture in the United States and elsewhere. It portrays her as a polemical figure who played a role in multiple controversies and who was therefore not easy to pin down. The chapter also discusses the relations between feminism and modernism, and highlights how Sibyl Moholy-Nagy brought aspects of femininity to bear upon the masculinist ethos that dominated architectural culture. Lastly, the chapter ponders what might be the reasons for the fading visibility of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s work in the decades after her death. Throughout the book I will consistently call my protagonist either ‘Sibyl MoholyNagy’ or ‘Moholy-Nagy’, except for the first, biographical chapter. As is the case for many females, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy went through life carrying different surnames – Pietzsch (which she anglicized to Peach or Peech), Dreyfuss and Moholy-Nagy. To avoid confusion with the other characters in this chapter sharing these surnames, I will refer to her as ‘Sibylle’ or ‘Sibyl’. László Moholy-Nagy, on the other hand, will often be called ‘Moholy’, which was customary in his time and which was also the name Sibyl Moholy-Nagy routinely used in his biography.

Notes 1 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd edition (revised

and enlarged) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997); Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture, Oxford History of Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd edition (revised, expanded and redesigned) (London: Phaidon, 2012).

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2 Florencia Fernandez Cardoso, ‘How Wide Is the Gap? Evaluating Current

Documentation of Women Architects in Modern Architecture History Books (2004– 2014)’, in MOMOWO: Women Designers, Craftswomen, Architects and Engineers between 1918 and 1945, ed. Marjan Groot (Ljubljana: Zalozba ZRC, 2017), 230–49. 3 Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray (London: Phaidon, 2000); Peter Adam, Eileen Gray:

Her Life and Work, the Biography. With 429 Illustrations, 164 in Duotone and Color (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2014); Sophie Hochhäusl, ‘From Vienna to Frankfurt Inside Core-House Type 7: A History of Scarcity through the Modern Kitchen’, Architectural Histories, 1, no. 1 (1 October 2013): n.p, https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.aq; Mary McLeod, ed., Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003); Christiane Lange, Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe & Lilly Reich: Furniture and Interiors (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006); Robin Schuldenfrei and Annika Fisher, ‘Lilly Reich: Questions of Fashion’, West 86th, 21, no. 1 (1 March 2014): 102–20, https:// doi.org/10.1086/677870; Olivia de Oliveira, Lina Bo Bardi: Built Work, Lina Bo Bardi: Obra Construida, Reprint, 2G Books (Barcelona: Gili, 2010); Zeuler Rocha Mello de Almeida Lima, Lina Bo Bardi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 4 Reyner Banham, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architectural Review, 150 (July 1971): 64. 5 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House,

1961); Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs, The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Matt Tyrnauer, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, Documentary, 2017. 6 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (New York: Harper, 1950). 7 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (New York: Horizon,

1957); Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964); Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment (New York: Praeger, 1968); Sibyl MoholyNagy, ‘Introduction’, in The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, ed. Paul Rudolph (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 7–29. 8 I use the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ in line with Marshall Berman’s

suggestions. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1985), 13–17. I also firmly subscribe to Jürgen Habermas’s understanding of modernity as a project of emancipation. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hall Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983). Neither the term ‘modernity’ nor ‘modernism’ was in general use in the periods between the world wars. Architects who were part of the Modern Movement would rather refer to themselves as ‘avantgarde’ or ‘modern architects’, and not as ‘modernists’. It is only as of the post-war period that ‘modernism’ begins to be used to identify architects aligned with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and with the so-called ‘International Style’. See Christopher Wilk, ‘Introduction: What Was Modernism?’, in Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a New World, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 11–22. 9 Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990); Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (London: Harvard University Press, 1995); Marianne DeKoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Harry Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 174–93; Griselda

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Pollock, ‘The Missing Future: MOMA and Modern Women’, in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Aty, ed. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 28–55; Kathleen A. Pyne and Georgia O’Keeffe, Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, High Museum of Art, 2007). 10 Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus – The Politics of Power at the

Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institute, 1919–1932 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001); Isabelle Bauer, Architekturstudentinnen in der Weimarer Republik: Bauhaus und Tessenow Schülerinnen (Kassel, 2003). 11 Susan R. Henderson, Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative,

1926–1931, Studies in Modern European History, vol. 64 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2013); Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home – The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). 12 Mary McLeod, ‘Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender and Modernity’, in

Architecture in Fashion, ed. Deborah Fausch et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 38–123; Hilde Heynen, ‘Places of the Everyday. Women Critics in Architecture/Plekken van Het Dagelijks Leven. Over Vrouwen in de Architectuurkritiek’, Archis, no. 4 (2000): 58–64. 13 See, for instance, Penny Sparke’s review of a book that claimed that Le Corbusier was

a feminist. P. Sparke, ‘Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist’, Journal of Design History, 18, no. 2 (1 June 2005): 216–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epi027. 14 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity (London: MIT Press, 1999). 15 Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, eds, Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions

of Gender in Modern Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 16 C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen, eds, The SAGE Handbook of

Architectural Theory (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC: SAGE Publications, 2012). 17 Hannelore Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy,

Rekonstruktion Des Biographischen Verlaufs Einer Deutschen Emigrantin (Oldenburg: BIS-Verl. der Carl-von-Ossietzky-Univ, 2008). 18 Judith Paine, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: A Complete Life’, Archives of American Art Journal,

15, no. 4 (1975): 11; Suzanne Stephens, ‘Voices of Consequence: Four Architectural Critics’, in Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, ed. Susana Torre (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977), 142. 19 Despina Stratigakos and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Hitler’s Revenge’, Places Journal, no.

2015 (16 March 2015), https://doi.org/10.22269/150316. 20 Hilde Heynen, ‘Zondag 13 Mei 1945. Dagboeknotities van Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’,

Feit En Fictie: Tijdschrift Voor de Geschiedenis van de Representatie IV, no. 4 (2000): 129–39; Hilde Heynen, ‘“Matrix of Man”. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Neglected Histories’, Harvard Design Magazine, 16 (2002): 28–33; Hilde Heynen, ‘Anonymous Architecture as Counter-Image: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Perspective on American Vernacular’, The Journal of Architecture, 13, no. 4 (August 2008): 469–91, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13602360802328008; Hilde Heynen, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and the City as a Matrix of Man’, in Human Settlements: Formulations and (Re)Calibrations,

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ed. Viviana d’Auria, Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon (Amsterdam: SUN Architecture Publishers, 2010), 38–43; Hilde Heynen, ‘Teaching as Vocation. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at Pratt Institute’, in Looking at Architecture: Liber Amicorum Max Risselada, ed. Dick Van Gameren and Dirk Vandenheuvel (Delft: TU Delft, 2014), 68–77. 21 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Where the Great City Stands’, Architectural Record, 115 (January

1954): 24.

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1 LIFE TRAJECTORY

The story of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s life reads as a condensed version of the history and diaspora of the German avant-garde. She was born in 1903 in Loschwitz near Dresden, a city which was home to many international exhibitions and to the garden city of Hellerau, an important base of the reform movement.1 During the Weimar Republic era, she spent several years in Frankfurt and in Berlin. Frankfurt was gaining reputation as a modern city because of the housing estates built by Ernst May and his fellow architects of Das Neue Frankfurt.2 It was also the city where the Institut für Sozialforschung, the cradle of the Frankfurt School, was established in 1923.3 Berlin was the capital of culture and avant-garde art, hosting many art movements, theatres and cinemas and being home to a host of progressive intellectuals and authors. When Nazism took over in Germany, she emigrated – just like so many other intellectuals and avant-garde artists for whom life had become unbearable in their native country. The exodus brought her first to London and then to Chicago, places where she was part of a vivid emigrant culture. After the death of her husband László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), she moved to San Francisco and finally to New York. When she arrived there in 1951, the city had already taken over the leading role from Paris as the capital of modern art and culture.4 In the 1950s and 1960s, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy became one of its movers and shakers, establishing herself as an architectural critic and historian well known for her sharp analysis of modernist architecture and her acerbic comments. When she passed away in 1971, it was at a point in time when the supremacy of modernism was called into question – a state of affairs to which she had contributed her part. Her life thus spans the rise and fall of avant-garde and modernism as major cultural forces in Europe and America.

Family background Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was born on 29 October 1903, as Dorothea Maria Paulina Alice Sibylle Pietzsch, the youngest daughter of architect Martin Pietzsch (1866–1961)

and his wife Fanny, born Clauss (1866–1945) (Figure 1.1).5 Her father came from an intellectually inclined bourgeois family. His own father, Richard Pietzsch (1836–1876), was a philologist and pedagogue, who established a boys’ school in Blasewitz near Dresden. His mother, Agnes Pietzsch, born Wagner (1837–1917), was the daughter of a high-office civil servant. She raised her five sons alone after she was widowed when Martin was ten.6 Sibylle’s mother came from a family with an even higher social standing. Sibylle’s grandfather Edmund Bernhard Clauss (1835–1877) was the son of a rich merchant from Chemnitz and married Eugenie Strahl, daughter of a very successful Jewish doctor from Berlin, who converted to Christianity. Fanny Clauss, their daughter and Sibyl’s mother, received a very good education and was fluent in French and English.7 Both sides of the family attached a major importance to the idea of Bildung, the conviction that a thoroughly humanist education based on the classics prepared one for an intellectually, culturally and morally satisfactory life. Sibylle Pietzsch was thus part of a family that firmly belonged to the Dresden bourgeoisie. As Hannelore Rüttgens-Pohlmann points out, this educated elite made up only 5–6% of the whole population, so this was clearly a privileged background.8 Her father, Martin Pietzsch, had studied architecture at the Royal Art Academy of Dresden under Constantin Lipsius, a nineteenth-century architect who favoured historicism.9 He had travelled extensively in Italy and had made a name for himself by constructing the so-called Künstlerhaus in Dresden-Loschwitz in 1898. This was a large complex in an eclectic style, with Romanesque and Italianate aspects, comprising of artist studios with high

FIGURE 1.1 The 70th birthday of Agnes Wagner Pietzsch in Blasewitz. Agnes, Martin Pietzsch, Claus, Eva, Hertha, Sibylle and Fanny Pietzsch, 1907.

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ceilings and large windows on the east side and apartments on the west side.10 On the neighbouring lot he built the Kleines Künstlerhaus in 1899, as a home for his family (Figure 1.2). This was the house where Sibylle Pietzsch grew up. Martin Pietzsch was successful as a private architect. He was commissioned to design many houses, restaurants and leisure facilities, and became a specialist in movie theatres. His first such design, for a silent movie theatre called UnionTheater, dates from 1912/1913 and was hailed as a significant contribution to theatre architecture.11 His 1926 movie theatre Capitol was ingeniously inserted inside an urban block bordering the most important shopping avenue in Dresden. It provided for more than 2,000 spectators and was fully equipped with electrical lighting.12 By this time, Pietzsch’s formal repertoire was reminiscent of art deco and expressionism. His work from the 1920s and 1930s continued in a classicizing, simple and robust style – not starkly modernist, but closer to the traditional tendencies characteristic of the work of Schultze-Naumburg. Wolfram Steude, his grandson, confirms that he never felt close to the avantgarde art and architecture of the Bauhaus and the Neue Sachlichkeit, even though he was well informed about it.13

FIGURE 1.2 Kleines Künstlerhaus, the family home designed by Martin Pietzsch.

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Sibylle was the youngest of four siblings. Her elder sisters were Hertha (1898– 1980) and Eva (1899–1981), her brother Claus (1902–1942) was closest to her in age (Figure 1.3). As was typical for their time, the siblings belonged to the youth movement Wandervogel, an organization which heralded a back-to-nature philosophy, emphasizing ideas of freedom, self-responsibility and national pride, cherishing Germany’s Teutonic roots and the importance of the landscape. Both father and mother frowned upon this organization, judging it too adventurous and not very sophisticated, but this probably added to the appeal it had for the young members of the family. Sibylle became a member when she was about 15 years old, but left the organization again one year later. Rüttgens-Pohlmann, who closely studied the young girl’s diaries, sees this as significant for her inclination towards autonomy and independence.14 Sibylle was an intelligent and rebellious girl, who did not easily fit in anywhere. According to her diaries, she did not have any close girlfriends and was seen by her mother as ‘difficult’. She did well at school, but only at the cost of intense psychological anxiety, which led to physical exhaustion and an almost breakdown right before she obtained her high school diploma in 1920.15 The only sense of connection she developed during these years was with her religious mentor Dr Carl Mensing, minister of the Lutheran church in the city of Dresden, where she went for her confirmation. She chose to attend the Dresden preparation rather than the one in Loschwitz, again for reasons of independence.16 Bruder Mensing, as she called him, became a trusted person whom she stayed in touch with also in her later life.17 When Sibylle graduated from high school in 1920, she was not allowed to prepare for university.18 Within the family, it was father’s will that only his son,

FIGURE 1.3 Sibylle, Hertha, Eva and Claus, 1912.

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Claus, should attend university – even if Sibylle was doing at least as well in school.19 According to her diaries, her deepest desire was to develop into a creative person, a poet or a literary author who would really mean something for German culture and who would contribute to the search for the new, which she observed around her.20 Given her father’s objection to female higher education, Sibylle’s choice to train for the book trading business might be understood as a way to reach out to the world of arts and literature. Her sisters before her, likewise, had to forego university. Hertha trained as a gardener, Eva as a nurse and a seamstress. Claus, on the other hand, went to university to study art history and German philology, and obtained a PhD.

In search of a profession Sibylle’s mental and physical health, which had always been delicate (maybe because of food shortages during the last years of the First World War), continued to be fragile during the period of her adolescence and early adulthood. The years of her training in bookshops in Dresden, Halle and Leipzig were punctuated by breakdowns and weeks or even months spent in sanatoria.21 In 1923, she stopped training as a book merchant and started working as a secretary, first a couple of months in the Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie in München, later in a factory in Giessen and in a publishing company in Leipzig. She received good references for all of these positions. Often her employers mentioned how they appreciated her knowledge of literature and her willingness to go the extra length to do her job.22 She was nevertheless dissatisfied with these different occupations, since she returned to Dresden in 1924 to live at home again and to start training as an actress with Lilly Kann.23 She started acting in the provincial town of Sagan, but soon moved to Berlin – the big city where everything that was modern and exciting flocked together. At the time Berlin was the most important centre for theatre and film in German-speaking Europe. Sibylle anglicized her name to Sibyl Peach and tried, as so many others, to make her way, auditioning for many different roles and struggling to get by (Figure 1.4). She also had several relationships with different men, who supposedly would be able to help her in her acting career.24 Between 1926 and 1929, she acted in quite a number of theatre plays and in a couple of films, among them Mädchenschicksal of 1928. Some of her roles received positive mentions in theatre and film reviews, but lasting success did not materialize.25 In these circumstances, she accepted the marriage proposal of the industrialist and intellectual Carl Dreyfuss, whom she met in Berlin but who lived in Frankfurt (Figure 1.5). Carl Dreyfuss came from a very well-to-do Jewish family, and combined the management of his inherited businesses with a scholarly life that

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FIGURE 1.4 Portrait of Sibyl Peach by Walter Jaeger, 1926.

FIGURE 1.5 Portrait of Carl Dreyfuss by Galor Hirsch 1930.

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was conducted in close collaboration with his best friend Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. Under the pseudonym ‘Castor Zwieback’ they co-authored surrealist texts that were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung.26 After a courtship of one year, Carl Dreyfuss and Sibylle Pietzsch married in Frankfurt on 30 September 1929, with Theodor Wiesengrund (Adorno) as one of their witnesses.27 Dreyfuss had convinced Sibylle that she was better off married to him and occasionally playing theatre roles in Frankfurt than forever hungering for jobs in Berlin. She indeed was offered a position in Das Neue Theater in Frankfurt, which, however, didn’t last very long. As evidenced in letters to her family, she very much enjoyed being in charge of Dreyfuss’s beautiful home, receiving guests and managing the staff, while also trying her hand at writing.28 She might also have attended public lectures at the university.29 Her new orientation towards writing was underscored when Sibyl was hired as an editor for the publishing house Rütten & Loening. She had to read and assess English and German manuscripts, which she considered a huge responsibility.30 She apparently did not do this for very long, because at the beginning of 1931 she started work as an assistant dramaturg at the Hessisches Landestheater Darmstadt. This brought her back into the orbit of the theatre, but this time behind the scenes rather than onstage.31 In letters to her family she was at first jubilant about this position, mentioning that she wrote a speech for intendant Karl Ebert which was published in several newspapers.32 In May 1931, she also managed to publish a first piece under her own name: a short article in an illustrated magazine.33 She moreover learnt to drive a car, commuting to Darmstadt in her own automobile. It did not take long, however, before it became clear that this professional situation was not to last and that she needed to look elsewhere for a job. This was also due to the impact of the economic crisis, which by this time had severely affected the wealth and position of Carl Dreyfuss too. One result of this difficult situation was that Dreyfuss thought it unwise that they would start a family – a decision clearly resented by Sibyl.34 By mid-1931 they had to scale down, giving up their comfortable domestic life in the beautiful home. These circumstances might have been contributing factors to the crumbling of their marriage, but they certainly were not the major cause. Carl Dreyfuss clearly was a playboy and a womanizer.35 Until 1926 he was married to the actress Ellen Dreyfuss-Herz. Afterwards he had, among others, a liaison with the dancer Ilona Karlevna, but the most important among his theatre conquests was Marianne Hoppe (1909–2002). Hoppe was a very successful actress, with a career that comprised the better part of the twentieth century. She was 21 years old in the summer of 1930, when she met Carl Dreyfuss, who was to become ‘her first friend, her first protector’.36 She was playing in Das Neue Theater in Frankfurt at that time. Later she would become a beloved film star in Nazi Germany. After the Second World War, she could rekindle her career as an actress,

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reinstalling herself as a major figure in German theatre, film and television, until her death aged 93. According to her own narrative, she never succumbed to Nazi ideology, because her years with Dreyfuss had brought her into contact with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School, and she was thus intellectually equipped to resist Nazi thinking.37 Hoppe’s biographer, Petra Kohse, doesn’t mention it, but at the time of their meeting in the summer of 1930, Dreyfuss was of course married to Sibyl. Whether or not the latter immediately knew of her husband’s affair is difficult to reconstruct, but we do know that Marianne Hoppe was received as a guest at the Dreyfuss home at least until the end of 1930.38 As of July 1931, the Dreyfusses led separate lives, although they remained on speaking terms. Sibyl landed a position with the film company Tobis, the income of which afforded her to lead a decent life in coveted Berlin, living in the suburb Charlottenburg and driving a small car.39 Carl Dreyfuss continued to live in Frankfurt, from where he remained in contact with Sibyl through letters and phone calls. Tobis was a major organization in the German film industry, which was involved in the transition from silent to sound films.40 Sibyl had a position in scenario development – most likely not as its head, as she implied in Experiment in Totality (1950), but rather as an assistant.41 It was in this capacity that she first met László Moholy-Nagy.

Establishing a family László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was a Hungarian-born artist who had made a name for himself as a constructivist painter and a Bauhaus professor already before he met Sibyl (Figure 1.6). Born in Borsod (now Bácsborsód) in Southern Hungary, in 1895, he graduated from high school in 1913 and registered as a law student at the Royal Hungarian University of Sciences, which he had to leave due to his enrolment in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915. Wounded on the Russian front, he spent a long time recovering in a military hospital in Budapest, where he executed drawings related to his war experience. After being discharged from the army, he decided to become an artist, attending a circle of avant-garde artists around the journal MA. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he met the writer Lucia Schulz, who became his first wife. Together they experimented with photography and frequented avant-garde circles involving Dadaists, constructivists and Elementarists. In 1923 László was appointed by Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, to run the Preliminary Course and the Metal Workshop. His arrival at the Bauhaus coincided with its turn away from crafts towards industry. Moholy-Nagy was put in charge of the publication of the Bauhausbooks, authoring himself Malerei

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FIGURE 1.6 Portrait of László Moholy-Nagy in the Dessau Bauhaus by Lucia Moholy.

Fotografie Film (published in 1925) and Von Material zu Architektur (published in 1929). He left the Bauhaus in 1928, moving to Berlin where he made a living as a commercial theatre designer, all the while continuing to experiment with photos and films and showing his work internationally. He separated from Lucia in 1929.42 When he met Sibyl in 1931, he was already involved in an intimate relationship with the actress Ellen Frank, the sister of Ise, Walter Gropius’s wife. Ellen Frank was a German actress, who performed to great acclaim in theatre plays by Erwin Piscator and others, and who later acted in many German movies.43 According to Rüttgens-Pohlmann’s research, she was L ászló’s companion from 1929 onwards, after his separation from Lucia.44 In Experiment in Totality, Sibyl indeed mentioned Moholy’s (as she called him) ‘well-known friendship with one of the prettiest, most elegant young actresses of the Berlin stage’, although she did not identify her by name.45 This involvement meant that the relationship between Sibyl and L ászló was not an exclusive one from the start. Both moreover were still officially married: Sibyl to Carl Dreyfuss, L ászló to Lucia Moholy.

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Their friendship took off on a professional plane. Seeing Sibyl’s interest in his work on films – an interest that definitely was not shared by her employer – Moholy made her part of his experiments and engaged her as an unpaid collaborator. According to Sibyl’s own testimony in Experiment in Totality, this engagement was difficult to reconcile with her position at Tobis: Through a coincidence it became known in my company that I worked with ‘an independent film producer’, as Moholy was styled in the accusation. I was fired, but my position had become untenable anyway. The political demarcation lines started to become visible across all trades and all classes. I also had learned that knowing Moholy was a full-time occupation.46 Whether she was fired for precisely these reasons or otherwise, it is clear from a letter by Carl Dreyfuss that by April 1932 she was unemployed and had been obliged to sell her car.47 She refuelled the hope of establishing herself as a freelance writer, publishing two short pieces in the highly reputed cultural magazine Uhu (Figure 1.7).48 The summer of 1932, nevertheless, became one of despair, most of all because Moholy had broken off with her and gone back to Ellen Frank. Her

FIGURE 1.7 Portrait of Sibyl Peach by Erna Stoll, 1932–1933.

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depression was further aggravated by a sense of imminent political doom. In a later diary entrance, she recalled the heavy summer of 1932. I was totally insane as far as my emotions were concerned. I was so much in love with Moholy that I felt I could not go on living without him when my brains told me that he did not want to break up his close longlasting connection with Ellen, and that even if he did he would be an almost impossibly difficult man to live with. But behind this acute pain was a black backdrop of my failed marriage with Carl and my intense awareness of the impending political disaster. I am not sure I would have lived through it that time had Moholy not returned to me that Fall.49 Professionally, the situation was also somewhat dire – no important writing commissions for magazines seem to have come her way, and she had to generate an income by freelance activities for the film industry. Relationship-wise, however, the situation gradually cleared out. By the end of 1932 her crumbling marriage with Dreyfuss was definitely over, and Moholy had left Ellen Frank for good.50 This apparently enabled her to take a major decision: she found herself with child early in 1933 and this time completed the pregnancy. Hattula, daughter of László Moholy-Nagy and Sibylle Pietzsch, was born on 11 October 1933, in Berlin.51 In the meantime, of course, the political situation had worsened. In the aftermath of the economic crisis that began in 1929 the Weimar Republic became increasingly ungovernable: stand-offs between Nazi forces on the right-hand side and communists on the left-hand side no longer could be managed by more moderate parties. In the beginning of 1933, Hitler was made chancellor. After the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, the Nazis began to turn Germany into a totalitarian state, curtailing civil liberties and passing the Enabling Act, which allowed them to edict laws without parliamentary vote. For Jews, communists, left-wing intellectuals and avant-garde artists, life in Germany increasingly became difficult or even impossible. Sibyl (as she now usually called herself) was very much aware of all this. Within her family, political allegiances caused a serious rift. Her mother, her sister Hertha and her brother Claus were all believers in Hitler. They had been nationalists all along, and their cultivation of Teutonic legacies easily transformed into a firm adherence to the Nazi Blut und Boden ideology. Her father was somewhat less fanatic, but also became a member of the Nazi Party. Only Sibyl and Eva stood on the other side. The rift in the family was very much evident in the letters they exchanged, in Sibyl’s diaries and in her later fiction writing. At the moment of Hitler’s coming to power, it was already a major factor in their lives. The family archive in the care of Anne Claussnitzer, which contains a continuous stream of letters from Sibyl to her parents, shows a gap between 1931 and 1934. It seems likely that the news of her failed marriage caused the fall-out, and that the political

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tensions contributed to it. Things might have been somewhat mended again after the birth of grandchild Hattula, with both sides agreeing that they would avoid talking politics. The correspondence resumed as of January 1934, when baby Hattula was three months old. When, however, Sibyl’s brother Claus later that year married a second cousin who shared his political beliefs, neither Sibyl nor Eva showed up for the wedding in Loschwitz.52 Around that time, it became clear that it would be increasingly difficult for Moholy to make a living in Germany, because he was a foreigner and an avantgarde artist who moreover had a Jewish background (he converted to Calvinism in 1918). According to Sibyl’s later account in Experiment in Totality, Moholy refused to submit his work to the assessment of the Reichskulturkammer and hence was denied a work permit.53 He moved to Amsterdam, where he ran a commercial design studio. One year later, he joined other émigré artists – among them Walter Gropius – in London. During the time that Moholy lived in Amsterdam, Sibyl and Hattula remained in Berlin, where they were often visited by him. Sibyl had taken up work again in the film industry, as a scenario writer for the Tobis company.54 She worked, among other projects, on the commercial film Pappi.55 She continued at first to live in her own apartment, while also keeping an eye on Moholy’s apartment and atelier at the Lietzenseeufer, where she often went to handle his professional correspondence. Later she moved to Moholy’s place, giving up her own apartment.56 In the same year, she accepted a full-time job with the film company Europa, which was well-paid. After a while she quit, because they refused to give her a part-time position, which would have made it easier to juggle her professional tasks with her other responsibilities.57 She was, however, quite sought after as a scenario writer, since she was soon offered a new contract to write a series of films, this time for the Lichtspiel-Syndikat.58 Whereas her professional life seemed more or less secure, she nevertheless had a change of heart with respect to the necessity of marrying. In a letter in October 1934, she writes to Moholy: I know that you must think me narrow-minded, because I suddenly want to marry after all, while until recently I didn’t care about this at all. But I am living here in a continuous fright, often terribly painful. I am afraid for political developments, over which we have no control whatsoever, and which might separate us from one day to the next for an indefinite period of time. The baby and I would have no legal connection to you, in that case and would not be able to reach you. When something would happen to you or when you would pass away, I do not even have the right to handle your artistic legacy. I am feeling very deeply the insecurity of the current world situation. Often, when I go to sleep, I have the idea that the next day might bring the catastrophe and then I feel afraid for the insecurity of mine and the baby’s relation to you.59

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László and Sibyl married in London on 25 January 1935. Moholy was in the process of transferring his work from Amsterdam to London in that period, but he was only actually joined in London by Sibyl and Hattula in June 1935.

Migration: London and Chicago The move was inspired, on the one hand, by Moholy’s sense that the situation in the Netherlands became worse for avant-garde artists, and, on the other hand, by commercial and artistic opportunities available to him in London. Several other German émigrés were already there and making headway. Walter Gropius, his old Bauhaus friend, had established an architectural office with Maxwell Fry. Lucia Moholy, his ex-wife, worked as a photographer in the British capital, Marcel Breuer was working for Jack Pritchard’s Isokon company. The presence of the MARS group, a group of young avant-garde architects and artists, proved that England was slowly opening up for modern art and architecture. The task of preparing the move and sorting out things in Berlin fell to Sibyl. She made an effort to move the entirety of their possessions, including MoholyNagy’s artworks, to London, but that proved impossible. Too many people were moving out of Germany at that time, and she could not get hold of the necessary transportation vehicles. Only one truck was available, and she thus was obliged to leave some goods behind – among them the earliest artworks of Moholy, from the period when he made the transition from representational to abstract works. She left them under the care of ‘a former housekeeper’, who apparently did not feel much respect for the belongings that had been entrusted to her. When Moholy was briefly in Berlin for the Olympic Games in 1936, he reported that the housekeeper had told him that they had used his works for kindling-wood and that, upon his complaints, her husband had threatened to call the police and have him arrested for Kulturbolschewismus.60 The story is significant, because at this time László and Sibyl were also looking after Lucia Moholy’s things. Lucia Moholy had had to leave Berlin in a hurry, when her partner, Theodor Neubauer, a Communist Party parliament member, had been arrested in her apartment in August 1933. This prompted her to go into immediate exile, first to Prague, and ultimately to London. She could take nothing but a suitcase with her, leaving everything behind in the care of her ex-husband.61 Thus when Sibyl, almost two years later, was sorting out things for the move to London, she also had the responsibility for Lucia’s possessions. Among these, especially the negatives of Lucia’s Bauhaus pictures later turned out to be valuable. After the Second World War, Lucia would desperately try to retrieve them. According to the letters exchanged between both women in the 1950s, it was understood that the negatives were not among the belongings of Lucia that Sibyl had managed to bring to London, because they were too bulky and fragile. Sibyl recalled bringing

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them to Gropius’s home in Berlin for safekeeping. From there, they were shipped, together with Gropius’s furniture and other things, to his American residence. When Lucia was able to establish that Gropius was using them from the States, she urged him to restore them to their rightful owner. He did so only reluctantly, after the intervention of several international lawyers – clearly discrediting her copyright as a photographer.62 This unsavoury episode, apart from highlighting the traumas that inevitably accompanied the experience of exile, is also indicative of the obvious entitlement that men like Gropius felt – they apparently had no qualms to present as their own work that was actually done by women around them.63 Sibyl’s role in the first migration years was mainly that of wife, mother and assistant to her husband. They found a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, which she appointed beautifully.64 She organized an active social life, hosting regular dinners and parties, while overlooking the care of home and child and managing a sequence of cooks, maids and nurses. From the letters that she exchanged with Moholy when he was travelling, it is clear that she also handled his correspondence and co-organized his exhibitions. Their social circle consisted of other migrants from Germany (the Gropiuses, Lucia Moholy, Gyorgy Kepes), but they also made British friends. Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Jack Pritchard, Jim Crowther, Julian Huxley, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson all were frequent visitors.65 On 25 March 1936, Sibyl gave birth to a second daughter, Claudia. She was in steady contact with her family during these years in London, exchanging letters with Loschwitz, mainly about the children and domestic issues. She was visited in London once by her mother and once by her older sister Hertha. Both she and Moholy could still freely travel to Germany. They visited Loschwitz in the summer of 1936, on their way to Moholy’s native Hungary. Hattula stayed behind with her grandparents and her niece and nephew, the children of Hertha, who were all living in the family home next door to the Künstlerhaus. Hattula was picked up again on her parents’ return trip. Sibyl’s life during this time was thus well-filled and satisfying, although she occasionally complained to her family that she didn’t find enough time to devote to her own writing.66 Similar plans for the summer of 1937 needed to be modified, since Moholy had been invited to Chicago by The Association of Arts and Industries, to discuss the possibility of opening a new school there. He left for the States in the beginning of July. A couple of days later, Sibyl travelled to Loschwitz with the two children, leaving them there for the rest of the summer while she returned to London to work on her own things, and to start preparing for the possible next move. A frantic exchange of letters and telegrams with Moholy showed how she was advising him about decisions relating to the new school: the programme, the name of the school, the teachers to be hired, and so forth. The green light came only on 13 August, when Moholy sent a telegram to announce that the contract had been signed and that Sibyl had to dismantle their London premises. The next weeks were hectic:

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FIGURE 1.8 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy with Claudia and Hattula, c. 1937.

Moholy’s mother was visiting; the children came back, under the care of Sibyl’s sister Hertha; she had to let the house; she had to take care of all the paperwork (it was at this time that Hattula’s name change from Dreyfuss to Moholy-Nagy became official) and she was taking driving lessons, while simultaneously making decisions on what to take and what to do away with, and negotiating with moving companies. The prospect of packing all Moholy’s artworks daunted her, while his last-minute decision to have her buy and bring some Aalto and Isokon furniture did not make it any easier.67 She managed, however, to finalize all that in five weeks, and sailed with Hattula and Claudia on the Berengaria, which arrived in New York on 28 September 1937. Sibyl’s first years in Chicago were almost completely filled up with her responsibilities as mother, hostess, wife and assistant to Moholy (Figure 1.8). The first home she found them was on Astor Street, and was quite grand, in accordance with the expectations that Moholy – as the director of the newly established New Bauhaus – had to make a good impression on the high society of the city. The industrial backers of the New Bauhaus were prepared to invest a hefty sum in the redecoration of the apartment, doing away with all the ornaments around fire places, papering the walls completely white and providing white curtains.68 Their

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own apartment thus displayed the modernist home culture that his new school sought to foster in the States. The school, however, ran into difficulties when the first academic year was over. The business men who had convinced Moholy to come to Chicago, were not true to their word when it came to raising enough capital for the school to survive (the fact that they didn’t really understand what Moholy was doing probably contributed to this failure). They informed Moholy that the school could not open again in the fall of 1938. This was a big frustration and disappointment, for both László and Sibyl, but they were able to turn the tables. With the help of Walter Paepcke, the one member of the former board who stood by them, they re-established the school on virtually no capital, renaming it School of Design. This was possible thanks to the investment of their own savings and with the help of faculty members such as György Kepes and Robert Jay Wolff, who agreed to teach the first semester without any salary. It was selfunderstood that Sibyl would be in charge of the administration of the school, working for several months as an unpaid ‘secretary, bookkeeper, registrar, and auxiliary janitor’.69 For the next couple of years, László’s and Sibyl’s private life completely merged with that of the school. They put in money, time, effort, furniture and devotion. They left the beautiful apartment in Astor Street for a smaller, less expensive and more manageable one on Lakeview Avenue. Sibyl shouldered the full responsibility for the farmhouse in Somonauk, that Walter Paepcke had donated, and which would serve for a summer school (Figure 1.9). Before it could, however, the Moholys again had to invest their savings, reconverting the old farm buildings to something that could function as a summer school annex weekend house for the family. The first year was a disappointment, but as of 1941, the summer school became a success. Meanwhile, Sibyl had not given up on her literary ambitions. In a letter to her family she admitted that she put all these tremendous efforts into the school, because she was convinced that Moholy’s well-being rested upon its success. For herself, however, she still yearned for recognition as a writer.70 She tried her hand at several things: a short novella, a children’s story and a more ambitious novel inspired by her own family’s history. She now forced herself to start writing directly in English. From 1939 onwards, her diary entrances were noted down in English, as was part of her correspondence with other émigrés. Repeatedly she sent manuscripts to publishers, hoping to get something published. A first success came in 1940: an essay published in the cultural and literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly.71 She submitted something for a competition sponsored by three Harvard professors, which called for manuscripts describing ‘my life in Germany before and after 1933’.72 Her entry was awarded a modest prize, which encouraged her to continue on this path.73 She nevertheless felt that the real purpose of her life was slipping through her fingers. On her fortieth birthday, in 1943, she made a balance of sorts in her diary:

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FIGURE 1.9 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy with Claudia and Hattula in Somonauk, 1943.

But the panic of failure is there. Ten more years to go … I have not succeeded in becoming a writer, and if I don’t succeed in these next ten years, I shall not make it. … Now at forty, I have the husband, the marriage, the children, the home, the occasional lover, the health, and tolerably good looks (although I am far from keeping up unusually well under the years). But the work, MY WORK, the contribution I was so deeply convinced I could and would make to the world of objective values, is far from being accomplished.74 (emphasis in the original) This passage shows how she was conflicted about who she was and where she stood. She was, on the one hand, educated and socialized to believe that she, as a woman, would succeed in life on account of acquiring a successful husband and supporting him in his endeavours. To this end she was expected to groom herself into a sexually attractive and sophisticated partner. Her experiences in the world of theatre and film in Berlin’s swinging 1920s, and her involvement, through Moholy, with the sexually liberated avant-garde circles, reinforced this aspect of her selfunderstanding. She had, on the other hand, a deeply felt need to be culturally productive herself and to contribute to the ‘world of objective values’. This aspect of herself was, however, far less supported by family, friends and the wider cultural environment. She clearly had trouble finding the time and the space to devote the necessary energy to developing her own creative potential.75

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FIGURE 1.10 Book cover of Children’s Children, designed by László Moholy-Nagy, 1945.

She was, nevertheless, on her way. The big novel based on her own family’s history had demanded several years of writing, but came to fruition: it was published in 1945 under the title Children’s Children, with a lovely abstract jacket designed by her husband (Figure 1.10).76

The Harvard manuscript and Children’s Children Both the Harvard manuscript and the big novel are significant in terms of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s intellectual biography. They are semi-autobiographical and hence offer good material to better understand her personal experiences and her ideas – if not the actual facts of her life. Although the Harvard competition called for ‘authentic’ memoirs, Sibyl clearly understood her own manuscript as partly fictional, describing it in her letters as a ‘novella’ and pointing out in the introduction that ‘facts and locations in this paper are true but names of certain persons have been changed’.77 She was incidentally not the only one of the competitors who did not completely obey the guidelines.78 It is thus unfortunate that Rüttgens-Pohlmann, who wrote a biographical study of Sibyl’s life based

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precisely on this manuscript, takes her to task for being untruthful, pointing out the many discrepancies between Sibyl’s descriptions and the actual facts as they can be reconstructed from documents and letters.79 Among the 230 manuscripts generated by the Harvard call, only 67 were written by women. These female manuscripts suggest, according to Liebersohn and Schneider, that women’s struggles with the Nazi regime were, more often than those of their male counterparts, coloured by family engagements and responsibilities, while women were as well victims of professional exclusion, harassment and persecution.80 Sibyl’s memoir covered several of these aspects, although she was personally never persecuted nor officially excluded. An important role nevertheless was played by the tensions within her family. The novella started with the description of a Sunday dinner in Dresden, where the news of her failed marriage along with her all-too-humorous description of a Nazi rally resulted in a terrible row. Her brother, she came to understand, as well as her eldest sister, her mother and her father were members of the Nazi Party – only her other sister shared her leftist ideas. She depicted this rift in her family as exemplary for the political fault lines between the big cities and the provinces, and stressed the way Nazi ideas were rooted in older romantic and nationalist tendencies. She placed herself on the side of ‘Democrats, Catholics, Social Democrats and Communists supported by intellectuals and artists’ who were fighting ‘Fascist dictatorship – Conservatives, Nationals, National Socialists’.81 Her professional situation as a dramaturg for the film industry was portrayed as secure at first (‘Never in my life had I been without work when I wanted some’82), but gradually subjected to more and more ideological constraints. Experimental and revolutionary films could no longer be made, and gave way to purely commercially inspired productions. She recalled several anecdotes and episodes that described the confusion and lack of solidarity among left-wing people, and the increasingly hostile situation towards Jews, which resulted in a first wave of emigration in the summer of 1932. She also hinted at the depression and suicidal thoughts that plagued her after her trip to the summer resort Hiddensee, where she had met with several intellectuals and theatre people: I had lost my family completely and though I had tried bravely not to think about it, I missed the feeling that there was ‘home’ somewhere, where I would be welcome for nothing but my being a member of a family. There was no longer the ‘Right or wrong, my country’ satisfaction in calling myself a German; and now after these four weeks with the people I had considered as friends and guides, even this feeling of belonging to a community had been destroyed.83 After Hitler’s coming into power in the beginning of 1933, the rift with her family deepened when her brother sent her a letter urging her to leave the country, because as a ‘Communist girl’ she endangered his position within the Party.84

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Although many of her Jewish friends left after the Reichstag fire in February, she herself at that moment still didn’t feel the need to do the same. The situation worsened, however, up to the point that her friend ‘the Hungarian painter’ (that is how she referred to Moholy in this manuscript) decided that he could no longer cope with it and would leave, asking her to go with him. When they wanted to marry, however, they had to produce so much paperwork that they dropped the idea of doing so in Germany.85 She dragged on, becoming more and more isolated because so many people either left or followed a path of least resistance and somehow became Nazi supporters. Her work became more and more unbearable, because of the many restrictions and the incomprehensible interventions of the censors (one of whom told her that she had no business, as a woman, to do this work, since women should be at home and not in public life).86 Ultimately, she made the decision to leave, ‘which was the most difficult, I had ever made in life’.87 In the beginning of 1935, she quit her job and started preparations to follow her friend to London to marry and live there. This manuscript no doubt had literary ambitions rather than purely autobiographical ones. The narrated chronology does not completely coincide with the factual one that can be reconstructed on the basis of documents and letters. The author left out, for example, the birth of her daughter Hattula – a major occasion in any parent’s life, one would imagine. She also misrepresented other events – she had her fictional brother Jasper marrying in 1933, whereas the actual wedding of Claus only took place in 1934. Likewise, she positioned a discussion with her mother about concentration camps in 1935, whereas a later letter to Eva revealed that it was during a visit in 1937 that this exchange took place.88 Given these discrepancies, one can assume that many of the other events and anecdotes that she described might not have had a firm footing in her own lived experience, but could rather have been based on hearsay. What the manuscript does convey though is a lively and convincing story of how everyday life in Germany was changing, and how the extraordinary political circumstances of the time had an impact on personal relationships, professional opportunities and cultural conditions. Sibyl Peech clearly had an intimate knowledge of the world of theatre and film, and she displayed a keen understanding of the motivations of many individuals living through the German political tragedy. As a literary work, therefore, the manuscript certainly has merit, because it offers an insight in the confusing and alarming everyday reality of Germany around 1933. It is somewhat strange, however, that Sibyl did not make use of one of the most tragic aspects of her own family history. Her brother Claus, who, after several years of unemployment, had found a position with the Nazi Reichsarbeitsdienst, was then fired when he could not prove the purity of his Aryan blood. One of their grandparents – Fanny Clauss’s mother – had a Jewish parent and this was reason enough for the Nazis to let Claus go.89 Their father, Martin Pietzsch, was so enraged about this decision that he left the Party. Claus himself, however, remained loyal

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to the Nazis, as did his mother and his sister Hertha. This episode played out in May 1937, and Sibyl found out later that summer, when Hertha was visiting her in London.90 Although this particular entanglement in her family story seems to offer quite some literary meat to expose the inner contradictions of the Nazi regime, she did not use this material. One can easily understand why the manuscript doesn’t mention the birth of Hattula in 1933: the child had to live her life in America and could certainly do without the stigma of having been born out of wedlock (America at that point was far more puritan than the Berlin of Sibyl’s youth had been). Why the author kept silent about her family’s partly Jewish descent is less clear. Did she fear that antisemitism would also blossom in America? Did she feel uneasy herself about this part of her inheritance?91 Or did she simply not want to include 1937 events in a narrative that ended in 1935? The Nuremberg Laws, which were the basis for Claus’s exclusion, after all were only passed in September 1935, so she could not simply reposition this event, as she did with the concentration camp discussion. Children’s Children, the novel that was published by Bittner in 1945, is the most important among Sibyl’s fictional writings. She worked on it for years, and used, again, her own family background as literary material. The novel set out to expose how the political tragedies of the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Nazi regime were rooted in long-standing tendencies in Germany. It thus started with the figure of Sebastian Dallmann, who fought in the Napoleonic Wars and became a postmaster afterwards. Through marriages, the Dallmann line became intertwined with the Van Neels, a landowning and merchant family, and the Poseners, who were Jewish (meaning that Sibyl did acknowledge here her own Jewish ancestry – if only on this fictional level). The stories of the generations living in the nineteenth century remained somewhat sketchy, but the novel picked up speed when the heroine, Jarni Dallman (alter ego of Sibyl herself) came into the picture. Jarni was depicted as a passionate girl who embodied all the longings and confusion of her generation. To the question whether she ever considered going to a university or art school, she answered: Why should I? There is no such thing as a career or an assured existence. … No matter how showy a degree I would get, I’d have to take any job that came along for the mere chance of survival as soon as I left school. Because by then a new inflation, a new war, a new depression or a new revolution would be under way … I want to live, forget about the joyless atmosphere in which I grew up.92 The author thus conflated the hunger for life that she felt when she was 17 years old with all the experiences of upheaval, revolution, inflation and uncertainty that characterized the first years after the end of the First World War in Germany. Jarni, according to the novel, was involved in a bitter and escalating conflict with her

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brother, who, encouraged by their mother, became a Nazi. Throughout the 1920s, both siblings grew ever further apart, with Jarni involved in socialism, communism and social democracy, and her brother increasingly fanatical in his pursuit of heroic and self-sacrificial Teutonic ideals. The conflict ended in a political murder, which forced Jarni to leave Germany. The book received mixed reviews, generally recognizing its interest in elucidating important tensions within German history, but criticizing its fragmentary character.93 Martha Dodd’s review sums it up: ‘Children’s Children’ is not a well integrated book: it is uneven, the characters for the most part are not of flesh and blood, and the writing is immature. The author fleetingly introduces characters in the first section of the book who are at times interesting but they are so briefly treated that they have vanished from the reader’s memory by the end of the book. They should have been a novel in themselves in a less ambitiously conceived project. Miss Peech does convey, however, quite effectively the confusions, the violence, the treachery, and disunity of pre-Hitler Germany. … Miss Peech makes a point that should never be forgotten and cannot be too often repeated: the tragic rift between the progressive forces – the disunity among the parties of the left and among labor itself, the paralysis of democracy – helped to open the way to reaction at the peak of which stood Adolf Hitler.94 Sibyl took the reviews to heart, stating in a letter to her sister Eva that she accepted, with disappointment but not bitterness, that she would not be a great success as a novelist: her manuscripts were turned down in America because she was considered too European, and in Europe they were turned down because she was too American. She thus understood her own situation as that of a ‘typical emigrant’, not completely at home in either context.95 This feeling of alienation had also been prevalent in another piece of writing that was kept in her estate but only published in 2000.96 It was written on 13 May 1945, the Sunday after Hitler’s final defeat, probably as a way of coming to terms with her own reactions. She couldn’t, like the average American, only revel at Hitler’s defeat. Her feelings were much more ambivalent, since she mourned for the German people, for the ‘little people’, whom, she thought, were falsely accused of being responsible for the wreckages brought about by the war. She also mourned for her family, for her elder brother Claus whom she was deeply estranged from and who had fallen as a German soldier in Leningrad in 1942.97 She indicated that she felt torn as a mother too. She felt obliged to show her children a harmonious and unbroken self, whereas this appearance did not coincide with her inner reality. She chose the image of a woman who killed herself as a symbol of what was haunting her:

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A women had killed herself an hour before by jumping from a 12th floor fire escape in our alley. Her body was lying there, covered scantily with an old curtain, and I told myself without reason and without justification that I understood why she had done it. But I did not. I lay on the couch, listening for a while to the celebrations roaring out of the radio. I was dazed and happy and ashamed. WHY WAS I NOT HAPPY?98 (emphasis in the original) Her relation with Moholy apparently didn’t leave any room for emotional exchanges either: Laci came home. There is an unwritten code among emigrants – even when you are married. One never touches on emotional complications. Every reference to Europe or to the past is guarded, casual, uttered only after the emotion behind it has been secured safely with an enforced dosis of self-control. There is an emigrant etiquette, and Laci has adhered to it the same as I. So the European victory, the defeat and death of the greatest objective enemy we had known in our life-time, the end of twelve incredibly strenuous years, was mentioned between us only in passing.99 So there they were: fortunate to be in the United States and to have escaped the tragedies, but, on the other hand, too much part of what had been happening in Europe to simply celebrate the end of the war. By the time Sibyl reflected in her letter to Eva on her status as an emigrant and on the lukewarm reception of her book, other concerns had become dominant in her life. László Moholy-Nagy had been diagnosed with leukaemia in November 1945. After intensive treatment, he went into remission and was able to go back to the school and continue his busy life. In the fall of 1946, however, he collapsed again, this time for good. He passed away on 24 November 1946.100

Moholy’s widow Before Moholy died, wheels were already in motion to ensure the succession at the head of the Institute for Design. On the recommendation of Walter Gropius, and with full support from Sibyl, Serge Chermayeff (1901–1996) was hired. He was a Russian-born British modernist architect who had moved to the United States.101 Sibyl herself had earlier been nominated Head of the Humanities Division, a gesture by Moholy that she was extremely appreciative of. She considered it his way of recognizing her intellectual capacities and her significance for the thriving of the school.102 Sibyl continued to be on the staff of the Institute under Chermayeff. Before long, however, their visions on how the school was to be directed clashed. Whereas she had originally warmly welcomed Chermayeff and his wife Barbara,

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the new director came to consider her a ‘nuisance’.103 Tensions evolved into a fullblown crisis in the spring of 1948, and Sibyl was forced to resign. Officially her resignation was said to be due to health problems (she had suffered heart problems in the previous winter) and to her plans to write a biography of Moholy.104 She had indeed begun to work on Moholy’s legacy, preparing exhibitions, lecturing about his art and contacting publishers. In the initial years after Moholy’s demise, she could provide for herself and her children through the combination of his life insurance, selling some of his paintings and her income from teaching (Figure 1.11).105 Although she became involved with a new man in her life (Martin Metal, a colleague from the Institute), she also revelled in her new-found independence and she liked lecturing very much. In her diary, she told her late husband, on the first anniversary of his death, how this work brought her joy: I have done well by your work. It has become my profession. It is shown all over America. Much of it has been sold to prices which would satisfy you. And the knowledge of your name spreads. You would hate to hear me lecture on your work – I know. But I am doing it and you can’t stop me. I do it because I have become sure of something you never believed – that I absorbed so much of you in these years that I can breathe more of your spirit into an audience than Giedion, Sweeney and Read combined.106 When she left the Institute, she found other employment as a part-time teacher at the University of Chicago College and at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. She also worked on Moholy’s biography, for which she had secured a contract with Harper Publishers in New York. In June 1949, she moved to San Francisco, where she had bought a house together with Martin Metal. There she taught at the

FIGURE 1.11 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy with Hattula and Claudia, 1949.

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University of California, Berkeley, and at the Rudolf Schaeffer School of Design, San Francisco. She also published a few literary pieces in West Coast magazines.107 Moholy’s biography was published in 1950 by Harper under the title MoholyNagy. Experiment in Totality, with an introduction by Walter Gropius.108 It contained a vivid account of his life and work, against the background of the artistic revolutions and political upheavals of his time. It was clearly written from a personal perspective, with the author not concealing her own role in the story as of the beginning of their relationship in 1931. It was not a scholarly book – it contained only the barest minimum of footnotes and some of its material should be seen as a somewhat fictitious reconstruction of factual events rather than a very trustworthy and truthful rendering of them.109 It nevertheless conveyed a very clear message about László Moholy-Nagy’s crucial role in many different moments and places – as a constructivist painter, sculptor, photographer, teacher, writer and filmmaker in the Weimar Republic, as a commercial artist and avant-garde painter in London, as a leading figure, tireless teacher and relentless crusader for modern art and design in Chicago. It also imbued its audience with an understanding of what all these modern ideas were about and why this new abstract art was so important. Sibyl thus made a lasting contribution with this book, which was the first serious study of Moholy’s whole work, and which still is seen as a basic source for the many scholars who are invested in researching his oeuvre. The book received very wide acclaim. It was mentioned or reviewed in many different periodicals and newspapers across America, as well as in some of the leading European journals.110 Generally, the focus of these reviews was on Moholy’s accomplishments and significance, rather than on the skills of the book’s author. Most reviewers would have agreed that Moholy’s widow ‘recorded with competence and verve’ the story of her husband’s life and work, without going further into detail.111 One of the more observant early reviewers was Edgar Kaufmann Jr., then director of the Industrial Department at the Museum of Modern Art (he is the son of the Kaufmanns who commissioned Fallingwater from Frank Lloyd Wright). He commented that the ‘plenitude of material is presented with the effective technique Mrs. Moholy developed when she worked as a film scenarist’ and commended her for her ‘well-modulated irony and quick pace’ which kept her writing ‘fresh’.112 As can be gathered from these remarks, Kaufmann knew her personally. He is one in a string of homosexual colleagues and professional acquaintances with whom Sibyl had cordial and mutually supportive friendships (later ones would include Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph). Sibyl’s overall treatment of her late husband’s intellectual and artistic legacy cannot only be judged positively. Whereas the writing of the biography doubtlessly laid the foundation for Moholy’s ever-widening appeal and recognition, other aspects of her dealings with his estate are less beneficial. The thing she did right, according to her daughter Hattula Moholy-Nagy – founder of the Moholy-Nagy foundation – was that she sold paintings to museums or even gave them away to

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be shown in public collections. She thus ensured Moholy’s presence in important collections that told the story of modern art. Otherwise, however, she was inclined to throw away a lot of stuff – administrative documents, but also photos and negatives.113 Hattula assumes this had to do with her lack of training – she didn’t understand how valuable these items could be to later historians, and discarded them because they were cumbersome when she moved house.114 There are stories of visitors to her apartment, who caught glimpses of photographs by Moholy (some of them reportedly nudes of Sibyl herself), carelessly thrown together in a closet. She certainly did not make an inventory nor did she spend time, once the biography was written, in cataloguing or curating all she held. She did, however, lecture quite extensively on modern art in general and on her late husband’s work in particular. This even brought her back to Europe in the summer of 1950 – her first visit after the war. She gave a lecture on ‘The Work of Moholy-Nagy’ at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, which gave her the opportunity to visit old friends such as Herbert Read and Maxwell Fry.115 She also delivered a series of lectures on Moholy’s work in several West German cities. Frances Saunders assumes that these lectures were part of the cultural programme financed by the CIA and meant to foster the image of America as the country where modern art could flourish because of the favourable circumstances offered by capitalism and democracy.116 The lectures in Munich and Stuttgart were indeed delivered in the so-called Amerikahaus in these cities, which is consistent with Saunders’s assumption.117 During this trip she enjoyed visiting her sister Eva Pietzsch, who now resided in Munich. She was, however, prohibited by the Russian and East German authorities from entering the Eastern part of Germany. Visiting her father in her native Dresden was thus impossible, but they managed to meet in Berlin. When she returned to San Francisco after this long summer trip, she knew that it would not be for good. Already in February 1950, she had sent a letter to Walter Gropius in Cambridge asking for his support in finding her a job on the East Coast.118 Her relationship with Martin Metal had crumbled – it became clear that their friendship, which was still productive on a professional level, would not result in a marriage after all. She fulfilled her teaching obligations in San Francisco for another year, and after that moved with her daughters to New York. Sibyl’s guardianship of her late husband’s artwork would continue for the rest of her life. She often collaborated in the organization of exhibitions, lending paintings and other materials. She occasionally wrote new pieces about specific topics related to his work and she stayed in contact with interested collectors and gallery owners, selling some paintings and donating others to museums. After 1950, however, these obligations gradually moved to the background of her life. Writing the biography had been a tribute to Moholy and his work, and she would certainly remain faithful to his intellectual legacy. She had, however, no wish to be reduced to the grieving widow whose sole purpose in life would be

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the continued glorification of her late husband. She thus moved on, to another city and another job.

Becoming a professor Sibyl arrived with her daughters in New York at the end of June 1951, after a long road trip from San Francisco. The confirmation that she had secured a teaching job only came a couple of weeks later: she was hired as a part-time lecturer in the architectural programme at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, on the recommendation of José Luis Sert.119 Pratt Institute was a private college established in the late nineteenth century to offer education for working-class people. In 1951, it consisted of an art school (where architecture was located), a school for home economics, a school of engineering and a library school. Architecture became a separate school in 1954. Pratt Institute did not belong to the Ivy League universities, but had a good reputation, especially for its art programme. In the late 1950s it was the only institute in New York, apart from Columbia University, to offer an architectural programme that was accredited. Teaching in an architectural rather than an art programme, Sibyl decided to reorient her scholarship towards architecture – not a strange decision if one takes into account the profession of her father and her close ties with people like Walter Gropius and Sigfried Giedion.120 She had entered Pratt in a somewhat misleading way – providing a CV that would not really stand up to close scrutiny, because she claimed to have studied at prestigious German universities.121 Her performance as a teacher was very satisfactory and she soon also proved herself as a prolific author of articles in leading architectural journals. From 1952 onwards she was a regular contributor to Progressive Architecture, one of the major journals in the field. In 1953, she published a translation of Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, with an introduction by her.122 She further wrote many book reviews and articles about the interconnections between art and architecture, and soon enlarged her scope to encompass criticism of specific projects123 or more general commentaries on theoretical issues.124 Pratt Institute was quite pleased with its new faculty member and granted her rapid promotions. Whereas she had started teaching only two half-days a week in 1951, her load increased until she officially became full-time in 1954. In 1956, she was promoted to Associate Professor, and in 1960 to Professor. Her salary likewise followed a steep upward curve.125 She was thus financially secure, which was very welcome because her two daughters were entering university. Her youngest daughter, Claudia, moreover suffered from a very serious form of arthritis and needed to regularly cure in a warm climate (she was also occasionally sent to Germany to be attended by a specialist there). These responsibilities drove Sibyl to accept a lot of invitations to lecture in many different cities. She was also able

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to buy a cottage in New Milford, Connecticut, which she used as a summer and weekend retreat. It was near a lake, which she enjoyed very much because she was an ardent swimmer. She settled in Manhattan – after some try-outs in the Bronx and in Greenwich Village – in an apartment at 244 East 32nd Street in Murray Hill – an address where she would reside for more than 15 years. She was thus carving out a life for herself in New York, enjoying her independence and her growing professional recognition. She had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, at first based upon her connections in the art and publishing world but increasingly widening to the world of architecture. Her friends included architects such as Paul Wiener and Felix Augenfeld, both immigrants from Europe, as well as critic and architect Philip Johnson, with whom she shared a particular friendship throughout the 1950s and 1960s. There was also a new man in her life – Jan C. Rowan, a Polish-born architect who was 20 years her junior and who would go on to become a managing editor of Progressive Architecture.126 The relationship lasted only a year or two, but seems to have given her some reassurance as to her continued attractiveness to men. A couple of years later she had a long affair with the illustrator Enrico Arno. In both cases, however, she did not allow these relationships to dominate her daily life or her feeling of well-being, coveting the independence that she came to see as most precious to her. When she turned 50 in 1953, she noted in her diary: I have made a success of sorts of my life, considering that I started a career from scratch six years ago … I followed a certain plan: to make myself independent financially, provide as best I could for the children, and make myself heard as a teacher and as a writer. In this I have succeeded, and there is a certain satisfaction in it.127 The sense of satisfaction certainly was helped along by her winning an Arnold W. Brunner fellowship from the Architectural League of New York, funding her proposal to study early American settler architecture.128 The grant allowed her to travel widely to look for the best examples of anonymous architecture in the Northern part of the Americas. In the summer of 1953 she thus undertook a long trip which brought her to Mexico and the Caribbean in the south and to Canada in the north. She felt healthy, reinvigorated and in control during these months of fieldwork, but in the beginning of the next year another health crisis struck. This time she had to undergo a hysterectomy, which kept her bed-ridden for several weeks, after which a slow recovery process was necessary. It took her quite a while afterwards to find her footing again, resulting in diary entrances that were melancholic and sad. She clearly had trouble coming to terms with becoming middle-aged and sexually less attractive. She nevertheless fought the depression, mentioning how she forced herself to continue writing and travelling. Gradually she regained her composure.

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In the summer of 1955 she was able to go to Europe again for a long tenweek visit, made up of a lecture tour, family visits and an architectural tour of Greece and Italy. The lecture tour brought her to 13 different German universities, academies and art associations, where she presented versions of three different lectures she had prepared: one on Moholy’s work, one on American settler architecture and one on Saul Steinberg – the architect turned cartoonist. Towards the end of the lecture tour, when she went back to Stuttgart and München (places that invited her for an encore), she added another item to her repertoire: a lecture on ‘Basic Design’, based on the Design Analysis course that she had developed for Pratt. Especially this last lecture was very well received, and she was in general very satisfied with her professional success.129 In terms of human relations, however, her feelings were more mixed. Visiting her family in Dresden was possible this time, and she appreciated very much seeing her father again, who was almost 90 by now. He was still alert and energetic and took her for long walks and had animated conversations with her. She also saw her sisters – Hertha in Dresden and Eva in München. Especially with Hertha, exchanges were rather strained, since their outlooks on life had only drifted further apart since they last met before the war. She was likewise very critical of the many people from her past that she met again during this trip. She felt that some of them were very convoluted and dishonest in trying to excuse their behaviour during the Nazi years. She also took exception to the combination of provincialism and snobbery that she detected in many places. Her overall feeling was thus one of disconnection: she no longer felt German in Germany, but became increasingly aware that she had shifted allegiance to America, which had now become her home. The book on settler architecture, funded by the Architectural League fellowship, materialized as Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, published by Horizon Press in 1957 (Figure 1.12). It was well received, although less widely reviewed than Experiment in Totality. Especially the architectural journals paid attention to it. Edgar Kaufmann, who had been so enthusiastic about Moholy’s biography, also acclaimed this new book, calling it in Architectural Record ‘the most refreshing and enlightening view of architecture I’ve encountered for some time’.130 Reviews in Progressive Architecture, Architectural Forum and Arts and Architecture were also positive in tone.131 The book certainly contributed to her growing reputation as an architectural historian and critic.

A critic feared and admired In the years following the publication of Native Genius, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy widened her scope and her field of operation. Already in 1955 one of her essays – an article on settler architecture in North America – had been published in the

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FIGURE 1.12 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy as depicted on the book jacket of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 1957. Portrait by V. Cherry.

Italian architectural magazine Casabella, which at that point was edited by Ernesto Nathan Rogers.132 From 1959 onwards she regularly contributed to the German journal Bauwelt, edited by Ulrich Conrads. Her big article on Frank Lloyd Wright, written when he passed away in 1959, was published in English and Italian as well as in German.133 A couple of years later she added the French Architecture d’Aujourd’hui to the list.134 She also had good contacts in Latin America, where she travelled extensively in 1959, which resulted in several articles.135 She was well acquainted with the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900–1975), who was a collector of László Moholy-Nagy’s artworks, and devoted her next book to him. Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela appeared in 1964 in two editions, one bilingually English and Spanish, the other German and English.136 The latter one received good reviews in German periodicals,137 but the reception in America was somewhat less enthusiastic, with only a few reviews appearing. Ester McCoy published a positive comment in Arts and Architecture, Peter Collins one in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.138 Especially the latter one might have been important to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, since she had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with this scholarly society, which she thought stuffy, unoriginal and all-too-rigid in their academic standards. The review, while being short, gives a good idea of her standing at that point in the scholarly community: Mrs. Moholy-Nagy … has long been esteemed for her critical writings, but most of us have come to regard her talents as essentially those of an attorney for the prosecution. Indeed, her brilliantly written diatribes have become so much

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part of our tradition that it can seldom have occurred to her admirers that she could idolize any single living architect. Her spontaneous choice of Villanueva will puzzle some of them; and all will have to regretfully admit that she handles a censer less adept than a sling.139 Sibyl’s life had fallen into a rhythm that was determined, like that of most academics, by her teaching responsibilities. Fall, winter and spring were mostly spent in New York, although she took many short trips for lecturing elsewhere in the country or for participating in conferences. The three months of summer were partially spent in New Milford and partially devoted to longer trips, usually including several weeks in Europe. Her father died in 1961, but she continued to regularly visit München and Dresden to meet her two sisters, her niece, her nephew and his family (Figure 1.13). To facilitate this, she accepted a visiting professorship in Braunschweig in 1965 and spent two months in Germany. Her eldest daughter Hattula also lived in Europe as of the summer of that year. After finishing her master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago and working for several years as an archaeologist in Mexico and Guatemala, Hattula married in 1965 a Swiss architect, Hans-Ruedi Hug and went to live in Zürich. She gave birth to two sons: Andreas (1966) and Daniel (1968), which made Sibyl into a proud grandmother (Figure 1.14). Claudia studied theatre science in Chicago, and later moved to Los Angeles, where she became the director of the Victor Gruen Foundation. She was briefly married, but remained childless, due to her bad health. Claudia was a source of distress and anxiety for her mother, who was not wholly convinced that her youngest daughter took well enough care of herself. She was sadly proven right in worrying about Claudia’s health, because Claudia would pass away very young – only months after Sibyl herself. During the 1960s, Sibyl subjected herself to a very busy working regime. She taught quite a lot at Pratt, while also committing herself to meet many writing deadlines. She published several articles a year in architectural magazines, next to a steady stream of book reviews and letters to editors. As Collins indicated, she had a reputation for being very critical and not sparing her wrath when dissecting buildings or ideas that she disliked. Politeness and likeability were not her first concerns. Peter Blake, the editor of Architectural Forum, wryly commented in one of his letters to her: ‘I have heard it said that you haven’t really lived until you have been properly insulted by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Now I quite agree!’140 She actively participated in the New York intellectual scene, for example, writing a letter to the editor of the Times in defence of Hannah Arendt’s position in the debate arising after the latter published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.141 In Germany she had caused even more of a stir when an abridged version of one of her lectures was published in the Stuttgarter Zeitung under the title Der Selbstmord der modernen Architekten (the suicide of the modern architect).142 A

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FIGURE 1.13 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy with her father Martin Pietzsch in Loschwitz, 1958.

startling number of reactions were sent in to the newspaper, showing that her harsh diagnosis somehow touched on a sore point. Towards the end of the 1960s she published two more books – Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment in 1968 and The Architecture of Paul Rudolph in 1970, which brought her further recognition.143 The tumultuous and rebellious years of the counterculture and the student revolt, on the other hand, did not sit easy with her. She followed world politics quite closely and was very much against the war in Vietnam.144 Otherwise, however, she did not share the anti-authoritarian opinions or the relaxed attitudes of the youngsters. She thought they were taking life far too easy and would benefit from being more disciplined. She also was impatient with some aspects of the civil rights movement. She couldn’t understand, for example, why African Americans wanted to be called ‘blacks’ rather than ‘negroes’ – to her this was a far-fetched, irrational claim which she saw as one of the many crazy aspects of American culture.145 The student revolt also played out in her own Pratt Institute, where mismanagement and inaptitude combined into a long-winded crisis which ultimately led to Sibyl’s resignation. She opted, in 1969, for an early retirement from Pratt, because she could no longer cope with what she perceived as indecisiveness and willingness to lower academic standards under pressure of especially black student groups.146

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FIGURE 1.14 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy with her grandson Andreas Hug, 1966.

After leaving Pratt she spent the academic year 1969–1970 as a visiting professor of architecture at Columbia University in New York. However, her health was far from robust. She had been suffering for some time from what Hattula later suspected was osteoporosis: she was very prone to breaking bones, having to postpone trips and other plans because of such problems. In May 1970, she underwent a lengthy cancer surgery, after which she seemed to regain some of her strength. She was energetic enough to devote the summer of 1970 to travelling to Europe, covering a wide range of destinations, including Austria, Switzerland, Italy, West Germany and Scotland. The fall semester found her in Houston, Texas, where she had accepted another visiting professorship. In Houston, in October, she fell seriously ill again and had to return to New York. There she passed away on 8 January 1971. Her death did not pass unnoticed. Several of her friends and colleagues wrote moving obituaries. Paul Rudolph mentioned how she seemed ‘indestructible with her well-nurtured passions and prejudices, devotion to work, organizational ability, and outpouring of energy’.147 Adolf K. Placzek, director of Columbia’s Avery Library, remembered how she combined ‘impatient criticism and passionate concern’.148 Peter Blake wrote in Architectural Forum that she ‘was the most prolific

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member of our Board of Contributors, and the most controversial and the most distinguished’.149 Her funeral service was organized by her daughter Claudia, with Hattula unable to attend because she couldn’t leave her young children in Switzerland. Claudia started to set up a memorial fund for her mother and took responsibility for handling the estate. She was, however, not able to finish this work because she succumbed to her own illnesses later that year, in September 1971. It was thus left to Hattula, who had suffered the loss of both mother and sister, to pick up the pieces – which meant managing not just the legacy of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy but also of her father László.

Notes 1 Hans-Peter Lühr and Dresdner Geschichtsverein, eds, Große Ausstellungen um 1900

und in den zwanziger Jahren, Dresdner Hefte (Dresden: Dresdner Geschichtsverein, 2000); Werner Durth, Erich Bracher and Wüstenrot Stiftung Deutscher Eigenheimverein, eds, Entwurf Zur Moderne: Hellerau, Stand Ort Bestimmung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1996). 2 Henderson, Building Culture; Christoph Mohr and Michael Müller, Funktionalität

Und Moderne: Das Neue Frankfurt Und Seine Bauten, 1925–1933, Originalausg (Köln: Ed. Fricke im R. Müller Verlag, 1984). 3 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the

Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co, 1973). 4 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,

Freedom, and the Cold War, paperback edition [Nachdr.] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 5 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy herself often stated her birthday as 29 October 1905 – thus

making herself two years younger than she actually was. Records prove, however, that it was 1903. 6 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 101–3. 7 Ibid., 99–101. 8 Ibid., 104. 9 Gernot Klatte, ‘Die Architektur Martin Pietzschs’, in Der Dresdner Architekt Martin

Pietzsch, ed. Anne Claussnitzer (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2016), 9–15. 10 Detlef Schweiger and Martin Steude, Einhundertzehn Jahre Künstlerhaus: Dresden-

Loschwitz 1898–2008 (Güstrow: QUMA-Verl., 2008). 11 Claussnitzer, ed., Der Dresdner Architekt Martin Pietzsch, 58. 12 Fritz Eiselen, ‘Das Lichtspielhaus “Capitol” in Dresden. Architekt: Martin Pietzsch’,

Deutsche Bauzeitung, Mai 1926, 60. Jahrgang, N. 40 edition. 13 Wolfram Steude, ‘Der Erbauer Des Loschwitzer Künstlerhauses, Martin Pietzsch, Als

Mensch Und Künstler’, in Detlef Schweiger and Martin Steude, Einhundertzehn Jahre Künstlerhaus Dresden-Loschwitz 1898–2008 (Güstrow: QUMA-Verl., 2008), 11–12. 14 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 132–7.

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15 Ibid., 131. 16 Ibid., 137–42. 17 Her correspondence contains letters to ‘Bruder Mensing’ dated 6 May 1948

(AAA944 – 303/305); 22 May 1949 (AAA944 – 378/380) and 24 May 1951 (AAA944 – 465/466). 18 In a letter to her sister Eva, dated 24 August 1948, she reminds Eva of how

embittered she was that she was not allowed to take on higher education (archive of the families Strahl, Esche, Clauss, Pietzsch und Steuche, in the care of Anne Claussnitzer – hereafter AC). In a later letter to her family, dated in 1964, she recalls ‘I never forgot how idiotic father reacted when Mensing and my teacher Hieke tried to convince him that I should go to university. Girls, uttered the venerable father, have no need of a university education. Well, I made it without one, but the combination of conditions that allowed me to do so will not be repeated’ (translation from German HH) (HMN). 19 In the extensive family archive, curated by Anne Claussnitzer (granddaughter of

Hertha Pietzsch), school reports are kept of all the siblings Pietzsch. Sibylle’s grades were generally better as those of Claus, but of course she did not attend the same high school. Anne Claussnitzer informed me that it was out of the questions for the daughters of Martin Pietzsch to attend higher education – a paternal decision that both Sibylle and her sister Eva bitterly resented, according to family lore. 20 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 148–58. 21 Ibid., 153–83. 22 Personal documents in AAA946. 23 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 191–223. 24 Ibid., 233–43. Rüttgens-Pohlmann interprets Sibyl’s many moves in the 1920s as

inspired by a pattern of ‘follow the man’ – ‘the man’ being her various love interests. I am rather inclined to understand her restlessness as indicative of a fundamental dissatisfaction with not being allowed to develop her intellectual abilities by an academic education. 25 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 243–57. 26 Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. One Last Genius (Cambridge, MA: Belknap,

2008), 110; Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, paperback edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 99. 27 AAA 946/0873. See also Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 279. 28 Letters of Sibylle Dreyfuss to the family in Loschwitz dated 2.X.1929, 8.X.1929,

30.X.1929, 7.XI.1929, 19.XI.1929, 26.XI.1929, 14.XII.1929, 26.XII.1929 (AC). 29 Later in life, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy would claim that she had attended throughout

her twenties many university courses as a ‘Hörer’, a listener who can attend for free because they are not pursuing an academic degree. This is mentioned for example in the ‘Short bibliographical notes of Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, dated 8 April 1967 and found among the materials in the Sibyl Moholy-Nagy collection at UCSC. In a later letter to Theodor A. Gill dd. 12 October 1970, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy likewise referred to her discussions with Paul Tillich, ‘who was my teacher at the University of Frankfurt in the late 1920s’. There is also an undated note from Paul Tillich in her correspondence, which confirms that they had a personal acquaintance. (AAA945)

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30 Letter home of 24.III.1930 (AC). 31 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 298–302. 32 Letter home 12.III.1931 (AC). 33 Sibyl Peach, ‘Wanderschmiere’, Das Leben. Die Grosse Welt. Der Die Das, 8, no. 11

(May 1931): 35–6. 34 Ibid. 35 Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. One Last Genius, 110; Petra Kohse, Marianne Hoppe:

Eine Biografie (Berlin: Ullstein Berlin, 2001), 77. 36 Kohse, Marianne Hoppe, 76. 37 Ibid., 77. 38 Letter home 20.XII.30 (AC). 39 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 322. 40 Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobis_Film, consulted 21 July 2016. 41 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 57; Rüttgens-Pohlmann,

Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 321–33. 42 Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed., Albers and Moholy-Nagy. From the Bauhaus to the New

World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 163–5. See also http://moholynagy.org/about/biography/, consulted 21 July 2016. 43 See http://www.steffi-line.de/archiv_text/nost_buehne/05f_frank_ellen.htm,

consulted 21 July 2016. 44 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 342. 45 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 75. 46 Ibid., 75. 47 Letter 20 April 1932 by Carl Dreyfuss, AAA 944/0191. 48 Sibylle Pietzsch, ‘Die Welt Der Mädchen. Zwischen 16 Und 18’, Uhu 9, no. 2

(November 1932): 38–45; Sibylle Pietzsch, ‘Er Macht Einen Ausflug Mit Ihr’, Uhu 9, no. 5 (February 1933): 73–8. 49 Diary entrance Somonauk, 30 June 1947 (AAA946 – 491/492). 50 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 359–75. 51 The divorce from Carl Dreyfuss only became official on 12 October 1933 – one

day after Hattula’s birth. For legal reasons Hattula first received the official name of ‘Dreyfuss’. Only later her parents managed to change her last name to ‘Moholy-Nagy’. 52 Personal communication with Anne Claussnitzer, Reutlingen, 18 July 2016. 53 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 100. The actual chronology

of things is somewhat different than suggested in this biography, however. In her correspondence with Moholy, Sibyl mentions twice the request of the Reichskulturkammer to present his works, a first time on 21 August 1934, a second time on 17 October 1934 – indicating in this particular letter that the date for the jury was set on 23 October 1934. It seems likely that until that moment, there had been no official restrictions on Moholy’s ability to work in Germany. His move to Amsterdam, however, was decided upon in late 1933 or early 1934. 54 Letter to her father dated 14 January 1934 (AC).

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55 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 412–28. 56 In a letter to László Moholy-Nagy dated 18 June 1935, she mentioned how she

sometimes longed for the earlier days, when she had her own apartment in Ruhleben and could simply come and sleep with him, whereas she now was a useful domestic fixture (ein ‘nützlicher Hausarbeitsgegenstand’) at the Lietzensee (AAA951). She used the letterhead of the Lietzenseeufer as of August 1934. 57 Letters home dated 27 March 1934 and 5 November 1934 (AC); Letter to László

Moholy-Nagy dd. 2 October 1934 (AAA951). 58 Letter to László Moholy-Nagy dated 8 November 1934 (AAA 951/0162) 59 Letter to László Moholy-Nagy dated 17 October 1934 (AAA 951/0156) – translation

Hilde Heynen. 60 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 133. In Experiment in Totality,

the former housekeeper is given the name ‘Frau Schwelker’. In her letter to László Moholy-Nagy dated 18 June 1935 she, however, refers to a ‘Frau Schiefer’ who doesn’t have as much storing space as she would have liked (AAA951). 61 Robin Schuldenfrei, ‘Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the

Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy’, History of Photography 37, no. 2 (May 2013): 182–203, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2013.769773. 62 Ibid. 63 Walter Gropius did likewise with the work of his wife Ise Gropius (formerly

Ise Frank), who edited his manuscripts and wrote many of his lectures (see his dedication in Walter Gropius, Apollo in Democracy: The Cultural Obligation of the Architect (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)). Hattula Moholy-Nagy saw a similar pattern unfolding in her father’s life and work, mentioning in a 2002 interview that her father’s career was shepherded by a succession of ‘male mentors and female handmaidens’. Ted Shen, ‘From Bauhaus to Her House’, Chicago Reader, https://ww w.chicagoreader.com/chicago/from-bauhaus-to-her-house/Content?oid=908358, accessed 5 April 2018. 64 In a letter to László Moholy-Nagy dated 10 August 1935, she states that the house

has certainly become one of the most beautiful homes in this ‘unsophisticated’ (unverwöhntes) city. 65 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 135. 66 Letter to her mother dated 26 January 1937. 67 ‘Six Aalto chairs, one Isokon longchair and four Isokon chairs, plus one bookshelf ’ –

letter to László Moholy-Nagy dated 2 September 1937. 68 Letter home dated 19 October 1937 (AC). Richard Koppe, a former student of the

New Bauhaus, later also remembered the Astor Street apartment, which was painted entirely in white. See Eckhard Neumann, ed., Bauhaus and Bauhaus People (New York: Van Nostrand Reinold, 1970), 238. 69 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 173; see also James Sloan Allen,

The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the ChicagoAspren Crusade for Cultural Reform, revised edition (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2002), 65–73; Michael Grüning and Konrad Wachsmann, Der Architekt Konrad Wachsmann: Erinnerungen Und Selbstauskünfte (Wien: Löcker, 1986), 462. 70 Letter dated 17 May 1939 (AC).

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71 Sibyl Peech, ‘Women Are Misunderstood’, The Atlantic Monthly 165, no. 6 (1940):

752–7. 72 Harry Liebersohn and Dorothee Schneider, My Life in Germany before and after

January 30, 1933: A Guide to Manuscript Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. N. S. 91, 3 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2001). 73 Letter to her parents dated 29 November 1940 (AC). 74 Diary entrance from 29 October 1943 (AAA946 – 0461/0464). 75 The classical arguments, formulated by Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay ‘A Room of

One’s Own’, certainly also applied to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. 76 S. D. Peech, Children’s Children (New York: Bittner, 1945). 77 Sibyl Peech, ‘My Life in Germany – Two Years Before and Two Years After the Start

of the Hitler Regime’, 1940, 2, bMS Ger 91, Houghton Library. 78 According to Liebersohn and Schneider, many entries did not fit the prescribed

format. Liebersohn and Schneider, My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933, 4. 79 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens. 80 Liebersohn and Schneider, My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933,

27–9. 81 Peech, ‘My Life in Germany’, 27. 82 Ibid., 36. 83 Ibid., 67. 84 Ibid., 94. 85 Ibid., 133. 86 Ibid., 137. 87 Ibid., 159. 88 Letter to Eva Pietzsch dated 16 August 1946 (AC). 89 See the documents in the family archive curated by Anne Claussnitzer. 90 Letter to László Moholy-Nagy dated 25 August 1937 (AAA 951/0274). 91 Rüttgens-Pohlmann recognizes antisemitism in Sibyl’s writing and attitude – see, for

example, Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 317. I do not agree with her, however. It is true that Sibyl interiorized many stereotypes of the time – for example the tendency to characterize certain groups of people as having specific features. She applied this attitude, however, to nationalities as well as races. While some of these generalizations sound politically incorrect today, we should be careful to historicize these utterances and not retrospectively apply the norms of today (e.g. in using the term ‘negro’) to writings of the past. 92 Peech, Children’s Children, 244–5. 93 In Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s papers at the AAA, the following were kept: Bernice Langert,

‘Panoramic View of a German Family’, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, 30 October 1945; Leo Lania, ‘Children’s Children by S. D. Peech’, Aufbau, n.d.; Kurt Weinberg, ‘Evolution Toward Atavistic Barbarism’, The Hartford Courant, 17 February 1946, D12; Katharine Kreisler, ‘Book Review Children’s Children by S.D. Peech’, Danubian

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Review 2, no. 1 (March 1946); Martha Dodd, ‘The Factionalism that Bred Nazism’, The Saturday Review, 13 October (1945): 66–7. 94 Dodd, ‘The Factionalism that Bred Nazism’. 95 Letter to Eva Pietzch dated 16 August 1946 (AC). 96 Heynen, ‘Zondag 13 Mei 1945’. See AAA946 – 0465/0468 for the manuscript. 97 ‘Last Letter’ to ‘Brother Enemy’, dated Chicago, 3 February 1942 (AAA947). 98 Heynen, ‘Zondag 13 Mei 1945’, 131. 99 Ibid. 100 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 247. 101 Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 80; Alan Powers, Serge Chermayeff:

Designer, Architect, Teacher (London: RIBA Publications, 2001), 175. 102 Diary entrance 24 November 1947 (AAA 946/512). 103 ‘Oral History of Serge Chermayeff/Interviewed by Betty J. Blum, compiled under

the Auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Department of Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago: Chicago Architects Oral History Project, http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm/ref/collection/caohp/id/1952, accessed 5 April 2018, p. 22. 104 Letters between Chermayeff and Gropius in Bauhaus-Archiv; letter from Sibyl

Moholy-Nagy to Jenö [Nagy – the brother of Moholy] dated 14 September 1948 (AC). 105 Letter to Jenö dated 30 April 1949 (AC). 106 Diary entrance 24 November 1947 (AAA946 – 510/511). 107 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Dadaism We Forgot’, Berkeley: A Journal of Modern

Culture, no. 8 (1950): 1+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Dead Man in Ambulance’, Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture, no. 9 (1950): 5–7; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Documented Seeing’, Occident, Spring (1950): 38–40. Occident was a literary magazine published by the Associated Students of the University of California, Berkeley. 108 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality. 109 The chapter called ‘Postal Interlude’, supposedly quotes the postal exchange between

László and Sibyl during the summer of 1937, when he was negotiating with the Chicago association that invited him. The quotes are to a certain extent made up and do not faithfully reproduce the letters and telegrams that can actually be found in Moholy’s and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s left papers. The chapter represents a literary reworking of these documents, which certainly conveys a lot of the content and the tone of their communication, but it should not be considered historically correct according to scholarly standards. 110 Copies of many of these reviews are among Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s left papers

(AAA948 – 675/709). 111 Anonymous book review in Architectural Review, no. 108 (July 1950), 28. 112 Edgar Kaufmann, Jr, book review of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment

in Totality, in Magazine of Art, January 1952, 44–5. 113 Helen Gee, from Limelight Gallery, was flabbergasted when she heard how Sibyl

had thrown away glass negatives, because they took up too much space. See Helen Gee, Limelight: A Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse

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in the Fifties: A Memoir, 1st edition (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 140 ff. 114 Interview by the author of Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Ann Arbor, 28–9 April 2003; see

also Hattula Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Rediscovery of Moholy-Nagy’s Color Photography’, in László Moholy-Nagy: Color in Transparency: Photographic Experiments in Color 1934–1946, ed. Jeannine Fiedler and Hattula Moholy-Nagy (Berlin: Steidl and Bauhaus-Archiv, 2006), 7–14. 115 Letter to Martin Metal dated 29 May 1950. 116 Francesca Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts

and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), 22–3. 117 AAA 948/914; AAA 948/871. 118 Letter to Walter Gropius dated 14 February 1950 – Houghton Library, Gropius

archive. 119 In a letter dated 7 March 1951, José Luis Sert recommended Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to

Olindo Grossi, chair of the Architectural Department of Pratt Institute (AAA948). 120 She noted down in her diary: ‘I have decided on architecture as the focal point or

central theme. … It has helped me immeasurably to bring a certain order into my mind’ (AAA 946/0560 – diary entrance 29 October 1953). 121 According to the Pratt Institute Bulletin. Announcement 1952–1953 Sessions, Volume

XIV, Number 1, April 1952, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy had studied at the University of Leipzig, the University of Giessen and the University of Frankfurt am Main. 122 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Introduction’, in Pedagogical Sketchbook, ed. Paul Klee (New

York: Praeger Publishers, 1953), 7–12. 123 See, for example, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Mexican Critique’, Progressive Architecture, 34,

November (1953): 109+. 124 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, Perspecta, 3

(1954): 2–7. 125 Her annual salary started at $1,280 in 1951–2 to reach $17,000 in 1968–9. See letters

in AAA948 between frame 1,100 and 1,200. 126 http://prabook.com/web/person-view.html?profileId=603539, consulted 13 March

2017. 127 Diary entrance 29 October 1953 – AAA 946/561. 128 Minutes of the Committee for Scholarships and Special Awards Meeting,

Architectural League, New York, 2 April 1953 (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 70). 129 See the long diary entrance with comments on this trip – AAA946 – 579/605. 130 Edgar Kaufmann Jr, ‘A Refreshing Glance at Western Folk Design. Book review

of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architectural Record 122 (October 1957): 58+. 131 E. Pickering, ‘A Basic Approach. Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous

Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Progressive Architecture, no. 39 (April 1958): 216+; ‘Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architectural Forum, no. 107 (November 1957): 191;

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Esther McCoy, ‘Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Arts and Architecture, no. 75 (March 1958): 9. 132 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Materiali Indigeni Nell’Architettura Dei Coloni Americani’,

Casabella, 204 (February 1955): 76–82. 133 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘F.L.W. and the Ageing of Modern Architecture’, Progressive

Architecture, 40 (May 1959): 136–42; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘La Tecnica e Frank Lloyd Wright’, Casabella, 227 (May 1959): 11–14; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright 1889–1959. Die Metamorphose der modernen Architektur’, Bauwelt, 50 (1 June 1959): 659–69. 134 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘L’Architecture Américaine Prend Une Nouvelle Orientation’,

Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui, 35, no. 113–14 (April 1964): 82–95. 135 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Brasilia: Majestic Concept or Autocratic Monument’, Progressive

Architecture, 40, no. October (1959): 88–9; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Some Aspects of South American Architecture’, Progressive Architecture, 41 (April 1960): 135–40. 136 Moholy-Nagy, Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela; Sibyl

Moholy-Nagy, Carlos Raul Villanueva Und Die Architektur Venezuelas (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1964). 137 Heinrich König, ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva Und Die Architektur

Venezuelas by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architektur Und Wohnform, no. 7 (October 1964); Heinrich König, ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva Und Die Architektur Venezuelas by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Werk Und Zeit, no. 3 (1965); La., ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva Und Die Architektur Venezuelas by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Moebel Interior Design, no. 11 (1964); Jürgen Pahl, ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva Und Die Architektur Venezuelas by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Db, no. 6 (1965). 138 Esther McCoy, ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of

Venezuela by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Arts and Architecture, October (1965): 37; Peter Collins, ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, The Concrete Architecture of Riccardo Morandi by Giorgio Boaga and Benito Boni, and Alvar Aalto, Complete Works by Alvar Aalto’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 25, no. 3 (1966): 227. 139 Collins, ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela

by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 227. 140 Peter Blake, letter to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 10 December 1968 (AAA 944/196). 141 The letter was never published in the Times, but Hannah Arendt wrote to Sibyl

Moholy-Nagy expressing her gratitude. Hannah Arendt, letter to Sibyl MoholyNagy, 5 July 1966 (AAA 944/861). See also Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, for Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 358. 142 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Der Selbstmord Der Modernen Architekten’, Stuttgarter

Zeitung, 24 January 1959. 143 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man; translated as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Die Stadt als

Schicksal: Geschichte der urbanen Welt (München: Callwey, 1968). Also translated as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Urbanismo y Sociedad: Historia Ilustrada de la Evolución de la Ciudad (Barcelona: Blume, 1970). The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, ed. Paul Rudolph (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970).

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144 A letter dated 23 December 1965 (AAA 944/768) instructed the comptroller at Pratt

Institute as follows: ‘My mounting revulsion against the United States’ actions in Vietnam make it impossible for me to buy further US bonds with a clear conscience. Please cancel my previous order to purchase each month a $100 bond from my salary’. 145 See letter to Wolfram Steude, 18 December 1969 (AC). 146 See her open letter in Pratt’s students’ magazine, a copy of which can be found

among her papers: ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Submits Resignation’, AAA 948/0910. She was not the only one to hold such a critical opinion about the integration of black students. Hannah Arendt apparently thought along similar lines and was also very much against the lowering of academic standards. See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, for Love of the World, 417. 147 Paul Rudolph, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architectural Forum, 134, no. 5 (June 1971): 29. 148 Adolf K. Placzek, ‘Obituary’, American Society of Architectural Historians. Newsletter,

15, no. 2 (April 1971): 4–6. 149 Peter Blake, ‘Obituary Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architectural Forum, 134, January–

February (1971): 25.

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2 VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE AND THE USES OF THE PAST

In a diary entry noted down on 10 July 1947, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy pondered the intellectual differences between her and her late husband. She recognized the value of his work and what it had taught her, but stressed at the same time that her own outlook was far more historically informed. She thus considered herself more conscious of the values of the past: My relationship to Moholy’s work has been very strange. When I first met him I had no eyes to see abstract art. Through the medium of my love for him I came to see a deep and incredibly rich message in form, color and light. But as the years went by I struggled against the exclusiveness of Moholy’s convictions. … The love for Moholy’s work made me see things in representational painting I had not seen before, and Moholy’s beloved Joyce-prose excited me with new possibilities of descriptive writing. But up till two years ago Moholy would not admit anything but abstraction in his world. The values with which I had lived for a long time were all punctured and depreciated. 3000 years of culture prior to 1920 were all ‘straw’ to him. That made me restive and obstinate and I had times when I simply refused to let his work enter my consciousness. He knew it and we had many a bitter discussion about it. He wanted admiration and encouragement without reservation. I wanted my heritage preserved, acknowledged. That is when we clashed most severely.1 Her later intellectual development corroborated this assessment. Whereas she would continue to honour Moholy’s legacy, taking up the cause of modern art and architecture, she would also deepen her historical knowledge and build up her interpretation of twentieth-century art and architecture in dialectical interaction

with her understanding of the past. This predilection for history – which set her apart from many protagonists of modernism in architecture – was probably one of the reasons why the teaching job at Pratt Institute suited her so well.

Opting for architectural history After her decision to focus on architectural history,2 Moholy-Nagy gradually built up her expertise as an architectural historian and as a critic. In preparing for her classes, she assembled a great deal of knowledge based upon textbooks and upon her travelling experiences. As she mentioned in one of her letters to her sister Eva, ‘cheek, spit and a good library’ could bring her quite far in preparing courses, all the more so while she had a sound knowledge base just by being European.3 As a native German, she could read the extensive art historical literature written in German, which also comprised quite a lot of architectural history.4 Having lived and travelled in Europe before the war, she was familiar with many European cities and monuments. She moreover was a prolific writer of book reviews in the early 1950s, using this platform to extend her own knowledge as well as to critically position herself.5 There were several good reasons that explain her choice to concentrate on architectural history, apart from the fact that her job description urged her to. First of all, she was close to the field because of the profession of her father and because of the many architectural friends of Moholy, among whom Sigfried Giedion and Walter Gropius had been frequent house guests when the Moholys still lived in Chicago. Second, Moholy-Nagy might have been aware that scholarly standards and expertise were slightly less demanding in architectural history than in art history. Whereas art historians long considered architectural history just a part of their wider field, there were also many professional architects who dabbled in historical research without being explicitly trained to do so. Since the latter often played an important role in architectural education, the sanctioning of what constituted credible research was arguably somewhat slack for architectural history in comparison to art history as a whole.6 Architectural history might thus have offered more opportunities to shine than the more densely populated art history. Third, Moholy-Nagy apparently felt more at ease in discussing works of architecture, which she thought offered a more secure basis to develop her insights. She articulated this last point in an article published in 1952, with the intriguing title ‘Flying Buttress–Flying Saucer’. In this article she compared the discourse of art history to the chasing of a ‘flying saucer’, because she thought that the classification mania in art evaluation obliged observers to adhere to pre-established stylistic chronologies, even if the artworks under discussion did not fully comply with the features of the style period they supposedly belonged to. Students of art history

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were therefore continuously struggling to catch the flying saucer of concepts that were not entirely consistent with what they actually saw in specific works of art. Architecture on the other hand was a field where the ‘flying buttress’ was key, the structural device in Gothic churches which holds up the soaring vaults. For in works of architecture, ‘every structural effort presupposes a principle of control, a focussing of the human will on shape, function, and material’.7 Architecture therefore seemed less arbitrary to her, because it had a firmer basis than art history. Architecture, she argued in the same article, was highly significant because it more fully embodied communal necessities and social change. This thought was confirmed in a book she reviewed around this time too: Herbert J. Muller’s The Uses of the Past.8 Muller was an American historian who set out to describe an encompassing overview of Profiles of Former Societies, as the book’s subtitle suggested. In his introductory chapter, he started from a thorough description of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, because the building’s magnificence as well as its historical trajectory told a lot about the civilization that built it, including its fate in history: St. Sophia remains an inspiring monument, glorious and vainglorious. It is a symbol of humility and pride, of holiness and worldliness, of the power of faith and the limitations of faith. It is an everlasting triumph, of a society that failed. It may epitomize all the great societies and golden ages of the past, which also failed and still inspire. It calls for reverence, and for irony.9 Moholy-Nagy greatly appreciated this opening gesture and thus recommended the book to the architect-readers of her review in Progressive Architecture. The shift in her publication strategy started, understandably enough, with a few articles on ‘the issue of integration’ (of art and architecture).10 Her first really critical intervention happened in 1953, when she published ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’, a review of a show of recent modern architecture at the MoMA.11 Whereas the article began in a rather conventional way by praising the show and especially the photography of Ezra Stoller, the second half contained some very sharp comments, focusing specifically on Mies van der Rohe (one should bear in mind that there had been a long-standing feud between Moholy and Mies while both were in Chicago) (Figure 2.1). Characteristically, MoholyNagy framed her appreciation as well as her criticism within a broad historical perspective, mentioning, for example, how the twentieth-century architecture’s focus on the ‘common man’ found a precedent in civic-minded Roman antiquity. She thought, on the other hand, that Mies’s ‘academicism’ and his ‘façade architecture’ were overrated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Arthur Drexler, authors of the catalogue, and she took them to task for failing to recognize that Mies was only the belated heir of the real pioneers of glass architecture – namely Burnham, Perret and Gropius.

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FIGURE 2.1 The 25-storey Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, Illinois, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: two unadorned slabs placed at right angles to each other.

While thus trying her hand at architectural history and criticism through articles and reviews, she also started to work on a book project. She decided to focus on the vernacular architecture of early settlers in North America. This choice, in the given circumstances, was a smart one. She was probably well aware that she did not yet possess a thorough academic knowledge or serious methodological training. She, however, compensated for these disadvantages by choosing a topic on which the scholarly material was not abundantly available, and for which intensive fieldwork offered an entrance ticket.

The vernacular: Between academia and banality According to Moholy-Nagy’s application for the funding of her research project, architecture in the 1950s was erroneously identified only with monumentality. Architecture as an idea, she argued, had become conventionalized and its actual essence as an idiom of the life of the people had become obscured. The anonymous buildings, built by indigenous peoples and early settlers in America, could, however, offer an untapped source of vitality for architecture. She took her clue from the recent fascination for aboriginal art: ‘Much has been written and published in recent years about the beauty of aboriginal art: masks, sculptures, ceramics, textiles. But the beauty of indigenous buildings has been largely overlooked, especially in the Americas.’12 She convinced the Architectural League to award her an Arnold Brunner research grant, which allowed her to travel widely to look for the best examples of anonymous architecture.13 Moholy-Nagy’s claim that these buildings were largely overlooked was, however, not entirely correct. True enough, they were not being taught in the architectural history classes in American architectural schools – often architectural students were

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taking classes from professors in the art history departments of their universities, which resulted in mostly stylistically structured courses with a focus on Europe.14 Since vernacular architecture was not researched in art history departments, it followed that it was not a major presence in architectural schools. There was nevertheless a growing field of vernacular architecture studies, very often strongly localized and regionalized, but largely outside of academia. Dell Upton traces the history of this field back to ideas and attitudes that developed in the eighteenth century and its first scholarly analyses to the 1880s and 1890s. He states that vernacular studies were being practised mainly by antiquarians, collectors and connoisseurs, although some of its authors had positions in university geography departments. Upton distinguishes two dominant strains within American vernacular architecture studies: a ‘historical’ one, which sought to understand architectural change by relating it to social and economic factors; and a ‘cultural’ one, which rather looked for large patterns, common values and shared perceptions through typological or geographical analyses of architecture.15 Although Sibyl Moholy-Nagy didn’t acknowledge these traditions in her own work, she clearly shared some assumptions with especially the ‘historical’ tradition: the emphasis on fieldwork, the interest in building technology and the view that architecture was rooted in social practices. There are also some commonalities with the ‘cultural’ tradition, such as her acceptance of the vernacular-academic dichotomy and her vaguely diffusionist thought model.16 Also, within the more formally organized architectural history, there were many scholarly works on early American architecture. Among these there were several that dealt with material reminiscent of what Sibyl Moholy-Nagy called ‘settler architecture’ – the unsophisticated buildings of early settlers which were informed by site, climate and materials rather than by stylistic ambitions; Hugh Morrison’s 1952 Early American Architecture. From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period is a clear example.17 Welcomed by Vincent Scully in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians as a long-needed comprehensive study of the early phases of American architectural history,18 it provided a survey that was structured according to chronological and geographical categories. These categories were seen as giving rise to stylistic patterns, an assumption that provided the organizational principle of the whole book. The earliest manifestations of colonial architecture – the frame houses in New England or the simple adobe structures in New Mexico – were thus treated by Morrison as first, somewhat clumsy steps in a stylistic evolution that was mostly interpreted in line with European traditions. They were not recognized by him as vernacular idioms in their own right, worthy of study outside of the stylistic paradigm that underscored his methodology. Vernacular architecture thus formed an uneasy category from a scholarly point of view. Seen by mainstream architectural history as the banal, mediocre background against which architectural monuments worthy of study stood out, and treated by

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non-academic vernacular studies as a field meant to yielding knowledge about social, cultural or historical patterns, this anonymous architecture did not lend itself to easy appropriation by architects. Although the knowledge was there, and the books were available, this material was not processed by an architectural eye and not interpreted in a way that made it digestible for designers. This, however, was exactly what Sibyl Moholy-Nagy set out to do.

Documenting vernacular architecture In sending out the manuscript of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture to a publisher, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy added a note on the ‘Genesis of the manuscript’, which is quite revealing about the intellectual trajectory that gave rise to it (Figure 2.2). She began by referring to her father and her husband, as the main sources for her ideas on architecture, explaining that she started a teaching career only after her husband’s death. While she was first teaching history of art and architecture, her main education during these ‘apprentice years’, she stated, came from lecture trips: These journeys – in the years between 1948 and 1952 I can count along 34 – made me see this country in a way I had never known it before. I discovered a spontaneous building genius, now almost smothered by technological and speculation construction, which through its uninhibited originality seemed often superior to European folk architecture.19 She thus positioned herself as first and foremost a travelling observer – learning from direct contact with artefacts and buildings, curious about their histories and willing to interpret material evidence and local narratives. To her it seemed as if these buildings embodied a certain ideal of architecture, which she described as follows: In search for an organic architecture for the living organism, I started to focus my attention on the basic houses and work buildings that had been constructed out of an intuitive comprehension of a specific need without the benefit of architectural theory. I discovered an astonishing number of examples in the Americas which combined my father’s classical ideal of form harmony and site response with the contemporary demand for functionality and adequate materials.20 These sentences indeed sum up the major arguments of the book: that American vernacular architecture is closer to the primal causes of architecture because it is less than the European one governed by stylistic traditions; that some (though not all)

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FIGURE 2.2 Cover of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, first edition by Horizon, 1957.

of these vernacular buildings are beautiful in an organic and coherent way; that this beauty is generated by the regard these builders have for site and climate, for function and form, and for materials and skills, thus producing a ‘sense of quality’, which since has been lost in common building production. Moholy-Nagy had been struggling to organize the material and to find a good structure for the book. Her early description of the book in a letter to a friend mentioned that she aimed at bringing together as many interesting examples, as I can find, of early settler architecture, with particular emphasis on the way they put their buildings in relationship to the landscape or the site, the way they reacted to climate, native materials and skills, and the use of ornament and traditional elements they brought along.21 It seems that especially the latter factor – the presence of ornament and tradition – was something that she had to ponder repeatedly, since her statements regarding tradition took different forms. Articles in Casabella and Perspecta in 1955 tried out initial formulations of what would become important arguments in Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. The Casabella one focused on the use of native materials, singling out examples in wood, brick, stone and straw.22 Here the author – somewhat surprisingly and no doubt incorrectly – stressed

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that the early domestic architecture of the American settlers was one ‘without tradition’, ‘the land settlers of the Western Hemisphere relegated their traditions to churches and public buildings. Their own shelter was shaped by environment, purpose and available materials.’23 This statement was radically in opposition with more conventional architectural history interpretations, since historians such as Morrison stressed the continuity between the settlers’ country of origin and their way of building in the new land. Moholy-Nagy’s article in Perspecta was already more prudent in this respect, modifying the radical character of the ‘traditionless’ statement.24 In this paper her formulation stressed the reliance upon brauch [sic] rather than tradition. She used this German term to stress the fact that the settlers only took from their past experiences those things that had proven their usefulness, and that they thus remained clear of the ‘tyranny of ideas’ imposed by tradition.25 In Native Genius, she would repeat this argument to reinforce her claim that American anonymous architecture was more direct and unmediated than the European one.26 In both the Casabella and the Perspecta article Moholy-Nagy refrained from a discussion of ornament, just like she later did in the book itself. This omission was doubtlessly symptomatic, since an overt attention to ornament would have made it more difficult to position vernacular architecture as inspirational for modern architecture. This positioning was already clearly present in Perspecta. The argument built upon a perceived differentiation in man’s relationship to environment (and was thus later seen as a first ‘manifesto’ in search of an ‘alternative history of architecture based on climate response and spatial typology’27). After a first stage of ‘primordial or intrinsic environment’, Moholy-Nagy explained, in which man sought shelter in caves, the second stage of ‘selective or cultivated environment’ was the stage of building with the landscape, in interaction with the characteristics of site and climate. In the third stage of ‘technological or man-made environment’ man looked for independence from environmental limitations by relying upon increasingly sophisticated building technologies. This stage was now running wild due to the industrial revolution. There remained nevertheless surviving remnants of the second stage, when man lived in interaction with the environment. These remnants – embodied in the anonymous architecture she was presenting in the article – were instructive because they provided examples of how form could be the ‘matrix of space’. The outer forms of these buildings simply resulted from the way they enclosed interior spaces paired with the way they were conditioned by site, climate, materials and specific purpose – without any consideration of academic conventions or style. Such ‘primitive’ [sic] structures were very much worth of consideration, especially by architectural students, because the latter should develop ‘an awareness of architecture as the carrier of life continuity that transforms tomorrow’s dreams into yesterday’s heritage’.28

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Both articles prepared the ground for a fuller development of the argument in Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. Moholy-Nagy constructed this book didactically in order to show architect-readers how vernacular builders were attentive to ‘site and climate’, ‘form and function’, ‘materials and skills’ – the three main sections of the book. By focusing on these factors, the structure of the book deviated considerably from the stylistic, chronological, geographical or typological organization, which structured works in architectural history or vernacular architectural studies. Whereas the Introduction (Part One) and the Conclusion (Part Five) formulated more general arguments about the nature of architecture and the sense of quality generated by the best examples of vernacular, these three main sections were composed by a brief theoretical argument, followed by a series of striking examples of anonymous buildings that demonstrated particularly well how they responded to specific requirements. These buildings were presented by one or two photographs, sometimes enhanced by a diagram, and by extensive captions that clarified their exemplary values. The photographs were mainly taken by the author herself, although she also used images from the Library of Congress and from some other photographers. The introduction to the section ‘Site and climate’ contrasted the attitude of the settler, who asked ‘what can the land do for me?’ to that of the speculator who posed the challenge ‘what can I do to the land?’ In responding to site and climate, Moholy-Nagy argued, anonymous builders developed a diversity of solutions, reflecting their diverse cultural backgrounds. They nevertheless all shared the characteristic of transforming handicaps into assets, making the best of whatever difficulty they encountered. Among the examples in this section is the Fortress La Ferière in Haiti (Figure 2.3). This fortress was begun by General Henry Christophe – the ‘second Emperor of the Negro State, Haiti’ – to emphasize the success of his rebellion against the French army of Napoleon. Moholy-Nagy stressed how this impressive structure was built entirely of local building materials and in close connection to the summit upon which it rests. It was built ‘by sheer intuition and a staggeringly costly process of trial and error’ and with ‘perfect’ adjustment to the site. The fortress was never finished – it ‘remained as unfinished as the battle for racial equality, but even as a ruin it is the most impressive building of the Western Hemisphere’.29 Another example is a sugar cane mill found at the Buccaneer Plantation in St. Croix, Virgin Islands (Figure 2.4). She called this mill an impressive example ‘of settler skill in devising a type of building as new and experimental as the automobile factory was in 1900’.30 Its remarkable tapered form resulted from the threat of earthquakes, which necessitated a particularly stable form. The large vertical opening was where the tall sugar cane was fed to the grinding mechanism of two meshing stones. It lent the monumental mass a magnificent articulation that was highly expressive, thus forming an unmistakable landmark for the seafarer.

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FIGURE 2.3 Fortress La Ferière, Haiti.

FIGURE 2.4 Sugar Cane Mill, Buccaneer Plantation, St. Croix, Virgin Islands.

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The section ‘Form and function’ started with a discussion of coherence as the distinctive quality of surviving anonymous buildings. Referring to Vitruvius, Moholy-Nagy argued that proportions and unity of parts – making up coherence – were important factors in assessing the quality of a building. The anonymous builder often had an ‘automatic’ aesthetic sense. He would have been perplexed by the complicated arguments between functionalists and formalists in the 1950s, for ‘he created with the artlessness of pure conscience that looks for nothing but fulfilled purpose. This purpose included physical and spiritual needs. The form mediated between the strength of materials and the interior space.’31 The generating force in the anonymous builder was thus his intuition, responding to the ‘need to shelter’ what he and his ‘were and hoped to be’.32 A particularly fine example of the interplay between form and function could be found in a stone house in the Otomi Region, Hidalgo, Mexico (Figure 2.5). The Otomi people lived in an area which could be bitterly cold at night and which suffered from a shortage of water. The barrel vault above the kitchen part of this dwelling was finished to extreme smoothness, because it was the water shed of the dwelling – each drop of precipitation and condensation that rolled off it being carefully collected. ‘In all its bleak simplicity’, Moholy-Nagy stated, ‘this is a dwelling in which function and form coincide in rare totality’.33 In a very different

FIGURE 2.5 Stone House, Otomi Region, Hidalgo, Mexico.

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FIGURE 2.6 Mennonite barn, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

region she found a Mennonite barn, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Figure 2.6), which likewise displayed an intricate but completely valid relationship between form and function. The Mennonite farmer, she explained, could only use wood and stone due to religious constraints. To make his barn as strong as possible, he tapered the outer pilotis, giving them the same angle as the one of the foundation, thus providing a very stable anchoring for the supporting beam and joists of the second floor. This second floor needed to be particularly strong because it was accessed by a ramp, on which the farmer drove his team to deliver the hay, whereas the ground floor was used for stalls and pens of livestock. In the section on ‘Materials and skills’, Moholy-Nagy stated that ‘native architects’ selected building materials and methods on the basis of their availability and fitness for the given purpose, but also with regard to their response to time and climate – their ageing. Another factor was ‘economy’, not in terms of maximum output for minimum input, but rather in terms of preventing waste: ‘Economy in indigenous architecture means maximum advantage of all given factors.’34 Anonymous buildings thus observed a rural ideal of quality that the author saw vanishing in her own time. It paid particular attention to jointings, which were not concealed but rather emphasized. The use of particular materials sometimes reflected the

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backgrounds of the settlers – in New England, frame and board construction prevailed because of the English shipbuilding tradition; in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, German settlers relied upon their heritage as stone builders. MoholyNagy singled out a double house in New Hope, Pennsylvania, to demonstrate how their skills in stone masonry gradually and organically developed and became more refined (Figure 2.7). The old house on the left dated from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was put together as simply as possible, with windows set into the wall with a minimum of framing. The new house from the end of the eighteenth century displayed more sophisticated techniques, using quoins of sandstone boulders, a footing of large blocks and specially cut stones above the window. Another remarkable example she found was the Dutch oven in the Senate House, Kingston-on-Hudson, New York (Figure 2.8). Whereas the foundations and the walls of this house were made from fieldstone lumps and rough boulders, the oven itself was in coloured glazed bricks ‘in yellow, red, pink and brown that delights the eye’.35 The effect was highly decorative, but the use of the glazed brick was prompted by its heat-retaining quality, allowing the oven to remain hot long after the embers had died.

FIGURE 2.7 Double house, New Hope, Pennsylvania.

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FIGURE 2.8 Dutch oven, Senate House, Kingston-on-Hudson, New York.

The vernacular as counter-image for the modern As can be gathered from this sample of Moholy-Nagy’s cases, her selection was highly eclectic and not at all systematic in terms of geographical coverage, typological diversity or historic evolution. Her cases include examples from Canada, the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean, the regions she had been able to travel in the period 1948–1953. They pertain as well to buildings constructed by European settlers as to indigenous structures, extending even to an example of ‘negro architecture’.36 By subsuming all these different experiences under the one heading of ‘anonymous architecture’, she glossed over major differences in social hierarchies, power structures and economical resources although these factors were often acknowledged in her extensive descriptions of each case. They were not seen, however, as structurally determining for the overall argument that she was making. This overall argument had more to do with a battle over the contemporary meaning of architecture than with an ongoing discussion with other scholars of the vernacular. It is clear that in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s case, her study of anonymous architecture was carried out most of all for the benefit of a discourse on modern architecture.

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This motivation clearly informed the choice of cases. Many of her examples stood out as fine demonstrations of Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture as the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light, although she denounced this definition in her book as ‘pure esthetics [sic]’.37 The sugar cane mill (Figure 2.4), the Otomi stone house (Figure 2.5) and the Mennonite barn (Figure 2.6) are compositions of pure geometric volumes, striking in their simplicity, their attractiveness stemming from the interplay of proportions and openings, underscored by the effects of light and shadow – just like modern architecture is supposed to do. Other cases provide clear visual expressions of their structural principles. The forms of the fortress La Ferière (Figure 2.3) articulate very clearly its construction in a primitive form of concrete: ‘roughly dressed fieldstone, interlaced with brick, an opus mixtum as solid as that of the walls of Rome’.38 A streetscape in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (Figure 2.9) shows the sticks and beams construction that is the basic principle of modern architecture’s open-plan structures. Although these buildings present, as Moholy-Nagy recognized, a somewhat ‘shoddy’ and ‘impermanent’ image, they are nevertheless, according to her, innovative in their use of these structural means to carry ‘balconies and loggias that allow to utilize each slight breeze and the cool air of the night’.39 Modern architecture’s obsession with the honest expression of the use of materials also resonated in the choice of cases like the

FIGURE 2.9 Typical street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

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double house in New Hope (Figure 2.7) or the Dutch oven (Figure 2.8), where differential use of materials was not covered up but rather exploited to give a specific presence to the building. What remained absent from Moholy-Nagy’s examples and discussions are all the things that did not fit in her preordained idea of ‘good’ anonymous architecture: the application of ornaments, the often less than sophisticated use of materials,40 the not-so-generous ground plans with dark interiors and cramped living spaces, the intensive maintenance that was necessary to uphold the quality of finishing and to withstand weathering. All these, however, were indeed not very important for Moholy-Nagy, because the impetus behind her book is clearly to construct an instructive narrative for contemporary architects, rather than a full and balanced account of American vernacular architecture. The introduction to her book clearly framed the argument this way. Studying the ‘folklore of building’, she argued, was instructive because this kind of architecture occupied an intermediate position between two extremes that were increasingly common: on the one hand, the idea that architecture was pure aesthetics, on the other, the reduction of architecture to technology. Moholy-Nagy however advocated that there is a growing awareness that architecture is neither the sophisticated libertinism of the artist who is responsible only to this own genius, nor the simpleminded mechanical objectivity of the slide rule, no matter how scientifically disguised. The variety of problems, inherent today in the architectural task, makes it more than ever a selective and coordinative function. It is a challenge of responsible choices with the ultimate aim of total coherence. A good vernacular structure, being eminently selective, coordinative and coherent, is of similar architectural importance.41 (emphasis in the original) She thus justified her study of American settler architecture by referring to contemporary needs. Condemning the ‘inadequate and unserviceable speculation houses, lacking in site orientation, durability, beauty, privacy and functionality’ that were crowding the American landscape,42 she claimed that the anonymous architecture of the past could offer sources of inspiration for designing better homes in her own time, for this architecture displayed the exact qualities that were lacking in the mass-produced houses of the 1950s. Imitation was nevertheless not the point she was advocating. In comparing a Levittown speculation house with the Abraham Hasbrook House43 (Figure 2.10) of which it was a pasteboard replica, she ridiculed the intentions of the building promoter. Whereas the original example was a marvel of functionality and good design for its location and its times (which implied poor heating provisions and unsafe territory open to Indian attack), the replica was a cheap reproduction of forms that lacked any functional or climatic justification. What she advocated, therefore, was that architects would commit

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FIGURE 2.10 (a) Abraham Hasbrook House, New Paltz, New York. (b) A Levittown speculation house.

themselves again to the design of homes, not leaving these to the care of building promoters and real estate developers, and that they would seek inspiration in the intrinsic qualities (not the external forms) of the vernacular houses of the past. For to provide the home as an ideal standard is still the architect’s first cause, no matter how great and rewarding are his other contributions to monumental and technological building. … As those builders of old, the architect of today has to create an anonymous architecture for the anonymous men of the Industrial Age.44 (emphasis in the original) The positioning of vernacular architecture as relevant for contemporary debates on housing is also what is at stake in a brief article she did for The Wisconsin Architect.45 This article is a condensed version of a lecture she gave at the Wisconsin Architects Association Convention in February 1955, and we can fairly assume that she gave this lecture – or versions of it – repeatedly in venues all over the country.46 The article set out by asking – against the background of all the ‘New Monumentality’ (a reference to ongoing discussions among modern architects) – ‘What is to become of the dweller?’ To find answers to that pressing question, Moholy-Nagy argued, the architect of tomorrow should look at yesterday, ‘at the actual architectural evidence of the past’. Here he will find ‘inspiration and stimulus’. The architecture of the future will have to rely upon a new understanding of technology – broader than the narrow focus on calculus and mechanics – and upon a study of settler buildings. The latter are offering a ‘superb lesson in regionalism without romanticism, in functionality without mechanism, in structure without ugliness, in tradition without regression’. These buildings provided clues, she concluded, for ‘a new type of domestic dwelling in a mastered but undestroyed environment’. In the article for Perspecta, mentioned above, she further reinforced this claim by stating that most architectural students of the day would find themselves in a couple of years working on the design of

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one family homes in suburban and rural areas, and that especially for this kind of brief the lessons of the vernacular past were invaluable.47

Native, anonymous, vernacular, primitive It is worthwhile to carefully ponder Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s use of specific words, since this can tell us a lot about the intellectual background that informed her writings. The title of her book, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, is symptomatic for her approach of the topic. Far less striking and provocative than Rudofsky’s later Architecture without Architects, it probably didn’t do a good service to the reputation and sales figures of the book. It did, however, point towards the elitism that was intrinsic to her view of the world.48 Her book, she advertised with the title, was not so much about vernacular architecture as commonly produced, but rather about those manifestations of it that are generated by a ‘native genius’ – a remarkable gifted and competent person who was capable of imbuing his buildings with a sense of quality, coherence and proportions that lifted them above crude mediocrity. It took this kind of ‘native genius’ to form an artist in the industrial age – in her diaries she indeed called her late husband Moholy a ‘native genius as a great painter and teacher’.49 Moholy was Hungarian, and self-taught, but hardly a ‘vernacular’ artist. The ‘native’ in ‘native genius’ thus seemed to be used by her more in its sense of ‘innate’ rather than as an allusion to ‘indigenous’ people. The term ‘genius’ bore, of course, romantic overtones and was loaded moreover with gendered associations that clearly qualified it as masculine.50 Moholy-Nagy indeed consistently used a masculine pronoun to refer to ‘the builder’ or ‘the settler’, following established customs in this respect. Interestingly enough, however, she sets this male builder off against a clearly femininely gendered concept of space and of architecture. She saw architectural space as the ‘matrix’ of man, offering him shelter and conditioning his life.51 She described the relation between the settler and his chosen environment as a love affair: ‘Like a lover who delights in the discovery of more beauty in his love, he sought out the best features of location, material, and climate to serve his purpose.’52 Thus following the old convention of describing the relation between artist and artwork as a labour of love,53 she nevertheless also stressed the female and nurturing nature of this process, by comparing house designing to child bearing.54 The term ‘anonymous’ then had to bear the weight of referring to the actual topic of her book: the vernacular architecture of the ‘Western Hemisphere’. In the Introduction, she constructs an opposition between ‘pedigreed’ architecture – commissioned by rulers and political leaders, ‘classified, catalogued and evaluated by scholars with platonical detachment from its contemporary function’ – and the architecture ‘that testifies to the aspirations of the group’ and that ‘tells not the official but the private history of a culture’. This is the architecture of ‘indigenous

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buildings’, which ‘speak the vernacular of the people’.55 It should be valued especially for its anonymity, because this very anonymity meant that ‘it was preserved for no other reason than its adequacy beyond the life of the builder’.56 Having thus established her topic, Moholy-Nagy further uses ‘anonymous’, ‘vernacular’, ‘folk’ and ‘indigenous’ more or less as equivalents – with neither the word ‘native’ nor ‘genius’ being used extensively beyond the title. Generally, her use of the first cluster of words reflected the sense given by anthropologists in the 1950s to ‘Folk Culture’. As George M. Foster explained in 1953, ‘folk culture’ uncritically referred to non-primitive, but relatively simple culture types which were rapidly being modified out of existence by increasing contact with modern industrial civilization.57 According to him, folk societies were seen as small, isolated, nearly self-sufficient groups homogeneous in race and custom, and characterized by closely interdependent personal relationships. Such societies were considered immobile; change was slow and the ways of life supposedly formed a single web of interrelated meanings. In fact, the meaning of ‘folk’ was, according to Foster, almost interchangeable with the idea of Gemeinschaft as formulated by Tönnies. These cultures were thus seen as rural, based upon tradition, the result of a ‘natural’ will to associate – in contrast with industrial societies which were urban, modern and artificial. Foster criticized in his article the assumptions underlying this dichotomy, stating that there was more and more field evidence showing that the strict opposition between ‘folk’ and ‘urban’ cultures could not be maintained. To a certain extent, this was also acknowledged by Moholy-Nagy, for example, where she stated, ‘Spontaneous building cannot be separated with a precise dividing line from technological and academic design. Simplified academic and technological elements do occur in anonymous architecture.’58 This modification, nevertheless, does not invalidate the fact that the opposition between anonymous and academic architecture was structurally determining for her book. There were a whole series of adjectives that Moholy-Nagy applied to anonymous and not to academic architecture, such as intuitive, spontaneous, rural and organic. As we already saw, however, she did not consider American vernacular architecture as ‘traditional’. In this respect, she differed from the more general view which established folk cultures as ‘traditional’ versus urban cultures as ‘modern’. For her ‘traditional’ referred to the ‘tyranny of ideas’ imposed by an academic canon which heavily influenced European folk architecture, whereas the American one supposedly remained rather free of this tyranny, because it had ‘no state religion and no Palladio to go by’.59 Most importantly, she attributed a quality of concreteness and directness to anonymous architecture that was absent from modern architecture: Even the simplest settler house in its own setting furnishes concrete answers to human aspirations that are common to mankind. It is sinnfaellig (evident to

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the senses) representing a microcosmos of the totality of life. The best modern architecture on the other hand, has the measure of its perfection outside the immediate reality of the building itself. … These are factors open to the trained mind while an indigenous and intuitive work of architecture is, as Goethe said of folk art, ‘like a word of God, spoken this instant’.60 This concreteness and directness was also what attracted architects as Adolf Loos or Le Corbusier to vernacular architecture. Loos famously heralded the simple farms in the mountains built by skilled craftsmen in harmony with the lake and with its natural surroundings, while the villa conceived by a city architect worked as a blasphemous addition to the site.61 Le Corbusier admired the vernacular architecture he encountered on his Voyage à l’Orient, and appropriated many of its lessons.62 In both cases, the directness and authenticity of the rural dwellings were contrasted with the artificiality and showiness of academic architecture. In following the logic that presented vernacular architecture as intuitive and true, Moholy-Nagy’s conception was thus in line with that of major protagonists of modern architecture. She went one step further than Loos and Le Corbusier, however, by explicitly calling upon the ‘primitive’ as a justification for the value of this architecture: But the value of vernacular architecture goes deeper. … In addition to service and aesthetic appeal, the structures built by settlers in a new land can serve as visual means to come closer to an understanding of the causes of architecture. They are in the actual meaning of the term primitive, meaning not simple but original.63 (emphasis in the original) The appeal to the ‘primitive’ qualities of the vernacular thus for Moholy-Nagy had to do with a desire to recognize ‘first causes’: primeval desires and needs that ultimately drive architecture. In that sense, she repeated a very old topos that one can find again and again in architectural discourse: the desire to anchor architecture in an ur-history of mankind, to constitute it as one of the very first human enterprises, to see it as one of the most characteristic achievements that differentiate humans from animals. As Adrian Forty observes, there is a traditional belief, which can be traced back at least to Laugier, that good architecture has always been in touch with the primitive, that the primitive has always belonged to architecture.64 This ‘primeval’ use of the term ‘primitive’, however, tended to get confused within architectural discourse with the use of ‘primitive’ as indicating remote, uncivilized societies with a low level of technology. Anthropologists in the 1950s, such as Robert Redfield, used the term ‘primitive’ to indicate so-called ‘pre-civilized’ groups living in small and isolated communities, without writing, composed of one kind of people, with a strong sense of group solidarity and with a low level of

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division of labour.65 In the anthropological parlance, therefore, ‘primitive’ was not the same as ‘folklore’ or ‘vernacular’, because the latter cultures were not necessarily remote, nor exotic, but could be found in the immediate vicinity of urban cultures. This difference, however, broke down in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s discourse. She had no trouble at all to accord ‘primitive’ value to the vernacular, explicitly exoticizing it. Take, for example, her description of a jacal or straw house in Puebla, Mexico (Figure 2.11): This flounced house stands on the road between Tequiquitla and Totlaxcala. These names are recorded here only because their exotic musicality seems to fit the character of this curious little dwelling. The exterior is as sophisticated as the flounced costume of a ballerina. Its interior is as primitive and primordial as the first pit-house: earth floor, a few steps below ground level, a small firepit on one end which is rarely used because life takes place out of doors if weather permits, and narrow benches, built up from rubble and mud binder, running along the walls as the only furnishings. … Every ‘half lifetime’, so the owner said, the house gets too old for comfort. Then it is burned down among great festivities after a new one has been constructed exactly like the old one on the opposite side of the yard. The Japanese do the same with their most ancient and revered Shinto shrines. It may be that the Mexican native feels compelled – as does the Japanese – to retain through the endlessly recreated house an unbroken contact with his ancestors.66 The orientalizing and exoticizing that is going on in this passage is hard to miss. The inhabitants of this straw house are clearly positioned as other – other in their lifestyle, in their beliefs, in their need of comfort and in their relation to

FIGURE 2.11 Jacal or straw house, Puebla, Mexico.

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their environment. The point is, however, that in Moholy-Nagy’s discourse this otherness is constructed like that of Rousseau’s noble savage: as containing the kernel of a lost authenticity that should be recovered. In their very primitiveness, these people and these buildings supposedly possessed a kind of spontaneity and directness, a respectful relation with their environment and a spiritual meaning, that their counterparts in America should strive to re-attain – that is MoholyNagy’s message. Although she deliberately refrained from inscribing her work into a scholarly tradition of vernacular studies, architectural history or ethnography, it is clear from her writing that she was familiar with certain ideas that were produced in these disciplines. It seems most likely that a major influence on her thinking came from the work of Leo Frobenius, although his focus was on Africa whereas Moholy-Nagy’s was on America. One can, however, assume that she was acquainted with his work, because biographical research by Hannelore RüttgensPolhman has confirmed that Moholy-Nagy worked for a brief period in 1923 as a secretary at the Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie, established by Frobenius in München.67 Frobenius was a German ethnographer, who became famous in Weimar Germany for his wide-ranging theories on the cultural history of the world, in which he denounced Eurocentrism and glorified the unspoiled, dynamic and vibrant primitive cultures of black Africa, especially the Yoruba one. Frobenius’s work is considered with mixed feelings by today’s scholars: whereas he is appreciated for his extensive and detailed descriptions of material artefacts and for his enthusiasm for the purity and vitality of African cultures (his work was in fact a prime source for Senghor’s anticolonialist idea of négritude), there is far less respect for his speculative, diffusionist hypotheses about cultural world history in general.68 A similar assessment can be made of Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture: whereas her description and analysis of particular cases often prove to be very astute, well written and rich in contextual detail, her sweeping generalizations about the nature and essence of architecture now tend to provoke suspicion and embarrassment. Her lack of methodological rigour, the randomness of her choices and her biased interpretations make this into a work that does not live up to scholarly standards. But then, of course, it was not intended as a scholarly book – at least not in the accepted sense of the term. If anything, this book was a rhetorical move in a battle about what was at stake in modern architecture – not more, but certainly not less. Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture was arguably the first book on vernacular architecture, written specifically for architects, with visually attractive materials, that aimed at providing them with sources of inspirations to make their own work more environmentally responsive and more adequate. It constituted a clear manifestation of what can be called modernism’s primitivism: the fascination of many modernist architects and critics for exotic, anonymous, indigenous or

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vernacular buildings that resulted from a supposedly direct and unmediated interaction between people and their environment, and which thus were seen to represent an ‘unspoiled’, more ‘primitive’ and therefore more authentic state of architecture.69

Double critique In László Moholy-Nagy’s book Vision in Motion, which was copy-edited and brought into production by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, there was a passage that described the design of a ‘primitive house’ as an exercise in the Institute of Design in Chicago. Moholy explained how students were given the task of designing a house in a tropical or arctic zone, with severe climatic constraints and a limited availability of building materials. According to him, this exercise was instructive for several reasons: The primitive house is in more than one way instrumental to architectural efficiency. The whole process of erecting a structure for a given site leads the student to a resourceful rediscovery of functional principles, to the diligent evaluation of technological and biological requirements. In this way the student, without any other resources than his own capacities, is bound to reenact the inventive mechanics of age-old architectures.70 It is this kind of reasoning that led Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to her study of vernacular architecture: the conviction that in conditions of severe environmental constraints and limited material resources, the resulting architecture will be more ‘primordial’ and ‘original’ and hence closer to a functional ideal and closer to the essence of building. Primitivism in modernist architecture should thus be understood in terms of that architecture’s essentialism and its minimalist, ascetic ideal. Modern architecture wanted to get as close as possible to the inner truth of the objects it was building, shedding in the process all kinds of embellishments as superfluous ornaments.71 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s assumption was clearly that the combination of two crucial factors – freedom from the tyranny of the academic canon combined with the restraints imposed by environment and economy – provided the conditions in which American anonymous architecture could come close to the essentialist ideal of functionality that governed modern architecture. She also thought that this vernacular could offer something that modern architecture was in danger of losing: a certain ‘spiritual’ quality, a capacity to embody more than a purely instrumental and technological logic and to offer also means of identification and belonging. Her discourse on vernacular architecture was therefore framed as a double critique – a critique as well on architectural history as on the technocratic and

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commercially inspired housing solutions of the 1950s. Her book attacked, on the one hand, mainstream architectural history and conventional opinion, which thought of architecture solely in terms of monumentality, of pedigreed buildings built in a codified style. Her documentation of some hundred examples of humble constructions that proved to be excellent specimens displaying prime architectural qualities was meant to dismantle academic architectural history’s hegemony in determining what is valuable architecture. In this respect, her struggle runs parallel with the one Giedion was waging in his 1928 Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton, which also aimed to offer an alternative to the stylistic approach that dominated architectural history by looking at engineering construction in the nineteenth century.72 Her approach reinforced the adagio of the Modern Movement that architecture should no longer be conceived of in terms of style, but rather in terms of functional, structural and material qualities. In Native Genius she was looking for examples from the past that could prove this precedence of function, structure and materials over style and that exemplified a respectful interaction with the environment. This was a critique that was embraced by the architectural world. O. Gueft, for example, who reviewed the book for Interiors, considered the book ‘a must for the student of architecture’ and a ‘model for the scholar or journalist who writes about architecture’, because it presented anonymous architecture as the expression of ‘functionalism at its truest’.73 Edgar Kaufmann, the reviewer for Architectural Record, called it ‘the most refreshing and enlightening view of architecture I’ve encountered for some time’.74 James Stirling approvingly mentioned Sibyl MoholyNagy’s book in a 1960 article in Perspecta in which he explored ‘the functional tradition’.75 Herbert Bayer wrote her in a personal letter: ‘You have touched on the very basic ideas of architecture which makes your book a lesson in architecture for anybody and should be a lesson especially for architects.’76 This approach certainly resonated also with other efforts to anchor modernism in the vernacular. As Mardges Bacon has argued, there were a variety of strategies at work in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the intellectual centre of modernism in the United States, to establish links between modernism and vernacular expression, ranging from the search for authenticity in modern American art to the promotion of American sources for modern architecture.77 The MoMA curators, authors and photographers, however, had looked at American urban and industrial vernacular,78 rather than at the settler architecture upon which Moholy-Nagy focused. In that sense Moholy-Nagy’s book remained a unique enterprise. The other aspect of her critique was less picked up in the immediate reception of the book. This aspect dealt with what Moholy-Nagy perceived as deplorable tendencies of the industrial age: the increasingly technocratic attitude among architects, the belief that scientific reasoning could solve all problems, and the commercial real estate developments that dominated the housing market

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in the absence of valid architectural alternatives. As to the latter aspect – the commercialism that pervaded the housing market – her lament was shared with other critics like Sigfried Giedion or Elisabeth Mock, who likewise condemned the ‘ruling taste’ of the general public that did not recognize the superior value of modern architecture.79 For Moholy-Nagy the popular architecture of her day – Levittown houses and other suburban dreams – lacked the qualities of the vernacular because it was based upon cheap imitations and easy appeal. She positioned modern architecture as the real heir of the vernacular, rather than the popular, commercial architecture that she considered misguided and superficial. Her logic thus coincided with that developed by Clement Greenberg in his 1939 ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’ essay, in which he claimed that in the industrial age avantgarde art occupied a position of authenticity, whereas kitsch, unlike the folk art of earlier ages, lacked this quality since it was retrograde, easy and cheap.80 Next to her disdain for real estate developers and commercial architecture, she was very critical of another tendency in the 1950s too. She refused to put her hope in industrial prefabrication, an attitude that was promoted by architects such as Buckminster Fuller.81 For her, technology was not the solution, but part of the problem. Technology could be used in a beneficial way, but the input of the engineer should always be modified by the approach of the architect, who would transform serviceable designs into significant forms. It was the architect who was to be responsible for providing ‘spiritual as well as material gratifications’.82 It was a similar double critique that drove Rudofsky’s exhibition and book seven years later (Figure 2.12). Rudofsky stated it very clearly in the introduction of Architecture without Architects: The exhibition is not an exercise in quaintness nor a travel guide, except in the sense that it marks a point of departure for the exploration of our architectural prejudices. It is frankly polemic, comparing, as it does, if only by implication, the serenity of the architecture in so-called underdeveloped countries with the architectural blight in industrial countries.83 (emphasis in the original) Indeed, Moholy-Nagy’s and Rudofsky’s endeavours are very comparable in this respect although he drew his examples from the Mediterranean and the developing world and she from what she called the ‘Western Hemisphere’. His narrative was also framed as ‘a parable against complacency and modern architecture’s inability to deal with the environment satisfactorily’84 and can still be read as ‘one of the most symptomatic readings of the deracinated, commercialized, and technological condition of modernism in the States’,85 as can Moholy-Nagy’s. But, of course, Rudofsky’s exhibition and catalogue were to have a much deeper impact on the architectural consciousness than Moholy-Nagy’s ever reached. As Felicity Scott’s research has made clear, the exhibition showed internationally in more than 80 locations over a period of 11 years, and the catalogue went through an impressive

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FIGURE 2.12 Cover of Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects, 1964.

series of reprints, becoming a quasi-permanent fixture on many an architect’s drawing board. Compared to that blockbuster success, Native Genius led a rather quiet shelf life.

The future of the past Native Genius was well received in the architectural community, giving rise to several positive reviews.86 This relative success apparently gave Moholy-Nagy the confidence to sharpen her pen and to continue the criticism of aspects of modern architecture that she disliked. More and more she brought architectural history to bear upon her criticism of recent works. She thus often relied on historical examples to corroborate her critical assessment of contemporary architecture. A very interesting example of this strategy can be found in the short article ‘Steel, Stocks, and Private Man’, published in Progressive Architecture in 1958.87 Mies Van der Rohe again figured as the recipient of her wrath, but she used him this time as a stand-in for what she perceived to be ‘a key problem of modern architecture’, namely that it did not distinguish between public and private building needs. To her the official skyscraper architecture worked well enough as public architecture

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that allowed man to identify with ‘the marvel of technological progress and limitless business expansion’. This however was not enough, because no man can live by stocks and steel alone, without starving his personality to death. He must have a place to recharge his energies, to remain superior to the brute levelling force of steel and stocks. And this he can do only in an architectural environment that separates, clearly and uncompromisingly, official existence from private existence.88 She then referred to several historical examples which managed to give shape to a concept of privacy by modifying the relationship between private and public through access, view and division of space. Interior curved staircases in the eighteenth century accentuated the gradual withdrawal from collective to individual living. Moucharaby windows in Saracenic architecture allowed outward views while prohibiting inward ones. The Moorish architects of the Alhambra provided calculated contrasts, handling outdoor spaces as framed panoramas in a succession of varied vistas (Figure 2.13). Such examples highlighted the importance of the subdivision of space, which was regrettably forgotten by modern man, who no longer seemed ‘to admit that it is enclosing form that forms man’. She therefore wished to remind architects to see themselves ‘not only as the builder[s] of technological monuments but as the keeper[s] of the matrix in which each individual is cast’.

FIGURE 2.13 Plan of the Alhambra, as drawn for Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s article Steel, Stocks and Private Man (1958).

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This short article of no more than three pages was typical for her way of arguing a case: well formulated and with eloquent architectural examples, which contributed very much to the point she wished to make. The examples were, however, only touched upon and not extensively presented; they were wide ranging in terms of geographical regions and time periods and hence could only support rather generalized and abstract claims. Whereas such an analysis thus lacked the thoroughness one might expect from a scholarly study, it was quite effective as an argument in a professional architectural journal, and one can easily imagine that it worked the same way in an educational context. Moholy-Nagy’s conviction that architectural history remained necessary to feed contemporary architecture most explicitly came to the fore in an article she published in the Yale student journal Perspecta in 1961 under the title ‘The Future of the Past’.89 Here she criticized modern architecture for its neglect of history, arguing that the younger continuity-starved architects, raised on the lean diet of functionalist supremacy, have displayed a craving for architectural history and theory in their mature years that is quite revealing. Their design and their writing are full of connotations which would have shocked their elders as indecent exposure.90 A case in point was that of four American architects whose work she compared with specific historical antecedents: Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn. Eero Saarinen was praised for his cantus firmus (literally ‘firm singing’), since he gave priority in his work to structure and materials, like Gothic and Romanesque builders did. For him, like for them, structure was ‘the generator of space’ and this brought him in line with the legacy of someone like Peter Behrens. With striking images, she pointed to the analogy between the latter’s Hoechst Color and Dye Works (1920) and Saarinen’s Oslo Embassy (1959), thus visually proving her point (Figure 2.14). Philip Johnson was portrayed as a ‘syncretist’, for he absorbed ‘the heritage of his “spiritual fathers” ’ and coalesced it ‘into his own synthesis’. His design concepts were often based on ‘a dichotomy of metric form and relational space’, on ‘the tension between the extremes of compactness and openness’. Relevant references with respect to metric form came from Egypt and Mesopotomia, but also from Greek temples and from Palladio and Schinkel. Relational spaces referred to constellations of built forms in open spaces which are rhythmical, free flowing and dynamic, as found in Maya ceremonial spaces but also in baroque ensembles such as the Dresden Zwinger. She showed again through her illustrations how, for example, Johnson’s Utica Museum incorporated metric form, whereas his plan for the University of St. Thomas, Houston, offered an example of relational space (Figure 2.15).

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FIGURE 2.14 (a) Peter Behrens, entrance hall, Hoechst Works, 1920. (b) Eero Saarinen, interior court of the Oslo Embassy, Norway, 1959.

FIGURE 2.15 Philip Johnson, museum in Utica, 1960, discussed by Moholy-Nagy as incorporating ‘metric form’.

Paul Rudolph was seen to give precedence to an architecture of ‘the beau geste’ (the nice gesture). For him architectural physiognomy was important: the emphatically designed exterior that was visually interesting and distinctive. This might signify a return to a long-lasting tradition in which buildings stand out because of their exterior appearance. Rudolph did not shy away from ‘a return to

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decorative form, visually designed streetscapes, emphasis on planar rather than linear elements, and a preference for light and shadow in place of reflectivity, calling for solid rather than transparent building materials’. This made Rudolph into the most characteristically American among the four architects, because his references often pointed to historical buildings in North America. Rudolph’s Wellesley Art Center, for example, brought to mind the Electrical Building from the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago from 1933 (Figure 2.16).

FIGURE 2.16 (a) Paul Rudolph’s Wellesley Art Center, 1958–1959. (b) The Electrical Building at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, 1933 (postcard).

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Louis Kahn lastly was presented as ‘Doctor Mirabilis’ (the wonderful doctor), who oscillated between his identity as a designer and as a teacher. As a teacher, he embraced the ambulatory, bookless and non-organized teaching method of the Greek Stoa and of Socrates, seducing his audience by his prophetic utterings about art as self-revelation. As a designer however, Kahn was a formalistic rationalist, emphasizing a priori solutions and predetermined space classifications evoking the cool rationality of Islamic plans or the geometric order of Ledoux’ factory design.91 The article ends with what some have understood as a pre-emptive strike against postmodernism – a style which at that point was not yet identified: Architecture today has a high potential which will be wasted if it is not combined with the stubborn fight of the mature years to keep a principled integrity inviolate. The reevaluation of the past might indicate a genuine revolution – it might also indicate no more than a fad for want of better copy. The decision for or against a new era is the responsibility of our ‘big names’. The singleness of their convictions more than their executed buildings will decide whether architecture still has a future.92 Kenneth Frampton indeed appreciated this article as a prescient criticism of what was to come. In a 2004 article for the commemorative publication of the first 50 years of Perspecta, he commented: This pertinent challenge to the incipient postmodernism of forty years ago is uncanny because it anticipates so many of the oporia [sic] of our time. Clearly, it was a rearguard stand in favour of Jurgen Habermas’s unfinished modern project.93 Since Habermas only published his ideas on the ‘unfinished modern project’ in 1980, it seems unlikely that Sibyl Moholy-Nagy already thought along the exact same lines.94 Frampton’s comment is nevertheless instructive, because it points out how Moholy-Nagy’s fiercely independent way of thinking brought her to formulate very astute and relevant criticisms that have afterwards not always received adequate recognition. This article in Perspecta certainly is an example of that: it remains standing, also in retrospect, as a very worthwhile and very observant commentary on four architects of the 1950s, whose work was far more indebted to historical examples than any of them would have been prepared to admit. At the same time, the article is neither widely known nor often quoted, which seems quite unjust in light of its relevance and its sharpness.

Notes 1 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, diary entrance 10 July 1947 (AAA946 – 496/497). 2 Half a year after obtaining the job at Pratt, she made a note in her diary: ‘I have

decided on architecture as the focal point or central theme. … It has helped me

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immeasurably to bring a certain order into my mind’ (diary entrance 29 October 1953 – AAA 946/0560). 3 Letter to Eva Pietzsch dated 1 May 1949 (AC). 4 In a letter to Eva Pietzsch dated 1 May 1947 (AC), she asks, for example, for the

complete collections of Propyläen Weltgeschichte and Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, promising that she will pay in CARE-packets – the food packages that American aid organizations were making available for sending to Europe, where conditions were very difficult in the aftermath of the Second World War. 5 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of World Geo-Graphic Atlas: A Composite of

Man’s Environment by Herbert Bayer’, College Art Journal, 14, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 177–8; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of Sun and Shadow by Marcel Breuer: Heir of the Bauhaus’, Saturday Review, 39, no. 4 (August 1956): 21; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Design Against Nature. Book Review of Climate and Architecture by Jeffrey Ellis Aronin’, Saturday Review, 37 (20 February 1954): 16–17; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Partial Integration. Book Review’, Progressive Architecture, June (1955): 198+; Sibyl MoholyNagy, ‘Selection versus Chronicle. Book Review’, Progressive Architecture, May (1959): 262+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Monumental Encyclopedia. Book Review’, Progressive Architecture, February (1954): 164+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Survey Continued. Book Review of The Art and Architecture of Japan by Robert Treat Paine and Alexander Soper, and Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages by Lawrence Stone’, Progressive Architecture, 37, February (1956): 198+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Mother Lode of Western Styles. Book Review of The Pelican History of Art Edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, and Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture: 800–1200 by Kenneth John Conant’, Progressive Architecture, 40, December (1959): 185+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of Oeuvre Complete 1946–1952 (Vol. 5) by Le Corbusier: ApparentGenius’, Progressive Architecture, 35, March (1954): 176+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics by Le Corbusier: Magnificent Folly: The Architect as Novelist’, College Art Journal, 16, no. 3 (Spring 1957): 187–91; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Sheer Delight. Book Review of Chinese Art by William Willetts’, Progressive Architecture, October (1958): 250+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The New Landscape in Art and Science by Gyorgy Kepes’, (1958): 28–9; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘History in Structures. Book Review of the Uses of the Past by Herbert Muller’, Progressive Architecture, May (1953): 168+; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Art of Ancient Peru (Book Review)’, College Art Journal, 12, no. 2 (1953): 191–2, doi:10.2307/773332. 6 This argument is corroborated by several chapters in the book The History of History

in American Schools of Architecture 1865–1975. See especially Spiro Kostof, ‘The Shape of Time at Yale, Circa 1960’, in The History of History in American Schools of Architecture 1865–1975, ed. Gwendolyn Wright and Janet Parks (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1990), 123–35. 7 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Flying Buttress – Flying Saucer’, Transformation: Arts

Communication Environment. A World Review, 1, no. 3 (1952): 157. 8 Moholy-Nagy, ‘History in Structures. Book Review of The Uses of the Past by Herbert

Muller’. 9 Herbert J. Muller, The Uses of the Past, paperback; original edition Oxford

University Press, 1952, Mentor Books MS112 (New York: New American library, 1954), 28.

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10 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Issue of Integration’, Progressive Architecture, 34, February

(1953): 77+; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Mexican Critique’, 109+. 11 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’, Progressive

Architecture, 34, April (1953): 18+. 12 Application of November 1952, summarized in the Minutes of the Committee for

Scholarships and Special Awards Meeting, Architectural League, New York, 12 December 1952 (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 70). 13 Minutes of the Committee for Scholarships and Special Awards Meeting,

Architectural League, New York, 2 April 1953 (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 70). 14 Wright and Parks, eds, The History of History in American Schools of Architecture,

1865–1975, Buell Center Books in American Architectural History, no. 1 (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and Princeton Architectural Press, 1990). 15 Dell Upton, ‘Outside the Academy: A Century of Vernacular Architecture Studies,

1890–1990’, in The Architectural Historian in America, ed. Elisabeth Blair MacDougall (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 199–213. 16 In her later career Sibyl Moholy-Nagy would further explore diffusionism – the idea

that similar forms of buildings or artefacts found in different regions imply that, one way or another, there must have been some historical contact between these regions. This is a highly controversial position, which was never completely accepted in academia. For more information, see Chapters 4 and 5. 17 Hugh Morrison, Early American Architecture: From the First Colonial Settlements

to the National Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952). This book was certainly known to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, because it was part of a book display organized during an exhibition she co-curated on ‘Architectural Schoolwork in the USA 1954’ (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 56). 18 Vincent Scully, ‘Early American Architecture from the First Colonial Settlements to

the National Period Hugh Morrison’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 12, no. 2 (1953): 29–30, doi:10.2307/987545. In comparison, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture was never reviewed by JSAH, most likely because it was seen as not scholarly enough. In a commentary published years later by JSAH, Moholy-Nagy claimed that her book never passed the ‘footnote test’, which ‘demands that at least half of an article be printed out of context and that at least half of the footnotes prove that what the author has to say has been said already by someone else’. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Maass for Measure’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 29, no. 1 (March 1970): 61. 19 AAA, Papers of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, microfilm reel 948/0162–0165, frame 0163. 20 AAA, Papers of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, microfilm reel 948/0162–0165, frame 0164. 21 Letter dated 13 August 1953 to ‘Dear Eugene’ (AAA944). 22 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Materiali Indigeni nell’Architettura Dei Coloni Americani’, 76–82. 23 Ibid., 67. 24 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, Perspecta, 3, no.

1 (1954): 2–7. This article was republished in Robert A. M. Stern, Alan Plattus and Peggy Deamer, [Re]Reading Perspecta. The First Fifty Years of the Yale Architectural Journal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 55–7.

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25 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, 7. 26 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 29–30. 27 Thomas Leslie, ‘Environmental Technology, Sustainability’, in Architecture School:

Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, ed. Joan Ockman and Rebecca Williamson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 306. 28 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, 77. 29 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 68. 30 Ibid., 74. 31 Ibid., 108. 32 Ibid., 111. 33 Ibid., 126. 34 Ibid., 171. 35 Ibid., 182. 36 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was well aware of this. In her already mentioned application to

the Architectural League, she claimed: ‘The European migrant who pushed his life’s ship away from the shore of the mother continent, had to create new buildings of his own, from the shelters of Iceland to the inland missions of Argentina. He had to transform his heritage under the influence of new climatic, social, and material conditions. What he built grew from a new land. That is why it stands coequal with the building art of the aborigines who were there when he arrived. Their structures – the joined wood houses of the Kwakiutl in Alaska as well as the finely woven mat walls of the Polynesians – grew from the same climatic, social and material conditions. There is a deep unity in anonymous building’. Application of November 1952, summarized in the Minutes of the Committee for Scholarships and Special Awards Meeting, Architectural League, New York, 12 December 1952 (AAA, papers of the Architectural League, Box 70). 37 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 36. 38 Ibid., 68. 39 Ibid., 122. 40 Morrison refers for instance to the ‘log-cabin myth’, which suggested that log

cabins had been built by the early colonial settlers. In reality, however, log-cabin construction was probably introduced by the Swedes and only reluctantly adopted by the English settlers in the eighteenth century. 41 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 36. 42 Ibid., 37. 43 Moholy-Nagy uses the spelling ‘Hasbrook’ in her book. It is now more commonly

referred to as ‘Hasbrouck’. 44 Ibid., 23. 45 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Future of U.S. Home Design Calls for Mating of Science with

Study of Historic Regional Buildings’, The Wisconsin Architect, August (1955): 5–7. 46 In the ‘Note on the Genesis of the Manuscript’, she mentioned that she ‘had many

attentive audiences all over the country – from Harvard and Yale to Florida and Iowa’. AAA, Papers of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, microfilm reel 948/0162–0165, frame 0164. 47 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, 77.

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48 In the 1968 preface to a new edition of her biography of L ászló Moholy-Nagy, she

stated for instance: ‘I came to consider the isolation of the original personality as inherent in the creative process whose charges were at best received as a message by those who lead society’, contrasting her view with Moholy’s conviction that everyone is talented and could develop his or her innate creativity. Sibyl MoholyNagy, Moholy-Nagy. Experiment in Totality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), xi. 49 Diary notes 24 November 1947, notebook, 46 – AAA 946/507. 50 Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London:

Women’s Press, 1994). 51 She uses the word ‘matrix’ quite often, most obviously as the title of her later book

on the history of cities (Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man). It already occurred in her 1945 novel (Peech, Children’s Children, 70), in Native Genius of Anonymous Architecture, 23 and in a related article (Moholy-Nagy, ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’, 77). 52 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 25–7. 53 Francesca Hughes, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (London: MIT Press,

1996), see introduction by the editor. 54 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 44. 55 Ibid., 19. 56 Ibid., 20. 57 George M. Foster, ‘What Is Folk Culture?’ American Anthropologist, 55, no. 2, part 1

(1953): 159–73. 58 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 33. 59 Ibid., 46. 60 Ibid., 44. 61 Adolf Loos, ‘Architecture’, in The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council

Exhibition, ed. Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang (London: Art Council of Great Britain, 1985). 62 Francesco Passanti, ‘The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier’, The Journal of

the Society of Architectural Historians, 56, no. 4 (1997): 438–51. 63 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 22. 64 Adrian Forty, ‘Primitive: the word and concept’, in Primitive: Original Matters in

Architecture, ed. Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr (London: Routledge, 2006), 3–14. 65 Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1953), 6–8. 66 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 98. 67 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk Eines Lebens, 187–90. 68 Suzanne Marchand, ‘Leo Frobenius and the Revolt against the West’, Journal of

Contemporary History, 32, no. 2 (1997): 153–70. 69 Denise Lawrence and Setha Low list Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s book among ‘romantic’

accounts of indigenous architectural forms, with ‘impressionistic cultural descriptions’. As other works in that category they mention Rudofsky’s Architecture

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Without Architecture (1964), Van Eyck’s ‘Basket-House-Village-Universe’ (1969) and Gardi’s Indigenous African Architecture (1973). Denise L. Lawrence and Setha M. Low, ‘The Built Environment and Spatial Form’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 19 (1990): 458. See also Michelangelo Sabatino, ‘The Primitive in Modern Architecture and Urbanism Introduction’, The Journal of Architecture, 13, no. 4 (1 August 2008): 355–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360802327943; Odgers, Samuel and Sharr, eds, Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture, 1st edition. 70 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, IL: Paul Theobald, 1947), 98. 71 This ascetic ideal can for instance be gathered from Mart Stam’s 1928 formulation:

‘Correct measures are those that conform to our requirements, that fulfill these needs without any pretensions, that do not claim to be more than they are. Correct measures are those that result in a minimum of ostentation. Everything else is ballast. … The struggle for modern architecture then is a struggle against pretentiousness, against every excess and for a human scale’. Mart Stam, ‘Das Mass, das richtige Mass, das Minimum-Mass’ in, Neues Bauen, Neues Gestalten. Das Neue Frankfurt/Die Neue Stadt. Eine Zeitschrift Zwischen 1926 Und 1933, ed. Heinz Hirdina (Berlin: Elefanten, 1984), 215–16 (translation Hilde Heynen). 72 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (Santa

Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995). 73 Gueft, ‘Genius of the untaught. Book review of Native Genius in Anonymous

Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. Interiors, CXVII (October 1957): 20. 74 Kaufmann Jr, ‘A Refreshing Glance at Western Folk Design’. 75 James Stirling, ‘ “The Functional Tradition” and Expression’, Perspecta, 6 (1960):

88–97. 76 Herbert Bayer to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, letter of 11 January 1958 – AAA microfilm reel

944. 77 Mardges Bacon, ‘Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art’, in

Vernacular Modernism. Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment, ed. Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 25–52. 78 See, for instance, Janine Mileaf, ed., Constructing Modernism: Berenice Abbott and

Henry-Russell Hitchcock: A Re-Creation of the 1934 Exhibition ‘The Urban Vernacular of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, American Cities Before the Civil War’ (Middletown, CT: Center, 1993). 79 Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 58), especially Part 1. On the Ruling Taste, 2–20; Elizabeth B. Mock, If You Want to Build a House (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946). 80 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch (1939)’ in Clement Greenberg, The

Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgment 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5–22. 81 Native Genius contained an illustration of a 1940 Dymaxion house, with the

comment that ‘to strip down life to the “rationalized” provisions of a standard box reduces the human being to the sole aspect of biological uniformity’. Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 42. 82 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 22.

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83 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects – A Short Introduction to Non-

Pedigreed Architecture (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 3. 84 Monika Platzer, ‘Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky. Introduction’ in, Lessons from

Bernard Rudofsky. Life as a Voyage, ed. Architekturzentrum Wien and Getty Research Institute Los Angeles (Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 2007), 12–34. 85 Felicity D. Scott, ‘An Eye for Modern Architecture’ in Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky.

Life as a Voyage, 172–210. 86 As mentioned already in Chapter 1: George W. Christensen, ‘Book Review of Native

Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Arizona Architect, April (1958): 22; O. Gueft, ‘Genius of the Untaught: Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Interiors, CXVII, October (1957): 20; David J. Hurley, ‘Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Liturgical Arts, XXVI, February, March (1958): 62; Kaufmann Jr, ‘A Refreshing Glance at Western Folk Design.’; Esther McCoy, ‘Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Arts and Architecture, 75, March (1958): 9; E. Pickering, ‘A Basic Approach. Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Progressive Architecture, 39, April (1958): 216+; John H. Scarff, ‘Humble Architecture. Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, 1957. 87 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Steel, Stocks and Private Man’, Progressive Architecture, 39,

January (1958): 128–9+. 88 Ibid., 129. 89 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Future of the Past’, Perspecta, 7, no. 1 (1961): 65–76. This

article was republished in Stern, Plattus and Deamer, [Re]Reading Perspecta, 120–6. 90 Ibid., 65. 91 Years later William Huff quoted her passage on Kahn, mentioning that she was

‘amusing, impudent, not incorrect, but inconsequential too!’ William S. Huff, ‘Kahn and Yale’, JAE, 35, no. 3 (1982): 29. 92 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Future of the Past’, 76. 93 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Reflections on Perspecta: The End of the Beginning’, in Stern,

Plattus and Deamer, [Re]Reading Perspecta, 768–72. 94 Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’.

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3 MODERNISM AND THE FORCES OF HISTORY

From a very young age onwards, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy identified with progressive and avant-garde movements in Weimar Germany. As became clear in Chapter 1 (‘Life trajectory’), she saw herself as part of a group of artists and intellectuals who embraced modernity and who experimented with new ways of living and new forms of art. This group was looking for modern forms of expression, no longer based upon convention or tradition, but propelled by the search for an all-encompassing vitality and a sense of collectivity. Her enthusiasm for modern art and culture probably was one of the reasons why she felt so attracted to László Moholy-Nagy, already a well-known avant-garde artist and teacher at the moment they met in 1931. Up until that point, her role within this larger group of progressive people was not very prominent. As an actress and a film script writer, she was well acquainted with the world of the theatre. Through her marriage to Carl Dreyfuss she knew several of the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Given her lack of a formal education, however, and her only modest success as an actress, it seems fair to assume that she was a bystander and observer rather than a primary actor in these circles. Her intense relationship with L ászló Moholy-Nagy, and especially his early death, nevertheless led to a series of conditions that forced her to focus her energies and to become really articulate about the ideas underlying modern art and design. In the first years of their relationship, she was enlisted by Moholy as an accomplice in his creative endeavours. In Chicago, her role turned into that of a translator and an editor, since her English quickly became much more fluent than his. This shift became visible in Moholy’s Vision in Motion (1947), where she was acknowledged by him for her help with the English formulations.1 Having Moholy as an instructor and sparring partner must have

constituted an invaluable education in many different aspects of modern art. Moholy was very important as a theorist of modern art. He was one of the first authors to write on modern art and architecture on the basis of a very wide knowledge of the many ‘-isms’ that constituted modernism. His 1929 Bauhaus book Von Material zu Architektur, translated as A New Vision in 1932,2 articulated an organic, non-deterministic functionalism (Figure 3.1). It brought together many of the disparate ideas that activated the various modernist tendencies, encompassing futurism, cubism, suprematism, neoplasticism, constructivism, dadaism and surrealism, and was later recognized as an important theoretical contribution.3 Vision in Motion built upon this earlier book, constituting a further development of this theory. Sibyl MoholyNagy, who was closely involved with the production of this last book, was thus in a position to absorb not only her husband’s understanding of modern art and design, but through him also a wide range of other people’s ideas. This process was further deepened when she went through all the material for the biography Moholy-Nagy. Experiment in Totality.4

FIGURE 3.1 Book cover of Von Material zu Architektur, 1929.

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Moholy’s intellectual legacy In early 1950, right before the biography came out, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy published a piece in the short-lived little magazine Copy: Today’s Better Fiction.5 This article, entitled ‘The Making of a Constructivist’, is very helpful because it allows us to understand how Sibyl Moholy-Nagy reconstructed the guiding ideas in the work of her late husband. She chronologically discussed different influences on his work, which all had to do with approaches to his central theme of light. The first two influences, which he explored in his early years in Berlin, were expressionism and cubism. They helped him to leave behind the realistic model of figurative painting, to act from a tabula rasa and to observe the structural reality of matter, the self-sufficiency of form in space. In the second period, he was influenced by the suprematism of Malevich and the neoplasticism of Mondriaan. They brought to him the means to render a universal, objectified emotional experience through purity and visual discipline, enhanced by tension and harmony. On the basis of these influences, he developed his own fascination with transparency and space penetration, and explored the role of dynamic colour constructions. He thus could differentiate between a static and a dynamic equilibrium, the latter characterized by harmonious opposition. All these facets of his work allowed him to come nearer to the central theme of light, which he sought to activate in a subsequent series of works he called ‘light modulators’. He experimented with transparent new materials such as celluloid and plexiglass, which he painted and moulded into warped shapes, capable of creating a dramatic variety of shadows on a white background. He then envisioned beyond the dynamic a kinetic fourth dimension, necessitating movement and active intervention from the spectator. He thus worked, according to her, on an aesthetic collectivism, uniting artists and viewers, which was the philosophical basis of his ‘experiment in totality’ (Figure 3.2). To clarify his vision, she quoted from a Moholy text from 1923: The protest against the defunct caste spirit of the Imperial world, and the deceptive sentimentality of the old iconography, had been sublimated into ‘a fanatic will to build constructively and to create jubilantly. The Constructivism that is our new dimension has no other purpose than to participate in life. It is essentially one with the spirit of evolution that created science, civilization, and the systems that govern social life. Like them, constructive art is processual, for ever [sic] open in all directions. It is a builder of man’s ability to perceive, to react emotionally, and to reason logically’.6 (emphasis in the original) The article, based on the writing for the biography, was composed of different excerpts from this longer text. Although it was not very well structured, its basic ideas came through loud and clear. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy proved herself, here and

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FIGURE 3.2 László Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator), 1930, Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Sibyl MoholyNagy.

elsewhere, very capable in articulating and conveying Moholy’s ideas and those of his contemporaries. As mentioned earlier, Experiment in Totality won wide acclaim (Figure 3.3). Its author received many invitations to lecture on Moholy and his work, and these lectures were appreciated by audiences. After leaving the Chicago Institute of Design, she found teaching positions in the field of modern art elsewhere. These jobs formed a recognition of her expertise and also allowed her to build up valuable experience. For a time, she focused on deepening her knowledge in the theory and practice of modern art, which led, for example, to her translation of and introduction to Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook.7 At Pratt Institute, she would further build upon this experience by teaching a course on design fundamentals, modelled on the Bauhaus foundation course as developed by László Moholy-Nagy and Joseph Albers. Throughout her life, she was further called upon to speak or write on Moholy, usually when a new exhibition opened or at other commemorative occasions. There are thus several later pieces that revisit and complement the work on

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FIGURE 3.3 Book cover of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 1950.

the biography.8 An important elaboration was written for the journal Arts and Architecture in 1966.9 In this well-illustrated article Sibyl Moholy-Nagy positioned László Moholy-Nagy and his work in a constructivist lineage that started with Kasimir Malevich and that comprised El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin and Naum Gabo. She presented the work of Moholy as the culmination of the evolutions embodied by these other artists, because in his work the different facets of constructivism all came together in a celebration of light, movement and participation. For Sibyl Moholy-Nagy the constructivism of her late husband constituted a genuine peak in the development of modern art, a peak that was not overcome by later evolutions. She abhorred specifically the abstract expressionism that became so dominant in the American art scene of the 1950s (Figure 3.4). In a 1959 article on ‘The Crisis of Abstraction’ she spelled out the reasons why abstract expressionism represented a betrayal of values of the modern tradition. According to her, abstract expressionism would not be able to stand the judgement of time. It would prove to be only a transitory fashion, because it did not resonate with the intrinsic ideas of the modern art of the first half of the twentieth century. This earlier modern art aimed at abstraction and relativity, but did so because these

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FIGURE 3.4 Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Untitled, 1949. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

artists were looking ‘to abstract through experiment and speculation the essence of collective man in a relative physical and social environment. … The abstracted essence addressed itself to the new collective man.’10 Modern artists and architects were breaking down reality to the point where they found the visual fundamentals that could speak an international language. They were thus the legitimate heirs to a tradition that interconnected perceived reality with Nature as the ultimate driving force. This tradition also implied that it was the responsibility of artists to conceive of their work as a message to mankind and as an influence on society. Abstract expressionism, on the other hand, was shaped purely by individual and unconscious drives. It thrived on shameless exhibitionism and had no ambition whatsoever to articulate messages that might be universal or beneficial to mankind. Hence it would turn out to be a fad, the misconceived product of a search for the ever new, whereas it was clear to her that ‘newness as such is no value’.11 This article is a clear illustration of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s ‘conversion’ to history, after the passing of Moholy. She continued to uphold his ideas and to defend his version of modernism in art and architecture. She stressed, however, how these were rooted in historical evolutions, which gave them their legitimacy. Without mentioning him explicitly, she followed in this reasoning the lead of Sigfried

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Giedion, Moholy’s long-time friend, who also justified and heralded modern art and architecture as the logical outcome of a long historical process. In his seminal Space, Time and Architecture (1941) Giedion had presented modern architecture as the most adequate answer to the challenges of the time, because it embodied space–time and relativity as important characteristics of the Zeitgeist, and because it was part of a historical evolution towards interpenetration between inner and outer spaces, which was ongoing since the baroque.12 Giedion’s historical argumentation upheld modernism as the rightful architecture of the time, denying any legitimacy to rival tendencies such as regionalism or classicism. Sibyl MoholyNagy used in this article a similar argument, distinguishing between ‘genuine’ forms of art (such as constructivism), which would rise to timelessness in the value judgement of future generations, and ‘bastardized’ works of art that could enjoy only temporary popularity and would not withstand the test of history. By doing this, she mimicked Giedion’s distinction between ‘constituent’ and ‘transitory’ facts – the first establishing long-lasting phenomena with a definitive impact on the future, the latter momentary phenomena which would pop up as seemingly important, but which would wither away without any fundamental impact on subsequent events. Likewise, she repeated Giedion’s gesture of labelling modern art and architecture as a ‘new tradition’ instead of subscribing to the alternative idea of modernism as the ‘tradition of the new’, which was Harold Rosenberg’s formula.13 The two concepts are of course quite distinct: the ‘new tradition’ means that modernism has established itself as something lasting and permanent, whereas the ‘tradition of the new’ signifies a continuous upheaval in which there are ever new tendencies and movements that supersede one another.

The Cold War setting As of the early 1950s, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy started focusing on architecture rather than on art for her scholarly endeavours. Her first topic of choice was the vernacular architecture of the settler societies in North America, as discussed in the previous chapter. Gradually she moved towards criticism of contemporary architecture, at first somewhat cautiously, but soon with full confidence in her writing and her value judgements. Again, she was smart in her selection of themes. She took advantage of her travels to Europe to propose articles that would be deemed interesting by professional journals. Her first larger contributions to Architectural Forum and Progressive Architecture were written after her 1955 summer trip to Germany, and dealt with the ‘Architecture of Eastern Germany’ and with ‘Berlin’s International Building Exhibition’.14 They provide very interesting illustrations of her critical mindset, while at the same time offering evidence of how the Cold War setting impacted her thinking.

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The article on East Germany came out first. The editors of Architectural Forum introduced it by quoting one sentence as a baseline: ‘If West German architecture is bad, it is by default; in East Germany it is so by decree.’ They further framed it by telling the readers to expect ‘a critical appraisal of the Communists’ fanatical but narrow rebuilding program by a recent visitor behind the Iron Curtain who prefers to remain anonymous’. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s choice to not attach her name to this article, probably inspired by her difficulties in getting a visa, was thus presented as significant proof of the ominous character of the communist regime. MoholyNagy set the article up in a comparative way: she contrasted what she found in East Germany with what she saw in West Germany. She thus highlighted the contrast between the ‘prosperous normal appearance of the Western half of the city’ of Berlin with the ‘pauperism, depopulation and acres of ruins in the East Sector’. She denounced the Stalinallee – a showpiece of East German urbanism and architecture of the 1950s – for showing a ‘startling resemblance to the Mietskasernen’ in the old Berlin, with ‘uniform, eclectic clichés’ for elevations (Figure 3.5). She nevertheless also mentioned that neoclassical, unimaginative architecture was prominent in Western Germany too, using the new home of the president of the Republic in Bonn as an example. ‘The difference’, according to her, ‘lies in the rare exceptions that are possible in the West but unthinkable in the East’ – referring to buildings by F. W. Kraemer in Braunschweig and Emil Freimuth in Munich. She then recalled her train ride to Dresden, accompanied by ‘Big Brother’s loudspeaker’, which continuously broadcasted biased news bulletins. The train ride allowed her to see some of the workers’ settlements near factories and trade centres. These she found ‘less depressing than the miserable little Eigenheim’ – the sprawl of single family houses in the Western part of the country. In Dresden itself, she was inevitably struck by the gigantic destruction and the vast openness

FIGURE 3.5 The Stalinallee under construction in 1960.

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of the historical centre, where there were only a few islands of reconstruction (she didn’t mention that it was American and British bombs that destroyed Dresden in February 1945) (Figure 3.6). She lamented the ‘lifeless and mechanical’ character of these reconstructions, which, she added, were no better or worse than many similar examples in the West. ‘The natural aging of buildings’, she observed, ‘is obviously more than structural survival. … It is a settling into environment, and a fusion of compatible building elements, that age as harmoniously as a good husband and wife’. Seeing not many signs of ongoing construction, she wondered about the architects: where were they? She was told that both architectural schools in Dresden were turning out architects ‘at top speed’, and that the focus for the moment was on rationalization and education. Her informant – a Dresden professor of architecture whose name isn’t mentioned in the article – explained to her that ‘Typenprojektion – type projection’ was the new task of German architecture. He referred to the instructions of ‘Comrade Khruschev, first secretary of the [Russian] Communist Party’, who called for the industrialization of building. Standardization was thus the motto of the day, reducing the wide variety of building elements to only a limited amount that could be produced much more efficiently, a system also advocated by Walter Ulbricht, the first party secretary of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in a speech delivered in April 1955 and quoted by Moholy-Nagy. She commented that this focus on rationalization, standardization and type projection sounded eerily familiar, since these had been concepts advocated by the German Werkbund already before the First World War. Evoking the 1914 discussion between Muthesius and Van de Velde and the 1924 Bauhaus book by Adolf Meyer (Ein Versuchshaus des Bauhauses), she claimed that the excessive regimentation of East German architecture had its origin in the German past.

FIGURE 3.6 Dresden, February 1945.

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Whereas the article on East Germany was full of comparisons between East and West, the one on ‘Berlin’s International Building Exhibition 1957’ lacked the polemic tone and the aggressive introduction of its counterpart. It rather read as a very informative piece, documenting and discussing the urban plans for the Berlin Hansaviertel. These plans were already well developed, in the summer of 1955, in preparation for the International Building Exhibition two years later. The article opened by evoking the ‘irreverent and indomitable’ character of Berliners, which brought them to pursue such a large project in less than favourable circumstances. (Moholy-Nagy mentioned Berlin’s geographical isolation as an urban enclave in Russian-dominated territory, its poor economic conditions and the lack of raw materials.) She then discussed the competition for an urban plan, which was won by Kreuer, Jobst and Schliesser, with what she called a ‘free-form’ plan: ‘Building groups are emphatically isolated, with an average height of eight stories and astonishingly uniform plan patterns’. Protests against this award came from both ‘the schematic forces’ (with this term she referred to those adhering to traditional and uniform patterns) and from ‘the organic forces’ (those rallying around Scharoun and opting for looser configurations). Otto Bartning was then commissioned ‘to coordinate both principles in a compromise scheme’. She carefully compared Bartning’s final scheme with the originally awarded one, blaming him for neglecting to provide well-defined neighbourhoods or a civic centre. She agreed with Scharoun, who criticized Bartning’s plan for ‘its lack of a carrying idea’. The whole plan should supposedly provide ample opportunity for international architects to participate in the design of specific buildings. She mentioned how both Mies and Le Corbusier were invited but declined (the latter one not without making a great ‘show of acceptance and rejection’ and managing to get a commission for another site in Berlin). Other projects were well underway, such as the Z-shaped 17-storey tower by Müller-Rehm & Siegmann, which encountered some difficulties because of the instability of the Berlin soil so close to the river Spree. She further positively discussed Gropius’s 8-storey apartment house and Niemeyer’s project which promised to become the most impressive edifice of the whole development (Figure 3.7). The article closed with a sober enumeration of all the architects who further contributed to the Hansaviertel and with mentioning the dates of the exhibition (6 July to 29 September 1957). By the time of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s 1955 visit, the Cold War was well under way (although the Berlin Wall would only be built in 1961), and the two sides of Germany had increasingly consolidated their structures. In 1949, two new states had been established: the Federal Republic of Germany on the Western side, a parliamentary democracy with a capitalist economy, which benefited from the Marshall Plan, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the Eastern side, a one-party state under the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) with a communist economy, which was firmly aligned with the Soviet Union. Architectural developments in both states thus began to diverge. Reconstruction in

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FIGURE 3.7 The Niemeyer building in the Hansaviertel under construction in 1957.

the West was tackled by subsidized larger projects as well as by giving room to private initiative. There were a lot of competing tendencies and a lot of discussions, but many of the commissions for larger urban plans were given to modernist architects. In the East, everything was managed by the state, and hence the guidelines for how to build also came from state institutions. The political alliance with Moscow meant that these guidelines closely followed directives from there. The construction of the Stalinallee presented a huge effort of the still young GDR and was widely publicized, especially in Eastern Europe. Professional journals such as Deutsche Architektur (the official architect’s journal) discussed it as an excellent example of a socialist architecture that was built for people and not for profit. In the general press, it was heralded as a magnificent place to live, where comfort and community, as well as modern conveniences, were abundantly available. It was portrayed in pamphlets, posters and books, contrasting the reconstruction of East Berlin with the still war-torn neighbourhoods in West Berlin (Figure 3.8). Special bus tours were organized to give West Berliners the chance to see what was being realized in the East.15 These were the conditions which provoked West Berlin to answer with an equally ambitious scheme to show how a free society dealt with urban reconstruction. The project for the Hansaviertel thus started as a response to the Stalinallee – allegedly the idea took hold when an unnamed

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FIGURE 3.8 Postcard Berlin-Stalinallee, ca. 1959.

American official casually observed that West Berlin needed something like the Stalinallee.16 The Hansaviertel indeed became in many ways the opposite of the Stalinallee: free-standing buildings in a green landscape, modernist architecture, technologically savvy construction methods, abstract art and modern furniture in the model apartments, showcasing the architectural individualities of its different, international designers (Figure 3.9). The Hansaviertel, states Francesca Rogier, ‘was thus presented to the world as a product of the free market, symbol of the cornerstone of western policy’ regardless of the fact that the project necessitated a lot of subsidies from both the city and the state.17 This is the setting against which one should read both articles by Sibyl MoholyNagy. In taking this context into account, it becomes clear that they were both moves that made part of the ‘Cultural Cold War’ as Frances Saunders dubbed it.18 This is most clearly the case for the article on East Germany. The editorial introduction already set the tone, alluding to the totalitarian and ominous character of the GDR. This was reinforced by the anecdotal evidence that was woven through the text – the story about the train ride and ‘Big Brother’s’ broadcasting, the reference to how only children of workers now had access to higher education, the absence of visible building activities. In this article, which proved to be very well informed, with its references to both Khrushchev and Ulbricht, and its announcement of the industrialization that was underway, developments in architecture and urban planning were very much presented as bound up with the political system of communism. Hence the defects that the author detects are presented as flaws in the political system, or even stronger, as evidence of the sinister character of the

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FIGURE 3.9 The Hansa Viertel as built. The Müller-Rehm building is the Z-shaped tower in the foreground, and Gropius building is the slightly curved one behind that. Niemeyer's building is at the other side of the wide road perpendicular to the river Spree.

regime. (She indeed thought that this was a ‘totally idiotic regressive dishonest slavery state’, as she wrote in a letter to Ise Gropius.)19 The fact that Moholy-Nagy nevertheless also saw some good things, and that the contrast between East and West sometimes turned out to be favourable to the East rather than the West, made the article all the more effective, because it seemed to be impartial and objective. A similar assessment can be made of the article on the Hansaviertel. Only here and there, between the lines as it were, does the reader possibly become aware that the construction of the Hansaviertel formed West Berlin’s answer to the Stalinallee. Its role in the Cold War cultural competition barely registered in Moholy-Nagy’s article. Whereas she mentioned ‘the isolated existence of Berlin as an enclave in Russian-dominated territory’, the rest of the article didn’t make explicit reference to this geopolitical context. The scheme was presented as ‘the most ambitious replanning and rebuilding project of postwar Germany’, leaving it to the reader to silently assume that in East Germany nothing comparable was happening. She didn’t pay a lot of attention to matters of policy and finance, instead focusing on professional rivalries and critical assessments of the different plans and buildings. In doing so, she subtly enhanced her own announcement of the ‘ambitious’ character of the project, while its connection to a political and economic system went without saying – silently reinforcing the assumption that such a project could only be realized in a free, democratic and capitalist society. For the American readers of Architectural Forum and Progressive Architecture she thus fulfilled a role which is completely in line with the Cultural Cold War conducted by the CIA. A central feature of the CIA’s secret programme of cultural

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propaganda was, according to Saunders, ‘to advance the claim that it did not exist’.20 Both these articles of Moholy-Nagy very subtly, but effectively, aligned innovation and cultural ambition with what was happening in the West, while the East was represented as oppressive and retarded. She thus underscored the idea that American and Western values were superior to their counterpart in the East, without explicitly articulating this as a politically informed position. This is consistent with her overall attitude concerning architecture and politics. Whereas she described the political aspects of Moholy’s constructivism, mentioning how ‘aesthetic collectivism’ formed the philosophical basis of his thinking, she was less clear in delineating her own position. She was well aware of the socialist ideals that were intrinsic to the modernist housing projects of the 1920s and that were at play at the Bauhaus,21 but she apparently did not really share these ideals. Her writings from the 1950s and 1960s seem at first sight apolitical. When reading between the lines, however, one can detect how she had appropriated American values and how she subtly supported American policies, an attitude that might not be so strange for someone who had found refuge and opportunities in her new country.

Architecture – art or design? In these first years as an architectural critic, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was very much concerned with the relation between art and architecture. For example, she gave a lecture at Goucher College, a women’s college near Baltimore, discussing the connections between the fine arts and architecture in the first half of the twentieth century.22 Expressionism and constructivism, she stated, were movements which had brought together energies in both domains, and which fostered architecture as fused with art. After the Second World War, however, these movements lost their sincerity and their inner balance, and architecture’s artistic integrity vanished. She advocated a renewed integration of the arts and architecture in order to save the man-made environment from becoming a sterile, soul-killing influence on humans. She elaborated this theme in several other texts. A long contribution to Progressive Architecture in early 1957 discussed the difference between architecture as art and architecture as design.23 Whereas art stood for the identity of form and idea, design was rather about the identity of form and function. According to Moholy-Nagy, contemporary trends treating architecture as design rather than art were mistaken, because they did not recognize the ‘First Cause of Architecture’, which was ‘to express that which is time required and that which will remain valid beyond the passage of time through a composition of enclosing form and enclosed space’.24 She re-used elements of this text for a lecture she gave in several German architectural schools and which was published in Bauwelt and in two German newspapers.25 This lecture turned out to be much sharper in its formulations and

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much more provocative than the earlier American version, because she now pitted art and construction against one another, rather than art and design. The artist and the engineer thus became opposite role models for the architect, with the author lamenting the increasing dominance of the architect’s identification with the engineer. This somehow boiled down in her reasoning to a ‘suicide of the architect’ – the catchy title of one of the newspaper articles. The lecture opened with an attack on the modernist negation of art. According to the author, the futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, as well as the American pragmatism of John Dewey, had all contributed to the idea that architecture was primarily a technical and social issue. In the eyes of these protagonists, architecture was no longer considered an art. Architectural students henceforth had no notion anymore of the nature of their field as an artistic endeavour. They were trained in technical and structural logics. This technical expertise should serve architecture as art, but instead means and ends had been reversed in education so that students were now very skilled in the means but totally unknowledgeable about the ends. The flight ahead which called for working in teams – a reference to the Gropius discourse of the period – did nothing to remedy the situation; to the contrary, it only made it worse, because really significant contributions came from individuals rather than from groups. Moholy-Nagy was very clear on why the old modernist formulas were no longer valid: Back then collectivism and technology were universal ideals, which were meant as alternatives to a collapsed societal order. Now we are one generation and one world war further, and we should have come to understand that technology and collectivism can only be the foundations for a limited part of construction – for industry and administration. Architecture of public buildings, of housing and of churches on the other hand must be in accordance with the shaping of history, lest architecture loses its legitimacy.26 She thus formulated a conviction that would stay with her: that an architect needs to be, first and foremost, an artist and that architecture has more to do with fine arts than with science and technology. This conviction is not really that surprising, when one considers that such an understanding formed the starting point for the development of the ethos of the Modern Movement. Even though protagonists such as Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus called for a more prominent role of science and technology, they did so from a position that considered architecture as art. Le Corbusier insisted in Vers Une Architecture that there was a difference between architecture and engineering and that the difference had to do with architecture’s artistic nature. The Bauhaus, while growing closer to scientific paradigms under the leadership of Hannes Meyer, nevertheless continued to build its curriculum on an artistic basis. Mies van der Rohe emerged on the scene as an important architect by

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publishing visionary projects in avant-garde periodicals such as G, which brought together architecture and art. Sigfried Giedion made the comparison between Gropius’s Bauhaus building and Picasso’s L’Arlésienne into a key argument in his Space, Time and Architecture. For this older generation, it was thus taken for granted that modern architecture was part and parcel of the avant-garde movements in the arts, although their rhetoric often pointed towards the incorporation of science and technology as the most important driving forces of the time. In the post-war period, however, some kind of bifurcation happened between art and architecture. The efforts of Sigfried Giedion, José Sert and others to keep strong links between architecture and avant-garde art movements were not able to stem the tide. The CIAM 7 conference, held in Bergamo, Italy, in 1949, all but marginalized its official theme ‘Synthesis of the Arts’, in order to focus its attention on technical and political aspects of urbanism and housing.27 People like Buckminster Fuller or Konrad Wachsmann, who talked about mass production and new materials, increasingly came to the fore. It also became quite normal to see functionalism, widely accepted as the theory underpinning modern architecture, as a paradigm favouring technical and economic rather than artistic reasoning. Avant-garde movements in the arts, on the other hand, tended to arch away from architecture. Abstract expressionism in the United States was not aligned with an architectural counterpart, while in Europe a movement such as the Situationist International directly opposed modern architecture and urbanism.28 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s defence of architecture as art thus was out of sync with important tendencies of the day. This was also the case in Germany, where she gave the most provocative version of this lecture. Given the multitude of reactions in the West German press, the article apparently touched a sore point.29 There were a few reactions that welcomed and appreciated Moholy-Nagy’s points. Hermann Finsterlin, former member of the expressionist circle Die Gläserne Kette (The Glass Chain), wrote her a personal letter to express his admiration.30 So did Wassili Luckhardt, who belonged to the same circle and managed to rekindle his architectural career after the war.31 Erich Pfeiffer-Belli, a Bauhaus-graduate-turned-journalist, published a lengthy, generally positive reaction.32 Many reactions, however, were supportive of only part of Moholy-Nagy’s argument, while disagreeing with another part. Interestingly enough, there was no consensus whatsoever among the various letters to editors as to what part of her reasoning did hold. Some writers thought that she was wrong in attacking the Bauhaus because they faulted the conditions under which Bauhaus principles had been applied, rather than the principles themselves. Others lamented that she did conceive of architecture as pertaining only to single buildings, whereas architecture should rather be seen as comprising the whole built environment. Still others thought that her appeal for architects as artists was ill-founded, because the self-perception of architects as artists was exactly what caused all kinds of troubles in the collaboration between architects and engineers

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(thus proving that the move away from architecture as art held considerable appeal in Germany too). A last interesting comment mentioned that the mediocrity of recent modern architecture in Germany resulted from hasty appropriation of Bauhaus ideas after the war by people who had long been working according to the Nazi guidelines. There was thus considerable confusion among her audience and genuine disagreement as to what architecture was all about. The wide-ranging reactions to her article seem to confirm Frederic J. Schwartz’s diagnosis, which posits that there was no consensus in German post-war culture as to the nature of architecture: there was no stable discourse by which to discuss and debate the built environment as a serious matter of public concern.33 Culturally, West Germany was indeed in troubled waters. The most prominent modernists from the Weimar Republic had emigrated before the war, and only a few returned afterwards. Those modernists who had stayed had had to carve out a living under a regime which was diametrically opposed to everything modern and avantgarde. For over fifteen years they had been banned from positions of power in the universities, the technical colleges and the professional organizations, where supporters of the Nazis took the upper hand. After the war this situation posed a serious challenge. Reconstruction of the country and of its cultural institutions had to grapple with a condition in which people with experience and expertise often had a politically suspicious past, whereas those that had been clearly anti-Nazi had been marginalized.34 In these circumstances the terms of the cultural debate tended to become somewhat blurred, since it was in the interest of many not to be too outspoken about their cultural and political values. This might have been one of the reasons why in West Germany, even more prominently than elsewhere, architecture tended to look at science and technology for validation.35 In such a situation, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s lecture clearly threw the cat among the pigeons and provoked a lively – if somewhat unproductive – debate. If her views on architecture as an artistic rather than technical endeavour provoked much debate in Germany, her ideas about architectural history likewise met with resistance. The tensions these provoked became apparent in the reception of a series of guest lectures she performed in Braunschweig. She was invited there by Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer (1907–1990), at that time the most important design professor at the architectural school and one of the few German architects she had favourably mentioned in her writings (Figure 3.10).36 She had known him personally since 1955, when he first came to the United States, where she introduced him to Philip Johnson.37 Like her, Kraemer was interested in architectural history and its relation to modern architecture. He sought to elaborate and substantiate the curriculum in Braunschweig and invited her to lecture on ‘The Usefulness of Architectural History’. She gave four lectures, one of which, published in the German periodical Baumeister, dealt with the organization of architectural form.38 Moholy-Nagy claimed in this lecture that the horizontal and vertical articulation of exterior form was characteristic for architecture, and that this

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FIGURE 3.10 Friedrich Kraemer, Volkswagen repair shop in Braunschweig.

could be traced back to Sumerian buildings in Mesopotamia. In a wide-ranging gesture, she went from Mesopotamia to Egypt and ancient Greece, extending her journey to Asian and South American examples, to land on Islamic architecture which she claimed was inspirational to Gothic architecture in Europe. All this was illustrated with well-chosen images that showed obvious formal parallels between otherwise very divergent works of architecture. Such sweeping treatment of architectural history – instructive as it might have been for architectural students – was very unusual and apparently stirred up quite some animosity among the Braunschweig faculty.39 Her reception by Kraemer’s colleagues was thus far colder than one would expect among academics. According to her own account, she had to face opposition both from the art historians who didn’t like her anti-stylistic approach and from the grid-reliant designers who rejected any link with history and identified instead with engineers. She nevertheless managed to attract a very large audience and was given a moving goodbye party by the students.40 A short article in a student’s periodical confirmed her assessment. It reported that some of the professors deemed her lectures so outrageous and ‘unscientific’ that they didn’t even want to discuss with her, and abstained from further attending her seminars. Many of the students themselves, however, appreciated her critical and open attitude, and responded well to her invitation to enter into a dialogue (which seemed to have been a novelty for them).41 In an interview with the student periodical, Moholy-Nagy in turn commented upon the ‘godlike’ attitude of German professors, who thought so highly of themselves that they treated students and assistants as servants rather than interlocutors.42 The match between

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Moholy-Nagy and Braunschweig thus turned out to be problematic and she was not re-invited. Content-wise, however, her lectures in Braunschweig constituted a further effort to elaborate on architecture’s intimate relation with its historical and urban context.

Modern architecture in South America Sibyl Moholy-Nagy liked travelling and spent a good portion of each year going abroad. Some of her trips took the form of extended study tours, which led to several publications. She had a special interest in South America, fuelled by her fascination for American vernacular architecture and by her contacts with Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900–1975), an architect from Venezuela who had purchased Moholy paintings from her. She was intrigued by Pre-Columbian built heritage and by the historical impact of Spanish and Portuguese colonial planning. Her critical contributions on South American architecture often focused on the links between this complicated past and more recent architectural projects. A first manifestation of this interest was a by-product of her travels for the Native Genius book, and appeared in 1953 in Progressive Architecture under the title ‘Mexican Critique’.43 This article commented on the university complex in Mexico City – since 2007 recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site but back then still under construction (it was finished only in 1954) (Figure 3.11). Several of the themes that she would later elaborate are already present in this article. She was very critical of the location of this university – far away from the city centre and not easily accessible by public transport. She also questioned whether the simple transplant of European–American modern architecture to Mexico made sense, in a context where the climate, the landscape, the economy and the people were so different: The powerful stirring of native impulses all over the earth at this very moment should force upon our architects a re-evaluation of building concepts, in relation to ethnic traditions and needs. Has our generation, in an exuberant realization of technical forms for a technical society, stepped carelessly over the subtle and irrepressible demands of populations outside the orbit of technology?44 The only moment where these native impulses came through, she thought, were the murals on the building for the university library, where Aztec suns, PreColumbian pyramids and Christian angels competed with socialist symbols and eulogies of labour. All in all, nevertheless, this university complex failed to integrate ‘the two incompatible Americas’,45 regardless of the talent and giftedness of the architects involved.

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FIGURE 3.11 The Central Library building on Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), main campus.

In 1959 she undertook a long study trip which brought her to Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Peru.46 The material she gathered allowed her to write three extensive articles for Progressive Architecture, one for Arts and two for Bauwelt.47 The first one to appear was a critique of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, which was being built in the empty Brazilian heart land to an urban plan by Lúcio Costa (1902–1998) and with many buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) (Figure 3.12). She was not overly impressed by the urban plan, because it lacked urban qualities: the dimensions of the monumental axis would not allow it to act as an urban square favouring easy communication between ministries. She considered the dominating buildings by Niemeyer scaleless in relation to the surrounding flat landscape. For her Brasilia at that point showed the tragic implications of misunderstood modern architecture: there was no regard for human inhabitants and no connection with history or landscape. ‘Ein Panorama südamerikanischer Architektur’ (‘A Panorama of South American Architecture’), which appeared in Bauwelt, was very comprehensive in terms of background information and arguments. Here she reminded the readers that many South American countries had up to 60% or 70% of ‘Indian’ inhabitants, who had proven to be ‘unassimilierbar’ (not capable of assimilating) and who did not speak Spanish or Portuguese. The Western concept of democracy was alien to this native population, and their poverty and illiteracy facilitated the coming into power of dictatorial regimes. These regimes prohibited sound economic development and hence prolonged the existence of enormous social contrasts. Meanwhile, South American natural conditions, its landscapes and its climates, also were extreme, so architects had to work within a very challenging

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FIGURE 3.12 Oscar Niemeyer, Brasilia, the parliament building and the secretariat under construction, 1959.

context. This, she thought, might be the reason for the particular intensity and emotionality which characterized the South American architecture. Some of the best modern architects succeeded in following the example of Pre-Columbian and colonial builders who worked with the landscape and respected natural forces. The legacy of magnificent sites such as Machu Picchu in Peru resonated in projects such as the Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya in Caracas (the architect of which she did not mention) or in the ‘excellent’ Pedregulho housing complex by Edoardo Reidy (1919–1964) in Rio de Janeiro (Figure 3.13). Monumentality, theatrical qualities and sculptural forms were featured in many South American projects. They echoed, according to her, the qualities of the Spanish colonial cities, which excelled in dramatizing public space. All too often, however, unmodified application of Corbusian ideas gave rise to buildings which were not responsive to the climate and which felt as alien bodies in their urban setting. Carlos Raúl Villanueva received special attention from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. In the survey articles in Progressive Architecture, she devoted only limited space to him and his work, but she singled him out for an article in Bauwelt and for the one in Arts.48 In both cases she highlighted his interest in the integration of visual arts in architecture. As the architect of the Ciudad Universitaria in Caracas, he created ample opportunities for painters and sculptors to intensify with their work the impact of the built structures. According to Moholy-Nagy, this was done with such empathy that it resulted in an overwhelming impression of adequacy – reaching a balance between the expediency of structure and the delight of the senses. Alexander Calder’s floating acoustic panels in the Aula Magna (Figure 3.14),

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FIGURE 3.13 Helicoide project for la Roca Tarpeya in Caracas, view from the west.

FIGURE 3.14 Alexander Calder’s magnificent artwork in the Aula Magna of the University of Caracas, architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva.

Fernand Léger’s murals in the library and Victor Vasarely’s dividing wall sculpture complemented the architectural atmospheres of the buildings by conscious syncopations of visual experience. Several sculptures – by Antoine Pevsner, Jean Arp, Baltasar Lobo and Henri Laurens – provided dramatic focal points, enhanced by their carefully chosen backgrounds.

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These themes were taken up again in the book publication on Villanueva, the first extensive documentation of his work, which was authored by Moholy-Nagy and appeared in 1964.49 The book, mainly written as a favour to Villanueva and because she ‘needed the money’50, does not belong to the most decisive among her writings. It nevertheless did a fair job in presenting and framing Villanueva’s work. She situated Villanueva within the long history of the built environment in Venezuela, stressing how he learnt from the traditions in his country. She thought he was standing in a line of building masters, going back to Spanish colonial times, who integrated architecture and planning and who were granted quite some authority over their designs since they were backed up by a non-democratic regime. The images in the book often pointed to historical examples that were inspirational for Villanueva’s solutions. She compared, for example, his treatment of the relationship between interior and exterior with the colonial courtyard houses, which offer intermediate spaces such as patios and open walkways. Her descriptions of Villanueva’s many projects singled out their best features, only hinting at weaker points, but without overtly criticizing his work. She thought his most important contribution concerned the integration of the arts. His own home, where his eclectic collection was displayed in the living room, was an example of that and he brought it to greater heights in the university complex, as already discussed in the earlier article in Arts (Figure 3.15). She considered him the most important architect of Venezuela because of his inspirational role as teacher, writer and civic leader.

FIGURE 3.15 House Villanueva, interior view towards the garden. Villanueva is quite eclectic in his choice of furniture and artwork, mixing, for example, a colonial Madonna with a plexiglass painting by László Moholy-Nagy. The atmosphere in this room reflects, according to Moholy-Nagy, the influence of Southern Spain and the historical requirements of tropical living.

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Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s dealings with South America were formative for her intellectual evolution. Her visits to grand Pre-Columbian sites such as Machu Picchu and Uxmal reinforced her regard for the impact of landscape and climate, already visible in Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. Her study of the colonial urban plans of many South American cities contributed to her insights in the impact of urban planning on the daily life of people. Her many conversations with local modern architects made her more aware of the importance of socioeconomic and cultural factors in the built environment. Most of all her already shaky belief in technical approaches to problems of human settlements was further undermined. Her experiences in South America made her only more convinced that it was necessary to foster an architecture that was responsive to site and climate, that interacted with the past and that took into account socio-economic realities as well as cultural patterns.

Considering the masters In 1959 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy published five articles on Frank Lloyd Wright (1867– 1959) in different journals.51 Originally written to honour him on his (supposed) 90th birthday, they turned into lengthy in-memoriams, since he unexpectedly passed away two months before he reached his birthday.52 Three of the articles appeared in American journals, one in the German Bauwelt and one in the Italian Casabella. Content-wise, they overlapped to a certain extent, but they were not exactly the same. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy had known Frank Lloyd Wright during her years in Chicago. She had visited him in Taliesin,53 and she was familiar with many of his buildings and with his writings. Of all the masters of modern architecture, she admired him the most, although her admiration was not unqualified. The article in Progressive Architecture articulated most explicitly her assessment of his work. She started by making a distinction between two meanings of the word ‘modern’: By its semantic root the word ‘modern’ means ‘just now’; but Shakespeare interpreted it as ‘Things supernatural and causeless made modern and familiar’. These different definitions of as simple a word as modern contain the whole conflict between the Founders of Modern Architecture and their heirs. One evaluation implies relentless actuality, the other a concretization of values transcendental; or, on the one side, modern architecture justified by material progress and, on the other, Modern Architecture justified on grounds of personal vision.54 (emphasis in the original) Frank Lloyd Wright, according to her, decided for the Shakespearean definition and always presented his work with a transcendental message, referring to

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Christianity, ethnography, democracy and humanism as the spiritual substructure of his work. He was the most American among the masters, giving America an intrinsically American architecture, rooted in his geocentric empathy for the land: ‘Wright’s claim to genius lies with his autochthonous design of the house.’55 His open plans, as in the Prairie Houses and in the project for Ladies Home Journal, with spaces flowing into each other yet remaining clearly accentuated, provided an uncompromising individualism that was fully humanist (Figure 3.16). His advocacy of the machine and his admiration for technology were part of an ideological protest against the Academy, as was the case with his peers Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe. Technology in their eyes was supposed to be spiritually transforming, and thus meant something very different than it did for the younger generation of modern architects, for whom it equalled efficiency, expediency and economy. It was inevitable, thought Moholy-Nagy, that a violent conflict between the forces of life and the constraints of the technological formula would arise from the masters’ approach. Only Mies, in her eyes, was able to solve this conflict early in his career, since he focused already in 1924 on the industrialization of building methods as the key problem of the day. ‘But Le Corbusier has never healed in himself the trauma of structure versus phantasy; nor did Wright.’56 Whereas Wright was capable, in his early period, to rely on technological means as supporting elements auxiliary to the free choice of form and space, in the second stage of his career technology turned from servant to dictator.

FIGURE 3.16 Frank Lloyd Wright, plan for Ladies Home Journal (1901), as published by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy in Progressive Architecture, May 1959.

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Fallingwater on Bear Run was still evidently organic, but ‘already the singing rhythm of interior space is sacrificed to the cantilevered slabs that have to prove “the destruction of the box”. The rooms of the house at Bear Run are chaotic and dark.’57 The Johnson Wax Factory was masterly in its scale and formal composition, but the Johnson Laboratory Tower demonstrated the irresoluble tension between structural and formal requirements, wrapping circular floors in a square-ish curtain wall (Figure 3.17). Towards the end of his career, Wright more and more succumbed to the risk of enshrining himself rather than America as the source of his vision: ‘Louder than a lifetime of noble regionalism grew the exhibitionism that had to prove to the world that the master was not OF his times but far out in the future’.58 Thus his later projects suffered from egomania. He remained nevertheless the architect who offered the twentieth century a durable understanding of architecture that neither shunned technology nor hailed it, but brought it into balance with man’s unchangeable need for an environment that offered him beauty and identification. It was rare for Moholy-Nagy to publicly recognize, as she did in this article on Wright, that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was among the greatest architects of the

FIGURE 3.17 Frank Lloyd Wright, Johnson Laboratory Tower.

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twentieth century. There had been a very tense situation between Mies and László Moholy-Nagy while both were in Chicago, because Mies took issue with Moholy’s use of the name ‘Bauhaus’. (Mies had been the last director of the Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin and thought therefore that he had the legal right to the name.)59 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy continued the animosity after Moholy’s death. Mies thus found himself repeatedly at the other end of her scathing criticism. He was one of her first targets when she started having doubts about the direction modern architecture was taking. In 1953 already she blamed him for the ‘lightless and airless bathrooms and kitchens, the impassable dining bays [and] the disquieting psychological effect of transparent living quarters facing each other’, featured in his Lakeshore Drive Apartment buildings in Chicago (Figure 2.1).60 She rarely devoted a full article to his work, and when she did, it was to criticize him. In 1960 she wrote a lengthy, well-documented piece about a large housing project in Detroit, designed by Ludwig Hilberseimer and Mies, which will be extensively discussed in the next chapter (Figure 4.4).61 She denounced the project mainly because of sociological reasons: the project for Lafayette Park displaced the (black) inhabitants of a slum area in order to turn the site into a (white) middleclass neighbourhood, using public money in the process, which she thought was really questionable. She also considered some specific design characteristics unconvincing: the tower apartments were cramped and illogical, and the town houses combined visual nudism with acoustic exposure. The design therefore was ‘a failure’ to her.62 Her most remembered comment on Mies, in which she labelled some of his work ‘fascist’, was uttered in the prestigious setting of one of the Modern Architecture Symposia organized by Columbia University and was published in 1965 in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH).63 This short article on ‘The Diaspora’ contained in a nutshell her diagnosis of the American trajectory of the Modern Movement. In a period in which the reverence for the masters was still prevalent among most critics and historians, her sharp words were really striking.64 She condemned a lot of what was going on at the time, explaining that the American reception of European modern architecture was based on a big misunderstanding that went back to Hitchcock and Johnson’s misrepresentation of modern architecture as The International Style (1932). It was clear to her that most of the German architects who came to the United States were not able to deliver work of the same quality in their new country. This also seemed to be the case for Mies: His first scheme for the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is painfully reminiscent of his deadly fascist designs for the German Reichsbank, and the Krefeld Factory of 1937 proved the old German proverb that he who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas.65

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This comment stood out and was seen by many as utterly insulting to Mies. Howard Dearstyne, who had studied with Mies in the German Bauhaus, took up his defence in a lengthy (and sexist) letter to the JSAH, which was published some months later.66 The passage in Moholy-Nagy’s article however continued with praising words for Mies: Yet he was the only one of the diaspora architects capable of starting a new life as a creative designer following World War II, because to him technology was not a romantic catchword, as it had been for the Bauhaus program, but a workable tool and an inescapable truth. There can be little doubt that the spark that ignited his talent was the Chicago School, just as the Tugendhat House and the Barcelona Pavilion of his European phase owe an acknowledged debt to Frank Lloyd Wright. His finest achievement, the Seagram Building in New York, carries Root’s Reliance Building of 1893 to its ultimate perfection.67 This was high praise indeed, since for Moholy-Nagy the ability to link past and present was critically important to the quality of contemporary architecture. The ‘deadly fascist’ comment, however, had such an impact that it completely overshadowed whatever else she had to say about Mies, which might well have been intentional on her behalf. As to Le Corbusier – the third architect in her triumvirate of peers – her appraisal was mixed. In a 1954 book review of Volume 5 of his Oeuvre Complète she called his ‘genius’, ‘dualistic’ or even ‘schizophrenic’.68 That was because, on the one hand, his urban plans imposed identical and regimented ways of living that did not take into account social traditions, ethnology or geographic location, whereas, on the other hand, in his individual buildings, ‘his handling of form elements [had] reached a point of highest perfection’.69 His strongest point was the integration of all visual elements, based upon his intimate knowledge of painting and sculpture. Some years later she repeated this assessment in a review of the English translation of Le Corbusier’s Modulor.70 She expressed her admiration for him as a great writer, but also her puzzlement in the face of the contradictions within his work: The violent contractions in his architectural design: on the one hand the straight-jacketed floor plans, the revolting monstrosity of the ‘Skyscraper for 3000 People’, and the brutal dictatorship of habitation and transportation in his concept of urbanization; on the other the deep humanism of his religious projects, his exquisitely formulated love of nature, his roof gardens and the joyful accents of color and sculpture in Marseilles. How can a leading architect be so contradictory and yet so dictatorial in his unending declaration of fundamental principles?71

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When Le Corbusier unexpectedly passed away in 1965, she wrote a commemorative article for Arts Magazine.72 She gave him credit for being the most original genius architect of the twentieth century, the one who had recognized the importance of architectural history by invoking timeless standards of architectural excellence. She thought he had been capable of integrating the lessons he took from painting into his architecture and that he managed, in some of his projects, to handle building technology as the orchestration of forms and space. Spatial continuity, as in Ronchamps and in his Philips Pavilion, was his most important contribution. His Carpenter Art Center at Harvard brought this into focus (Figure 3.18). It was living proof of his triple understanding of architecture – as providing the balance between man and his environment, as the play of form under the light and as enabled by the foot that walks and the eye that sees: ‘Light and shadow, primary color planes and the illusions of reflecting glass activate perception into a total participation.’73 This building thus proved – as no other one in the twentieth century – how the essence of architecture was defined against the expediency of building. Of all the ‘masters’ of modern architecture, Moholy-Nagy had the most personal and the most cordial relationship with Walter Gropius, who had been a close friend of her late husband. When Moholy had passed away, she had turned to Walter and Ise Gropius for comfort, exchanging many letters and visits.74 Although the frequency of this exchange diminished over the years, they remained in contact, also because Moholy-Nagy shared with Gropius

FIGURE 3.18 Le Corbusier, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, ca. 1963.

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the copyright of the Bauhaus books. She was therefore somewhat reluctant to turn her critical eye in his direction.75 Moholy-Nagy’s growing discomfort with modernist architecture however also related to Gropius’s work, and at a certain point she stopped mincing her words. Especially his involvement in the design of the Pan Am building in New York evoked her scorn. Gropius had been asked, together with Pietro Belluschi, to intervene in the design of this skyscraper, because the original plans were not granted a building permit (Figure 3.19).76 These famous architects’ contribution, however, could not salvage what was basically a problematic proposal. Moholy-Nagy called them out on it. In 1959, she publicly denounced Gropius’s participation in the project as a willingness to sell out to a promoter. She saw this as a great tragedy, given Gropius’s own highminded appeal to morality and his reputation among young students.77 In the 1960s, Moholy-Nagy more and more doubted whether modernism would live up to its high potential, and whether American culture would be able to absorb the European influence without betraying its own qualities. The more her disappointment grew, the more her formulations became acerbic and wry. In

FIGURE 3.19 Walter Gropius, Pan Am Building in New York, with Grand Central Station in the foreground.

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her already mentioned article on ‘The Diaspora’ (1965), she didn’t spare Gropius either: ‘With a tactful shrug America looked the other way when Gropius and Breuer built those astonishingly ugly little houses, leading up to that permanent diner, the Harvard Graduate Center.’78 Her critical attitude further culminated in the 1968 article ‘Hitler’s Revenge’. It started thus: In 1933 Hitler shook the tree and America picked up the fruit of German genius. In the best of Satanic tradition some of this fruit was poisoned, although it looked at first sight as pure and wholesome as a newborn concept. The lethal harvest was functionalism, and the Johnnies who spread the appleseed were the Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer.79 The author claimed that the import of German functionalism had destroyed the vitality of American functionalism, and that the latter was no longer providing the urban and architectural qualities it had in such abundance before. The article was a direct attack on a design proposal by Marcel Breuer for the area above Grand Central Station in Manhattan, which would have put a second skyscraper on the axis of Park Avenue, next to the Pan Am building (Figure 3.20). Her vehement argument stated that Breuer’s project, helped by American commercialism, would destroy the last testimony to an era of free enterprise and architectural urbanity (she meant the Grand Central Station) when ‘thoughtful refinement of detail beyond the call of commerce’ (she ironically cited a phrase used in the publicity pamphlet for Breuer’s project) still permitted all citizens a scaled identification with their city. For her this project of Gropius’s former collaborator was the ultimate proof of how Bauhaus modernism played havoc with American cities.

American architecture coming of age Moholy-Nagy’s general appreciation of American modern architecture had not always been as dismissive as it would turn out to be in ‘Hitler’s Revenge’. In 1964, she published a lengthy article on the state of American architecture in the French periodical Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.80 This article was basically positive in tone, arguing that American architecture had now processed the questionable influence of the German immigrants, and that it had come of age, turning towards its own tradition of regionalism. As to the first-generation modernists, Mies’s influence still was considerable, especially in large offices such as SOM, Wright’s impact was less than could be expected and Le Corbusier’s was still growing. Gropius’s influence, on the other hand, had completely waned since he stopped teaching. She favourably mentioned the work of Eero Saarinen, whom she gave credit for ‘having broken the functionalist spell paralyzing American architecture’.81 She appreciated that he had aligned himself with Le Corbusier (and against Mies), just like José

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FIGURE 3.20 Marcel Breuer, Proposal for Grand Central Tower, New York, 1969.

Sert had done. She praised Le Corbusier’s recently completed Carpenter Center of Visual Arts in Harvard, which confirmed for many American architects his status as a genius (Figure 3.18). They oriented their compass on his basic principles: the use of contemporary materials, spatial continuity, interaction of form and space, natural light, and experience of the building through movement. The most

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important among the Gropius students were Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph, both ‘rebels turned leaders’ who dismissed the functionalism they were taught at Harvard. Both now encompassed references to the past in their more mature work and treated works of architecture as works of art. Louis Kahn had more or less taken over the position of Wright as the mentor and prophet of American architecture, with very effective and emotionally appealing buildings such as the Yale Art Gallery and the Richards Medical Research Laboratories in Philadelphia (Figure 3.21). She furthermore mentioned I. M. Pei, Victor Gruen, Bertrand Goldberg and some others, commenting how, like always, the best architecture was an exception to what was built on average in America. Among contemporary American architects, Paul Rudolph took a special place in Moholy-Nagy’s universe. They were long-time friends, who regularly met for dinner, and belonged to the same social circle in New York.82 MoholyNagy had first mentioned his work in 1953, when he was only starting out as a young architect.83 She also had favourably discussed him in 1961 as one of the four American architects who processed elements from the past in their work.84 In 1964 she devoted a full article to his recently completed School of Art and Architecture at Yale. She called this building a ‘splendid achievement, crystallizing potential solutions for some of the most vexing propositions facing architecture today’ (Figure 3.22).85 It offered historical continuity, providing an urban link between buildings from various ages surrounding it (among them Kahn’s Art Gallery). This was made possible by the building’s corner treatment of the street intersection, which sustained and connected the urban experience. Its concrete surfaces were visually pleasing and wholly un-technological (a compliment in Moholy-Nagy’s book), while it’s very effective entrance stairs were reminiscent of the dramatic impact of Bernini’s Scala Regio in the Vatican. When Rudolph was

FIGURE 3.21 Louis Kahn, Richards Medical Research building, Philadelphia.

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FIGURE 3.22 Paul Rudolph, Yale University, Art and Architecture Building, entrance stairs.

later criticized for this building, which was not particularly liked or respected by its first generation of users, she came to his rescue, sending in a rebuttal letter to the editor of Architectural Forum, denouncing Ellen Perry Berkeley’s arguments against the building.86 Her closeness to Rudolph led her to write the introduction to a book-length documentation of his work up to 1970.87 This introduction, today still seen as an excellent interpretation of his work,88 hailed Rudolph as an iconoclast modernist, who left behind his functionalist Harvard education to embrace Frank Lloyd Wright’s regionalism, and who was among the first to bring architecture into dialogue with its urban context. Moholy-Nagy skilfully wove together her intimate knowledge of Rudolph’s intellectual development with an astute analysis of his most prominent buildings, positioning him within the context of contemporary American architects as the one who decisively declared – against the notions of the time – his preference for a civic architecture offering environmental and formal variations. His significance, according to her, relied on his willingness to become a new link in the long chain binding urban past to urban future,

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‘welding industrialization to design without submitting to the fascist dictatorship of technological systems control’ and showing ‘profound faith in the architect’s mission’.89 She commended him because he, like her, believed in the significance of architecture as a work of art, and because he, like her, was convinced that the architect had to design a meaningful and humanist environment, without giving in to social or commercial pressures. Her appreciation of Paul Rudolph’s work was consistent with her overall understanding of the ‘aging of modern architecture’, as divulged in a 1967 contribution to a Finnish journal.90 Here she underlined that the architecturally committed designers of the 1960s had taken their leave from the misunderstood functionalism of the Modern Movement’s founding fathers, and were now taking their clues from regionalism and from urban history. Her graduating students, she found, were especially interested in questions of architectural structure, and how these intertwined with architectural space. While dismissive of functionalism, they were inspired by Le Corbusier’s post-war work, by Scharoun and by Saarinen. The next generation would thus perpetuate the historical ‘cycle that makes protest the pre-condition for development’.91 A similar assessment was at the core of her very positive criticism of the Boston City Hall, designed by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles (Figure 3.23). She highlighted that the ‘significance of the new Boston City Hall lies in historical continuity made contemporary’.92 The new city hall referenced the buildings that were its predecessors by putting emphasis on the ‘triple chord of base, body and attic as the most ancient harmonious canon, and on a modified verticality’.93 Its different facades provided a concept of harmonious contrast, in tune with their different urban orientations. They also could be seen as an

FIGURE 3.23 Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, Boston City Hall.

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homage to ‘the constructivist heritage from Rietveldt [sic] to Le Corbusier and Kahn, brought into the contemporary fold by Venturi’s canonization of complexity and contradiction’.94 The spatial continuity bringing visitors from outside into the heart of the building through ramps and stairs met with her approval, because it would effectuate in citizens an awareness of the building’s profound humanism. Both Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building and the Boston City Hall are currently hailed as great examples of the 1960s brutalism that is newly appreciated by upcoming generations of architects and connoisseurs.95 This newly won reputation, however, is at odds with their long histories of neglect and dismissal. Recent studies of the Boston City Hall reception show how Moholy-Nagy’s comments, while illustrative of the general opinion of the profession, totally missed the mark with respect to the users’ perspective. The public at large was far from impressed by this building, its popular image long being one of arrogance and waste.96 This was not something that Moholy-Nagy saw coming, or something that she would have deemed extremely important, had she been aware of it. In her opinion, architecture’s value proved itself in the long run, over a timespan of generations, and she would not have granted too much weight to immediate reactions of people who were not knowledgeable about architecture. That position however was less and less in tune with the tendencies of the time, which increasingly heralded diverse forms of populism.97 Moholy-Nagy’s viewpoint would thus become identified as somewhat old guard.98 Although she nodded to Venturi in the quote above, it is clear that she did not share his and his partner Denise Scott Brown’s fascination with mass culture.99 She abhorred popular taste, and thought modern architecture should stay far from any commercial involvement. She was, for example, greatly opposed to the decision of the Architectural League of New York to organize an exhibition of Morris Lapidus’s work. Lapidus (1902–2001) was an architect who had incredible success with his designs for glamorous beach hotels in Miami (Figure 3.24).100 He was generally not very much respected in the profession, because of his use of exuberant forms, which had no other function than to appeal to a taste of luxury and sensual gratification. In the changing climate, the League still decided to organize an exhibition of his work, which Moholy-Nagy thought was too much honour. In a letter to the president of the League, she explained: Lapidus is a well-known phenomenon in the profession. After having made his pile and excusing his aberrations with the nauseating cliches [sic] of ‘what the people want’ (as if taste pollution did not go the other way from designer to public), he is now grooming his son to refurbish the image by becoming an ‘art’ architect. And in doing so, he sidles up to these almost unbelievable ‘young rebels’ and agrees to their befuddled interpretation of Las Vegaism or Venturism of POPCAMP environments to get himself a show.101

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FIGURE 3.24 Morris Lapidus, Fontainebleau hotel, Miami Beach, Florida.

She threatened to resign from the executive committee of the League if they did not reconsider this exhibition, but she lost that battle, as well as the more general war about keeping kitsch at bay in architecture. Whereas her good friend Philip Johnson flirted with this new kitschy sensibility by approaching it as Camp,102 Moholy-Nagy could not make herself treat architecture in such a light-hearted way – as if there would be nothing at stake. Like Paul Rudolph, she remained committed to humanist and historical values, and could therefore not appreciate trends towards pluralism and populism. Whereas her death in 1971 occurred at a time when postmodernism was not yet named as such, it seems fair to assume that she would definitely not have embraced it. The modernism she championed was one that embodied a sense of gravitas and an awareness of its historical calling. It was a modernism that repudiated functionalism while re-establishing a connection with landscape or city, a modernism that realized spatial continuities while at the same time articulating differences, a modernism that valued materials and structures, but always in the service of specific spatial concepts and formal expressions. She preferred syncretism above eclecticism, and hence would not have appreciated the ‘anything goes’ attitude of postmodernism.

Notes 1 Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion. 2 László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur: Faksimile der 1929 erschienenen

Erstausgabe (Berlin: Mann Verlag, 2001); László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision:

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Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, first edition 1938 (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005). 3 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 2nd edition (New

York: Praeger, 1970). First edition 1960 – see also excerpt in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology (New York: Da Capo, 1991): 214–22. John Summerson, ‘On the Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture’, RIBA Journal, (June 1957), 307–10. 4 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 1st edition (New York:

Harper and Bros, 1950). 5 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Making of a Constructivist’, Copy: Today’s Better Fiction, 1,

no. 1 (Spring 1950): 81–6. 6 Excerpt from The Spiritual and Social Aspects of Constructivist Art, manuscript of

a lecture given before the Bauhaus students, November 1923, quoted in MoholyNagy, 197. 7 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Introduction’, in Pedagogical Sketchbook, 7–12. 8 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Moholy-Nagy und die Idee des Konstruktivismus’, Die

Kunst, 57, no. 9 (1959): 330–3; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Moholy-Nagy und der Konstruktivismus’, Die Kunst Und das schöne Heim November (1966): 57–60; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’, in Moholy-Nagy, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Chicago, IL: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1969), 14–18; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Moholy-Nagy: The Chicago Years’, in Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology: 22–6. 9 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Constructivism from Kasimir Malevitch to Laszlo Moholy-

Nagy’, Arts and Architecture, 83, no. 5 (June 1966): 24–8. 10 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Crisis in Abstraction’, Arts, 33, April (1959): 22. 11 Ibid. 12 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). 13 Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1965). 14 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architecture of East Germany’, Architectural Forum, 105, (July

1956): 152–5; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Berlin’s International Building Exhibition 1957’, Progressive Architecture, 37, (August 1956): 89–93. 15 Francesca Rogier, ‘The Monumentality of Rhetoric: The Will to Rebuild in Postwar

Berlin’, in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (London: MIT Press, 2000), 165–90. 16 Ibid., 178. 17 Ibid., 181. 18 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Art and

Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). 19 Letter to Ise Gropius, 20 September 1955 (Houghton Library, Harvard). 20 Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, p. 1. 21 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,

24 (March 1965): 24–5.

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22 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Art Isms and Architecture in the 20th Century’, Goucher

College Bulletin, 24, no. 1 (July 1957) (AAA948 – 857/859). 23 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architecture – Art or Design?’, Progressive Architecture, 38,

(January 1957): 13–14+. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 The lectures were given at the TU Berlin on 19 June 1958 (AAA 948/888) and

in Baden-Baden on 4 July 1958 (AAA 948/887). A long version of the text was published as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architektur – Kunst oder Konstruktion? Ein Vortrag, gehalten an Deutschen Hochschulen’, Bauwelt, 50, no. 1 (January 1959): 4–8. Abbreviated version appeared as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Der Selbstmord der Modernen Architekten’; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Der Rückzug der Architekten’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1 February 1959. 26 ‘Kollektivismus und Technologie waren damals weltverbindende Ideale, die

eine zusammengebrochene Gesellschaftsordnung ersetzen sollten. Inzwischen sind wir eine Generation und einen Weltkrieg weiser, und wir sollten uns klar darüber sein, dass Technologie und Kollektivismus nur die Grundlage einer scharf begrenzten Bautätigkeit – für Industrie und Administration – sein können. Architektur der öffentlichen Gebäude, des Wohnraumes und der Kirchen dagegen muss geschichtsbildend sein, oder sie verliert ihre Daseinsberechtigung.’ (italics in original). Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architektur – Kunst oder Konstruktion? Ein Vortrag, gehalten an Deutschen Hochschulen’, 8. 27 Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2000), 179–97. 28 Ruth Baumeister, L’Architecture Sauvage: Asger Jorn’s Critique and Concept of

Architecture (Rotterdam: nai010, 2014). 29 The article gave rise to a long-lasting flow of letters to the editor of Bauwelt – 14

published letters in total, the last one appearing roughly six months after the article itself. The abbreviated versions in the Stuttgarter Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung also generated quite some reactions. Moholy-Nagy kept these among her papers (AAA948). 30 Quoted in Reinhard Döhl, ‘Am Ziel is das Spiel der Stil’ (opening lecture for the

exhibition Hermann Finsterlin 1887–1973, Sindelfingen, 1987) – http://www.unistuttgart.de/nd11/finsterlin/finsterlin1.htm, consulted 13 August 2001. 31 Letter from Wassili Luckhardt to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy dated 17 April 1959 (AAA

944/590). 32 Erich Pfeiffer-Belli, ‘Der Rückzug der Architekten’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31

January–1 February 1959. 33 Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘The Disappearing Bauhaus: Architecture and Its Public in the

Early Federal Republic’, in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, ed. Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2009), 61–82. 34 Peter Krieger, ‘Learning from America: Postwar Recovery in West Germany’, in

Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 187–207. 35 The history of the Bauhaus-successor, the School of Design in Ulm, which existed

from 1953 to 1968, might be seen as illustrative for this tendency. See Isabel Clara

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Neves, João Rocha and José Pinto Duarte, ‘Computational Design Research in Architecture: The Legacy of the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm’, International Journal of Architectural Computing, 12, no. 1 (2014): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1260/ 1478-0771.12.1.1. 36 She referred to his ‘superbly designed Volkswagen repair shop in Braunschweig’ – see

Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architecture of East Germany’, 152. For more information on Kraemer, see Karin Wilhelm and Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, eds, Gesetz und Freiheit: Der Architekt Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer (1907–1990) (Berlin: Jovis, 2007). On Kraemer and the Braunschweig school, see Olaf Gisbertz, ‘Marke Und Mythos – “Braunschweiger Schule”’, in Architekturschulen: Programm, Pragmatik, Propaganda, ed. Klaus Jan Philipp and Kerstin Renz (Berlin: Wasmuth, 2012), 159–72. 37 Karin Wilhelm, ‘Atmosphäeren Aus Übersee’, in Gesetzt und Freiheit: Der Architekt

Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer (1907–1990) (Jovis: Berlin, 2007), 74–87. 38 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Formgliederung – Urprinzip der Architektur’, Baumeister 62,

no. 12 (December 1965): 1409–22. 39 Axel Siemonsen, ‘Anregung in Braunschweig’, Baumeister, July 1965, 713 (AAA

948/545). 40 Letter to Wolf, Annemarie and Hertha, 11 March 1965 (AC). 41 Axel Siemonsen, ‘Über Zwei Professoren. Gast in Quarantaine’, Omnibus, 11 (1965):

41 (AAA 948/638). 42 ‘Vom göttlichen Professor. Ein Gespräch mit Professor Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’,

Omnibus, 11 (1965): 3–6 (AAA948 – 631/635). 43 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Mexican Critique’. 44 Ibid., 175. 45 Ibid. 46 Letter to Jenö Nagy from 22 October 1959 (AC). She also mentioned in this letter

that she prepared long articles for several journals on the basis of this study trip, which allowed her to recuperate the steep expense. 47 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Brasilia: Majestic Concept or Autocratic Monument’; Sibyl Moholy-

Nagy, ‘Some Aspects of South American Planning’, Progressive Architecture, 41, (February 1960): 136–42; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Some Aspects of South American Architecture’; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Ein Panorama Südamerikanischer Architektur’, Bauwelt, (8 February 1960): 147–57; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Bauten unter tropischer Sonne. Zum Werk des Venezolanischen Architekten Villanueva’, Bauwelt, 51, no. 24 (13 June 1960): 679–84; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Villanueva and the Uses of Art’, Arts, 34 (September 1960): 46–51. 48 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Bauten unter tropischer Sonne. Zum Werk des Venezolanischen

Architekten Villanueva’; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Villanueva and the Uses of Art’. 49 Moholy-Nagy, Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela; Moholy-

Nagy, Carlos Raúl Villanueva y La Arquitectura De Venezuela (New York/Caracas: Praeger/Lectura, 1964); Moholy-Nagy, Carlos Raul Villanueva Und Die Architektur Venezuelas. 50 As mentioned in a letter to David Mackay, dated 1 February 1965 (AAA 944/729). 51 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Testament’, College Art Journal, 18,

no. 4 (Summer 1959): 319–29; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright 1889–1959’;

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Moholy-Nagy, ‘La Tecnica e Frank Lloyd Wright’; Moholy-Nagy, ‘F.L.W. and the Ageing of Modern Architecture’, 136–42; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘F.L.W. and the Ageing of Modern Architecture’, Perspective (1959), 40–5. 52 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy erroneously mentioned in the article in College Art Journal that

Frank Lloyd Wright would turn 90 on 8 June 1959. Although he was born on 8 June 1857 he often stated his birthday as 8 June 1859. See https://www.biography.com/ people/frank-lloyd-wright-9537511, consulted 7 August 2017. Incidentally, this was the same trick that Sibyl applied (she also made herself two years younger than she actually was). 53 Mentioned in a letter to Ise Gropius, dated 29 September 1948 (Houghton Library). 54 Moholy-Nagy, ‘F.L.W. and the Ageing of Modern Architecture’, Progressive

Architecture, 136. 55 Ibid., 136. 56 Ibid., 140. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 142. 59 Avis Berman et al., ‘An Interview with Katharine Kuh’, Archives of American Art

Journal, 27, no. 3 (1987): 2–36, https://doi.org/10.1086/aaa.27.3.1557604. 60 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’, 198. 61 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Villas in the Slums’, The Canadian Architect, 5, (September

1960): 39–46. 62 Ibid., 44. This article is more extensively discussed in the next chapter. 63 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’, 24–5. This issue of the journal contained the full

proceedings of MAS 1964. More recently all the MAS symposia have been published in a critical edition. See Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Joan Ockman and Nancy Eklund Later, eds., MAS, the Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962–1966: A Critical Edition (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2014). 64 In her introduction to the recent MAS publication Rosemarie Bletter mentions

how Moholy-Nagy stood out: ‘The “halo of greatness” around the former Bauhaus teachers had become questionable in her eyes, as it had for others, with the difference that Moholy-Nagy was fearless in her criticism of postwar architecture and its sacred cows.’ Bletter, Ockman and Later, MAS, the Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962–1966, 8. 65 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’, 25. 66 Howard Dearstyne, ‘Letter Reacting to SMN Article in JSAH March 1965’, Journal of

the Society of Architectural Historians, 24, no. 3 (October 1965): 254–5. I am calling this letter sexist because Dearstyne saw it fit to mention that Moholy-Nagy had been ‘at her Sunday best’ when delivering her lecture (a patronizing comment, to say the least). He also contrasted László Moholy-Nagy’s attitude versus Germany with Mies’s, as if somehow Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was accountable for that, while remaining silent about her feelings, although she was the one who was German, like Mies. 67 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’, 25. 68 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of Oeuvre Complète 1946–1952 (Vol. 5) by Le

Corbusier: Apparent-Genius’, 176.

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69 Ibid., 181. 70 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The Modulor’. 71 Ibid., 190. 72 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Achievement of Le Corbusier’, Arts Magazine, 40, no. 1

(November 1965): 40–5. 73 Ibid., 45. 74 See letters in Houghton Library, Harvard University and in Bauhaus Archive, Berlin. 75 In a letter dated 25 December 1954 Moholy-Nagy explained to Ise Gropius that she

would not review the book Giedion recently published about her husband (Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork (New York: Reinhold, 1954).) She thought she could not do so without insulting the author. In hindsight, it is indeed a very strange book, that is neither well constructed nor consistent. Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Ise Gropius, 25 December 1954 – Houghton Library, Harvard. 76 Meredith L. Clausen, The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist

Dream (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005), 158–60. 77 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Letter to the Editor: Quantity vs. Quality’, Progressive

Architecture, 40, May (1959): 59+. 78 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’, 25. 79 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Hitler’s Revenge’, Art in America, 56 (September/October

1968): 42–3. The article is recently republished online with an introduction by Despina Stratigakos. See Stratigakos, ‘Hitler’s Revenge’, Places Journal. 80 Moholy-Nagy, ‘L’Architecture Américaine prend une nouvelle Orientation’. The

English-language manuscript for this article bears the title ‘American Architecture comes of Age’ (AAA948 – 65/86). 81 AAA 948/70. 82 Timothy M. Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2014), 183. 83 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’, 20. 84 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Future of the Past’. See the discussion of this article in the

previous chapter. 85 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Yale’s School of Art and Architecture. The Measure’,

Architectural Forum, 120 (February 1964): 77. See also Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architektur – und Kunstschule der Yale Universität’, Bauwelt, 55, no. 7 (17 February 1964): 189–95. 86 Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, 174–5. 87 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Introduction’, in The Architecture of Paul Rudolph. The book was also

published in Spanish: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Introduccion’, in La Arquitectura de Paul Rudolph, ed. Paul Rudolph (Barcelona: Gustavo Gill, 1971). 88 Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, 6; Jeffrey Lieber, ‘Knowledge in the

Making’, Cuadernos Del Centro de Estudios En Diseño y Comunicación. Ensayos, no. 53 (July 2015): 231–42. 89 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Introduction’, in The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, 29. 90 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Aging of Modern Architecture’, ARK. Finnish Architectural

Review, no. 7–8 (1967): 19–20.

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91 Ibid., 20. 92 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Boston’s City Hall. It Binds the Past to the Future’, Architectural

Forum, 130 (January/February 1969): 44. 93 Ibid., 44. 94 Ibid., 45. 95 Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, 248. See also the comments on the recently

published ‘Brutalist Boston Map’ (2017) on http://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/07/ 31/brutalist-boston-map (accessed 22 August 2017). 96 David Monteyne, ‘Boston City Hall and a History of Reception’, Journal of

Architectural Education, 65, no. 1 (2011): 45–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1531 -314X.2011.01171.x. See also the undergraduate thesis by Angie Jo, ‘How a Civic Building Means: The Languages of Boston City Hall’ (undergraduate thesis, Harvard, 2016). 97 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, ‘In the Name of the People/In de Naam van

Het Volk’, Forum, no. 3 (1976): 5–33. 98 Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘History and Theory in Architectural Periodicals: Assembling

Oppositions’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 58, no. 3 (1999): 243, https://doi.org/10.2307/991527. 99 Although Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas would only

be published in 1972, Moholy-Nagy certainly knew the article that preceded it: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, ‘A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas’, Architectural Forum, 132, no. 2 (March 1968): 37–43ff. 100 Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 109–49; Morris Lapidus, Too Much Is Never Enough (New York: Rizzoli, 1996). 101 Letter from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Arthur Rosenblatt, president of the Architectural

League of New York, 9 July 1970 (AAA945). Lapidus largely quoted this letter (with a certain glee, it must be said) in his 1979 and 1996 autobiographies: Morris Lapidus, An Architecture of Joy (Miami, FL: E.A. Seemann, 1979), 211; Lapidus, Too Much Is Never Enough, 254. 102 Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, 2nd edition (Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books, 1986), 207–12.

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4 THE GREAT CITY AND ITS CIVIC CULTURE

In 1954, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy declared her love for the great city. As a reaction to the widespread idea that the big city had failed and that the future of planning and housing ought to be sought in green-belt towns and suburbs, she took up the defence of the city itself. Her letter to the editor of Architectural Record was entitled ‘Where the Great City Stands’ – a reference to a poem by Walt Whitman (1819– 1892) and possibly also to a book by C. R. Ashbee (1863–1942).1 Walt Whitman was a poet, essayist and journalist, whose work is among the most influential of the American canon. He is often seen as grasping as no other of the spirit of America, with his love for democracy and for free thinking. Ashbee had been a proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement, who acted as a cross-Atlantic liaison between its British and American wings.2 His 1917 book Where the Great City Stands discussed how the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement could be combined with recent ideas about planning and housing in order to transform the cities into places of well-being and civic pride. The book implicitly took its title from Whitman’s well-known poem, ‘The Great City’.3 With a bow to Whitman and Ashbee, Moholy-Nagy stated that the tendency to solve the city’s problems by moving away from it would amount to nothing. It was clear to her that there are and forever will be congenital city dwellers and congenital country dwellers and no amount of sanitation in the broadest meaning of the word – sanitation of the soul and the body, so to speak – will make a country dweller out of a city dweller. There are millions of Americans, who, in spite of regional planning and House Beautiful, do not enjoy being Sunday ushers or Elk presidents, who are bored by bridge and group television, and who do not want to bake cookies for the benefit of Girl Scouts. They hide behind the cold impersonality of a numbered apartment door not sinister tendencies, but the cherished right to be anonymous.4

She brought to mind the medieval German proverb Stadtluft macht frei (city air is liberating), stressing that it was in the city that individualists among all classes could find a place where they could live according to their own preferences, a place that offered more than mere sanitation and real estate values, a place where authorities could be challenged and social norms questioned. Her interest in the collective and urban dimension of architecture thus was already apparent in her work of the 1950s, informing some of the material in Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (especially where she dealt with the complementarity between public buildings and standard houses).5 It was also one of the key drivers in the criticism of modernist architecture that she developed throughout the 1950s and the 1960s. Gradually, the urban theme gained more importance in her work, eventually culminating in the book Matrix of Man.6

Urban planning in Latin America The study trip to Latin America she undertook in 1959 was also meant to study urban planning. As we saw already, she visited Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, which was then under construction, and was rather dismissive of what she observed.7 According to her, Brasilia lacked urban qualities, because of the vastness of its scale. The buildings by Niemeyer published thus far in the American press – the hotel, presidential palace and chapel – might be interesting in themselves, but they were separated from the city centre by vast stretches of land. The monumental axis, designed by Lúcio Costa as the symbolic carrier of the city’s public significance, was much too wide to allow for easy communication between the buildings on both sides (Figure 4.1). She missed a connection with the surrounding landscape,

FIGURE 4.1 Brasilia under construction in 1959. The monumental axis.

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and thought that the concrete and glass of the modernist buildings without air conditioning were a wrong choice in a tropical climate. She repeated this harsh judgement even more strongly in a 1961 article that discussed Brasilia and Canberra.8 Whereas Walter Griffin had, according to her, taken his clue for Canberra from the 1666 plan by Christopher Wren for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, Costa’s plan for Brasilia took up an even older tradition: his basic gesture of the crossing of two axes brought to mind the Roman cardo et decumanus system. It repeated the basic figure of Versailles and Washington, DC, which aimed at glorifying the seat of government by approaching it along a monumental triumphal way. This seemed to her at odds with Costa’s professed debt to CIAM and Le Corbusier, which rather opted for standardization and equalization. These features are nevertheless also there in Brasilia, where thirty thousand are herded together in identical minimum-standard superblocks, strung along public thoroughfares, without sub-cores or intermittent parks. Even the paralyzing flower-decked gentility of Canberra seems preferrable [sic] to this contempt for individuality and visual stimulus.9 To her, both cities were unattractive as national capitals because they did not succeed as vibrant dwelling places of a cohesive citizenry. She saw several reasons for this, among them the lack of commercial and market forces that she thought should normally underpin the thriving of a city. In both cases, moreover, she considered the architectural homogeneity of the whole set-up detrimental, since the dictatorship of one architectural conviction produced strait jackets rather than fostering diversity. Whereas Brasilia was a disappointment to her, there was much in her Latin American trip that she found inspiring. She was greatly impressed by her visit to Machu Picchu, an image of which prominently figured on the first page of her article ‘Some Aspects of South American Planning’.10 She thought Machu Picchu taught a lesson of respect for the environment that continued to be relevant. Latin America first of all seemed to be a region full of contradictions and strong emotions. Architects and planners needed to deal with these, and they did so in different ways: There are those who accept and love the paradoxes of their country, who are trying to balance man and nature on the fulcrum of their design. They are, to use an old cliché, the regionalists. The others are the universalists, who define architecture as manmade environment, deliberately planned on intellectual and technological resources, only.11 The regionalists sided with Frank Lloyd Wright, the universalists with Mies van der Rohe. They thus continued to choose sides in the old dilemma ‘between

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environmental submission and environmental protest’, which had been forced upon these countries from the very beginning. The Inca planners opted for site integration and a maximum utilization of given features, as could be seen in Machu Picchu, where they provided ‘a kaleidoscopic experience of the overwhelming mountain setting’ (Figure 4.2). The Mayan peoples, on the other hand, relied upon their intellect and artistic genius to build inward facing complexes with important civic spaces based on a rhythmic sequence of courts and interrelated spaces, as could be gathered from the site of Uxmal in Yucatan (Mexico) (Figure 4.3). When the Spanish came, they destroyed these old

FIGURE 4.2 View of Machu Picchu.

FIGURE 4.3 Uxmal, Mexico.

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civilizations, but learnt from them regarding urban planning. The Law of the Indies, which regulated the building of colonial cities, specified a lot, but still many cities showed real imagination within that established pattern. There were some cities, such as Antigua in Guatemala, that were very responsive to their environment in their layout. Others seemed to deny that they were anywhere else but in Spain, closing themselves off from the surrounding landscape. The most recent import, however, which included modernist planning ideas, induced a deterioration in the ability to work with the landscape. Technological planning, uncritically based on Corbusian recipes, caused havoc, not only because of the innumerable skyscrapers often left unfinished but also because of unsurmountable problems of traffic congestion. Cities such as Sao Paolo (Brazil) or Caracas (Venezuela) unfortunately showed the destructive impact of these modernist scenarios. Moholy-Nagy finished this article by blaming the modernist planners of South America for not having succeeded in ‘striking a balance between man and his environment’.12 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy developed several themes in these writings that would continue to hold her attention in the subsequent years. There is first of all her regard for geographical and climatological conditions and for the landscape – an issue she already focused on in Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture.13 A second theme is the importance of urban history both in terms of precedents for new urban plans such as that of Brasilia and in terms of actual developments of specific cities such as Caracas. She delved deeply into the history of Latin American cities, studying Pre-Columbian sites as well as Spanish colonial legislations and plans. For her, the current city could only be understood as the result of complex historical processes of formation, and she blamed modernist urban planners for demolishing historical city parts to make way for traffic infrastructure. A third theme she addressed was how cities were not just the result of governmental decisions and urban planning, but were also influenced by economic forces and a multitude of individual decisions which provided the life blood of vital and thriving cities. The freedom of individual citizens, who should have different options for their own way of living while at the same time being proud of the collective environment, is key to her. The latter feature of the great city could be ensured only by the architect, since he was a crucial factor in the design of civic buildings and collective environments one could take pride in. As she declared in her article on Canberra and Brasilia: It is the task of the planner to isolate the physical factors and social interactions that characterize the present and future survival of a community, but it is the architect who transmits that which is characteristically human in human settlements. There is nothing metaphysical or dogmatic about architectural humanism. In the building of cities it is the attempt to strike a balance between an individual and a collective environment.14

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Neighbourhoods, housing and public buildings Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Moholy-Nagy built up her understanding of the city and the role architecture played in it. She undertook a first in-depth research on these topics in her analysis of the Lafayette Park project of Mies and Ludwig Hilberseimer in Detroit.15 Nowadays this project is praised as a well-designed urban neighbourhood offering exceptional liveability for a diverse population (Figure 4.4).16 Back in the day, however, it was far more controversial – and for good reasons. Moholy-Nagy structured her article according to four guiding questions: 1 What is an urban neighbourhood? 2 For whom is it built and by whom is it financed? 3 Which dwelling types are preferable in urban renewal projects? 4 What is the role of the architect?17

She answered the first question by stating that an urban neighbourhood should be a clearly recognizable part of the city, preferably visually identified by a central plaza that acted as a civic centre and that provided the main channel of communication (this is exactly what she earlier thought missing in Brasilia’s superblocks). For her the Lafayette Park project did not offer such a clearly defined neighbourhood, because its central park feature (welcome in itself) made up for a confusion between suburb and city (because only few houses directly related to it, and it did not offer a focal point of identification).

FIGURE 4.4 Lafayette Park, Detroit, in 2014, designers Mies van der Rohe and Hilberseimer.

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Her second question – which was only rarely addressed in architectural magazines– was the most important for her critical appraisal. She had dug up sociological reports and analyses, and was thus well informed about the whole planning process that led up to the actual construction of Lafayette Park. The construction site was located in a former slum area, where ‘1953 Negro families’ had been obliged to leave their houses to enable clearance. The black families were never given alternative housing, while the public housing built on part of the site was mostly leased to white families. The private developers who constructed the rest of the project opted for housing types meant for higher-income families. Hence the declared intention of the city to construct a racially integrated neighbourhood was belied by a project that was realized within a de facto for-profit-development: The answer to the question of whom urban renewal builds for, and who finances it, is given then in Lafayette Park. It serves the upper-middle and high income groups (who by their financial independence are least in need of public assistance), and it condemns many thousands of citizens to become either welfare cases or cram into existing low rent ‘grey’ or slum dwellings. It is interesting to note that those dislodged families who were not eligible for public housing or could not purchase their own houses now live within a twomile radius of the cleared area that has sprouted a mirage of villas in the slums. Under Title I the elegant result of a public wrangle, involving the labors of publicly-financed agencies over a period of 12 years, is paid two-thirds by the Federal Government and one-third by the City, meaning in both cases by the taxpayer – white and Negro, laborer as well as executive.18 As to the dwelling type in urban renewal projects, she thought that the preference for family housing was ill-founded, since cities should also cater to single residents. Families fared best with flexible ground plans with their own outdoor spaces, but these conditions were not met by Mies’s design. The tower apartments were cramped and illogical, and the town houses combined visual nudism with acoustic exposure. The design therefore was ‘a failure’ to her.19 Whereas other architects had done better in similar circumstances (she mentioned projects by I. M. Pei and by Harry Weese in Chicago), such failures nevertheless were quasi-integral to the set-up of urban renewal processes. These processes confronted professionals with unsurmountable dilemmas: Just as the dilemma of the developer lies between the social character of mass housing which is unprofitable and his commitment to the spoils of Free Enterprise, so the architect’s dilemma lies in his quest for self-expression and attention-getting originality on the one hand and the creation of a characteristic, regionally satisfying neighborhood. This specific character makes or breaks urban renewal from a humanistic and a historical viewpoint and it can only be achieved through a sort of hidden creativeness in the design.20

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The role of the architect was thus, according to her, crucial, although the mechanisms of urban renewal were such that he barely had the elbow room to adequately deal with these responsibilities. Moholy-Nagy’s analysis adopted such a critical tone that she could not get it published in one of the major American architectural journals of the time – which all held Mies in high regard. She thus was obliged to turn to a Canadian one to have it see the light of the day.21 What she did here was rare indeed – certainly at the time: she made a connection between architectural analysis and sociological questions, thus effectively questioning and challenging the socially disruptive aspects of the project. Whereas she might have been overly harsh in her criticism of the actual design features of the project, it cannot be denied that she was spot on when she questioned the use of public money to facilitate a process that ultimately benefited developers and new middle-class residents, while pushing out lowerincome groups. She also was right in addressing the role of the architect and in underscoring the crucial responsibility of design. She understood quite well that sometimes designs could be architecturally delightful while still contributing to negative effects on a higher level. In a book review of Victor Gruen and Larry Smith’s Shopping Town, U.S.A., she pointed out that, regardless of the architectural qualities of Gruen’s designs, shopping centres still had a destructive effect on local cores: By killing off all local trade, shopping centers are preventing the development of any civic cores in the new satellite towns of America. The traditional square (which gives identity to a community) functions through stores, restaurants, professional offices, etc., all of which depend on each other for the attraction of crowds. The shopping center channels off this congregational instinct. … Then there is the decay of the city core.22 This critical approach was unnecessary, since she was supposed to review a book that did not address such larger questions, but merely documented the rich array of well-designed shopping centres coming from Gruen’s office. She nevertheless used this opportunity to make a point about overall urban developments that she thought detrimental for the well-being of cities and for the cohesiveness of a broad citizenship. The interplay between public and private buildings constituted for her a core feature of interesting urbanity. This could already be seen in her comments on a Presbyterian church and parsonage in New Milford, Connecticut (Figure 4.5), which she documented in her 1957 Native Genius of Anonymous Architecture: The Meeting Houses of New England are as abstractly uniform as the Saltboxes. The arresting charm in this particular example comes from a physically and symbolically stated contrast to the parsonage. … The men of New England,

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FIGURE 4.5 Church and parsonage in New Milford, Connecticut, where Sibyl MoholyNagy had her summer cottage.

passing through the white clarity of their [church’s] porticoed halls, entered into the Protestant ideal of ‘a free association of free citizens, met without summons’ … . The parsonage [on the other hand] was outside this symbolism, whether spiritual or esthetic. It was a worldly affair, dedicated to service and well-being. There was no need to deviate from the standard house type that had developed from the 18th century.23 Public buildings, according to Moholy-Nagy, should be invested with dignity and symbolic meaning, testifying to their importance as bearers of collective identity. Their architecture should therefore be different from the housing that constituted the bulk of the city’s material fabric, and that provided a neutral background for the focal public buildings that rightfully demanded attention.24 Public buildings formed a core component of any vital city, which was for her the reason why the discipline of city planning should never be disconnected from architecture. She took several of these points up again in an article discussing urban renewal projects for Philadelphia.25 She confirmed that ‘the old cores of cities cannot be heartlessly destroyed without destroying the heart’, adding that ‘this heart can only function well if all citizens are adequately housed’.26 This meant to her that old typologies such as townhouses could not just be reinterpreted and built anew, since they did not provide high enough densities to make such housing affordable.

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Neither were residential skyscrapers a good solution, since they were out of context and had too much visual impact on the historical core. She advocated therefore the use of ‘the third alternative – medium rise residential blocks arranged around communal green spaces’, pointing to European examples such as Vällingby, which provided domestic expediency as well as a sense of urbanity. Architects and planners should learn from eighteenth-century cities, such as Philadelphia, to strike the right balance between the virtues of adequate housing, on the one hand, and the glory of public buildings, on the other.

The four environments of man At Pratt, Moholy-Nagy taught not only conventional architectural history courses but also a graduate course called ‘History of Architecture – Study of Human Settlements’.27 This is probably where she started working on the history of cities across the world – a study which would ultimately lead to the publication of Matrix of Man.28 In anticipation of this book, she published two articles which provided early versions of several of the arguments she would further develop in the book.29 Significantly these articles were published in Landscape: Magazine of Human Geography, a journal started in 1951 by John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996), who remained its editor-in-chief until 1968.30 Landscape was seen by Jackson as a human artefact, as the product of humankind’s effort to shape the earth’s surface according to his ideals. With his interest in vernacular landscapes and ordinary buildings, Jackson was a keen critic of the Modern Movement in architecture. He gathered around him many talented authors, who shared his sensibilities – among them other critics of modernism such as Lewis Mumford and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy’s first Landscape article, ‘Four Environments of Man’, introduced four basic categories of man-made environments, which would later be expanded in Matrix of Man. They were distinguished according to their physical shape. Geomorphic communities, the first category, were determined by their position in the landscape. They had an organic structure and were based upon an interaction with the topography and the climatic conditions of the site. They were typical for rural environments, where the interaction with nature was paramount: ‘Seeding, harvesting, storing, preserving are part of an organic cycle that is invariable and endlessly repetitive … geomorphic environment is static, uniform, and nonhierarchical.’31 The second category she mentioned were concentric settlements. They came forth from a different lineage, since they fostered individualism rather than collectivism. The concentric plan was based upon the symbolic identification of each citizen with the temenos, the sacred centre devoted to the gods. MoholyNagy contrasted organic village society, which ‘had celebrated its own power to force nature into human sustenance by worshipping its sources of supply’ to the concentric city, which spoke of ‘a single-focused urban society’, which ‘invented

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the invisible arbitrator, hovering axially above his own territorial realm whose destiny was unrelated to other realms claiming different leadership prototypes for cosmological protection’.32 The third type of environment in her scheme was orthogonal. The orthogonal city derived from a shift in focus: the monumental building in the centre of concentric settlements gave way to the monumental road which had to be fed by a network of access roads. The orthogonal city was thus the city of merchants, where lines of communication and trade were the most important elements. Some versions of the orthogonal city, such as the Roman cities, were based on modules and grids, and those spoke of coercive powers. In general, however, she saw the orthogonal city as balanced, shaped by an alliance between imperialistic forces and the merchant classes. The final category was that of clustered environments. She introduced these ex-urban and regional environments by referring to Brasilia, which, she claimed here, was a failed orthogonal city, formed of only splinters of the urban unit, without contributing to its environmental order. Clustered environments, according to her, were dependent upon a city for all aspects of their existence, but did not contribute to its vitality. In the twentieth century they unfortunately started to gain an importance that might be decisive for the death or life of great cities. The cluster invaded the urban body like a cancer disrupting the continuity of street elevations and plazas with welfare housing ghettos which turn their bare backsides to the community and hold a piece of tattered lawn in front to hide their ugliness.33 She concluded the article by calling for a potential synthesis of the four environments of man, as the task awaiting architects and urban designers. They should understand that ‘modern life is urban, and only tightly maintained urban contact can save half our population from turning into sub-urban village idiots’.34 They should therefore respect the importance of roads, rather than highways, as lines of communication that allow for the transition between the individual and the collective. The factors that determine man’s relation with his environment did not fundamentally change during the last century – hence she thought historical continuity in city shaping much more crucial than any technocratic progress in mechanical equipment. Moholy-Nagy understood ‘environment’ not in the ecological sense that is dominant today. For her, as for Jackson, ‘human environment’ was per definition an artefact, generated by the human desire to carve out an existence from the earth. There is a clear sense in ‘the four environments of man’ that she considered respect for the organic qualities of nature and of life absolutely necessary, and that this should be the basis of the further development of human settlements. Moholy-Nagy’s anti-technocratic outlook was firmly established in the second article in Landscape, entitled ‘On the Environmental Brink’ (1968).35 The article

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started with a diatribe against the computer, and against Warren M. Brodey, a MIT-based psychiatrist and sociologist who had written an article on ‘soft architecture’ in a previous issue of Landscape.36 This article, which occasionally is still referenced today in essays on domotica or smart architecture, presented a thought experiment in which cybernetics and feedback loops would have been developed to such an extent that man’s environment would respond in an intelligent way to its occupants’ individual and momentous needs. Humans would thus, thanks to the computer, be surrounded by pliable, intelligent, self-organizing and evolutionary systems, which would be connected to their occupants in an artificial, continuous-feedback-generating man-machine loop, which Brodey dubbed ‘soft architecture’. The very idea of ‘soft architecture’ apparently was absolute horror to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. She called the computer America’s deus ex machina, which was believed to be the final trump card in the country’s competition with the old world. The effects of it, when applied to architecture and planning, would be disastrous, because it would make humans part of a system the only teleology of which would be utter efficiency. She saw this attempt to technologize the home and the city as part of a systematic destruction of the man-made environment understood as architecture. This destruction started, according to her, with industrialized building in the nineteenth century, was proliferated by ‘Bauhaus Functionalism’ in the first half of the twentieth century and was now reaching an apogee with the calls for a post-architectural perfect environment. That was the point at which a destructive analogy was useful: The destructive analogy of a computer-controlled environment is with the Fascist systems many of us have observed in full action. It is the same raw drive for power over the lives of the multitude that produces the political dictator and the environmental system-maker. It makes no difference whether the Central Control is called Gestapo, Central Intelligence Agency, or Self-organizing, Computerbased Man-Machine System. The common denominator is the reduction of personality to ‘a stabilized input-output pattern’ that erodes vitality.37 The hopeful obstacle, she claimed in the concluding section of the essay, to this disastrous evolution was ‘woman’. Women would continue to give birth to children with unaltered biological and psychological characteristics, which would learn the path to self-realization in designed environments made by them. They would continue to play the fostering and protecting role of the old goddesses. She recalled a couple of these. First there was the Palaeolithic mother goddess of the earth, idol of chthonic fecundity and represented by the Greek goddess Demeter. After her deposition, she was replaced by ‘Tyche, the Fortuna Redux of safe return’, at whose feet the Greeks put the spoils of conquest and whose head they crowned with a mural crown representing urban success (Figure 4.6). These goddesses stood in for a long lineage of women who resisted the reduction of city life to efficiency, for

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FIGURE 4.6 ‘Fortuna Redux, the Tyche of Antioch, presided over the birth of the worldly metropolis in the Hellenistic Age, just as the Venus of Willendorf – whose outline looms behind her – presided over the birth of the geomorphic village community’, Figure 103 in Matrix of Man. The image also appeared in Landscape. The caption is quoted from the latter source.

woman is an old practitioner of ‘relatively unformalized synthetic reasoning and stimulation’ by which to maintain her supremacy as the maker of the individualized environment – for loving, working, learning, playing, healing. It is she for whom the architectural matrix of the human collective has been designed. … Only her staying power can prevent the turn of the screw that programs men into morons, and a national symbol – the computer – into a world menace.38 In this article Sibyl Moholy-Nagy thus clearly articulated a gendered awareness in her understanding of the city and the human environment. She positioned science and technology as based on masculine values that were imperialist, coercive and dominating, contrasting them with life-giving and nurturing forces associated with women and femininity. She used this gendered awareness to advocate the balancing out of masculine and feminine values, positioning women and femininity as counterbalancing forces to technocratic desires for control and mastery, purely based upon rationality, functionalism and computerized management. A similar logic is at work – although rather more implicitly – in her 1968 volume Matrix of Man.39

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Matrix of Man The title Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment was chosen in a rather late stage in the development of the manuscript; its first title was A History of Urban Origins.40 Matrix is appropriate since she treats the city as a generative force, capable of moulding people and civilizations, bringing forth creative energies and interconnectedness, with Rome as the utmost example (‘the city above other cities, the primordial urban matrix upon which all civilization had to shape itself ’41). Moholy-Nagy had long had a certain predilection for the term ‘matrix’, a word that is neither so commonly used in everyday language nor among architectural historians. The term appeared in her 1945 novel Children’s Children,42 and again in 1958, in the article ‘Steel, Stocks, and Private Man’, where she stated that it was ‘the obligation of the architect … to see himself not only as the builder of technological monuments but [also] as the keeper of the matrix in which each individual being is cast’.43 She further elaborated in this book her scorn for all those who sought recourse in science and technology to solve the city’s problems. The introduction stated clearly: The technocratic illusion that man-made environment can ever be the image of a permanent scientific order is blind to the historical evidence that cities are governed by tacit agreement on multiplicity, contradiction, tenacious tradition, reckless progress and a limitless tolerance for individual values.44 She sharply condemned the likes of engineers and architects such as Constantinos Doxiadis or Richard Buckminster Fuller who thought they could reinvent the human environment on the basis of science and technology and nothing else. She lashed out especially against Archigram’s Plug-In city (1964) (Figure 4.7), which she acerbically described in the caption as a quasi-fascist system: Plug-in City, developed by Chalk and Herron of the British Archigram group. The similarity between fascist systems – which subject each individual to the brutalizing regimentation of centralized dictatorship – and a computercontrolled environment system makes Orwell’s 1984 look positively humanistic.45 Moholy-Nagy used the formal categories described in ‘Four Environments’ to more or less structure the book – a construction which in all likelihood inspired also later books such as Spiro Kostof ’s The City Shaped.46 In Matrix of Man MoholyNagy expanded the four categories into five patterns that formed the Gestalt of cities: geomorphic, concentric, orthogonal-connective, orthogonal-modular and clusters. The book was abundantly illustrated, and its most salient feature is the juxtaposition of images and captions which in themselves brought forward

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FIGURE 4.7 Archigram, Plug-in City, as depicted in Matrix of Man.

a version of the overall argument. The first chapter dealt with geomorphic and concentric environments. Now she could give many more examples than in the Landscape article. Geomorphic patterns, responding to the shape of their natural environment, were according to her typical of the most ancient traditions, and could be found in many places where rural civilizations took hold. Copper Age fortresses and Celtic strongholds belonged to this category, as did the Inca holy city of Machu Picchu, which ‘achieves a total accord with the given environment because the sun worshipers conceived the city as a crown of nature, and nature as the crown of the city’.47 This geomorphic pattern lived on in many instances where architectural designs interacted with topographical features such as mountain ranges or island conditions. The Ancient Greek theatre at Delphi thus kept company on the same page with the Spanish Steps in Rome, designed in 1721, and a formally similar set of steps found in the archaeological site of the Syrian Carchemish (Figure 4.8).48 She thought this geomorphic approach also informed Bruno Taut’s Stadtkrone (1919) as well as very recent designs for hill resorts by Paul Rudolph in New Haven or by Bruce Graham and Norman Jaffe in Vermont. Concentric settlements came forth from a commitment to a suprahumane ideal, from a tradition that conceived of the urban form as the superimage of the ideal self. The concentric city offered an image of power, from which the influence of its ruler radiated over a vaster area. Moholy-Nagy quoted Mumford here, who declared that ‘every feature of the early city revealed the belief that man was

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FIGURE 4.8 Moholy-Nagy compared the ‘sophisticated Spanish Steps in Rome, from 1721 (A)’ with an ‘almost similar solution 3,500 years earlier in Syrian Carchemish (B)’.

created for no other purpose than to magnify and serve his gods. That was the city’s ultimate reason for being.’49 She ironically connected this statement with the many acts of violence and destruction, carried out in the name of specific gods, which showed that cities owed their very existence to ‘sheer power obsession’.50 At the same time she modified this observation by pointing towards the importance of trade, adding a world map which showed that the 36 largest metropoles of the world (in 1968) were located on coasts or major waterways.51 Examples she gave of concentric settlements ranged from ancient Sumeria and Mesopotamia, over the Indian town of Palitana and the Maya city of Uxmal in Mexico, to medieval European cities built around a cathedral and Renaissance ideal cities (Figure 4.9). More recently this tradition impacted, for example, Ebenezer Howard’s proposal for garden cities surrounding a central metropolis. Like before, she stressed that the urban qualities of this concentric pattern derived from the interaction between public buildings and the more humble constructions that form their background. The second chapter introduced the ‘orthogonal environment’. Proto-orthogonal concepts were found in Ancient Egypt or Babylon, and were inspired by the transition from self-sufficient city states (heralding the concentric model) towards imperia. Many of these cities however disappeared without a trace, since their housing stock was not made of durable materials, in contrast with religious and ceremonial buildings. She nevertheless illustrated these proto-orthogonal cities with examples such as Amarna in Egypt (New Kingdom, fourteenth century BC) and plans of palaces and urban sectors in Babylon. The third chapter, called ‘The Greek Wave’, studied how the orthogonal pattern was further developed in ancient Greece. Moholy-Nagy gave a prominent role to Alexander the Great, since he was the one who conceived of a new ideal – the

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FIGURE 4.9 ‘Cracow in the fourteenth century. This concentric city intelligently combines three factors: the slope, the river, and the central power symbol of the castle summit’.

cosmopolis, the universal city – where men could live regardless of race or creed, governed not by one specific religion, but by ethics, the mutual agreement of right conduct. Alexander founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt, the orthogonal plan of which was designed by the Macedonian architect Dinocrates in 331 BC. The knowledge of urban planning culminated in the acropolis of Pergamon, built mainly during the second century BC, which she described as ‘a summary of 3000 years of city planning: geomorphic in its site adjustment, concentric in the focal emphasis on the theatre … and orthogonal-linear in the succession of squared temeni’ (Figure 4.10).52 A further successful example she found was in the city of Antioch, planned in the second century AD, whose symbol was the Fortuna Redux, the Tyche of Antioch, who guaranteed safe return from foreign ventures. She reused here the double image of Fortuna Redux depicted against the silhouette of Demeter, which also figured in ‘On the Environmental Brink’ (Figure 4.6).53 Julius Caesar, who had enjoyed the qualities of Hellenist city planning ‘on his days off from Cleopatra’s couch in Alexandria’,54 was the one who brought its principles to Rome. The basic concepts he tried to transplant were: 1. A hierarchy of street functions as structural system of the city … the multispaced place that offers purpose, diversion, and sustenance to all. 2. Designed building relationships, aiming at perceptional unity in the diversity of urban functions; the architectural definition of public spaces, the willed singularity of public monumentality. 3. Change in grade and scale through steps, ramps, terraces, raised and lowered points of art, fountains, planting; perceptive discovery as neutralization of orthogonal linearity.55

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FIGURE 4.10 ‘The acropolis of Pergamon’, built mainly during the second century BC. It is a summary of 3,000 years of city planning: geomorphic in its site adjustment, concentric in the focal emphasis on the theatre – whose hemicycle connects the upper and lower city – and orthogonal-linear in the succession of squared temeni. Each has its own focal point but is connected with the whole plan through the mountain terrace and a principle road’.

Caesar’s attempt to bring Hellenism to Rome was not completely successful, however, because Rome’s hilly topography wasn’t very compatible with an orthogonal grid. Nevertheless, the fourth chapter, ‘The Orbit of Rome’, aimed at tracing the worldwide impact of Hellenism through the spectre of Rome. It started with discussing the actual urbanism of Ancient Rome, using Piranesi’s famous engraving of the Campus Martius. Moholy-Nagy argued that Rome’s energies went into magnificent buildings rather than urban spaces – pointing to Trajan’s Market, designed by Appolodorus of Damascus, ‘the first shopping center in history’ (she depicted it alongside an interior image of a shopping centre by Victor Gruen in Milwaukee) (Figure 4.11).56 It was only much later, during the Renaissance and the baroque, that the city builders of Rome reconnected with Hellenistic principles and magnified the city

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FIGURE 4.11 (a) ‘Interior of the Mercato, the shopping center Apollodorus laid like a necklace around one of the apses of Trajan’s Forum’. (b) ‘Interior of a Milwaukee shopping center (Victor Gruen Associates, architects), built in 1961, which is different in materials but identical in concept and function with its Roman predecessor’.

through grandiose avenues and squares. This was the tradition that consecutively was embraced by many city planners worldwide, giving rise to urban plans such as those of Washington, DC (Pierre Charles L’Enfant), Paris (Baron Haussmann), Delhi (Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker) or Brasilia (Lúcio Costa).

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The modular grid plan was another legacy of the orbit of Rome. It also had very ancient precedents and equivalents in China, in the Indus Valley, in Persia, in Egypt and in Pre-Columbian America. The orthogonal-modular plan displayed the military logic of Roman camps. In this case, streets were less lines of communication than dividers of lots, and public spaces were not designed environments but voids between housing modules. ‘In contrast to the other types of urban foundations’, Moholy-Nagy stated, ‘the modular grid plan is not generated from within the community but is predetermined from without. To the genesis of urban intentions from rural (geomorphic) to cosmological (concentric) to ecumenical (orthogonalconnective), the modular grid adds a coercive concept, whether political or religiously motivated, imposing on plan, building and inhabitant the same predetermined dimensions’.57 This type of plan became the guiding principle for the planning of American towns, through the Land Ordinance that was passed by the Continental Congress in 1785. This ‘mandate of Rome’ was taken up also by CIAM, which dedicated its efforts to ‘an elimination of all architectural frivolity and to the application of a scientific urban order’.58 The fifth chapter was entitled ‘Orthogonal Variations: The Linear Merchant Cities’. These orthogonal-connective cities were based on a desire for communication and very much linked to the impact of merchants who see the city as a place for commerce and communication. This type of plan, according to the author, ‘gained ascendance over all other planning concepts because it offered participation in the drive for power to the majority’.59 This type of city was not the power symbol for a monarch, nor did it solely derive from the most profitable allotment of the land. It rather fused architecture, communication and real estate values into a self-conscious expression of an open, outside-oriented community. She discussed medieval European cities such as Zürich or Cologne under this heading, but the bulk of the chapter was devoted to American cities. New York received ample attention, as well as Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. In general, she discussed the urban plans of these cities very positively, especially the ones from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The advent of the automobile in the twentieth century, however, changed things: The automobile had come and conquered, and the orthogonal-linear merchant city – living by architecturally-expressed street communication, human exchange, and environmental economical hierarchies – had started to decline.60 The decline of urban living was fostered also by the youngest city pattern – clusters – the topic of the sixth chapter (‘Clusters and the End of Origins’). The whole idea of clusters, and by extension the idea of satellite development, was anti-urban and tended to isolate certain social groups. ‘City satellites’, she stated, ‘are clusters of buildings that belong neither to the city nor to the village, partaking of the open land and vestiges of nature, but dependent on an imitation of city life for survival’.61

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She thus denounced the environmental ideals of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin, and the modernist urbanism that followed their suit. Most disastrous, she thought, was the influence of Le Corbusier’s work as a city planner, especially in his conception of the Unité d’Habitation (Figure 4.12). The target of Le Corbusier was the liquidation of the city as a compound social and architectural entity. Throughout his professional life, he worked tirelessly on the elimination of the ligaments that held the urban body together.62 Modernist city planning thus did not meet with her approval, because it was either inspired by the imperious tradition of the Roman camp (orthogonal-modular) or by the anti-urban cluster logic. In both cases, it was not capable of guaranteeing the vibrancy and the sense of identification that she thought essential for real urbanity. Her criticism of modernist city planning was spelled out along several lines. First, she claimed that the idea of clusters was dissolving the city as such. Second, she thought that many visionary architects – and especially Le Corbusier – attributed a suprahuman power to themselves as matrix makers for the common men and thus ignored the rightful claims of citizens to be involved in the making of their city. Third, she argued that there was a distinction between traffic (just transport) and communication (interconnection through streets and plazas), and that the CIAMdoctrine took traffic into account without paying attention to communication.

FIGURE 4.12 ‘Le Corbusier’s Marseille block demonstrates the effective contrast between a gridiron modularity in plan and elevation and the sculptural imagination of the “artificial earth” of the roof garden’.

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Her idea of the city as a matrix thus encompassed many aspects of urbanism and civic culture. It had to do with the historical evolution of cities, where different forces interacted with one another to mould a rich and interconnecting urban fabric, punctuated with public buildings that citizens could be proud of. Political powers, governmental agencies, religious institutions, civic organizations, commercial entrepreneurs and ordinary residents all had to play their part to enrich and differentiate the city’s complex physical and social reality. In this interplay of forces, the role of the architect certainly was not a minor one.

In defence of architecture A continuous feature of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s writings on architecture and the city was her regard for the role of the architect as form-giver. She was convinced that this form-giving should be done on the level of buildings rather than neighbourhoods or whole cities, and she insisted that a worthwhile city could not exist without the contribution of architects for the design of public buildings capable of embodying the collective identity of the citizens. She had repeatedly taken up this theme before the publication of Matrix of Man. She explicitly addressed it for the first time in a 1961 article entitled ‘Of Planners and Primadonnas’.63 Here she deplored the tendency towards ‘over-all planning’ and the ‘lure to accept “total environment” as the architectural task of the future’.64 She advocated the ‘distinctly separate roles of architect and planner’, arguing that it was ‘the task of the planner to supply the collective groundwork for society’ (i.e. to think in terms of land use and density), whereas it was ‘the destiny of the architect to protect and enhance the singularity of each citizen through the walledin matrix against the executive pressure of the community’.65 She thus implied that it was the task of architecture to counteract the levelling and homogenizing forces that resulted from dominant social conventions – a theme which resonated with the lines of Walt Whitman’s poem ‘The Great City’ that she quoted in her 1954 declaration of love for the city: Where the city stands that is beloved by these, And loves them in return and understands them – Where outside authority enters after the precedence of inside authority Where the citizen is always head and ideal.66 She also brought this conviction to the fore in her discussion of Jane Jacobs’s 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.67 One might have expected that she would have applauded Jacobs’s criticism of modernist urban planning, which in many respects came close to her own. This, however, was not the case and the reason had to do with what she considered Jacobs’s failure to recognize

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the importance of architecture. (The title of her review was, tellingly, ‘In Defense of Architecture’.)68 Whereas Jacobs considered the desire of the architect to turn the city into a work of art harmful to the city’s liveability, Moholy-Nagy held that the fate of Jacobs’s ‘happy sidewalk watchers’ was dependent first and foremost upon architectural tradition. She denounced Jacobs’s disdain for the architect, stating that it were precisely his ‘buildings as singular masterpieces, as functional servants, and as designed dwellings in inexhaustible variety’ that ‘proclaim a city rich or poor in vitality’. In vehement opposition to Jacobs, she argued that the architect’s contribution transcended everyday social life: To serve the city best, the architect must love his art more than the people. The mold he creates for their lives will only be beneficial if it fulfills an ideal standard that transcends their limited social experience. Man became man not only through his urge for survival, but [also] through his desire to create a beautiful environment. … Architecture, being non-scientific, noncategorical, and pragmatic, has been and remains man’s greatest tool to make this desire visible and viable.69 Similarly, she was very critical of Lewis Mumford’s bestselling The City in History, which also came out in 1961.70 The City in History was a lengthy interpretation of the nature of cities, covering their history from the Palaeolithic shrines and burial grounds over the female-oriented Neolithic villages and the maleoriented cities of warmongering kings in Mesopotamia, to democratic ancient Greece (a highpoint of civilization) and on to Roman cities (which became cities of excess), to medieval Europe and the cities of Renaissance and baroque, to end with a plea for the garden city. Moholy-Nagy, who was interested in the same archaeological and historical material, thought that Mumford was ‘interested neither in the organizational nor in the esthetic aspects of city planning. He is a MORALIST who uses the city as a vehicle to propagate his philosophy of life’.71 She granted him ‘superb diction’ and ‘a persuasive eloquence’, but fundamentally disagreed with many of his interpretations, blaming him for ‘exasperating subjectivity’ and for failing to provide legible illustrations. She also thought that it was monstruous to write a history of the city without a single reference to, or analysis of, its architectural realizations, without a single plan and without a careful analysis of the timeless as against the timebound solutions.72 Moholy-Nagy increasingly came to stress that planning could not do without architecture to the extent that she explicitly stated, in a 1964 article in Arts and Architecture, that city planning was inherently a design discipline and that planners should be architects first and planners second.73 Only with a background

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in architecture and architectural history would they be able to understand what the city was all about: A profession that postulates its education and its goals on a mechanistic interpretation of materialistic requirements, without reference to the collective memory of the community and the need of each individual to feel himself anchored in and justified by this memory, can only destroy, it cannot plan. And city planners, no matter how world famous, who postulate that ‘low-cost housing efforts may be more important than “big architecture” . . .’ (Doxiades) show a contempt for the aspirations of mankind that was unknown to any preceding culture.74 Throughout the 1960s she grew ever more critical of the path American planning was taking. In a 1969 article she explicitly declared an ‘urban crisis’.75 She described the situation as one in which different groups battled and blocked one another, making sure that no progress could be made. There was first of all the tension between municipalities, on the one hand, and federal agencies, on the other. Whereas the municipalities had the local knowledge and sometimes the historical sensitivity to propose sensible schemes, these were often blocked by federal funding that prioritized standard and cheap solutions. Second, there was the ‘deadly confrontation’ between ‘Citizen’s Advocacy Planners and the Scientific Systems Planners’: the advocacy planners following in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs, the systems planners in those of Buckminster Fuller.76 Although those tendencies had opposing views on how to make American cities liveable, they also shared a common denominator: ‘They simply ignored the rock foundation of the entire American system: the sanctity of private property.’77 It was the logic of the return on investment which made the cities unaffordable places to live, and which prompted the explosion of skyscraper projects that did nothing to enhance the quality of urban spaces (she explicitly mentioned here Marcel Breuer’s Grand Central Terminal project for New York, Minoro Yamasaki’s World Trade Towers in the same city, and the John Hancock Tower, designed by SOM, in Chicago). This urban crisis ultimately led to ‘the total exclusion of the architect from any practical solutions’, since it were planners, speculators and expressway engineers that dictated urban development. In stressing the importance of architecture and denouncing the merits of master planning, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy clearly took sides in the disciplinary battle focusing on the production of the city. She opposed the introduction of planning programmes in architectural schools (in so far as they did not prioritize design) and thought that architects were selling out by minimizing the import of design and maximizing the use of ‘scientific’ instruments and logics. Her ardent argumentations against advocacy planners as well as against technocrats were always devoted to the defence of architecture as a conceptual-pragmatic interaction

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with multiple inputs that could not be reduced to a simple algorithm. In the end, for her, ‘it is the ethical obligation of the architect-planner to be totally responsible for the physical matrix of society’.78 This is a mission that could be accomplished neither by planning on its own nor by an architectural profession disavowing its core competence – design. For her it clearly was the professional duty of architects to understand the historically crucial role of architecture in matrix making and to expand on this by claiming leadership in the future design of cities.

The urban condition The 1960s were a decade where the attention of architects and others turned to the city. It began with the publication of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, immediately followed by two acclaimed publications: Mumford’s The City in History, which was awarded the National Book Award, and Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which has been influential on many generations of urban planners.79 It was the decade in which Aldo Rossi wrote L’architettura della città, which saw Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown venture out to Las Vegas and which had Oswald Matthias Ungers starting his ‘laboratories on the city’ in Cornell and Berlin.80 It was also the decade in which Erwin A. Gutkind began his impressive series of volumes dedicated to the history of urban development in different parts of the world.81 There was indeed a growing awareness, in many places of the importance of the city, for mankind in general and for architecture in particular. Moholy-Nagy’s writings on the city are, on the one hand, completely immersed in this historical context, but on the other hand stand out as an idiosyncratic contribution that interconnected some of these threads while prying loose from some others. She was probably not very much aware of what Aldo Rossi was writing in Italy although she was through Bruno Zevi in contact with the Italian scene.82 Neither did she pay much attention to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, whose interest in commercial and popular culture she definitely did not share.83 Her contacts with Ungers were, as far as the available evidence tells us, limited to the years he spent in Cornell, where he only started teaching full-time as of 1969.84 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy paid tribute in Matrix of Man to a few other authors who had done work on the history of cities. In the (very limited) bibliographical section, she specifically pointed out the works of Gutkind, together with earlier works by Ernst Egli and Pierre Lavedan, as comprehensive surveys of the history of urbanism in various parts of the world.85 These surveys were written by architects and urbanists who had secured scholarly positions in prestigious research universities (Egli at the ETH Zürich, Gutkind at the University of Pennsylvania and Lavedan at the Sorbonne) and who were devoted to developing a scholarly tradition in the history of urbanism. Compared to their work, Moholy-Nagy’s book was not extremely well structured and somewhat rough around the edges. (It shows that she did

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not have a formal academic education.) Her arguments were often deliberately provocative rather than fine-tuned or subtle. She also used diffusionist ideas built upon visual analogies rather than on archaeological or other evidence of contact between remote cultures. A typical example is her juxtaposition between ‘a ShriYantra meditation pattern from Buddhist Ritual’, ‘a cabalistic sign on the main nave wall of the mosque at Kairouan, Magreb, Africa’ and the ‘central design by Michelangelo for the Campodoglio, Rome (1567)’, which all share a visual pattern but come from very distinct historical and geographical contexts (Figure 4.13).86 Although she did not imply in this specific case that there would have been any

FIGURE 4.13 ‘The influence of Eastern cosmology on sixteenth-century Renaissance concepts. A) A Shri-Yantra meditation pattern from Buddhist ritual. B) A cabalistic sign on the main nave wall of the mosque at Kairouan, Magreb, Africa. C) Central design by Michelangelo for the Campidoglio, Rome (1567)’.

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connection between these different contexts, she still used the visual analogy as an organizing device in developing her narrative. Her interest in archaeology had been increasing throughout her years of teaching. In Matrix of Man this interest became very evident not only in the bibliographical section but also in the sheer space she devoted to ancient cultures. Her treatment of ancient urban cultures thus took the overhand on dealing with contemporary challenges. This is consistent with the fact that she had initially been somewhat reluctant to address issues of urbanism. In a 1963 lecture for the Intercollegiate Conference on Urban Affairs, held at Long Island University, she expressed her discomfort with being invited to this event, since she was ‘neither an expert nor a believer in city planning’.87 She again quoted at length the Walt Whitman poem ‘Where The Big City Stands’ [sic], which, to her mind, adequately expressed the very chaos and heterogeneousness characteristic for city life. This poem likewise suggested to her that imposing regulations on urban development might only be harmful to these very qualities. Her experience in America, however, taught her that things were not so simple. American cities, she perceived, never reached the urban qualities of the historical European ones. She saw several reasons for this. First, there was the ‘managerial revolution’, consisting of a shift in the economy from private to corporate ownership, which brought with it that rich people no longer had a home town for which they felt responsible. Second, there was the ‘population explosion’, which necessitated suburban growth and the increase in automobility that had such a negative impact on city life. Third, she saw ‘urban renewal’, as it was at that time conducted under federal law, as a serious threat to the self-regulating powers of the city. She repeated here the arguments she had formulated already in her criticism of Lafayette Park: developers, enabled by legislation, could tear down entire quarters and build office towers or apartment towers, for which they could ask very high rents. In this way, the working middle-class was pushed out from the city, since they could no longer afford to live there. These three revolutions together formed a deadly menace to American cities, because, unlike their European or Latin American counterparts, these cities lacked a strong urban tradition based on their urban origin. According to Moholy-Nagy, ‘The trouble with the American city is the absence of an urban concept.’88 North American cities were not founded as such, but had been settled first on the basis of agriculture, and second on the basis of privateering – the main source of American wealth by the end of the sixteenth century. This, combined with the Protestant ethics that were so conducive for capitalism,89 resulted in cities where only few citizens felt responsible for the city as a whole. American capitalism moreover was oriented towards the multiplication of profit, rather than towards providing cultural or social services, and thus did not foster a lively urban setting. A final factor were the universities – many of them land-granted institutions built in the middle of nowhere, and thus not contributing to a civic urban culture either.

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After this harsh diagnosis, she also had a few suggestions to rectify the situation. First, she thought cities should have clear boundaries, and settlements near to them should organize themselves as towns and civic centres, rather than remain totally dependent on their large neighbour. Second, she proposed the installation in each major city of an autonomous committee of an independent architect, landscape architect, architectural historian and artist, who would look after the preservation of valuable historical property, and who would persuade new builders to invest in accordance with the best interests of the city. The next suggestion was that cities should have a standing committee on urban affairs staffed entirely by temporarily appointed citizens (not administrators), who would have a say in the city’s development. Lastly, she prompted universities to devote their energies towards the education for civic leadership, which was now dearly lacking. It is clear from this text that Moholy-Nagy did not seek answers to the urban crisis in the realm of planning or urban design, but rather in the realm of political arrangements of urban governance and in the fostering of a really civic culture. When she thus devoted her next major book to the study of the history of the city, it was not in order to formulate urban planning guidelines or recipes for the future. Her major objective in writing Matrix of Man was rather to study the origins of the city, in order to better grasp the concept of what a city could and should be. That is what is at stake in this book, but that was not necessarily how it was understood at the time. Whereas most reviewers were positive about the book,90 more than one expressed his disappointment that Matrix of Man didn’t seem to offer specific guidelines for future urban planning. It documented and described the historical developments of the city with much verve and wit, but did not carry this compelling rhetoric over into a well-formulated and clear strategy for the future. Moholy-Nagy indeed wrote more as an engaged historian than as a practice-oriented architect or planner. For people like Walter Segal or Paul Oliver, the book thus fell short when it came to really indicating which direction to go with urban planning. Walter Segal thought that ‘the centre of gravity of the study has shifted further backward than would allow for balance. … Technology gets less than fair attention and transport is hardly considered.’91 Paul Oliver assessed that ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy rightly chides Lewis Mumford for his pessimism and romantic nostalgia, but she is herself unable to come to terms with the imminent problems of the future’.92 The book’s visual appeal on the other hand was something that was repeatedly mentioned in its reception. Many reviewers of Matrix of Man commented favourably on the wealth of images that the book had to offer, recognizing it as a major effort to offer insight in the history of the city and admiring the breadth of its author’s knowledge. Ervin Galantay, an associate professor at Columbia University at the time, wrote the most damning reaction, ridiculing, in a review for Progressive Architecture, her ‘capricious mingling of archetypes’ and her championing of diffusionist theory.93 It is tempting to assume that Mololy-Nagy wrote Matrix of Man as a long-winded answer to both The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs) and The City

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in History (Mumford), books that she critically reviewed immediately after their appearance, as mentioned earlier.94 There were many elements in common between Moholy-Nagy’s criticism of modernist urbanism and planning and that of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford although, characteristically, she had no words of praise for either of their books. She blamed Jacobs for her disregard for architecture, while Mumford’s history of the city was condemned for its ‘exasperating subjectivity’ and for its scant use of illustrations. All three of them nevertheless shared a belief in the importance of the historical city; they thought the human scale was crucial for the liveability of cities and they insisted that variety and diversity were crucial ingredients of urban vitality. Mumford, moreover, like Moholy-Nagy, stressed the feminine qualities of the city and the need to restore them.95 Her own book significantly differed from the other two, especially with respect to the points she criticized in her book reviews. In contrast to Jacobs, Moholy-Nagy gave a central role to the architect as form-giver, mentioning many architects by name and pointing out how their contributions were essential for the qualities she perceived in the cities under discussion. In contrast to Mumford, her own work was constructed around the illustrations, which were very well researched and drove the narrative. The book (although in no way less ‘subjective’ than Mumford’s) thus fulfilled its promise as ‘An Illustrated History of Urban Environment’ – a feature which she had so dearly missed in Mumford’s earlier work. Just like Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, Matrix of Man was written to first of all appeal to an audience of architects and architectural students.96 As a textbook, it was much more convenient than the multivolume scholarly works of urban historians such as Gutkind, while the abundance of good-quality illustrations (sadly without adequate credit lines) certainly made it more easily digestible for that intended audience.97 The book was clearly a success in these terms, since it sold more than 5,000 copies during its first year in print and was translated in both German and Spanish.98 What was hardly considered in the book’s reception was Moholy-Nagy’s intellectual positioning, which, arguably, owed much to the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975).99 This, admittedly, was not something that was easily deductible from a simple reading of Matrix of Man. The book contained no overt references to Arendt and hence one cannot really blame the reviewers for not picking up on this. In hindsight, however, it is possible to consider Moholy-Nagy’s own claim about the influence of this philosopher, which she uttered in a letter that accompanied her dispatch of Matrix of Man as a gift to Arendt: Dear Hannah Arendt, the book you find herewith is something of an overelaborated fan letter. It just came out, and although it probably is outside your own interests, I take the opportunity in sending it to you to thank you for your many valuable and stimulating thoughts. I am especially moved by your analysis of Walter Benjamin. … Again: I have much to thank you for. Your Sibyl Moholy-Nagy.100

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Hannah Arendt acknowledged receiving the book and wrote some weeks later: Dear Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, I found your book only upon my return from Chicago. You have provided me with a very unusual kind of joy – it is indeed an ‘over-elaborated fan letter’. I would appreciate if we could meet and talk about Benjamin. Please call me … Hannah Arendt.101 Hannah Arendt’s thinking has variously been qualified as ‘reluctant modernism’ or ‘political humanism’.102 She was, like Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, an immigrant from Germany, and belonged to the same generation (Moholy-Nagy was born 1903, Arendt 1906). In contrast to Moholy-Nagy, Arendt, who came from a Jewish family, had been exposed to the full benefit of a university education, which comprised philosophy studies with Martin Heidegger in Marburg, Edmund Husserl in Freiburg and Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. As a Jew, Arendt’s experiences under Nazism were far worse than those of Moholy-Nagy, and her early years as a refugee in the United States were far from comfortable.103 She continued however to think and write, and gradually built a living for herself as a journalist and an academic. When the two women exchanged friendly letters in the 1960s, it was thus on the basis of a common German background and a somewhat similar trajectory in the United States. One of Arendt’s philosophical themes, to which she returned in several books, was the importance of the public realm. In her early book on Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833) she already explored this theme by investigating how Varnhagen’s salon acted as an alternative form of public sphere, one, according to Benhabib’s reading, ‘that is more egalitarian, fluid, experimental, and in which the lines between intimacy and sociability, the public and the private are renegotiated and resignified’.104 The public sphere was also a major topic in Arendt’s most influential work, The Human Condition, first published in 1958.105 In this book Arendt returned to ancient Greece to ponder the distinctions between the public and the private, and between the social and the political. For her the city states of ancient Greece – most specifically Athens – provided the possibility for living a political life where action and liberty were central concerns for citizens. She compared later regimes with this touch stone, and deplored the decline of the importance of public life and of political action in the modern world, where the economic and the social took the upper hand over the political. In his book on Arendt’s ‘political humanism’, McCarthy gives his first chapter the title ‘The City in Ruins’ – describing how in Arendt’s thinking the advents of totalitarianism and of modernity coincide with a crumbling of the foundations that enable real freedom and real participation in the political life of the city.106 He explains why Arendt thought it necessary to return to Greece: With our economic and political institutions shaken by global depression and war and their moral foundations weakened by the modern spirit of suspicion

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and distrust, political thinking is driven back to its original ground. Historically, this has meant a return to the Greek thinkers and statesmen who formulated our basic categories of political discourse; theoretically it has meant an attempt to recover through articulate reflection the underlying principles and norms of political activity.107 It is not difficult to see the overlaps between Arendt’s and Moholy-Nagy’s work. Like Arendt, Moholy-Nagy believed that to understand the idea of urbanity, one had to return to its origins, hence her lengthy discussions of ancient civilizations, ranging from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome. Like Arendt, she privileged the Greek experience, singing the praise of Greek architects and of a Hellenic ruler like Alexander and following the traces of these early city builders through their Roman successors (almost half of Matrix of Man is devoted to these early periods in history). Like Arendt, she hailed the republican citizen – the person who was concerned with public life and with the city – while mourning that this specimen had been replaced in the modern world by the bourgeois capitalist, for whom profit making was more important than civic pride. For Moholy-Nagy, like for Arendt, the modern reliance on science and technology was threatening rather than reassuring, and they both were convinced that a critical and revisionary articulation of traditional ideas was necessary in order to deal with the challenges of their own time. Moholy-Nagy was, in philosophical and theoretical terms, far less accomplished than Hannah Arendt. Matrix of Man indeed suffered from the weaknesses reviewers were quick to point out: it lacked a clear structure; its argument was driven by visual and formal analogies and thus tended towards an unjustified diffusionism; it failed to give clear directions for the future. Regardless of all this, however, the book was convincing as a long-winded love letter to the city as the centre of civic culture. It was convincing as an act of faith in the crucial role of citizens – rather than planners and administrators – as the guardians of urbanity and of the public realm. It was convincing, lastly, as a laudatio to the work of architects who designed the buildings that were capable of transferring civic pride and collective meaning to the next generation. It could indeed be seen, therefore, as an architectural counterpart to Hannah Arendt’s celebration of the polis of old.

Notes 1 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Where the Great City Stands’, 24; C. R. Ashbee, Where the Great City

Stands: A Study in the New Civics, Primary Source Edition 1917 (Milton Keynes: Lightning Source UK, s.d.). She names Whitman in the text, finishing it with several lines of his poem. She does not explicitly refer to Ashbee, but her title is an exact quote of his book title.

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2 Martin Danahay, ‘Arts and Crafts as a Transatlantic Movement: C. R. Ashbee in the

United States, 1896–1915’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20, no. 1 (2 January 2015): 65–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2014.980611. 3 ‘Walt Whitman: The Great City’, http://www.sojust.net/poems/whitman_great_cit

y.html, accessed 27 February 2018. 4 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Where the Great City Stands’, 24. House Beautiful was (and still is) a

popular magazine on home decoration; the Elks were a service club (they still exist). 5 Native Genius of Anonymous Architecture, 162. 6 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man. 7 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Brasilia: Majestic Concept or Autocratic Monument’. 8 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘New Cities of the Twentieth Century’, The Journal of the

American Institute of Architects, 35 (March 1961): 104–9. 9 Ibid., 107. 10 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Some Aspects of South American Planning’. 11 Ibid., 137. 12 Ibid., 142. 13 Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. 14 Moholy-Nagy, ‘New Cities of the Twentieth Century’, 109. 15 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Villas in the Slums’. 16 Charles Waldheim, ed., CASE-Hilberseimer/Mies van Der Rohe, Lafayette Park

Detroit, CASE Series (Cambridge, MA: Prestel; Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2004); Francesca Scotti, Lafayette Park, Detroit: la forma dell’insediamento = the Form of the Settlement (Milano, Italy: Libraccio, 2010). 17 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Villas in the Slums’. 18 Ibid., 43. Title I refers to legal regulations included in the Housing Act of 1949. 19 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Villas in the Slums’, 44. 20 Ibid., 46. 21 As Sibyl Moholy-Nagy indicated in a letter to Catherine Bauer Wurster (9 December

1960 – Catherine Bauer Wurster archive), the article was not accepted by the periodical Progressive Architecture, which originally commissioned it. Neither was it accepted by Architectural Forum (letter from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Walter McQuade, 18 January 1961 – Douglas Haskell papers in Avery Archive, Columbia University, box 34:6). The article appeared instead in a Canadian journal, which of course was far less read in the United States. Bruno Zevi published an Italian translation in four instalments in his journal L’architettura. Cronache e Storia in 1961. 22 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘If Shopping Centers Must Be. Book Review of Shopping

Towns, U.S.A.: The Planning of Shopping Centers by Victor Gruen and Larry Smith’, Progressive Architecture (September 1960): 204–7. 23 Native Genius of Anonymous Architecture, 162. 24 Aldo Rossi developed a similar argument in his 1966 volume L’architettura della

città (The Architecture of the City), Oppositions Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). As far as I know, there was no direct contact between Aldo Rossi and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, although Bruno Zevi was a mutual acquaintance. 25 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Take a Second Look’, Charette, 45 (March 1965): 20–2.

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26 Ibid., 22. 27 This graduate course by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy is mentioned in the Pratt Institute

Bulletin as of 1964–1965. 28 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man. 29 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Four Environments of Man’, Landscape, 16, no. 2 (Winter

1967): 3–9; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘On the Environmental Brink’, Landscape, 17, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 3–6. 30 On Jackson, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, ‘J. B. Jackson as a Critic of Modern

Architecture’, Geographical Review, 88, no. 4 (1998): 465–73; Marc Treib, ‘The Measure of Wisdom: John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996)’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55, no. 4 (1996): 380–491, https://doi. org/10.2307/991179. Symptomatically Treib mentions László Moholy-Nagy as a contributor to Landscape, which was probably a mistake, since Sibyl was the only ‘Moholy-Nagy’ I could find who contributed to it. 31 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Four Environments of Man’, 4. 32 Ibid., 5. 33 Ibid., 8. 34 Ibid., 9. 35 Moholy-Nagy, ‘On the Environmental Brink’. The title contained a double-entendre,

since John Brinckerhoff Jackson himself was known in daily life as ‘Brinck’. 36 Warren M. Brodey, ‘Soft Architecture: The Design of Intelligent Environments’,

Landscape, 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1967): 8–12. 37 Moholy-Nagy, ‘On the Environmental Brink’, 6. 38 Ibid. The quoted fragment is taken from Brodey’s article, which claimed that

analytic logic fails when complexity increases, leaving us ‘with the relatively unformalized power of synthetic reasoning and simulation’ (p. 10). 39 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man. 40 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to the publisher Frederick A. Praeger, dated 8 January

1967 (AAA945). 41 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 123. 42 Peech (Sibyl Moholy-Nagy), Children’s Children, 70. 43 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Steel, Stocks and Private Man’, 128–9, 192. 44 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 12. 45 Ibid., 15. 46 Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped – Urban Patterns and Meanings through History

(London: Thames and Hudson, 1991). 47 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 28. 48 Ibid., 27. 49 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961) (no page indicated), quoted

in Matrix of Man, 39. 50 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 40. 51 The world map was taken over from Kingsley Davis, ‘The Urbanization of the Human

Population’, Scientific American (September 1965). Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 39.

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52 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 110. 53 Moholy-Nagy, ‘On the Environmental Brink’. 54 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 118. The famous Hollywood film Cleopatra,

featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, had come out in 1963: we can assume therefore that the relationship between Caesar and Cleopatra was common knowledge for the readers of the book. 55 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 119–20. 56 Ibid., 130–1. 57 Ibid., 158. 58 Ibid., 195. 59 Ibid., 198. 60 ibid., 240. 61 Ibid., 241. 62 Ibid., 275. 63 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Of Planners and Primadonnas’, AIA Journal, 35 (October

1961): 59–63. 64 Ibid., 60. 65 Ibid., 61. 66 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Where the Great City Stands’. 67 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random

House, 1961). 68 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Letter to the Editor: In Defense of Architecture’, Architectural

Forum, 116, April (1962): 19. It is significant that this text is presented by the editors of Architectural Forum as a letter and not as a commissioned review, which it actually was, as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy said in a letter to Philip Johnson dated 4 March 1962 (MoMA, papers of Philip Johnson). The fact that the piece is very critical towards Jacobs, who happened to be a senior editor of Architectural Forum, is probably the main reason for this misrepresentation. 69 Ibid. 70 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its

Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961). According to his biographer Donald L. Miller, it sold 55,000 copies in the first three years. Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Groove Press, 1989), 462. 71 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The City in History: Its Origins, Its

Transformations and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford’, Pratt Planning Papers 1 (Feburary 1962): 2. 72 Ibid., 7. 73 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘City Planning and the Historical Perspective’, Arts and

Architecture, 81 (December 1964): 22+. 74 Ibid., 35–6. 75 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘America and Urban Crisis’, Architecture: Formes et Fonctions, 15

(1969): 40–9. 76 Ibid., 42.

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77 Ibid., 45. 78 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Making of Non-Architects’, Architectural Record, 146

(October 1969): 149–52. 79 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960); Mumford,

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects; Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 80 Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città (Padua: Marsilio Editori, 1966); Venturi and

Brown, ‘A Signficance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas’, 37–43; Jasper Cepl, Oswald Mathias Ungers: eine intellektuelle Biographie (Koeln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, 2007). 81 E. A. Gutkind, Urban Development in Central Europe, International History of City

Development 1 (Glencoe: Free Press, 1964); E. A. Gutkind, Urban Development in the Alpine and Scandinavian Countries, International History of City Development 2 (New York: Free Press, 1965); E. A. Gutkind, Urban Development in Southern Europe: Spain and Portugal, International History of City Development 3 (New York: Free Press, 1967); E. A. Gutkind, Urban Development in Southern Europe: Italy and Greece, International History of City Development 4 (New York: Free Press, 1969); E. A. Gutkind, Urban Development in Western Europe: France and Belgium, International History of City Development 5 (New York: Free Press, 1970); E. A. Gutkind, Urban Development in Western Europe: The Netherlands and Great Britain, International History of City Development 6 (New York: Free Press, 1971). 82 Bruno Zevi (1918–2000) was, as a Jew, forced to leave Italy, where he was studying

architecture at the University of Rome. He migrated first to the United Kingdom and later to the United States. He finished his architectural education at Harvard, under Walter Gropius, during the war. He later returned to Italy, taking up university positions in Venice and in Rome, and establishing his own journal L’architettura. Cronache e storia. He had a cordial relationship with Sibyl MoholyNagy, whom he probably had met during his time in Harvard. 83 In a short letter to Robert Venturi dated 24 February 1966 (AAA 944/819) Moholy-

Nagy stated: ‘Yale gives me a hell of a time. I like all of you as personalities and feel intuitively that somewhere somehow we are conceptually related, but my bewilderment and opposition at your actual performance grow with each new confrontation’. In 1970, she explicitly distanced herself from Venturi and Scott Brown in a letter to the editor of Progressive Architecture (P/A, Vol. 51, No 4, April 1970, p. 8), criticizing their article ‘Co-op City. Learning to Like It’ (P/A, Vol. 51, No 2, April 1970, pp. 64–72). 84 With Oswald Mathias Ungers she arranged in 1969 for a meeting to talk about the

organization of a Graduate Architectural Workshop (letter from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Oswald Mathias Ungers dated 23 May 1969; answer by Ungers 25 July 1969 – AAA945). 85 Ernst Egli, Geschichte des Städtebaus, 3 vols. (Zürich, 1959–67); Erwin A. Gutkind,

International History of City Development, Vol. 1–3, (New York, 1964–67) (the other five volumes would appear later on); Lavedan, Pierre, Histoire de l’Urbanisme, 3 vols. (Paris, 1925–52). 86 Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 71. 87 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Unplanned City’ (Lecture, 8 March 1963). Typoscript held

at the University of California at Santa Cruz archives.

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88 Ibid., 10. 89 Moholy-Nagy referred here to Max Weber’s famous book The Protestant Ethic and

the Spirit of Capitalism. 90 Walter W. Condit, ‘Book Review. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Matrix of Man: An Illustrated

History of the Urban Environment’, Isis 60, no. 2 (Summer 1969): 253–5; Sylvia Crowe, ‘Book Review of Matrix of Man by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, The Architect and Building News, 3 (July 1969): 85; C. M. Deasy, ‘Matrix of Man, an Illustrated History of Urban Environment’, Architectural & Engineering News (May 1969): 83–4; G. St, ‘Matrix of Man. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Deutsche Bauzeitung (December 1969): 908; W. Houghton-Evans, ‘Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment’, Town & Country Planning (May 1969); John M. Johansen, ‘Book Review Matrix of Man’, Architectural Forum (May 1969): 84–5; Rita Cruise O’Brien, ‘Matrix of Man’, Journal of Development Studies, 6, no. 9 (July 1969); Walter Segal, ‘And What’s Her History? Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment, by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Pall Mall Press, 90s’, The Architects’ Journal, 23 (April 1969); Wolf Von Eckardt, ‘Moholy-Nagy, Sybil. Matrix of Man’, Library Journal, 15 (December 1968); X, ‘Matrix of Man. An Illustrated History of Urban Planning’, Liturgical Arts (November 1969); X, ‘Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of the Urban Environment’, The Nation, 23 (December 1968), 701; X, ‘Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment’, Interior Design (July 1969); Percival Goodman, ‘Book Review of “Matrix of Man” by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architectural Record, 145, no. 3 (1969): 147. 91 Segal, ‘And What’s Her History?’. 92 Paul Oliver, ‘Evolution of Cities’, Books and Arts, Nature, 8 March 1969, https://doi.

org/10.1038/221977a0. 93 Ervin Galantay, ‘Capricious Mingling of Archetypes. Book Review of “Matrix of

Man” by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Progressive Architecture, no. 3 (1969): 158ff. 94 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Letter to the Editor: In Defense of Architecture’, Architectural

Forum, 116, April (1962): 19; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford’. 95 ‘We must restore to the city the maternal, life-nurturing functions that have long

been neglected or suppressed. For the city should be an organ of love; and the best economy of cities is the care and culture of men’. Lewis Mumford, ‘The City in History’ (Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), 655. 96 This becomes clear from her correspondence with the publisher Frederick A.

Praeger. In a letter dated 8 January 1967, she explained that she often received the question from students as to why there wasn’t an ‘inexpensive basic text on the subject [the history of cityplanning] instead of the steadily rising flood of extremely expensive specialized books of prophecy, dealing with THE city – present and future?’ (AAA944). 97 Matrix of Man was used as a textbook, for example, at Columbia University, where a

couple of years ago Avery library still had more than five copies of the book. 98 Letter to Victor Gruen dated 28 March 1969 (Victor Gruen papers, Library of

Congress). In a letter dated 2 June 1970 George Aldor from the publisher Praeger mentioned to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy that by that time 11,064 copies had been sold (AAA945).

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99 Jeffrey Lieber already mentioned the intellectual affinities between Moholy-Nagy

and Arendt, but he refers to her 1970 book on Paul Rudolph, rather than to Matrix of Man. See Jeffrey Lieber, ‘Knowledge in the Making’, Cuadernos Del Centro de Estudios En Diseño y Comunicación. Ensayos, no. 53 (July 2015): 231–42. 100 The letter is dated 23 November 1968 (AAA 944/180) and is written in German.

It is worth quoting it in full here: ‘Liebe Hannah Arendt: das beigeschlossene Buch ist eine Art über dimensionierter Fan letter. Es ist gerade herausgekommen; und obgleich es wahrscheinlich ausserhalb Ihres Interessenkreises liegt, gibt es mir Gelegenheit Ihnen für viele und wertvolle Anregungen zu danken. Mich hat ganz besonders Ihre Analyse Walter Benjamin’s berührt. Ich kannte ihn gut – erst in Frankfurt und dann in Berlin, zwischen 1927 und 1930. Viele der Debatten zwischen ihm und den Gründern des Instituts für Sozialforschung (Weill, Horkheimer, Wiesengrund und mein damaliger Mann, Carl Dreyfuss) haben sich in meinem Wohnzimmer in der Ulmenstrassen in Frankfurt absgespielt. Der sterile Marxismus der wirklichkeits-unfähigen Dreieinigkeit Weill-HorkheimerWiesengrund und Benjamin’s verzweifelte Abwehr sind mir noch heute ganz scharf in Erinnerung, obgleich ich damals ganz jung und ganz dumm war. Nach meiner Scheidung sah ich Benjamin einen Winter durch sehr viel in Berlin – ohne ihm in seiner zunehmenden Vereinsamung helfen zu können. Aus sehr komplizierten Urgründen kam es zu dieser unkongruenten Freundschaft die mich, als ich etwas heller sah, für immer von den Frankfurtern entfremdete. Als ich im New Yorker las, dass Teddy Wiesengrund jetzt Benjamin herausgegeben hat, konnte ich es fast nicht glauben. Die Grausamkeit seiner (und Horkheimer’s) totalen Kälte gegen Benjamin’s abgründige Lebensverwicklung war zu rege in meiner Erinnerung. – Heute ist Benjamin eine reinere Gegenwart als Teddy und Grete Wiesengrund! Nochmals: ich habe Ihnen viel zu danken. Ihre Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. 101 Letter in German of Hannah Arendt to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy dated 15 December

1968 (AAA 944/201). German text: ‘Liebe Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ich erhielt Ihr Buch eben erst, nachdem ich aus Chicago zurückgekommen bin. Sie haben mir eine ganz ungewöhnliche Freude gemacht – das ist in der Tat ein “überdimensionaler Fan letter”! Ich würde mich sehr freuen, wenn wir uns einmal über Benjamin unterhalten könnten. Wollen Sie mich anrufen – meine Telefonnummer ist RI 9–5846. Hannah Arendt.’ 102 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, new edition,

Modernity and Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Michael H. McCarthy, The Political Humanism of Hannah Arendt, first paperback edition (Lanham Boulder, NY: Lexington Books, 2014). 103 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, for Love of the World (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1982). 104 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, xii. 105 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University Press, 1989). 106 McCarthy, The Political Humanism of Hannah Arendt, 25–62. 107 Ibid., 52.

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5 TEACHING AS A VOCATION

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy proudly declared herself a ‘DCT (Devoted Classroom Teacher), the lowest species on the academic ladder’. In an interview with a students’ periodical, she clarified that she had made it her ‘life task to scuttle academic stuffiness, to make lecturing as entertaining or better than a variety show’. Whereas in general ‘college teaching suffers from lack of humor, lack of alertness to the constant shifting of interpretation of historical values and inflated self-importance’, she was devoted to countering these traits by offering students up-to-date, visually attractive and engaging lectures.1 That she largely succeeded in her self-imposed mission can be deduced from the deep admiration that former students expressed for her, years after they left school. It was not one type of student she appealed to, since several of those who explicitly remember her later became prominent cultural actors in quite diverging fields. Jeffrey Cook, the advocate of solar passive architecture, always mentioned her in his bios – even in short ten-line ones.2 Peter Zumthor, the acclaimed architect, refers to her as a major influence during the year he spent at Pratt.3 Interior designer David Easton likewise assigns her a prominent role in his biography.4 Robert Wilson, director and playwright, gives her credit for the theatrical set-up of her classes, with the students in the dark and the only light coming from the slides projected on three screens simultaneously.5 He fondly remembers one of the exercises she gave them. The assignment was to design a city in three minutes. Wilson recalls: I have always remembered what I did in that tiny window of opportunity: I drew an apple with a crystal cube as its core. Several days later, Professor MoholyNagy asked me what I was thinking when I did that. I responded that the crystal cube was capable of reflecting the universe and that cities need similar centers. Her class and that lesson have continued to resonate throughout my life and in all the work I have done in experimental theater. Before it can be complex, theater must first be simple. This little three-minute exercise forced me to think in a big way, simply.6

Teaching architectural history Pratt Institute was a private college established in the late nineteenth century to offer education for working-class people. When Sibyl Moholy-Nagy started teaching there, it consisted of an art school (where architecture was located), a school for home economics, a school of engineering and a library school. Not long afterwards, the architectural programme became independent (architecture became a separate school in 1954) and started to grow. Because of her close contacts with many prominent modern architects, Moholy-Nagy was instrumental in bringing in new colleagues who would become eminent design teachers: Sibyl is the pillar on which Pratt Institute was built. Nobody would deny that. If it weren’t for Sibyl, we wouldn’t have had William Breger, we wouldn’t have had Stanley Salzman, we wouldn’t have had Harold Edelman … teaching at Pratt.7 Pratt Institute did not belong to the Ivy League universities, but had a good reputation, especially for its art programme. In the late 1950s it was the only institute in New York, apart from Columbia University, to offer an architectural programme that was accredited. The architectural curriculum was heavily design oriented, with several of the principal studio-teachers graduates of Walter Gropius’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University.8 Pratt’s architectural programme was thus moulded on the principles of modern architecture – functionalism, rationality in construction, sobriety in form, preciseness in detailing. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy rapidly rose in the ranks. Whereas she had started teaching only two half-days a week in 1951, her load increased until she officially became full-time in 1954. Her promotion to professor followed in 1960. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was considered a ‘star performer’ at Pratt.9 One of her former students described her as ‘a one man band, a very powerful woman’.10 Others admit that they were awestruck, even almost intimidated by her (Figure 5.1). Part of her impact had to do with the students’ and colleagues’ conviction that she had a very tough training at prestigious German universities. Pratt Institute indeed advertised its new faculty member as having studied at the University of Leipzig, the University of Giessen and the University of Frankfurt am Main.11 This, however, was based upon misleading information. As mentioned earlier, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at this point was inclined to ‘embellish’ her CV with this type of information, which – although untrue – would help her gain the position she aspired to.12 She had spent enough time in these German cities, and probably attended enough public university lectures there, to lend this claim some credibility. By the time she arrived at Pratt she also had a list of publications which, although short, was already impressive enough that her credentials were not questioned.13 Her performance at the school anyhow convinced everyone that she possessed a very wide and sophisticated

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FIGURE 5.1 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at Pratt. In the background her assistant Gary Cirincione.

knowledge, and thus her intellectual standing was never challenged – at least not in this context. During most of her time at Pratt, architectural students were expected to take courses in the history of art and architecture in their second, third and fourth year, enhanced with one course in theory of architecture in the third year. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was responsible for this part of the curriculum, as well as teaching a course in the graduate programme on the ‘History of Human Settlements’. The undergraduate courses in architectural history were mostly survey courses, starting with ancient architecture (Mesopotamia and Egypt) and proceeding over Greek and Roman antiquity via Romanesque and Gothic to Renaissance and baroque. Structural systems and the developments in city planning were addressed in the last part of the survey, whereas more contemporary issues were dealt with in ‘Theory of Architecture’, which gave special attention to the works of F. L. Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe and other modern architects.14 In the beginning of her career at Pratt, when the architectural programme was rather small, she was well respected, but her courses were not seen by the students as absolutely crucial, since the focus of the programme was so much on design.15 In the 1960s, when the school was growing, her standing among her colleagues was definitely on the rise, due to her prolific publications of books and journal articles. She was admired and liked by the dean, Olindo Grossi (1909–2002), who probably appreciated the fact that her considerable reputation as a lecturer in the United States and abroad reflected favourably on his school. Hence, he gave her great freedom in organizing the history department and hiring assistants.16

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Having found this sure footing, she began to experiment with the format of her lectures and seminars. She was building an enormous collection of slides and made good use of them: In order to make sure that we wouldn’t fall asleep or lose interest in the dark, she made us do sketches of the slides she showed. We barely had time to do this – she was very soon ‘clicking’ to ask for the next slide. But it certainly taught us how to draw rapidly. We did some fast line drawings that we would fill in afterwards with shade and shadow. The sketches were not that great, because they were done so quickly – but it was a wonderful experience and tool to practice and sketch as a young architect to get all these buildings in our fingers and minds.17 Other students mentioned that she often used a comparative method by showing slides side-to-side in order to draw out a particular point.18 She encouraged the students to express themselves graphically and comparatively too. Assignments for her courses often requested that students would present drawings or models with elaborate captions to answer a specific question. A typical assignment, for instance, reads as follows: Consider the following 4 principal criteria for architecture: 1) Exterior form … ; 2) Structure … ; 3) Plan and space … ; 4) Esthetics … . Consider each of these 4 overall aspects in the work of a) Frank Lloyd Wright and b) Le Corbusier … . Juxtapose on boards or sheets the solutions most characteristic for Wright and Le Corbusier, and write brief, clear captions which will explain in a few sentences the different approach of each man to the same basic problem.19 She expected a lot from her students: She was a tough taskmaster. But we all respected her. She wasn’t mean, she wasn’t nasty about it. She was just very hard to please. So we all made extra special efforts to try to please her or to try and do better … to somehow surmount that, to overcome [our limitations]. … Yeah, she was feisty. You had to work hard to put up with her. You did. That’s just the way it was.20 Her own enthusiasm in talking about architectural history inspired a similar attitude in some of her students: She planted the seed in me for my love of architectural history and later architectural preservation. Her lessons were so informative and entertaining. I later used her outline of architectural history for myself, when I started teaching architectural history.21 By the time Moholy-Nagy left Pratt, in 1969, she had assistants teaching the seminars of the second-year survey course, while she remained fully responsible

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herself for the survey courses of the third year and fourth year. She now felt, as she expressed in a letter to her daughter, ‘so sure in [her] field that [she could] drop a lot of buildings, architects and even movements which were considered sacrosanct and which [she had] come to consider irrelevant’.22 The third-year course thus had expanded to include ‘Non-Western Cultures’, ‘Islamic Architecture’ and ‘Early Settlers’ Architecture in North America’, whereas the fourth year dealt with the most recent period from the Enlightenment to 1950. The third-year course was accompanied by a seminar on ‘contemporary problems of space and structure, with concluding investigations into the mutual influence of art (sculpture, mural and colour-light-texture applications) on the space experience’. The ‘History of Human Settlement’ course was ongoing as part of the graduate programme.23 She was working on a completely new set-up for the curriculum in architectural history taught to architectural students. In a memo drafted for Columbia University in spring 1970 she elaborated a proposal to that end. It started with a preamble that is worth quoting in full: 1) Architecture is a generalizing rather than a specializing profession. The majority of its problems are multi-purpose and multi-inhabitant oriented. 2) The acceptance of architecture as an essential factor of environment by the public depends on a balance between historical continuity and the implementation of change, or: between the appeal of what is familiar and the hope for what is new. 3) In times of social upheaval, like ours, the tendency of the public is loaded toward historical continuity, and that of the professional toward radical change. Both are the result of the alienation from the present. 4) Architectural education has failed in recognizing and answering to this existing dichotomy. Historical continuity has been promoted as a token acquaintance with historical monuments, analyzed according to pictorial standards of style characterization. The commitment to change has been interpreted through socio-technological innovations based on laboratory methods inapplicable to the pragmatic reality of designed human environment. The conventional historical approach denies the instinct for change; the discontinuous analytical approach denies the instinct for continuity. 5) A reconciliation between these 2 opposites is essential in order to provide for the student a HISTORICAL ORIENTATION of himself and his future work within the continuity of time. This can be attempted through a reinterpretation of past architectural achievements – both factual and ideological – as research. Not the static result but the intentional process generating the result would be investigated as a constituent factor producing the present.24

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She thus positioned architectural history as a crucial hinge in the education of architects, since it allowed them to bridge the gap between the longing for continuity from the general public, on the one hand, and the continuous quest for the new intrinsic to the profession, on the other. She therefore saw the students’ interaction with architectural history as one that allowed them to fundamentally understand what architecture was all about. The rest of the memo further elaborated on these notions. She advocated that architects should be taught architectural history, not as a stylistic-chronological sequence, but rather to make them understand some basic ideas about architecture – architecture as design, as social record and as a timeless, environmentally based concept. These ideas could be conveyed in a threeyear course by focusing in the first year on ‘Cities and Buildings of the Western World’, in the second year on ‘Archetypes of Designed Environments as Stimulus to Architectural Thinking’ and in the third year on ‘Antecedents and Projections of Twentieth-Century Architecture’.25 Her approach thus became much more based upon a structural and comparative understanding of architectural history than upon the stylistic one which had informed the more conventional initial setup of her courses. She developed these insights throughout her teaching career, and in close interaction with her peers in other institutions, for the teaching of architectural history to architects was a topic that was intensely debated, especially in the 1960s.

The role and relevance of architectural history Moholy-Nagy defended the idea that architectural history was to play a central role in the education of architects from the early 1960s onwards. In an article ‘Teaching More than Design’ from 1961, she argued that environmental awareness was the basis of architectural intellect, and that it was the task of architectural history to make students familiar with this idea. Architectural history had to initiate students in value judgements that would allow them to distinguish between architecturally accomplished buildings and those that were assembled without any architectural aspiration. History should disprove architecture as technology and prove architecture as social commitment, and as the validation and visualization of the values of society. She thus stressed that architectural concepts were more important than architectural styles, and that the teaching of history should proceed accordingly.26 The role of architectural history in the architect’s educational curriculum was such a hot topic in the 1960s because of modernisms fraught relation with history. Bruno Zevi, an Italian architectural historian who was a former student of Walter Gropius, had famously written that Gropius had banned history courses from the Bauhaus and that he had stuck to this position when he came to Harvard.27

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Although this was not entirely accurate, it was correct that Gropius did not support the conventional teaching of survey courses, which, to his mind, would only instigate students to superficially imitate formal elements from the past. Gropius rather thought that the ‘architect who has to shape the future in a creative way must draw his strength from the present’.28 History might have its uses, as far as Gropius was concerned, but only in so far as it allowed students to understand how the present had come into being, and what timeless elements of architecture could be brought to bear upon their own work – a position which championed history teachings in line with Sigfried Giedion’s understanding of the historical development which led, inevitably, to the Modern Movement in architecture.29 Zevi was advocating, against Gropius, the idea that architectural history should be the backbone of the education of architects. To that end, however, he also stressed that it was important not to teach it as a sequence of styles. Rather, all the courses with their various emphases, will be courses of architectonic history. … From a coherent historical-critical direction the entire teaching of architecture … will draw on the notion of dynamic unity. Many professors, with the most varied and technical inclinations teaching only one subject: architecture in its history, acting on the problems of man in forging its modernity.30 Zevi’s viewpoint, on the other hand, was also under scrutiny. Henry A. Millon – at that point a young assistant professor at MIT – took Zevi to task for overly simplifying what history could be and could do. In a contribution to AIA Journal Millon argued: History is the selection, organization, and presentation of facts which seem the most important to the writer. And the process of selection of facts is, in itself, an act of interpretation and will vary from generation to generation. So there are many different ‘true’ histories and it will be difficult to decide which one the schools should espouse.31 Millon defended the idea that the architectural historian teaching in an architectural programme should be given free rein. He must be selected for his ‘intrinsic qualities’ and then be allowed to teach as he sees fit. Whether or not that history was ‘useful’ is irrelevant. History had its own raison d’être and should not be put to service as a handmaiden for architecture. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy intervened in this discussion between Zevi and Millon. She applauded Millon’s contribution, but not without throwing a lifeline to Zevi. She suggested that Millon had misunderstood Zevi and that they were more in agreement than he was willing to admit. She deliberately constructed Millon’s concept of architectural history as continuous with her own, in that they both adhered to a ‘sense of values’, which, if genuine, was ‘indivisible’ and which offered

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‘immense moral comfort in the demonstrable unity of excellence’.32 Zevi shared the same conviction according to Moholy-Nagy: The considerable body of Zevi’s work is, I think, in complete agreement with Mr Millon’s demand for a guiding idea (in his [Zevi’s] case architecture as space-conditioned), and with the ultimate goal of ‘developed sensibilities, deep compassion and profound understanding’.33 It is hard to find in Millon’s text a ‘demand for a guiding idea’, although he does mention that a ‘student of architectural history might become a man of developed sensibilities, deep compassion, and profound understanding’.34 (Note that in this period nobody thought of gendering either students or teachers other than male – Moholy-Nagy herself least of all.) Moholy-Nagy, however, was all too eager in declaring their positions close to one another: she saw, just like Zevi, architectural history as an absolutely crucial element in an architect’s education, but this was because she was convinced that intimate knowledge of architectural history would make better architects out of the students. Millon, on the other hand, thought that the study of history might make better men out of the students, but that didn’t automatically mean better architects. Moholy-Nagy’s search for a guiding idea further crystallized when she delivered a talk at the 1964 History, Theory and Criticism seminar at Cranbrook. This seminar was one in an annual series jointly set up by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) to discuss various aspect of architectural education. The 1964 edition was supported by the Graham Foundation, which allowed the organizers to invite European luminaries (Bruno Zevi and Reyner Banham) to participate. The one-week seminar hence had an impressive list of speakers, further including Peter Collins, Stephen W. Jacobs and Serge Chermayeff.35 Moholy-Nagy’s talk positioned her close to Zevi, and advocated an architectural history which would be a crucial element in future architects’ education (Figure 5.2). It was published under the title ‘The Canon of Architecture’.36 For her the canon of architecture resulted from the interweaving of basic architectural concepts, which one could recognize in architectural history. She considered six of these concepts, five of them historical, the sixth one emerging only in the twentieth century. These concepts were verticality, space progression, modulation and modification, structured planning, art-space symbolism and space-form continuity: The cumulative effect of the five primary concepts on the history of architecture may be likened, somewhat loosely to a musical canon. Each subsequent voice takes up the harmony of the previous one with a different interval; but in contrast to the musical term, each addition to the architectural canon is completely original … it all adds up to a cumulative force of conceptual selections of which none is ever obsolete because all are predicated on the human condition.37

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FIGURE 5.2 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at the Cranbrook seminar in 1964, holding court for a group of interested scholars.

Because of the centrality of these concepts, which guaranteed the ‘eternal presence’ of architecture (a term also used by Sigfried Giedion),38 the best teacher of architectural history for architectural students was not an art historian. Art historians, according to Moholy-Nagy, tended to cling too much to the stylistic categories made up by the likes of Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin, and were therefore not fit to imbue architectural students with an awareness of history in architecture. Rather students should be taught history by ‘an architect of unusual perception and education, or an architectural critic capable of projecting the buildings he analyzes into the double dimension of actuality and duration of time’.39 Since inspired and devoted architects, however, tended to leave their teaching jobs in favour of their more lucrative practices (this was 1964!), these people were hard to come by. Hence, she thought, one of the reasons for the crisis in the education of architects was the combination of general neglect of teaching as a vocation and the appeal of work in the office which was seemingly more rewarding, financially as well as creatively. Cranbrook 1964 signifies an important moment in the historiography of modern architecture, for a younger generation of architectural historians started to make their mark.40 Henry A. Millon (1927–2018) was a member of the scholarship committee, and Colin Rowe (1920–1999), James O’Gorman (1933–) and Stanford Anderson (1934–2016) were all among the participants. Although they were not listed as main speakers, they contributed to the lively discussions that followed the main presentations of the day (and Anderson’s paper got published in the proceedings). According to John Harwood, the main dividing line was between those who defended a close alliance between architectural history and design education (Zevi, Moholy-Nagy, Collins, Chermayeff, Banham) and those who rather opted for a scholarly and rigorous approach that distanced itself from direct involvement with architectural practice (Millon and his MIT colleague Anderson).41 It was the latter viewpoint that would dominate the later graduate programmes leading to PhDs in architectural ‘history, theory and criticism’

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(as the one at MIT was called).42 In the 1960s, however, the discipline was still finding its own footing and many well-respected scholars teaching architectural history in an architectural school did so without the benefit of an academic training culminating in a PhD.43 In hindsight, Millon and Anderson’s position is most defendable, and now most common among architectural historians. In the early 1960s, however, this was not yet taken for granted. The stakes for architectural history were hotly debated because of the intimate link between historians and critics, on the one hand, and architect-protagonists of the Modern Movement, on the other – a link that Moholy-Nagy embodied herself because of her close alliance with László MoholyNagy and through him with the Bauhaus. As Manfredo Tafuri famously pointed out in Theories and History of Architecture, this link led to increasingly paradoxical and contradictory positions. In the interwar period, according to Tafuri, the only authentic criticism of modern art and architecture came from authors who derived their analytical methods from direct contact with the avant-gardes. Operative criticism, practised by Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner, was thus a historical given: as historians, they advocated an interpretation of history that positioned modern architecture as the obvious and inevitable outcome of the historical forces they analysed. This complicity between critics and architects was, however, no longer tenable in the post-war period. Historical conditions had changed, and a close alliance between historians and architects no longer made sense, since ‘criticism is bound, like architecture, continuously to revolutionise itself in the search for adequate parameters’.44 Tafuri used quotations from Moholy-Nagy and from Zevi to show how they found themselves on shaky ground, because they blamed, on the one hand, modern architects for their dismissal of history, while, on the other hand, firmly believing in some form of modern architecture that would be a continuation of the Modern Movement: We have shown adequately the diffused attitude of architectural historiography: with the exception of Banham, paladin of technological orthodoxy, the historians are in revolt against the very sources of modern art. The Bauhaus and the masters of the avant-garde have been put in the dock; the new tasks are those left unsolved in the ‘roaring twenties’; the anti-historicism of the Modern Movement is judged contingent and surmountable, and what is put forward is the hypothesis of history as a guide for a new type of experience. … What one should rather ask is whether the proposed remedies are not themselves antihistorical. It would not make much sense to accuse a revolutionary movement of having been what it has been, and then state one’s loyalty to it in every other statement.45 For Tafuri, the days of operative criticism were over, but this put historians like Moholy-Nagy and Zevi in a double bind. They could, according to Tafuri, not

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claim a new role for history and at the same time adhere to the continuity of the Modern Movement, hailing their own favourites as successors to the masters – at least not without contradicting themselves. Tafuri’s analysis put into relief a paradox that indeed haunted Sibyl MoholyNagy’s work: her simultaneous commitment to history and to architecture, which brought her to assume that architecture’s essence could be found – somehow – in history, whereas her keen historical interpretations, on the other hand, showed ‘architecture’ to be a concept and an artefact that was variously interpreted in different historical circumstances and hence did not lead to one ‘guiding idea’ that was a yardstick for architectural quality (a consequence that she refused to think through). This paradox also manifested itself in her fraught relationship to architectural theory. As Donlyn Lyndon pointed out in his discussion of the Cranbrook 1964 seminar, Moholy-Nagy denounced ‘theory’ in her introduction, but afterwards ‘eloquently described her efforts to teach history according to what seemed remarkably like a theory’.46 Since Moholy-Nagy at this point associated ‘theory’ with the general principles informing specific architectural forms, she was clearly dismissive of it: Architectural form and any architectural theory behind it are so relative in their interpretation as to be unrelated to any ascertainable reality. It is well to remember that admiration for Classicism produced identical triplets in Stalin’s Moscow, Hitler’s Germany and Roosevelt’s Washington.47 For her, architectural theory had revealed ‘its total futility for learning or practicing architects’,48 because the ‘whole vast body of generalized principle, from Vitruvius to Banham, refers backward to established architectural facts. It can never refer forward to future design solutions.’49 The architectural concepts she developed further on in the same article as emerging from history – verticality, space progression, modulation and modification, structured planning, artspace symbolism, space-form continuity – were thus not understood by her as ‘theoretical principles’. She tended to see ‘theory’ as completely in line with ‘style’, and hence failed to see how she was developing a theory of her own (closely related to those of Giedion and Zevi). This paradoxical attitude might have contributed to her waning impact in the decades following her demise, which were precisely the decades that architectural theory came to dominate the architectural scene.50

A beachcomber of history Although Moholy-Nagy received invitations to important events like the Cranbrook History, Theory and Criticism seminar, her standing within the scholarly community was not unchallenged. She herself had the idea that she was not given her due by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), which

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indeed did not publish reviews of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture or of Matrix of Man.51 The Society had been established in 1940 in Harvard University, and published the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) as of 1941. Initially the organization had close ties with the College Art Association (CAA) and its annual conventions coincided with those of the CAA. That was no longer the case in the 1960s, but the art historical tradition lingered in setting the standards for what was seen as sound academic scholarship in architectural history. Typical for this American academic tradition was the inclination towards connoisseurship and factual knowledge, whereas interpretation and analysis of ideas were lagging behind.52 Moholy-Nagy was greatly frustrated by this state of affairs. She described herself as a ‘beachcomber of history’,53 always on the outlook for significant details, but ultimately more interested in grand historical narratives than in detailed and rigorous analyses of archival sources. Moholy-Nagy ventilated her frustration a first time in the JSAH in 1963, in a letter to the editor reacting to an article by Peter Collins on ‘The Origin of Graph Paper as an Influence on Architectural Design’.54 Collins’s article was a modest attempt to discuss the use of graph paper by Thomas Jefferson, after his visit to Paris in 1784, as a basis for his architectural plans (Figure 5.3). Collins wondered whether this use might not be at the origin of the emergence in the

FIGURE 5.3 Front elevation of the Rotunda, University of Virginia, by Thomas Jefferson.

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nineteenth century of systematic and repetitive compositions, such as those by Durand, as well as of twentieth-century endeavours to develop modular design. Moholy-Nagy couldn’t care less. In her opening salvo she immediately used big words: I accuse the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Journal of the Society (to a much lesser degree) of a plot to kill architecture as a living, acting tradition.55 She blamed Collins for having his facts wrong (Jefferson was not the first one to use such paper, and the modular design tradition started with Imhotep rather than in the twentieth century, according to her), but he also erroneously assumed that it mattered on which paper architects plotted down plans. Her quarrel, she explained, was however not so much with this particular article of Collins. She mainly used this one example to launch an attack on the Society, which had ‘succeeded in perverting the meaning of “scholarship” to a point where it indicates the exact opposite of its original function’. Papers read at the recent convention of the Society in Baltimore were focusing on minute details, losing touch with architecture as ‘body-space-structure-context totality’. ‘Architecture is a matrix of life, she argued, and not a piece of carrion to be dissected into narrower and narrower strips of dead tissue.’56 (Collins, by the way, deftly refuted Moholy-Nagy’s criticism, pointing out that he was correct on a factual level and that his opponent had not been careful enough to read the footnotes modifying his claims with respect to exactly the points she mentioned.57) A similar difference in opinion as to what exactly constituted significant facts in architectural history emerged during one of the so-called MAS symposia (already mentioned in Chapter 3). These were symposia on modern architecture organized by Columbia University in the 1960s. The first one happened in 1962 and focused on the decade 1919–1928. The second one was organized in 1964 and dealt with the decade 1907–1919. The third, and last one, of 1966 zoomed in on the decade 1929–1939.58 Moholy-Nagy participated in all three of them and was perhaps the most outspoken critical voice present (Figure 5.4). According to Joan Ockman, a controversy unfolded during the third symposium, brought along by an extended discussion on what was presented as an important new finding: the fact that Frank Lloyd Wright had been born in 1867 rather than in 1869 (as had been assumed until then).59 Moholy-Nagy reportedly replied that she didn’t see why this mattered, since Frank Lloyd Wright remained a genius anyhow, regardless of the year in which he was born. (We might bear in mind that Moholy-Nagy herself also misrepresented her own birth date as 1905 rather than the actual 1903.) Later in the proceedings she commented that her commitment was firmly to applied rather than pure science, although she could appreciate the books coming out of the latter. (She explicitly complimented co-participant Rudolf Wittkower here, for

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FIGURE 5.4 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at the MAS symposium of 1962, surrounded by, from left to right, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., H. Allen Brooks (standing in the back), James Marston Fitch, Philip Johnson and an unknown student.

his book on the baroque.) She clearly felt that in writing and discussing the history of modern architecture, one was addressing a topic with immediate consequences for the present, and hence could not study it in a detached manner.60 Moholy-Nagy, in other words, positioned herself also in this context as first of all a teacher of the next generation of architects. Her work in architectural history was not for the sake of history, but for the sake of architecture. The driving impetus behind her scholarship was the search for the first principles of architecture, as they manifested themselves throughout the ages and as they were brought up to date by the most creative architects of the twentieth century. This was what she was looking for, and this was why she fought so hard against all those who, to her mind, were unfaithful to these principles by selling out to real estate (Gropius), to fashion (Lapidus) or to technology (Buckminster Fuller). This was also why she didn’t have any patience for stylistic histories, which she increasingly saw as totally missing the point. Hence it might not be a real surprise that her work was not abundantly featured in the prestigious JSAH. Throughout the 1960s, she only managed to get two articles published, both of which were part of theme issues put together after an event in which she participated.61 She also contributed a couple of book reviews in the journal, and her own book on Villanueva was reviewed for the JSAH by the same Peter Collins she had taken to task for his interest in irrelevant things like squared paper. (Collins and Moholy-Nagy enjoyed a friendship that apparently thrived on such friendly polemics.)62 Although short, her first article in the JSAH, managed to raise quite a controversy, as was mentioned already in Chapter 3, with Howard Dearstyne taking offence at her less than amiable depiction of Mies’s relation to the Nazi regime in Germany.63 She also authored a remarkable piece placed by the editor as ‘commentary’ (rather than as a letter), which reacted to an earlier piece by medieval historian

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John Maass. Maass had presented a critical analysis of the topics and approaches favoured by the authors of the JSAH in the period 1958 to 1967.64 On the basis of a statistical analysis, he denounced the ‘bourgeois standard’ of the journal (very few articles on vernacular architecture), its ‘racial bias’ (less than 5% of the contributions dealt with non-Western architecture), its Eurocentrism, its preference for ‘the genteel tradition’ (only three articles on industrial buildings, nothing on engineering structures), its authors’ tendency to analyse facades rather than plans or structures, and their neglect of context, including political context (here he referred to the way Moholy-Nagy had been vilified by Dearstyne for her diaspora article). Maass’s criticism in many ways prefigured the transformations architectural historiography would go through in the decades to come (although he failed to include a gender perspective in his analysis). Moholy-Nagy gratefully took up the baton and pushed the criticism even further (although not taking up the gender dimension either) using far harsher formulations and more damning judgements. (Maass’s text is wonderfully polite, compared to Moholy-Nagy’s prose.) She started out by stating that every architectural historian aware of his place in the cultural scheme of things must be grateful to John Maass for his exposure of irrelevance and professional esoterics in the Journal of the SAH (March ’69). The seven main sins of commission and omission he lists and documents statistically are excellently selected. What is puzzling, however, is his reluctance to draw conclusions from the assembled facts and point out – beyond the symptoms – the causes of this suicide by stagnation of a potentially creative and contemporary profession.65 She went on by listing the causes that Maass had failed to identify: the obsolete curriculum, the obsolete convention and the obsolete journal. As to the curriculum, this was obsolete because architectural historians tended to highly specialize in minute stylistic details, but the scholarly focus on ‘the unqualified detail as an end in itself ’ did not contribute to the quality of teaching architectural students. The annual convention was obsolete because it was ‘no place for creative scholarship but a coming-out cotillion for graduating debutantes seeking employment’. And the journal was ‘the third element in the incestuous cycle of academic elitism’. The editors tended to only publish articles on Western European architectural history, because they didn’t feel competent to judge other things for accuracy: ‘Anything that smacks of conceptual or actual discovery on uncharted territory lies around for unconscionable lengths of time before it is returned.’ Such was the fate of a few of her own submissions, which made her understand that nothing I had to offer could pass the footnote test. The footnote test demands that at least half of an article be printed out of context, and that at least half of

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the footnotes prove that what the author has to say has been said already by someone else. … Footnotes are an old man’s disease which, like other old man’s diseases, can be cured by surgery.66 She hence advocated a different type of journal that would offer space for new hypotheses and for critical exchange, a journal that would foster controversy rather than shy away from it. It was not only in the SAH that Moholy-Nagy was confronted with resistance to her approach of architectural history. In 1967, she was invited as the American Representative at the Conference for American Historiography that took place at the Central University in Caracas, Venezuela. In a letter to her daughter, she recounted that she had diligently practised her Spanish and thus was able to deliver her lecture, on conceptual continuities between Asian and American design, in the local language.67 The feedback she received however did not make her happy: The reaction to my paper was much worse than I had expected. Nothing whatsoever made the slightest impression on this fiercely unanimously nondiffusionist academic enclave. The tone and climate were dominated by the Mexicans who cited the ‘resolution’ of the 1962 Americanist Congress in Mexico City that there ain’t no diffusion. … In conversations it became clear to me, that particularly for the Mexicans the absolute pure originality of Mexican culture is a matter of fierce national pride. They consider Peruvian cultures vastly inferior, not only to Maya but to all meso-american peoples. George Kubler, who personally is a terribly nice guy and brimful with a conciliatory and humankindness spirit, tried to defer all decisions ‘to a future when scientific proof will possibly vindicate some of the statements made by Professor M-N.’ but he was most outspoken in a lengthy statement that – while ‘we’ (the diffusionists) were ‘the creative spirits’, art history and archeology had to rely entirely on ‘the hardware merchants of fact’. Some of the younger men, Villanueva, and a few students tried to press for explanation s of the VISUAL analogies – the pouch carriers, the voladores game, the identical section through a Javanese and a Maya roof comb structure, the Quipou, the balsas of Formosa and Ecuador, etc etc. but the scientists refused to discuss the matter.68 The resistance of Americanists against her diffusionist stance was echoed by her daughter’s reaction. Hattula Moholy-Nagy, a trained archaeologist herself, was rather critical of her mother’s position. In their correspondence from the late 1960s, when Hattula was living in Switzerland, they have on and off arguments related to diffusionism, mixed with family news and comments on their daily lives. Hattula tried to convince her mother that her diffusionism was not tenable, but Sibyl fiercely rebutted her arguments, coming up with all these visual analogies which were no proof whatsoever to Hattula. Years later, Hattula’s memory of her mother’s standing as a scholar was still strongly tainted by this ongoing dispute:

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She lost a lot of time … she reinvented the wheel a lot of times. And this was a shame. By not building on other people’s research, she had to do the whole thing herself. And she got into blind alleys. She was a firm believer in diffusionism and things like that. Things that kind of took up her time, kind of wasted her time. If she had been more focused, I think she would have gotten even further than she did.69 It was probably due to Hattula’s influence that Sibyl Moholy-Nagy muted down her diffusionist stance in Matrix of Man, where one can find only a few traces of it. Most of its reviewers, anyhow, who were critical of several aspects of the work, did not pick up on this particular flaw (except for Ervin Galantay, see Chapter 4). Sibyl Moholy-Nagy seemed to embrace the role of enfant terrible in which she was cast by her peers. Her polemical interventions became ever more sarcastic and blunt. This feature of her work, which made it controversial or sometimes even unacceptable in scholarly venues, might have been, on the other hand, an asset in her teaching. Student audiences cared far less about the accuracy and preciseness of her insights, and probably found it exciting to listen to someone who dared to explore big ideas and who didn’t mince her words (Figure 5.5). She was well aware

FIGURE 5.5 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy lecturing, ca. 1961.

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of this. In a letter to her publisher, John Hochmann from Praeger, she commented about her experience with teaching at Columbia: (The dean is visibly upset about my success, aggrieved to have new seats in a room that was MEANT for 36 and not for 60 students … of the enrollment of 30 or more students NOT from the year to which the damn course is assigned, etc.) People like me ‘do not belong in universities but on soap boxes’ I was once told many years ago by a California Dean, but the species dies hard!70 Her beachcombing of history thus served her well – if not always in her academic writing, then at least in her teaching and lecturing.

A nation in an uncanny mood As Sibyl Moholy-Nagy noticed herself, the 1960s were a time of social upheaval and political unrest, especially in the United States. The murders of John F. Kennedy in 1963, of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968, the hotly contested war in Vietnam, the black civil rights movement that gained momentum, the 1967 summer of love at the West Coast with its sex and drugs and rock and roll, the fledgling ecological movement, the second wave of feminism, all this and more left a huge imprint on the universities which were confronted with political activism and emancipatory demands from their students. The schools of architecture were often hotbeds of student activism,71 and Pratt certainly had its share – it was, reputedly, the first school to experience a walkout by its architecture students.72 Moholy-Nagy was keenly aware of the mood in the country and in the school. In December 1966, she commented to Hattula: This country is rocking in a most unheimliche Laune [uncanny mood]. The Kennedy-Manchester affair about the book ‘Death of a President’ about which you must have read has the most sinister connotations. Not only is Jackie [Kennedy] a fabulous idiot, retracting now what she poured out in a 10 hour interview, but Bobby [Kennedy], the ‘next President of the United States’ is in a hell of a fix. He has to stand behind her while everyone [k]nows that the thing is an outrageous injustice to the author. While this goes on, [President] Johnson’s stock is sliding faster than an avalanche. … At Pratt, we had a miniature situation as in Washington: a totally incapable unsuited president, stagnation, graft, general bitterness and declining quality in teaching and student services.73

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She took an active stance against this stagnant situation, taking the lead in petitioning Pratt’s president, Richard Heindel, to resign,74 which he did: Funny feeling. Now we have a big reorganization programme under way which would be fun if college teachers were not such character failures in this country.75 Her dealings with the reorganization of the school and with the concurrent student protests would ultimately not be very successful, although it took some years for the drama to fully unfold. In general, Moholy-Nagy was very ambivalent about the students’ activism. On the one hand, she shared their opposition against the Vietnam War. Having lived herself through the roaring 1920s, she did not necessarily reject their explorations of free love either, although she thought that they didn’t need too many distractions from their intellectual and professional goals. She had, on the other hand, many qualms about the students’ demands that architectural education should become more socially relevant (and thus less design oriented) and that the school should take in more black students (by lowering the standards of admission). She thus had a hard time when confronted with these issues. At first things were relatively simple. When P/A (Progressive Architecture) published a long (though not uncritical) article on ‘LSD: A Design Tool?’ in August 1966, she was not the only one to express her disgust that the journal took this topic seriously, running the risk of somehow encouraging architectural students to experiment with drugs.76 Peter Collins reacted in a similar way, but there were also several other, probably younger letter writers who felt the journal had done a marvellous job with this article. There were thus clear indications that a generation gap was opening up, but it didn’t yet seem impossible to communicate across the dividing lines. In May 1967, Moholy-Nagy gave a lecture at an event organized by the ‘Committee of the Planning Professions to End the War in Vietnam’. (Other speakers were Percival Goodman, Mario Salvadori and Christopher Tunnard.) The lecture provided a remarkably negative reading of the history of America and of American exceptionalism. Moholy-Nagy recounted a long list of how Americans had repeatedly positioned themselves as the harbingers of a missionary ideal – which somehow inevitably required the destruction of opponents – starting with the extermination of the Indians as of the seventeenth century, continuing in the fights against Jacobinism, Free Masonry, the Mormons and the Negroes [sic], as well as in the Civil War (which positioned a supposedly morally superior North against the slave holders in the South), or in the numerous imperialist interventions afterwards (she listed Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Santa Domingo), as well as in the Prohibition era and with McCarthyism, only to culminate in the Vietnam War. She claimed that it was time to do away with this basic sentiment:

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The first step toward a reorientation in the 20th century would have to be a smashing of the founding myth as the national symbol masquerading as historical fact. … There are no chosen people.77 She ended by applauding the younger generation who were against these fascist tendencies and who demanded the end of facadism in politics – the end of masquerading the ugly truth of imperialism with tales of patriotism and moral courage. This lecture clearly showed that she positioned herself against the Vietnam War and for the anti-war movement. On this particular point, she obviously was in line with the protesters, and she recognized the validity of the anti-war discourse of the student movement. On other points, however, she was far more critical of what activist movements sought to achieve. A case in point is the document she edited for Architectural Forum in August 1968, which took stock of the state of affairs in architectural education.78 Moholy-Nagy had prepared eight specific questions dealing with the sense of strikes, the desirability of student participation, the set-up of the curriculum, the position of architectural history, the idea of the vertical studio, the relation to communities, the adequacy of visiting critics and lecturers and the recently published Study of Education for Environmental Design from Princeton University. Responses were formulated by Robert Yelton, a student at the Harvard GSD, Doug Michels and Robert Feild, recent graduates from Yale, and George Anselevicius, dean of the architectural school of Washington University in St. Louis. None of her interlocutors answered the questions in a structured way. They rather provided a continuous text in which several of the points raised were addressed. Student Yelton insisted on the idea that students wanted the design professions to be relevant. He felt that the focus on architecture as art prohibited this to happen, because it cultivated a professional ethos that was out of touch with social and economic reality. Students hence were being prepared for a world that did not exist, and they did not have the skills to interact with the real decision makers, who were the clients with money. He advocated that future architects would be familiarized with design-as-a-process rather than directed towards designing ‘Noble physical forms’. Students, according to Yelton, demanded an educational environment that would be much more flexible, that would be capable of responding to changing needs, and that would be based on democratic principles. Recent graduates Michels and Feild sang a similar song, also mentioning the changing needs and the necessity of working in interdisciplinary groups. For them the ideal school would be a place that students could transform, change and manipulate up to the point that the school would no longer be a building but rather a telephone bill, an electricity bill and rent. Dean Anselevicius was very sympathetic to the frustrations of the students, and tried to formulate a few workable ideas that could provide an answer. He pointed towards two tendencies that helped face this frustration and showed

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ways to be more closely involved with populist values and social change: what he called POP on the one hand (using popular imagery), and advocacy planning on the other. Moholy-Nagy’s comments showed her to be very sceptical about the new ideas in the air. For her the common denominator of the three responses was ‘a professional death wish based on a total disregard for architectural reality outside of the schools’.79 She disagreed with the idea that architecture was ‘irrelevant’ – pointing to many churches, campuses, government centres, theatres, museums and other buildings that formed lasting contributions to the urban environment. For her the call for interdisciplinarity was erroneous, because things would be in no way better when the behavioural sciences would be the determining influences on environment making. She also diagnosed the contradiction between the students’ insistence on self-development, on the one hand, and social service, on the other, subtly underscoring Dean Anselivicius’s suggestion that advocacy planning might most of all be ‘a game for the saviors rather than a benefit for those to be saved’.80 The water was deep: this historical document clearly shows how Moholy-Nagy failed to connect with the honest motivations behind the activist discourse of the (ex)-students. Her commitment was, as usually, firmly with architecture as a cause, whereas the students felt that it was exactly this approach to architecture as art that was responsible for the design discipline’s ‘irrelevance’. In other contexts, Moholy-Nagy had blamed real estate developers, modernist urban planners and technology-driven designers for mutilating urbanity and producing a built environment that was deplorable. In this particular instance, however, she could not bring herself to acknowledge that, in this respect at least, there might be some common ground with the students’ feeling that architecture as taught in the schools had nothing to do with the way buildings were produced in the real world. This sense of disconnection also prevailed in an article from one year later, in which Moholy-Nagy criticized ‘field service work’ – the practice in which architectural students could earn credits by doing some form of advocacy planning in deprived neighbourhoods.81 Pratt Institute played an important role in the development of such community design work. Ron Shiffman had been hired in 1963 to initiate a special programme to assist the impoverished community living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant community, next to the Pratt campus. He was also organizing the ‘Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College’ that offered courses to this black community82 and co-founded the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED), which was the first such centre in the United States. Roger Katan was another staff member, working in deprived neighbourhoods. He was engaging students for community work in East Harlem (although, to his dismay, he could not convince Pratt to give them credits for this work).83 These teachers were quite sympathetic towards

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the students’ struggle, because they understood where they came from. As Ron Shiffman explained to me: When the students went on strike in Pratt, they were questioning the fact that the projects they were doing in the school of architecture were luxury homes and beach houses, and yet they were at an institution that bordered a low income community and they experienced a disconnect between what they saw in the street when coming to school and what they were designing within the school.84 There was thus clearly a faction at Pratt Institute that was campaigning for more ‘relevant’ student work, that was involving students in community design and advocacy planning and that saw all this as linked with the general aims of the students’ movement. Moholy-Nagy nevertheless did not directly refer to them in her 1969 article, but rather presented it as a response to the ‘Harvard Urban Field Service Report’ written by Chester W. Hartman and Jon Pynoos – another pair of young teachers who were active in the community design movement.85 Still, the concerned tone of the article reveals her intimate knowledge of the discussions in architectural schools about advocacy planning and the role students could or should play in it. Moholy-Nagy turned out to be very critical of ‘field service’ and very obtuse when it came to understanding the drive of the students to do socially relevant work. Although some of her critical comments made sense, she framed them in such a way that she came across as utterly out of touch with the students’ commitment. Two of her points were eminently sensible: first, the idea, which she repeated here, that this social service work did more to enhance the students’ feeling of superiority than to adequately help whoever might be at the receiving end; second, her criticism that all the social service work in the world did not change one iota to the structural conditions under which architecture was produced: The established power structure shows not the slightest signs of vacating its position of free enterprise, profit, economy and competition, and it is the architect’s responsibility to impose the highest possible architectural standards on the environmental influence of those who hold the means. The basis of such a contact with the decision making powers must be a full understanding of the role of architecture as a shaper of urban environment.86 If she had used this diagnosis to call for structural societal changes, she might have been considered in line with the progressive claims of the students. Since she did not make this call, however, her analysis came across as the reaction of a conservative, elitist critic who defended the status quo rather than the social and democratic ideal of a city for all.

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Crisis at Pratt The same phenomenon of disconnectedness might also be at the basis of her ultimate decision to resign from Pratt Institute. As mentioned earlier, trouble had been brewing at the school since 1965 when students first stood up to demand substantial improvements in the architectural programme. Their complaints pertained to the lack of research opportunities, the inadequacy of courses in mechanical systems and construction techniques, the missing interaction with the school of engineering and the art school and the virtual absence of field trips or involvement of external critics.87 Nothing much happened, however, and the situation grew increasingly worse in the years to follow. As already mentioned, there was a first student strike in 1966, but the situation did not really improve in the following years. The upheavals happening at multiple universities in North America and in Western Europe in the eventful year 1968 also affected Pratt. On 2 April 1968, the students of the school of architecture petitioned the president of Pratt Institute, declaring that Pratt had failed in providing an ‘energetic environment in which the students feel involved and committed to the serious and purposeful effort of postulating and solving meaningful and relevant problems’. They demanded ‘the immediate resignation of Olindo Grossi, dean’ and suggested that ‘a Committee be composed of top professionals in all fields related to Architectural Education to work with the President’s office and the students to redefine Architectural Education for today and tomorrow’.88 Moholy-Nagy summarized the situation in a letter to Hattula: At Pratt Institute the students break out with the annual spring bitch, being chronically grumbling. Grossi announces sincerely that if it were demanded he would resign and announces a phony reform program. The students split into cynics and activists, the latter carrying the day with a 2 day strike and a threat of total walk-out unless Grossi and the administration resign. The faculty works up a strenuously dishonest front of solidarity behind Grossi but is split down in the middle into reform democrats and hard-core conservatives. … More talk … no classes.89 A few weeks later the climate had not improved: The students at Pratt, Columbia etc. are still out on strike and the situation is so depressing that the only defense is to stay away. The psychological spectacle of America is this – that the students like a bunch of naughty kids taunt their fathers into getting madder and madder waiting desperately to be put down by authority; and this totally disoriented older generation sits there, doing nothing, sulking, offering compromises because some shit psychologists have told them that permissiveness breeds gentleness!!90

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In this uneasy situation, which was not well managed by the leadership of the Institute, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy reluctantly accepted to become a member of a three-person committee that stood in for the dean of the architectural school, who was given a leave of absence. In that capacity, she formulated a proposal for restructuring the curriculum, which might have done something to improve the quality of the architectural education at Pratt, but which was at odds with what the activist students were aiming at. Whereas they asked for a more generous admission policy, which would bring in more minority students, Moholy-Nagy rather opted for admission after at least two years of college education elsewhere, which would restrict rather than open up admissions.91 All of this needs to be seen in the context of the civil rights movement. In 1968, Whitney Young had given a keynote speech to the AIA convention, in which he chastised architects for failing to support civil rights: You are not a profession that has distinguished itself by your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights, and I am sure this has not come to you as any shock. You are most distinguished by your thunderous silence and your complete irrelevance.92 He was blaming architects for not speaking out on issues of segregation and blaming architectural schools for the pitiful amount of black students they allowed in, and for the quasi-absence of black teachers. He also took them to task for their indifference towards black communities, often in the immediate neighbourhood of the schools themselves. His words were inspirational to the black students at Pratt, several of whom had attended his speech (Figure 5.6).93 The following academic year they intensified their activism. In the spring of 1969, tensions grew worse. In March, Sibyl MoholyNagy resigned from the three-person committee ‘after the most frustrating and time-killing year in my whole career’.94 In April, the Black Panthers or someone burned down the east wing of the Pratt Institute Main building, and the place is in a state of moral decay – as are Columbia, Harvard et al. The real tragedy are the majority students who are cowed beyond description and shackled by the fact that they do not want to retaliate with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] tactics. After the fire the Faculty Council cancelled all classes for a week which was a fatal blow for morale. I made a big poster that I would continue my regular classes, and more than half the students came! We rescued my 32 000 slides from my smoke-filled office in the last minute. … The whole thing is terribly exhausting.95 Upheaval at the school was now ripe with racial tensions. Students of the Black Students Union (BSU) tried to close the school on 5 May 1969 in an effort to

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FIGURE 5.6 Students demonstrating at Pratt in 1968.

demand attention for their grievances. In the race riots that followed, at least one black student was arrested. Pratt’s president completely mishandled the ensuing fall-out, and was accused by the students of outright lying.96 Moholy-Nagy apparently had had enough. Frustrated and angry, she gave up and submitted her resignation on 9 May 1969. She commented to her daughter Hattula: I have resigned from Pratt Institute last Friday. It was a hell of decision to make, but I simply could not take that bullshit anymore. One has to have at least a residue of respect either for one’s own colleagues, one’s department or the College administration. When all of it has changed to contempt, there is nothing else to do but to get out.97 Her letter of resignation, which was published in the students’ newspaper, was a j’accuse pamphlet, directed not against the students, but against Pratt’s administration and against her colleagues: I accuse the representatives of the Pratt Institute Faculty of bad faith in dealing with the liberal and moderate MAJORITY of students, and of browbeating their supporting teachers into silence and inaction. I accuse them of gross neglect of their teaching duties by cancelling classes … I accuse the Vice President of Academic Affairs of a total lack of leadership, of invisibility and muteness … I accuse the Coordinate and The New School Committee of the School of Architecture of floundering in a morass of verbiage, resolutions and comforting hallucinations of chorus lines … in order to avoid the inevitable conclusion that the central issue is THE STUDENT WHO CAME IN GOOD FAITH TO PRATT INSTITUTE TO BE TAUGHT, AND HIS FRUSTRATION BY A NEGLIGENT AND LEADERLESS FACULTY.98 (emphasis in the original)

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Central in her account were the needs of the majority of students, who wanted to be taught well and who were not given their due by a faculty and a leadership who simply gave in to minority demands. That at least is how she appreciated the situation. She apparently considered the demands of the black students – for more recognition and for a more open admission policy – unacceptable because this would lower standards. In the interview published in the same issue of the student’s newspaper, she commented: I think Pratt is bound to become a Black community college. And I think with extremely low standards, shortchanging any black student who wants to be brought up to very high standards, because the community college, under socalled community control is bound to fail in any form of quality education. The School of Architecture, if we don’t make a complete re-organization, will simply gradually die of attrition, because the students will find out what the graduate students here have already found out that what we promise we don’t deliver.99 Whereas her lack of empathy for the cause of the black students might be seen as tainted by racism, there is no doubt that her central concern was the quality of the teaching.100 In the interview she commented on the fact that, for too many architects, teaching was something they didn’t give their full devotion too, since their focus was most of all on their office. She clearly felt that the general climate at Pratt was such that it no longer provided an environment where a quality education was guaranteed. Hence, she chose to resign rather than quietly accepting this frustrating condition. Her resignation was met by incredulity and indignation among colleagues, students and friends. Peter Blake, the editor of Architectural Forum, the periodical that published many of her articles, wrote a furious letter to Pratt’s president, expressing his outrage at the apparent destruction of its school of architecture, from which he graduated himself in 1949: In the name of equal rights and equal opportunities – objectives which all decent people support – the rights and opportunities of the majority of Pratt’s students have been violated or erased. Educational standards have been destroyed, and scholarship has been declared surplus. … It is very sad indeed when such world-renowned scholars as Professor Sibyl Moholy-Nagy are forced to resign in ‘hopeless frustration’ … hundreds of present and future Pratt students have been deprived of the right to benefit from her knowledge, her wit, and her idealism.101 Unexpectedly finding herself without a job, she accepted the invitation of Columbia University to take up a visiting position in the academic year 1969– 1970. At Columbia, as mentioned earlier, she continued her starring role, playing for ‘standing room only’, as she stated in a letter to Richard Kostelanetz.102

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She continued to think about architectural education and to confront what she considered a very sad state of affairs. In October 1969, she published an article with the title ‘The Making of Non-Architects’.103 Architectural education had become a failure, she stated, because it no longer turned out a model that responded to professional demands. She thought that the making of an architect was ultimately incompatible with the college evaluation system, and called therefore for an innovative new graduate programme that would take the training of architects outside ‘the built-in invariables of the established university into a freely associated workshop collaborative’.104 She considered his type of programme as the only possibility to preserve the architect’s role as a design professional combining aesthetic, structural and economic know-how, against the onslaught from the technocratic camp on the one hand and that of the advocacy planners on the other. Both technocratic beliefs and community focus tended to ignore the essence of architecture as the combination of various skills with creative impulses. This was why the survival of architecture as an art was threatened. A few months later, she launched an appeal for architectural educators to counter that evolution.105 She was not granted the time, however, to further act on these initiatives. In the spring of 1970 she developed cancer, and she passed away on 8 January 1971. It is clear from all of this, nevertheless, that Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s calling in life was teaching. Whereas she was a capable and omnipresent assistant to Moholy, a generous (if critical) mother to her daughters, a prolific researcher and writer, it was as a teacher that she really excelled. The obituaries written by her friends and colleagues unanimously praise her for her intense devotion to teaching. Paul Rudolph, for instance, recalled how ‘her students loved her, partially because she demanded their best, but also because they sensed that all her life Sibyl MoholyNagy grew, becoming ever more aware, ever more committed and passionate in her prejudices, giving of herself to students, friends and, above all, architecture’.106

Notes 1 ‘Moholy-Nagy: Molder of “Big City Students” (Interview with Sibyl Moholy-Nagy)’,

The Prattler, 29, no. 4 (30 October 1967): 7. 2 Jeffrey Cook, ‘Thinking about Energy Education’, JAE, 31, no. 3 (1978): 8–10, https://

doi.org/10.2307/1424441; ‘Professor Jeffrey Cook’, The Independent, 31 March 2003, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-jeffrey-cook-36388.html. 3 ‘Peter Zumthor’, Klatmagazine, 6 March 2013, http://www.klatmagazine.com/en/

architecture-en/peter-zumthor-interview-back-to-the-future-07/33335, accessed 13 April 2018; Sarah Williams Goldhagen, ‘Place of Grace’, The New Republic, 240, no. 21 (18 November 2009): 29. 4 Felicia Bishop, ‘David Easton – Interior Design for DIY Home Builders, Repairs,

Furniture & Windows’, http://davideastoninc.com/DavidEastonBiography.html, accessed 13 April 2018.

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5 ‘Mit dem Körper hören, mit dem Körper sprechen. Robert Wilson im Gespräch mit

Holger Teschke’, http://www.theaterderzeit.de/content/arbuech3a.php, accessed 25 November 2007. 6 Robert Wilson, ‘Simple to the Core’, in Those Who Can … Teach! Celebrating

Teachers Who Make a Difference, ed. Lorraine Glennon and Mary Mohler (Berkeley, CA: Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999), 92–3. 7 Ron Shiffman, skype interview on 14 July 2018. 8 Both William Breger and Stanley Salzman had their degrees from Harvard, whereas

Harold Edelman received his from Cornell. 9 Letter of her colleague Herbert Seymour Howard to the author, 9 May 2002.

Seymour Howard is an architect who worked for Marcel Breuer at the UNESCO building in Paris before taking up, for a couple of years, a teaching position at Pratt. He later returned to France. 10 Jeffrey Cook in an impromptu interview with the author on 18 June 2001. 11 Pratt Institute Bulletin: Announcement 1952–1953 Sessions, Volume XIV, Number 1,

April 1952. 12 Hannelore Rüttgens-Pohlmann, who has thoroughly investigated Sibyl Moholy-

Nagy’s German years, came to the conclusion that there was no indication at all that she would ever have been registered as a student at any of these institutions. Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Kunstwerk eines Lebens. 13 Apart from the book on László Moholy-Nagy, there were some articles in art

journals: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Retreat from the Model’, College Art Journal, 10, no. 4 (Summer 1951): 370–6; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Idea and Pure Form’, Arts and Architecture, 68, no. 3 (1951): 24+. 14 Course descriptions in the Pratt Institute Bulletin, Volume XVI, Number 1, April

1954. 15 Laurie Maurer (graduated in 1957) in an interview on 17 April 2008: ‘Now she was a

member of the faculty, but because she wasn’t an architect, I do not think they took her very seriously. I really don’t. You know, in the five years that I was there, they obviously were respectful and all that, but I really don’t think that she had the credit of her colleagues the way she would – maybe today, she would have’. 16 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to her daughter Hattula, 18 December 1968. 17 Telephone interview with Jeffrey Shorn (B. Arch. 1961–1966), 4 March 2008. 18 This is corroborated by a proposal by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy for a textbook

(Architectural History for Undergraduates), which I found in the archives at Pratt Institute. The proposal is undated, but since it identifies her as ‘associate professor’ it must be drafted in the period 1956–1960. In this proposal, she stressed her method of ‘condensation, comparison and graphic rather than verbal detailing’. 19 AAA 948/1162. 20 Lee Cott (graduated in 1966) in an interview on 6 December 2007. 21 Telephone conversation with Jeffrey Shorn, 4 March 2008. 22 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 11 December 1968 (collection HMN). 23 Inter-office memorandum from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to John Belle, dated 12 May

1969 (three days after her resignation).

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24 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Preamble to a History of Architecture design curriculum’, AAA

949/137. 25 AAA 949/144. 26 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Teaching More than Design’, The Canadian Architect, 6, March

(1961): 39–42. 27 Bruno Zevi, ‘Architecture’, Encyclopedia of World Art, vol. 1 (New York, 1959),

quoted in Winfried Nerdinger, ‘From Bauhaus to Harvard: Walter Gropius and the Use of History’, in The History of History in American Schools of Architecture 1865–1975, 89. 28 Nerdinger, ‘From Bauhaus to Harvard’, 96. 29 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. 30 Bruno Zevi, as quoted in Henry A. Millon, ‘History of Architecture: How Useful?’,

AIA Journal, December 1960, 24. 31 Millon, ‘History of Architecture: How Useful?’, 24. 32 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Letter to the Editor: Thanks a Millon’, AIA Journal, 35, March

(1961): 6. 33 Ibid. 34 Millon, ‘History of Architecture: How Useful?’, 25. 35 Immediate reports were published in the journals of both organizations and the

publication of the full papers followed one year later: Donlyn Lyndon, ‘Cranbrook 1964’, Journal of Architectural Education, 19, no. 2 (September 1964): 26–8; Marcus Whiffen, ‘History, Theory and Criticism. The 1964 AIA-ACSA Teacher Seminar. Abstracts and Extracts’, AIA Journal, XLII, no. 5 (November 1964): 29–40; Marcus Whiffen, ed., The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 112. It is clear from these proceedings that the animosity between Moholy-Nagy and Chermayeff, which had driven her away from Chicago in 1948, had softened enough for them to professionally function on the same panel. 36 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Canon of Architectural History’, in The History, Theory

and Criticism of Architecture, 37–46. See also Louise Ballard, ‘Book Review of The History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture by Marcus Whiffen’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 26, no. 1 (1967): 133–5. 37 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Canon of Architectural History’, 42. 38 Moholy-Nagy was well aware of this link since she was preparing a book review

that dealt with Giedion’s most recent publication: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The Beginnings of Architecture by Sigfried Giedion’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XXIII, no. 4 (December 1964): 216–17. 39 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architectural History and the Student Architect: A Symposium’,

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 26, no. 3 (October 1967): 180. 40 Stanford Anderson, ‘Architectural History in Schools of Architecture’, Journal

of the Society of Architectural Historians, 58, no. 3 (1999): 282–90, https://doi. org/10.2307/991520; John Harwood, ‘How Useful? The Stakes of Architectural History, Theory and Criticism at MIT, 1945–1976’, in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 106–43.

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41 Harwood, ‘How Useful? The Stakes of Architectural History, Theory and Criticism

at MIT, 1945–1976’, 125–7. 42 Anderson, ‘Architectural History in Schools of Architecture’. 43 Joan Ockman mentions that many of the participants of the MAS symposia in the

1960s, including the organizers George Collins and Adolf Placzek, did not hold doctoral degrees, ‘reflecting both the interruption of their studies by the World War II and the fluidity still existing among disciplines and career paths in that era’. Joan Ockman, ‘Looking Back at the 1960s Looking Back: History and Historiography at the Modern Architecture Symposia’, in MAS, The Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962–1966, 18. 44 Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (London and New York:

Granada, 1980), 4. This book was first published in Italian in 1968. 45 Ibid., 14. 46 Lyndon, ‘Cranbrook 1964’, 26. 47 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Canon of Architectural History’, 39. 48 Ibid., 40. 49 Ibid., 41. 50 K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1998); K. Michael Hays, ed., Oppositions Reader – Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, 1973–1984' (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 701. 51 She complains about this neglect, for example, in Moholy-Nagy, ‘Maass for Measure’,

60–1. 52 Ockman, ‘Looking Back at the 1960s Looking Back: History and Historiography at

the Modern Architecture Symposia’, 30–1. 53 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’, 24. 54 Peter Collins, ‘The Origins of Graph Paper as an Influence on Architectural Design’,

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 21, no. 4 (1962): 159–62, https:// doi.org/10.2307/988076; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Letter to the Editor: Squared Paper and the SAH Assailed’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 22, no. 2 (3 May 1963): 107. 55 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Letter to the Editor: Squared Paper and the SAH Assailed’. 56 Ibid. 57 Peter Collins, ‘Squared Paper Revived’, Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians, 22, no. 2 (1963): 107, https://doi.org/10.2307/988249. 58 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Joan Ockman and Nancy Eklund Later, eds, MAS, the

Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962–1966: A Critical Edition (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2014). 59 Ockman, ‘Looking Back at the 1960s Looking Back: History and Historiography at

the Modern Architecture Symposia’, 25. 60 Bletter, Ockman, and Later, eds, MAS, the Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962–

1966, 313–14. 61 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architectural History and the Student

Architect: A Symposium’.

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62 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The Beginnings of Architecture by Sigfried Giedion’;

Collins, ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of The Beginnings of Architecture by Sigfried Giedion’; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Book Review of Architecture since 1945, Sources and Directions by Jürgen Joedicke’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 29, no. 4 (December 1970): 360. 63 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’; Dearstyne, ‘Letter Reacting to SMN Article in JSAH

March 1965’. 64 John Maass, ‘Where Architectural Historians Fear to Tread’, Journal of the Society of

Architectural Historians, 28, no. 1 (1969): 3–8, https://doi.org/10.2307/988523. 65 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Maass for Measure’, 60. 66 Ibid., 61. 67 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Continuidad Conceptual En El Diseno Asiatico-Americano’,

Boletin Del Centro de Investigaciones Historicas y Esteticas, no. 9 (April 1968): 198–214. 68 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 19 October 1967 (collection HMN). George

Kubler (1912–96) was a renowned scholar of Pre-Columbian art and architecture. Villanueva was the architect Sibyl Moholy-Nagy had devoted a monograph to, published in 1964. 69 Interview with Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Ann Arbor, 28 April 2003. 70 Letter to John Hochmann dated 17 October 1969 (AAA945). 71 Mary McLeod, ‘1968–1990. The End of Innocence: From Political Activism to

Postmodernism’, in Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, 160–201. 72 Roger Katan and Ron Shiffman, Building Together: Case Studies in Participatory

Planning and Community Building (New York: New Village Press, 2014), 7. 73 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 19 December 1966 (collection HMN). 74 Letter by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Richard Heindel, president of Pratt Institute, 16

November 1966 (archives Pratt Institute). 75 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 19 December 1966 (collection HMN). 76 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Some Psychedelic Comments’, Progressive Architecture, 47,

no. 10 (October 1966): 6; ‘LSD: A Design Tool?’, Progressive Architecture, 47, no. 8 (August 1966): 147–53. 77 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Planning Profession and the Vietnam War. A Historical

Perspective’ (manuscript for a lecture 16 May 1967, Hotel Warwick, New York City) – AAA948 – 0245/0256. 78 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘What’s Wrong with Architectural Education?’ Architectural

Forum, 129 (July/August 1968): 59. 79 Ibid., 59. 80 Ibid., 59. 81 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architecture’s Young and the Real Reality’, AIA Journal, 52,

October (1969): 53–4. 82 Peter J. Farley, ‘Neighborhood College Seeking Breakthrough to the Ghetto’, The

Prattler, 29, no. 4 (30 October 1967): 4.

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83 Katan and Shiffman, Building Together, 4–5. Both Katan and Shiffman are now

recognized as important protagonists of advocacy planning since the late 1960s. 84 Ron Shiffman, skype interview on 14 July 2018. 85 Hartman and Pynoos were at the time assistant professors at Harvard and directed

the Harvard Urban Field Service. They sent a copy of their report to the editor of the Yearbook of the National Institute for Architectural Education in New York, from whence it found its way to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (letter and report in the Sibyl Moholy-Nagy archives at the University of California at Santa Cruz). Both authors went on to prestigious careers as scholars and activists. Chester Hartman became the director of Research of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington, whereas Jon Pynoos is currently professor of Gerontology, Policy and Planning at the University of Southern California. 86 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Architecture’s Young and the Real Reality’, 54. 87 Letter of The Student Body, School of Architecture, to Dean Grossi, 12 April 1965.

Courtesy of Lee Cott (a copy is also kept in the archives of Pratt Institute). 88 Letter of the students of the school of architecture to President Donovan, 2 April

1968 (archives of Pratt Institute). 89 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 7 April 1968 (collection HMN). 90 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 27 April 1968 (collection HMN). 91 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Curriculum Structure, Meeting 6 December 1968 (AAA

948/1130). 92 Mimi Zeiger, ‘Remembering Whitney M. Young Jr.’s Landmark Speech’, Architect.

The Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 2018, http://www.architect magazine.com/practice/remembering-whitney-m-young-jrs-landmark-speech_o. Whitney Young was a civil rights leader and the executive director of the National Urban League. 93 Skype interview with Ron Shiffman, 14 July 2018. 94 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 21 March 1969 (collection HMN). 95 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 18 April 1969 (collection HMN). Ron Shiffman

commented that it seems unlikely that it were indeed the Black Panthers who were responsible for this fire, since in that case he would surely have been questioned by the police, as someone with good connections in the black community (Skype interview Ron Shiffman, 14 July 2018). 96 See, for instance, the letter of Kathy Palladini in Prattler Forum, the students’

newspaper, of 15 May 1969, AAA 948/0911. For general context see Ibram H. Rogers, ‘The Black Campus Movement: The Case for a New Historiography’, The Sixties, 4, no. 2 (1 December 2011): 171–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/17541328.20 11.625195. 97 Letter to Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 17 May 1969 (collection HMN). 98 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Submits Resignation’, The Prattler, 30, no.

23 (20 May 1969). (AAA 948/910). 99 AAA 948/0910. 100 Ron Shiffman comments seem very relevant here: ‘I don’t recall anything that would

lead me to believe that [she was racist]. She was more of a representative of the

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mainstream culture of that time, and, quite frankly, that culture was racist.’ Skype interview, 14 July 2018. 101 Letter by Peter Blake to Dr James B. Donovan, president of Pratt Institute, 23 May

1969. AAA 945/0139. 102 Letter by SMN to Richard Kostelanetz, 5 October 1969. AAA 945/0285. 103 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Making of Non-Architects’. 104 Ibid., 151. 105 Unpublished note of 13 January 1970: ‘Architects are made – who makes them?

Memo for a meeting on architectural education’. Papers SMN, Special Collection UCSC. 106 Rudolph, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’.

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6 A CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE

It is not an easy task to position Sibyl Moholy-Nagy within the intellectual tendencies and movements of her age. As we have seen throughout this book, she was very outspoken in her opinions and arguments. She nevertheless only rarely declared alliances with other intellectuals or with specific architects. It might be typical for her work that people remember it in many different ways. For some, her ideas about the environment, the vernacular and the role of humble builders stood out. Jeffrey Cook saw her as inspirational for his life-long devotion to bio-climatic and environmental design.1 Ron Shiffman honours her as a teacher from whom he learnt the intimate connection between architecture and culture: If you read her book … Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, it really called for an understanding of the culture in which the architect operates, as if the architect rose out of that culture and communicates the cultures of the past to the cultures of the future. Each time, whether it is the environment or other attitudes that really informed the anonymous architecture that we know today, and that always had an appeal to me. And that was to a certain extent what we were trying to do when we called for working in communities.2 For others, like Lee Cott, it was her close ties to the main architects of the Modern Movement that made her so memorable: So Sibyl came to Pratt. We were always told, but I never checked for sure, that ‘Gropius came to Harvard, Mies came to Chicago, and Sibyl came to Pratt’. That is how she liked us to hear about it. That is what she said. And so … it was her moving into the International Style that made Pratt move into that.3 Still others revered the breadth and depth of her architectural history courses: Her outline was pretty comprehensive, covering the whole of Western architectural history up to late modernism. Of course, I expanded the material

(she didn’t discuss Japanese and Indian architecture for example, nor the architecture of South-East Asia), but for the sixties it certainly was quite a large array of material that she covered.4 Many are also the anecdotes about her love of a feisty exchange. The obituaries written by those who knew her best invariably pointed out how she loved controversy. James T. Burns, senior editor of Progressive Architecture, called her ‘courageous, opinionated, energetic, cantankerous, humorous, outspoken, inventive, vivacious and concerned’, while also reminding his readers that she held opinions that were somehow contradictory – he thought her interest in anonymous architecture as an environmental design resource contrasted with her dedication to architecture as art.5 Adolf Placzek, long-time friend and colleague at Columbia University, portrayed her as ‘one of the sharpest critics the Society of Architectural Historians ever encountered’ and ‘a remarkable human being at the center of constant controversy’.6 Peter Collins, friend and some-time adversary, used similar phrases: ‘She was the author of several influential books; but it was in her devastating and brilliantly worded diatribes that her literary genius was most triumphantly displayed’.7 Architect Paul Rudolph, also mentioned her contradictory streak: ‘She could be imperiously impatient, but touchingly vulnerable; passionately obstinate, but ruthlessly objective; exhaustive in her research, but conveying her unique feelings, which rendered her critics defenseless.’8 Her contemporaries thus saw her as passionate but not necessarily consistent, and they hesitated to pin down her influence to a set of very specific and clearly delineated ideas. Suzanne Stephens, writing in 1977 when she was senior editor of Progressive Architecture, summed up: She appeared in the architectural press almost once a month, sometimes more. Her articles always generated vehement rebuttals, avid discussion, and considerable controversy. They usually centered on strictly architectural issues, but ones that were highly volatile. In many cases she was dead right – but she had a way of saying it and a time for saying it (too early to be acknowledged) that struck raw nerves.9

Alliances and controversies As we saw in Chapter 1, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy started her professional life after Moholy’s death with a resounding conflict with Serge Chermayeff, Moholy’s successor as director of the Institute of Design in Chicago. The historical records are not very clear as to the precise reasons for this clash, but it is most often assumed that Sibyl thought Chermayeff ’s leadership lacking and that she blamed him for not staying loyal to Moholy’s conception of what the school should be10 (Figure 6.1). Her alliance at that point was to Moholy and his legacy, and she certainly

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FIGURE 6.1 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy seated under a painting and next to a plexiglass sculpture of László Moholy-Nagy.

had sympathetic friends among the other faculty at the Institute, most explicitly Martin Metal, her lover and fiancé, who quit at the same moment as she did and moved with her to San Francisco. From her Chicago days, she also took with her a long-standing enmity towards Mies Van der Rohe. Mies, who had also landed in Chicago in his emigration trajectory from Germany, resented that Moholy had called his American school the ‘New Bauhaus’, since he was convinced that, as the last director of the German Bauhaus, he himself had legal rights to the name. He also took offence at Moholy’s worldly ways and at his easy appropriation of authorship in collaborative projects.11 Moholy-Nagy often struck out to Mies Van der Rohe, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. It began already in 1953, with a scathing (but not unjustified) remark about his Lake Shore Drive apartments, with their ‘lightless and airless bathrooms and kitchens’.12 It continued in 1958 with the article ‘Steel, Stocks and Private Man’, which posed that the difference between public and private buildings was absolutely crucial – a feature of architecture that Mies’s grid architecture failed to

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recognize.13 It came to a full-blown attack in 1961, with a critical analysis of the Lafayette scheme in Detroit that was so outspokenly negative that no American periodical wished to publish it.14 As we saw, some of this criticism again was justified, although the overall negativity of the article was not. The culminating point of this feud was doubtlessly the 1965 article on ‘The Diaspora’ – arguably her most dense, and most intense, diagnosis of the vicissitudes of modern architecture in America. It was in this article that she used the hated word ‘fascist’ for Mies’s 1935 design for the Reichsbank in Berlin (a proposal that failed to win the competition), and it was this article that evoked a lengthy and sexist response by Howard Dearstyne, an American architect and academic who had studied under Mies in Berlin.15 Characteristically, however, Moholy-Nagy was fair enough to recognize (in the very same article) that Mies Van der Rohe succeeded – best of all the diaspora architects – in reinvigorating his architecture in America, where he was able to reinvent himself as a creative architect and where he went on to produce such masterpieces as the Seagram Building in New York. She clearly had a lot of respect for his talent and drive, even if she chose not to write any lengthy commentary on his work that might have been framed as positive. Yet she did suggest to her student Laurie Maurer (Pratt Arch. ’57) that she should go for an internship to Mies’s office in Chicago and she was willing to write her a recommendation letter to that end. This never materialized because Maurer did not wish to leave New York and hence ended up with a recommendation for the office of Philip Johnson (who – to Maurer’s astonishment – took her on without hesitation).16 The anecdote proves, however, that Moholy-Nagy could readily overcome her negative stance if she was convinced that it was in the interest of a student or graduate to do so. Johnson was a good friend of Moholy-Nagy, as testified by their correspondence kept in Johnson’s papers in the MoMA archive.17 They found one another in their love for architecture, their elitism and their joint criticism of many others, creating a ‘mutual admiration society’ that supposedly helped both to cope with the difficulties and criticisms they encountered in their professional lives.18 Their letters are full of interesting comments on each other’s publications, and they apparently enjoyed the occasional disagreement which allowed them to practice their critical minds and to hone their arguments.19 They saw eye-to-eye during the 1950s, agreeing on many things and consulting one another on specific questions. Moholy-Nagy shared with him, for example, her hesitations with respect to the required tone for a commissioned review: I am also wrestling with an article on Breuer’s ‘Sun and Shadow’ commissioned by the Saturday Review of Literature. If I had known how difficult it would be, I would have turned it down. He really is a fascinating example of all the achievements and failures of the Bauhaus generation, but he would most certainly not want to be told so in public. And little Peter [Blake]’s attempts

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to base the origins of modern architecture on Breuer’s genius are outright ridiculous. But is it really worth to make two enemies out of two good friends? Where precisely lie the responsibilities of the architectural critic??? (A question that never bothered me when I raised children and garden vegetables in Illinois!)20 This passage shows that she was pitting her critical mind in 1956 already against Bauhaus modernism (here embodied by Breuer), but was not yet ready to unleash her full fury. That would change in the years to follow, but in this particular case, she toned down her criticism. A point of dispute between Johnson and Moholy-Nagy, on the other hand, was the value of contemporary tendencies in the visual arts, especially with respect to action painting which Johnson appreciated while she didn’t.21 Later on, their differences in opinion increased. Whereas they both agreed in the early 1960s that the ‘“modern movement” [sic] is winding up its days’, MoholyNagy continued to believe in the fundamentality of structure as the basis for architecture and fostered a certain seriousness that was far removed from what would become postmodernism.22 Johnson, on the other hand, cherished more and more a frivolous and ironic stance, gradually developing his camp sensibility. They nevertheless continued their friendly professional exchanges, with Johnson regularly visiting Pratt Institute for lectures, discussions or student presentations (Figure 6.2), and Moholy-Nagy, for example, giving a speech in Bielefeld, West Germany, at the occasion of the opening of a museum there designed by Philip Johnson.23 Philip Johnson also spoke at the memorial service held after MoholyNagy’s funeral. Her position in Germany was quite controversial too. Whereas her publications in American journals on the Stalinallee and on the Hansaviertel went largely unnoticed in both East and West Germany, this was different with the lecture series she delivered in 1958 in several West German cities. The most provocative of these lectures, on modern architecture’s ‘suicide’, was published in a Stuttgart newspaper and evoked a multitude of reactions, as we saw in Chapter 3. Her teaching in Braunschweig in 1965, on the use of architectural history, likewise met with resistance from the faculty (if not from the students). In contrast with her American situation, however, the reaction in West Germany from the part of academics and scholars seems to have been to close the ranks and to refuse any acknowledgement of her potential contributions. Rather than actively engaging in a discussion with her, they opted for ignoring and belittling her. By the late 1960s she had trouble receiving further invitations for visiting positions, and mentioned to her family that a possible relocation to Europe (to be nearer to her grandchildren in Zürich) was out of the question for that reason.24 She had apparently conducted negotiations with the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, but they came to nothing. (Stuttgart hired instead Antonio Hernandez, an art

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FIGURE 6.2 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Philip Johnson at Pratt Institute, 3 November 1965.

historian 20 years younger than Moholy-Nagy and with a PhD.)25 Whereas her standing as an architectural historian in the Anglo-Saxon world was a given, this was thus not the case in the German-speaking world. Although she published quite a lot in periodicals like Bauwelt, and both her books on Villanueva and on the city appeared in German, she never was invited to prestigious gatherings, seminars or conferences.26 Her own interpretation was that Germany was much more hierarchically inclined and narrow-minded than the United States in its academic culture, and that might very well have been the case. Of course, Germany was also notoriously slow in fostering the full participation of women in academia.27 Her most outspoken ally in Europe at the time was probably Bruno Zevi. Zevi, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, was an Italian anti-fascist and Jew, who had studied under Gropius in Harvard during the Second World War. Influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, he became a proponent of organic architecture, establishing the Association for Organic Architecture (APAO), and published a book called Towards an Organic Architecture (Italian version in 1945, English version in 1950).28

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He taught in Venice and Rome, and became an influential architectural critic and historian, editing his own journal L’architettura. Cronache e storia. This was the journal that published the Italian version of Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Villas in the Slum’ – the critical analysis of Mies’s and Hilberseimer’s urban renewal scheme in Detroit. Moholy-Nagy’s first letter to him, about the possibility for publishing this article, was addressed to ‘Dear Professor Zevi’, suggesting that they were professional acquaintances at that point, rather than good friends. Zevi’s enthusiast response already saluted ‘Dear Sibyl’, indicating that he applauded her critical position visà-vis Mies and was ready to shift the relation to a more personal plane.29 Their subsequent exchanges pertain to the discussions regarding the role of architectural history in the education of architects. In early 1961, he wrote to her to thank her for her intervention after the criticism of Henry Millon in the AIA Journal. In this letter, he announced that he had won the competition for the chair of architectural history in Rome, explaining that it meant that ‘our side is becoming stronger even in the university super-structures’ [my italics].30 They indeed shared a similar view with respect to the centrality of architectural history in the education of architects, as became clear when they were each giving presentations in the 1964 Cranbrook seminar. That they were both singled out by Manfredo Tafuri as targets of his criticism in Theories and History of Architecture (Chapter 5) only reinforces this perception of shared convictions. Arguably the most important controversies that Moholy-Nagy was involved with were those focusing on projects by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer for sites in New York, most importantly, because they were instrumental in the downfall of Bauhaus modernism as the dominant architectural tendency in the United States. The first one concerned the project for the Pan Am building (currently the MetLife building), designed by Gropius and Belluschi, which was built in 1963 squatting across Park Avenue (Figure 3.19). As we saw in Chapter 3, Moholy-Nagy was the first one to loudly articulate her doubts in 1959.31 This was in an unsolicited letter to the editor of Progressive Architecture, clearly a courageous step because Gropius at that time was still crowned with the halo of the modernist hero who brought modern architecture to the United States. She was soon followed by a score of other critics, a scenario which has been aptly baptized by Meredith Clausen as the ‘shattering of the modernist dream’.32 After the offensive skyscraper was built, her ally Bruno Zevi rearticulated at length Moholy-Nagy’s objections in an article about ‘Gropius on Park Avenue’ – this time provoking Gropius to a direct answer (which he had not deigned necessary in Moholy-Nagy’s case).33 Although the severe criticisms had not been able to prevent the actual construction of the Pan Am building, the memory of the uproar caused by this project was doubtlessly a factor in the burying of a similar proposal for a nearby site nine years later: the Grand Central Terminal building designed by Marcel Breuer (Figure 3.20). Again, Moholy-Nagy vocalized the objections most eloquently in a vicious article entitled ‘Hitler’s Revenge’.34 The more decisive steps to prevent the project were taken by

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the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, which did not accept Breuer’s project and ultimately won the lawsuit brought against it in the Supreme Court.35 Compared to these big fights, Moholy-Nagy’s role in other controversies seemed almost bleak. Morris Lapidus was fond of remembering her outrage at his one-man show at the Architectural League in 1970, as we saw in Chapter 3, but in her own papers the only trace of this clash is the letter to Arthur Rosenblatt.36 She attached more importance to her long-standing discontent with the SAH, which was discussed in Chapter 5. For example, she sent a copy of her diatribe against Peter Collins’s article on the origin of graph paper to Philip Johnson. She also wrote to Henry Millon, then president of SAH, to complain that, after three months, she hadn’t received any answer from the journal’s editor regarding her article elaborating on John Maass’s criticism of the journal (the article got published after all, whether or not thanks to an intervention by Millon remains unclear).37 Still these discussions, although sometimes heated and not always polite, seemed to be far less personal than the attacks against her former friends Gropius and Breuer. She was indeed capable of maintaining personal friendships with some people she criticized in public, for example, with Philip Johnson, who was taken to task for misrepresenting the main ideas of modern architecture in his (and Hitchcock’s) International Style exhibition and book publication from 1932.38 Also Peter Collins remained a good friend, regardless of her criticism on his ‘graph’ paper. Gropius and Breuer, however, seemed to have been insulted to the point of breaking off friendships.39

Matriarchy and motherhood The 1960s were a crucial decade for feminism and the women’s movement. The suffragettes of the first feminist wave had won the vote: in Germany, this happened in 1918; in the United Kingdom in 1919; and in the United States in 1920. Severe disappointments with the continuing discrimination against women, especially in the post-war period, gave rise to a second feminist wave. This was greatly inspired by Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which seemed to crystallize all women’s discontents in a brilliantly written analysis.40 The ‘women’s lib’ (women’s liberation) movement of the 1960s and 1970s gathered considerable energy, changing legal conditions, cultural understandings and women’s lives in the process.41 In architecture schools the movement’s impact registered as of the mid-1970s, a couple of years after Moholy-Nagy’s passing, with many women students and women faculty members campaigning for greater representation in the profession and in the university.42 Moholy-Nagy was certainly aware of feminism and its claims. She also had strong opinions about women and their roles in society. She nevertheless did not often speak out on these issues in public nor did she openly address

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the underrepresentation of women in architecture (although she did have some interest in it).43 She certainly was not an avowed feminist who would take an explicit stance by joining a demonstration or campaigning against discrimination. Her opinion, which seemed to have remained fairly consistent throughout her life, can be pieced together by a cross-reading through an early publication, some diary entries, an unpublished manuscript and a series of utterings in her letters. The early publication is the first she managed to get published in English: the 1940 essay ‘Women Are Misunderstood’, still under the name of Sibyl Peech.44 This is an amusing analysis, with striking generalizations, of why American upper-middle-class women, although smarter than their European sisters, were so discontent with their lives. The reason was, according to Moholy-Nagy, that they were not willing to accept the position society assigned to them as home makers and mothers. Homemaking, however, was doubtlessly their first responsibility, and this should be recognized by granting them 25% of their husbands’ income as fair payment for their competence and their work. Women would thus feel acknowledged and overcome their frustration. When she wrote the manuscript ‘Muddled Matriarchs’ 20 years later, her ideas apparently had not changed fundamentally.45 She started this paper by critiquing – probably inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s La Deuxième Sexe – that ‘man the male and man the species became synonymous’.46 After the demise of matriarchy in prehistory, she explained, women willingly subjugated themselves to men, because this provided the best opportunities for their children. Patriarchy, however, came under attack from Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ onwards. After that initial call for emancipation, free enterprise, industrialization and conspicuous consumption intervened to complicate the picture. Biology, however, could not be denied, and equality between men and women was a mirage: ‘Men and women are opposites, multiform and infinitely variable in their specific characteristics. There never can be equality between them.’47 Married women who also wanted a professional life disturbed a precious equilibrium between the official world and the personal one. Women with small children should not pursue a career. She also declared, however, that we cannot do without women as lawyers, teachers, doctors and the multitudes of attendants on whom depends a highly diversified culture. But they are only productive if they serve because of and not despite their femininity, if they have stopped being insufficient men, and have grown into perfect women.48 She thus advocated male and female not as competitors or equals but as ‘equivalents of a synthesis’.49 This position, which stressed differences rather than similarities between men and women, and which assigned to women their reproductive role as their

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most important responsibility, was consistent with how she herself had lived her life as Moholy’s wife and collaborator. It was also consistent with her taking up a professional career only after his passing. These convictions also came to the fore in her exchange with her daughter, when Hattula came in the stage of having to juggle her professional ambitions with the care for her young children. When Hattula was asked to do some academic work in the United States, Moholy-Nagy devoted a long part of a letter considering arrangements that would allow her to do that while still looking after her young son, since ‘it is so very important that you keep some contact with objective work no matter how many Andreases you should produce’.50 Some years later, they started discussing the women’s lib movement. After Hattula had asked her to buy her a copy of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, her mother wrote back: As to your comments on the Women’s lib mvt., ‘absolute equality’ in society has never and will never exist. It is against human nature, I am sorry to say. And not only against human but also against animal nature. ‘Pecking order’ exists from pigeons to gorillas. Two things escape me most conspicuously among many aspects of this ‘revolution’. One is that the AVERAGE man’s life is anything but enviable. I concede that for the extremely rare creative or extraordinary individual the potentialities are much better if he is male than if she is female; but for the other 98% the pressures, routines and conventions of the male world are much worse than for an intelligent housewife who knows how to organize her world. The other point is that this ‘me too’ howling never stops to consider that the sheer fact of the existence of two vastly different types of the species indicates that there are two vastly different elements necessary in personal as well as in group existence. These cats never ask themselves what it means to be a WOMAN, different from being a MAN. I must confess to horrible hubris attacks when, in my younger career days, I would walk away from an important meeting, or a very successful lecture in this ‘man’s world’ and feel with undescribable [sic] satisfaction: ‘And in addition, I am a woman!’ – In the end it is, I believe, a question of personal security whether you feel discriminated against. I NEVER did, and I never felt that I could not advance because I was a woman.51 (emphasis in the original) In a later interview, Hattula confessed to me that she was not entirely sure how her mother meant these remarks: And … I remember, one time she told me, she went to a meeting, a professional meeting, and I think, she might have been honoured for something at that meeting, or maybe she gave a paper or something, she did something, and she said, ‘I remember walking into that room and thinking, “I’ve done all this as

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a woman.”’ And I was, at that time, I thought, ‘Oh, she means she did all this because she is a woman, and women can do these things, you know’. But now I am beginning to think she meant ‘I did all this in spite of being a woman, sort of an inferior being’. And I think that is the German upbringing, you know, so oriented towards men, you know, men are the only people … . Well, I have seen this in other European women of that generation – men are valued differently from women. And women are … everybody knows that women are inferior … You know, she didn’t have any women friends. Can you imagine not having women friends? Especially as a single woman?52 Hattula was not the only one who was confused about her mother’s precise position. Others apparently were not sure either about her appreciation of women architects. After she came back from a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Moholy-Nagy wrote an extensive letter to Lydia Rubio de Garcia, an architect she met there, complimenting her while at the same time expressing surprise at de Garcia’s apparent assumption that she was against women architects: Although I know it is now very much frowned upon to single out someone BECAUSE she is a woman; I wanted very much to tell you how much I enjoyed seeing you work with the students and how I appreciated your all-round approach to designed environment. It is precisely this – the specifically feminine ability to think in universal approaches, rather than in fixed specialized principles, that is so needed in architecture. I am still shocked and mystified at what you told me about my being opposed to women architects. I have rather desperately tried in 25 years of teaching and publishing to encourage US to stick to a profession in which they are desperately needed. My God, if women don’t know that there is a delicate balance between biological and spiritual needs in a human being, then who does.53 (emphasis in the original) In the same letter, however, she mentioned how labour unions didn’t want to take orders from women architects and how male clients were reluctant to hire them, while American women tended to ‘conk out when the going gets a bit tough’ – implying that most women architects did not have what it took to succeed. There was thus clearly some ambiguity in her position, and she apparently didn’t share the radical call for equality of the feminist movement of the 1960s. There are also some indications that she considered herself to be an exception among women and to belong to the 2% creative, extraordinary individuals to whom, supposedly, the normal rules would not apply. In 1956, for instance, she noted in her diary, recollecting some memories about her trip to Middle America in 1953 (undertaken for what would become Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture):

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As I thought back over the enormous effort of this trip and the work preceding it, I felt no pride and little enthusiasm for the building specimens I had collected like butterflies in labeled kodachrome tins. All I remembered at that moment in the dark were the women I had seen – women in straw jakals [sic] of Vera Cruz, in mountain Cailles and shoddy brothels in Haiti; women in the ruined haciendas of the Mexican highland, and in the graceless stone fermes of the Isle de Orleans in the St. Lawrence. That night I felt an overwhelming compassion with the young and hopeful girls, the work harassed mothers, the wrencheddry hags who were part of an eternal cycle that defined womankind. I wanted to be part of it – be rid of the exception – bow low and be woman and nothing else. But somewhere in back of me [sic] across the beach stood my jeep which I had learnt to drive like a man. I handled it like a trainer handles a horse for maximum performance. And back in the same darkness stood the Mexican man who was my guide. Him too I had learnt to handle like a tool. … In these weeks I was all man because I had chosen an idea. I was after the truth, but I was also after the gratifications of recognition. Was I old – beyond being a woman?54 It might thus very well be that the so-called ‘queen bee’ phenomenon applied to her: the situation in which a woman who has made it takes her success as proof that there is no discrimination against women and hence refuses to support younger women or to otherwise actively engage with issues of emancipation.55 This would be corroborated by a peculiar letter I received from Seymour Howard, a former colleague of Moholy-Nagy at Pratt Institute who had left the United States to work in Paris. After explaining how he knew her and how good memories he had of their social interactions, he continued: She was a star performer at Pratt. … She had no need of feminist support, but did resent male chauvinism. After more than twenty years, she still rankled at the insulting way Le Corbusier treated her when he visited the Moholy-Nagys in Chicago. ‘Demande à la femme de me préparer du thé’ or words to that effect – and that in Sibyl’s presence. But she had no need for moral support. She knew what she was worth as a personality and intellectual.56 Regardless of her statement that she was never discriminated against, she clearly remembered all too well those instances where exactly that happened. She also had some other stories about how men would treat her with less than respect. In a letter to Hattula after she first moved to Zürich, she thus told her daughter about the Giedions (Sigfried Giedion and his wife Carola Giedion-Welcker, who lived in the Swiss city): I have my doubts that the Giedions will ask you to rush into their arms. There is too much bitterness on both sides. During my marriage and while he was living

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all over us in Chicago, he was the most ungracious guest I have ever mentioned. He had started to treat me back in Berlin as ‘eine kleine Hure’ [a little hooker]; when I wasn’t taking it, he got very vicious … Giedion simply and idiotically cannot bear the fact that I am doing what he does and that I have to a certain extent succeeded.57 She was very much aware of her status as a woman scholar and the idiosyncrasies of her double load. She particularly cherished those instances when there was proof that she fulfilled her role as a mother and a caretaker well, together with that of breadwinner and intellectual. In a letter to Hattula a couple of days after her own birthday in 1967, she thanked her daughter for calling her on that day, mentioning that ‘Buschi [nickname for her other daughter Claudia] had phoned an hour earlier, and I went around all day feeling that I was not “just one of the boys” but a real functioning female’. In the same letter she commented to Hattula how she had trouble finding the time for finishing a paper for a conference: I have tomorrow night some people for dinner and must go shopping, come h or h w [hell or high water]. (‘What a lady scholar needs is a wife’, sighed Hypatia as she tried to beat the supermarket on her way back from the Mouseion!)58 Hypatia was a famous neo-Platonist philosopher and mathematician in fourthcentury Alexandria at the Mouseion – the name for the institute where intellectuals and artists gathered and discussed. These offhand remarks reveal how much she was aware of the complexities provoked by being a ‘lady scholar’. She also did not hesitate to refer to other women intellectuals, although the pattern is not established enough to recognize it as a feminist strategy (which of course it would be today). The most surprising (to me at least) of these references is one to Helena Syrkus, with which she concluded the ‘Diaspora’ article: The halo of greatness and originality surrounding the Bauhaus teachers gradually became questionable. … In 1949 at the CIAM Congress in Bergamo, Helena Syrkus, a Polish State architect, buried Ideological Functionalism. Although her motivations were certainly not purely architectural, she had the insight and the courage to tell the old lions that their days were over: ‘We must revise our attitude’, she said, ‘the Bauhaus is as far behind us as Scamozzi’.59 This remark referred to an intervention by Helena Syrkus, avowed communist and by 1949 an important architect in the newly erected Polish communist state apparatus. Syrkus was a long-standing member of CIAM, who acted as its vicepresident between 1945 and 1954. Moholy-Nagy knew her from when she had visited the United States in 1946 with her husband. During the seventh CIAM conference, which took place in the Italian town of Bergamo in a palazzo facing

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FIGURE 6.3 Helena Syrkus at the speaker’s table during the CIAM conference in Bergamo.

Scamozzi’s seventeenth-century town hall, Syrkus took up the defence of socialist realism, in line with the official policy in Poland (Figure 6.3). Moholy-Nagy quoted from a partial publication of this intervention edited by Sigfried Giedion. Read in context, a fuller quote of Syrkus’s words reads: The countries of the East have come to the conclusion that we should have greater respect for the past. We do not need to fall into the eclecticism of drawing our material directly from the forms of the past but we should have a greater respect for the spirit of the past. … We of CIAM must revise our attitude. [Looking through the large windows towards Scamozzi’s palace, Helena Syrkus concluded]: The Bauhaus is as far behind us as Scamozzi.60 It was a rather surprising alliance that Moholy-Nagy set up through her quoting of Syrkus. Nowhere else in her work had she defended socialist realism (the only time that she engaged with it – very critically – was in the anonymous 1956 article on East Germany, discussed in Chapter 3) and neither did she have any political inclination that would bring her close to communism. Although she distanced herself from Syrkus’s remarks by the modifying qualification that ‘her motivations were certainly not purely architectural’, it seems not too far-fetched to assume that her reasons to end this forceful article in this way might have had to do with calling upon the insights of another female intellectual. Coincidentally, it seems that Helena Syrkus also did not self-identify as a feminist.61 They were apparently no exception among professional women of their generation. In a book on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women engineers, Ruth Cowan Schwarz noted that many of these women engineers were not feminists, at least not of the recognized political variety. Most of the protagonists of that book were indeed not engaged in organized political activity nor were

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they taking explicit feminist positions. They did however, by the pure fact of their existence, consistently challenge gender norms, which might be construed as a somewhat implicit form of feminism.62 Moholy-Nagy challenged many gender norms too throughout her life: she was rebellious as a girl and fought to liberate herself from home; she always refused to accept a position in the background, but systematically sought the limelight; while being supportive of Moholy, she nevertheless continued to pursue her own career as a writer; she did not give in to the temptation of a marriage with Martin Metal, which could have ensured her a safe and relaxed existence; after Moholy’s death, she earned her own money, not only through teaching at Pratt but also through her many publications (which gave her a double income, as she sometimes boasted in her letters); because of that she was able to financially support family members (her daughters, her sisters, her niece and nephew) as well as organizations such as SAH; she did not keep silent when her peers expected that from her; she was very demanding rather than caring or tactful towards her students. In all these ways, she led a feminist life, which might ultimately be the most important thing in considering her feminism.

Feminism and modernism Since the 1990s, the relationship between modernism and feminism, and the place of gender in modernism, has been a focal point in literary studies. Literary historian, Bonnie Kime Scott, wrote in 1990: Modernism as we were taught it at mid-century was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine. The inscriptions of mothers and women, and more broadly of sexuality and gender, were not adequately decoded, if detected at all. … Deliberate or not, this is an example of the politics of gender. Typically, both the authors of original manifestos and the literary historians of modernism took as their norm the small set of its male participants, who were quoted, anthologized, taught and consecrated as geniuses.63 Feminist criticism has since done a lot to reconsider this gendering. Writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Viriginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Mansfield have been closely studied and have been made part of the canon, necessitating a revision and remapping of what literary modernism was all about.64 Multiple articles and volumes have appeared, which resulted in the acknowledgement of ‘gender as a constitutive category of modernism’.65 What is called for in these revisionary projects is on the one hand a work of recovery – lifting female writers up from the obscure corners of history

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where they have been relegated to by patriarchal historiographies – and on the other hand a rethinking of the criteria and assessments that define modernism. These efforts lead to an understanding of modernism that is much more multifaceted and complex. In his 2005 cultural history of modernism, Tim Armstrong highlights the contradictions and ambivalences that characterized modernist culture: it could encompass both a rejection of the past and a fetishization of certain earlier periods; both primitivism and defence of civilization against barbarism; both enthusiasm for the technological and fear of it; both a celebration of the impersonal making and a stress on subjectivity.66 Modernist culture was also ambivalent in its attitudes towards women and their role. Armstrong observes that the canonical narratives indeed excluded women writers and made many disappear from visibility, because they were often in supportive roles rather than agonistic ones. He therefore advocates an understanding of modernist culture in terms of networks rather than in terms of its iconoclasm. In that case, women move closer to the centre, since they often are the ones who maintain the connections between different groups and individuals.67 In art history, similar revisions of modernism are taking place, although the patriarchal canonical narratives are apparently even more difficult to displace in this field. Again, like for female writers, it is a misconception to believe that there were no women artists in the heydays of the avant-garde. In Weimar Germany, there were scores of women artists who were part of modernist networks. They and their work were however seen as ‘not modern enough’.68 In twentieth-century New York there were plenty of women active in the art world as collectors, exhibition organizers, critics and artists. As Griselda Pollock points out: Modernist consciousness was fundamentally engaged with the changing social roles, economic activity, public visibility, and cultural articulation of women in urban society at the levels of both lived processes and cultural representation. So how can we account for the counterintuitive fact that despite every form of evidence to the contrary, and despite everything that made the modernization of gender roles fundamental to modernity itself, the dominant vision of modern art created by the most influential American museum [the MoMA] systematically failed to register the intensely visible artistic participation of women in making modernism modern?69 Part of the answer to this puzzling question is offered, according to Pollock, by modernism’s gender politics, which posited the male flaneur, as a figure of masculine sexual freedom and intellectual mobility, as central to modernist aesthetics, whereas modernist imaginations of women tended to focus on the prostitute and

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the hysteric. Gender difference hence easily translated into gender hierarchy, with masculine features and values (rationality, strength and sobriety) presented as superior to feminine ones (sentimentality, weakness and superficiality). Another part of the answer is provided by psychoanalysis: The story of art as a story of great men, and only men, registers a specifically masculine narcissism; primary, infantile idealization of the father gives way to, and is compensated for by, the creation of a hero, who must be like the heroizing self but also an idealization, a figure elevated above that self. … Thus we can recognize the psychological investment in an art history that is shaped as a history of great men.70 Typified by Alfred Barr’s infamous chart (Figure 6.4), which mapped tendencies of cubism and abstract art in their relation to one another, the narratives of modernist art focused on how male painters and artists influenced other male

FIGURE 6.4 Cover of Alfred Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art, featuring his infamous chart of the developments in the arts between 1890 and 1935.

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painters and artists, while historical contexts, political constellations, technological developments and social roles were edited out of the picture. Like in literature, therefore, a more inclusive history of modern art will necessitate the recognition of women artists as well as the reconsideration of value hierarchies. Modern architecture also figured in Barr’s chart as the result, appearing around 1925, of the lines of influence emanating from machine aesthetics, purism, neoplasticism and the Bauhaus. This positioning is consistent with how Hitchcock and Johnson, three years before Barr’s chart, had introduced modern architecture to the MoMA and to the United States as The International Style.71 Pollock’s criticism certainly applies to this conceptualization of modern architecture, which hinges on the European ‘master architects’ Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier and Oud. There are, however, important differences between modernism in literature and art, on the one hand, and modernism in architecture, on the other. One of the main differences is that there were not that many female practitioners of architecture, in contrast with the fields of literature or the arts. Whereas it was, in the first half of the twentieth century, in many places perfectly acceptable for women of the upper-middle classes to spend their time writing or painting (as long as they were not too serious about it), it was much more difficult to practice architecture as a kind of leisure activity. Architecture, after all, was also a business: it involved huge quantities of capital and necessitated the creator to engage with clients, collaborators and contractors. Women might be able to become semiprofessionals in the field of interior design, which was seen as very feminine,72 but they had much more trouble if they really aimed for the masculine field of architecture, as the numerous stories of would-be female architects testify.73 Sociologically, therefore, the field of architecture was definitely more male than that of literature or the arts. The politics of gender also played a role in architecture. It is well documented that Gropius at first welcomed women to the Bauhaus, explicitly mentioning in the Bauhaus-manifest that it was open to students of both sexes. When however there turned out to be as many women as men, the faculty became worried as to what this would mean for the standing of the school. Hence they devised ways to minimize the impact of the female presence, for example, by restricting women students’ access to the highly reputed domains of painting and of architecture.74 Whereas many of the male Bauhaus people – Gropius, Mies, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Breuer, Hilberseimer – managed to establish themselves in the United States after the demise of the school, this proved to be a much more challenging endeavour for its most talented women. Lucia Moholy – Moholy’s first wife – fruitlessly tried to get a visa for the United States, and was moreover deprived of her photographic negatives as well as of her copyright of the images that made the Bauhaus famous.75 Marianne Brandt, another of Moholy’s love interests, did not manage to get out of Germany because she gave precedence to family obligations.76 Gunta Stölzl, the only female professor at the Bauhaus, was fired for political reasons by Mies Van

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der Rohe in 1931, and moved to Switzerland where her career was modest.77 Only Anni Albers could carve out a successful career for herself in the United States.78 Indeed, the big migration and exile of avant-garde artists and architects from Weimar Germany was a predominantly male affair.79 The focus on male careers was, however, only one aspect of the politics of gender in modernism. There was also a hierarchy in values that tended to pit modern architecture as the manful and virile alternative to an effeminate eclecticism or a soft traditionalism. These associations were already clear in the writings of the Dutch architect H. P. Berlage, who summoned modern architecture to embody the sublime, the masculine form of beauty, rather than mere prettiness, the feminine form of beauty.80 Authors such as Hermann Muthesius and Adolf Loos likewise advocated a strong, wilful and virile architecture, that would be sober and straightforward, rather than charming or decorated.81 Le Corbusier presented his machines-à-habiter (dwelling machines) as the honest alternative for the ‘sentimental hysteria’ that animated the cult of the home.82 In Weimar Germany, critics warned against the coziness and comfort that women brought to the home, because these were false values that prevented true humanity to unfold.83 In the United States, modernism was presented by Lewis Mumford as associated with working-class masculinity – honest, primeval, healthy, virile, authentic – while differentiated from upper-class femininity – decadent, decorative, soft, seductive, frivolous.84 This hierarchical gendering was further reinforced in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, which became a film in 1949 – the epitome, one might state, of gendered discourse related to modern architecture.85 Because of all these reasons, feminism and modernism did not easily interact. Whereas the inscription of women and the feminine in modernist literature has by now been analysed up to the point where many agree that the canon should be revised, this work proved more difficult in the visual arts and in architecture where patterns of male domination seem to linger even longer. In considering the work of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, we can recognize some strategies of resistance against this male dominance – which is why I have called her at one point a ‘feministin-disguise’.86 This resistance first of all resides in the very fact that she did forge a career for herself as an architectural critic and historian against all odds and against all kinds of social pressure as to how to live her life as an artist’s widow. But it also became visible in her writings and in the way she framed modernism. Her writings on modern architecture of course did not entirely escape the dominant pattern of gendered appreciation. In a review article from 1953, for example, she reminded her readers of the masculine characteristics of the avantgarde: In those old enough to remember, the STIJL show [in the MoMA] aroused nostalgia. How simple the equation between structural form and social progress had seemed in the mid-Twenties, how virile and manly its realization!87

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Her writings also subscribe to the conceptualizations of gendered domains that were prevalent in her days (and to a large extent still are). Hence rationality and technology were indeed articulated as masculine, whereas forces of nature and relations of care were rather associated with the feminine. What she did oppose, however, was the hierarchy that modernist critics typically endowed these associations with. For her it was clear that modern architecture should not only embrace science and technology, but that it also should take into account cultural references and contextual considerations. She gendered the environment – the natural environment as well as the urban sphere – as feminine and strongly advocated respect for this environment as the source of nurturing and identification. This was indeed one of the consistent themes in her oeuvre as the frequent use of the term ‘matrix’ proved. As I mentioned earlier, the term already appeared in Children’s Children, reappeared in Native Genius of Anonymous Architecture and ultimately figured in the title of Matrix of Man.88 ‘Matrix’ was also used in a key text from 1958, which advocated the differentiation between private and public space, since the first one needed to act as a protective enclosure allowing for privacy and regeneration.89 As we saw in Chapter 4, she really was insistent in calling upon feminine images and forces as counterweight for masculine dominance. In her 1968 article ‘On the Environmental Brink’, for instance, she portrayed science and technology as based on masculine values that were imperialist, coercive and dominating, contrasting them with life-giving and nurturing forces associated with women and femininity.90 Evoking images of Demeter and Fortuna Redux, she called upon their symbolic powers to counterbalance technocratic desires for control and mastery, purely based upon rationality, functionalism and computerized management (Figure 4.6). This strategy brought her close to what later would become ecofeminism. This movement did not yet exist at the moment of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s writing, but there are clear parallels with her thinking. The origin of ecofeminism is usually traced back to French feminist and writer Françoise d’Eaubonne, who in 1972 set up a group called ‘Ecologie-Féminisme’, arguing that ‘the destruction of the planet is due to the profit motive inherent in male power’.91 She introduced the term ‘ecofeminism’ two years later in her book Le féminisme ou la mort.92 The ensuing decades have seen the development of many strands of ecofeminism, but they all shared ‘the assumption that there is a connection between the patriarchal oppression of women and the destruction and exploitation of the natural world by capitalist, male-dominated, modern society’.93 Some eco-feminists also made use of the matrix metaphor. For example, Rosemary Radford Ruether argued, ‘We need to recognize our utter dependence on the great life-producing matrix of the planet in order to learn to reintegrate our human systems of production, consumption, and waste into the ecological patterns by which nature sustains life.’94 This passage is indeed reminiscent of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s argument, even though the latter would neither use the word ‘ecology’ nor position herself explicitly as a ‘feminist’.

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My point is that Moholy-Nagy’s interventions in modernist architectural culture consistently brought to the fore the importance of the feminine sphere, be it under the form of the inherited culture of the past, the nurturing matrix of home and city, or the vital forces of nature. She pitted these against what she perceived as modernist architecture’s obsession with science and technology, against a thoughtless race into the future and against a construction industry that solely thought in terms of economy and expediency. In this process, she sometimes found herself aligned with tendencies, such as brutalism, that we now tend to qualify as masculine rather than feminine. Her reasons for doing so, however, always had to do with how specific buildings, like Rudolph’s A&A building (Figure 3.22) or the Boston City Hall, designed by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles (Figure 3.23), responded to their urban context and how they made connections with the past, while at the same time fostering civic culture and engaging their users.

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: A forgotten intellectual? In her introduction to the recent re-publication of ‘Hitler’s Revenge’, Despina Stratigakos mentions how Sibyl Moholy-Nagy ‘has faded from view’.95 She has indeed become something of a forgotten intellectual, not often recalled or quoted, and usually not listed among her more famous peers such as Reyner Banham or Bruno Zevi. For Stratigakos, one of the reasons for this fading might have to do with Moholy-Nagy’s combative writing style and her ability to land punches which made her most memorable to the targets of her criticism, who, however, would have the least reason to commemorate her. In an article about Erich Fromm, Neil McLaughlin analyses the reasons why a very popular and respected author might still quasi-disappear from the public arena in only a couple of years. According to him, ‘The social construction of intellectual reputations can be understood in variants of four models: (1) climate of times, (2) geography/national traditions, (3) institutional prestige, and (4) personal characteristics.’96 Let’s use these four models to see whether they can contribute to an understanding of Moholy-Nagy’s fading. As to the ‘climate of the times’, we have indeed seen in several chapters that Moholy-Nagy’s ideas were not always well in sync with those of her contemporaries. Her Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture was something of a precursor to Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects, which made it early but timely and relevant (Chapter 2). Her dealings with modernist architecture often went against the grain, but it was especially in the late 1960s that her critical embrace of the brutalist architecture of Paul Rudolph and others made her somewhat old guard (Chapter 3). Her Matrix of Man came a bit too late for it to be considered as groundbreaking or innovative, although it functioned well as a textbook

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(Chapter 4). Her point of view regarding the centrality of architectural history in the education of architects was made redundant by Manfredo Tafuri, which also rendered her work irrelevant for the theoretical turn that was about to happen in the 1970s (Chapter 5). Her failure to sympathize with the counterculture and with the initiatives fostering community design and advocacy planning likewise put her at odds with one of the most important impetuses of the 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 5). Lastly, her failure to actively engage with women’s lib and feminism might have prevented her from becoming an icon for the women’s movement in architecture (this chapter). In terms of ‘geography and national traditions’, Moholy-Nagy certainly had the idea that she was too German for America and too American for Germany. During a long period after the war, however, her being German helped her to build credibility as an intellectual in the United States (regardless of the fact that her credentials were fake). Likewise, her being based in America helped her to gain access to lecturing platforms in Germany and to write with authority on American topics for European journals. Both these effects faded away, however, when the 1960s drew to an end, due to demographic effects on the one hand (the impact of the German intelligentsia in exile on American culture decreased because some of them went back and all of them grew old), and anti-American sentiments in Europe, on the other hand. Institutional prestige was in Moholy-Nagy’s case definitely an important factor. Pratt Institute was a respectable school and its architectural programme had a good reputation. It was, however, not among the outstanding research universities on the East Coast, lacking an Ivy League status and not harbouring graduate studies beyond the master’s degree. Moholy-Nagy thus had no doctoral students who might have championed her ideas or honoured her by editing a liber amicorum. She also had the very bad luck of leaving Pratt shortly before her passing, which meant that there might have been lingering feelings of resentment among her colleagues, which would not have helped to foster commemorative initiatives (in Chapter 1, I mentioned how Claudia Moholy-Nagy took such an initiative immediately after her mother’s death, but it petered out because Claudia herself passed away less than a year after Sibyl). McLaughlin mentions how personal characteristic models stress how some thinkers become influential through their charismatic presence and others decline in prestige because of their interpersonal incompetence, lack of tact or personal scandals. … In addition, countless intellectuals are ignored because of their gender, race, class, or ethnicity, while other intellectuals are able to translate class or cultural advantages into intellectual recognition.97

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Some of these elements certainly apply to Moholy-Nagy. She clearly had a charismatic presence and was a brilliant speaker, generating invitations to speak in numerous cities and for many different audiences (Figure 5.5). Her impact at these events mostly came forth from her masterly performance, which enabled her to provoke and fascinate her listeners. (She indeed made good use of her experience as an actress.) She probably did not reach the same level of impact with her writings, which meant that her death inevitably diminished her influence. The fact that many observers thought her ideas not really coherent probably contributed to her fading: nobody seemed to be capable (or willing) to adequately summarize what her work had been about and why she hence needed to be remembered. Did her gender also contribute to her diminished impact in the decades following her death? It is clear that she did encounter misogyny and that some of those who felt threatened by her responded by belittling and ridiculing her. It is not so difficult to find instances where that was the case. I referred earlier to Serge Chermayeff (Chapter 1), to Howard Dearstyne (Chapter 3) and to Sigfried Giedion (this chapter). There was clearly also some gossip around about her past in Weimar Germany and some saw it fit to use that (often incorrect) information to bring her down from her pedestal.98 We also might refer to a more recent instance where an, otherwise reputed, scholar failed to register that it was Sibyl and not László Moholy-Nagy who wrote for J. B. Jackson’s Landscape.99 One can thus assume that gender might have been a contributing factor in the process that led to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s fading from memory in architectural culture. The main reasons, however, are outlined above: the fact that she was not identified with a clearly defined body of ideas, her inclination to be out of sync with the dominant tendencies of her time and the aggravating conditions surrounding her passing. As this book has demonstrated, however, her intellectual and polemical contributions to the architectural culture of the 1950s and 1960s stand out. During her lifetime, she clearly was a force to reckon with. Her writings on vernacular buildings opened up a field that soon came to fascinate architects. Her criticism of the heroes of modern architecture – Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier – alluded early already to the untenability of their axioms, which threatened the vitality of urban environments. Her writings on South American architecture and planning drew attention to the importance of region, culture, climate and landscape, and offered a welcome modification of the often myopic bias towards Europe and North America. Her article ‘The Diaspora’ provided a unique and utterly sharp diagnosis of the transformation of modern architecture in its journey from Europe to America. Her idiosyncratic history of human settlements introduced scores of students to the lessons of history and the values of civic culture. Her powerful presence in class rooms and on lecture stages made a lasting impression on audiences in multiple settings. She was indeed a ‘one man band’, as one of my interlocutors labelled her powerful, fearless, polemical and controversial. Her presence on the architectural

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scene doubtlessly enriched it with humour, wit, humanity and acuity. She more than deserves therefore to be remembered, admired and criticized, as we do with all the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Notes 1 Dennis Sharp et al., ‘Jeffrey Cook: 1934–2003’, Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly;

Cambridge, 7, no. 1 (March 2003): 7–9. 2 Skype interview with Ron Shiffman, 14 July 2018. 3 Interview Lee Cott, Cambridge (MA), 6 December 2007. 4 Telephone interview with Jeffrey Shorn, 4 March 2008. 5 James T. Burns, Jr, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy 1903–1971’, n.d., unknown journal (AAA948

– 647/648). 6 Placzek, ‘Obituary’. 7 Peter Collins, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, Architecture Canada, 48, no. 555 (1971): 3. 8 Rudolph, ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. 9 Stephens, ‘Voices of Consequence’, 140. 10 Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 80. 11 Ibid., 60. 12 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’. 13 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Steel, Stocks and Private Man’. 14 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Villas in the Slums’. 15 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’; Dearstyne, ‘Letter Reacting to SMN Article in JSAH

March 1965’. 16 Interview Laurie Maurer in Brooklyn, New York, 8 April 2007. 17 Philip Johnson papers in the Museum of Modern Art Archives, Folder IV.6:

Correspondence between PJ and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 1956–1969. See also the comments of Johnson’s biographer: Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 267–9. 18 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy in a letter to Philip Johnson, 30 September 1962. 19 An academic journal recently saw it fit to publish part of their exchange, because it

shows, according to the editors, a ‘captivating interweaving of personal warmth and precise criticism’: Philip Johnson and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Unsolicit**d Comments’, Cornell Journal of Architecture, 8 (2011): 97–105. 20 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Philip Johnson, 25 March 1956. The review appeared

as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Heir of the Bauhaus. Book Review of Sun and Shadow by Marcel Breuer’, Saturday Review, 39, 4 August (1956): 21. 21 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Philip Johnson, 29 April 1956 (MoMA). 22 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Philip Johnson, 21 December 1961 (MoMA). 23 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Laudatio for the architect Philip Johnson at the occasion of the

dedication of the Richard Kaselowky Museum of the City of Bielefeld, September 27, 1968’, typescript held in UCSC.

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24 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Wolf [Steude], 18 December 1969 (AC). 25 Christiane Fülscher a. o., ‘Geschichte des Instituts für Architekturgeschichte der

Universität Stuttgart’, in Architekturschulen. Programm, Pragmatik, Propaganda, 105. 26 The international seminar on ‘Architekturtheorie’, for example, convened by Oswald

Matthias Ungers in Berlin (11–15 December 1967) featured Peter Blake, Colin Rowe and Eduard Sekler from the United States, as well as Reyner Banham, Sam Stevens and Kenneth Frampton from London. The other 12 speakers were men from Vienna, Basel, Genève, Zürich, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Berlin. ‘Architekturtheorie. Internationaler Kongress in Der TU Berlin 11. Bis 15. Dezember 1967’, Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur (Berlin: TU Berlin, 1968). 27 Dagmar Schultz, ‘The Status of Women and Women’s Studies in West German

Universities’, Women’s Studies International, no. 3 (1984): 22–5. 28 Bruno Zevi, Towards an Organic Architecture (London: Faber and Faber, 1950). 29 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Bruno Zevi, 17 September 1960; letter of Bruno Zevi

to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 6 October 1960. 30 Letter of Bruno Zevi to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 4 February 1961. 31 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Letter to the Editor: Quantity vs. Quality’. 32 Clausen, The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream. 33 Ibid., 268–71. 34 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Hitler’s Revenge’, Art in America. 35 ‘The New York City That Never Was: Grand Central Terminal Towers’, Untapped

Cities, 22 December 2016, https://untappedcities.com/2016/12/22/the-new-york-city -that-never-was-grand-central-terminal-towers/. Moholy-Nagy could not participate in the hearings of the commission, but wrote them a letter (4 April 1969 – UCSC) referring to her earlier article ‘Hitler’s Revenge’. 36 Letter from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Arthur Rosenblatt, president of the Architectural

League of New York, 9 July 1970 (AAA945). 37 The copy of her reaction to Peter Collins is kept in the Philip Johnson papers at the

MoMA archive (with a reception stamp 4 February 1963). The letter to Henry Millon is dated 7 October 1969 (AAA945). 38 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’. 39 Robert F. Gatje, Marcel Breuer: A Memoir (New York: Monacelli, 2000), 231–2. 40 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963) (New York and London: W.W. Norton &

Company, Inc., 2001). 41 Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women

from 1960 to the Present (New York; London: Back Bay; Little, Brown, and Co. [distributor], 2010). 42 McLeod, ‘1968–1990. The End of Innocence’. 43 There is, for instance, a newspaper clipping preserved in her teaching archive, which

mentioned that ‘recent figures of the U.S. Office of Education show that 89.4% of all doctorates conferred in 1964 went to males, but only architecture scored a 100% shutout on the fair sex’. UCSC, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Collection, box-folder 3:16 [‘Women in Architecture’] [A-11–12]. 44 Peech, ‘Women Are Misunderstood’.

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45 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Muddled Matriarchs’ (post 1958), AAA947 – 324/335. It is

unclear what was the purpose of this manuscript or whether she ever tried to publish it. It is undated, but since it contains statistical data for the year 1958, it must have been written after that year. 46 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Muddled Matriarchs’, 1; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex,

translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010). The original book dates from 1949; the first English translation came out in 1953. Moholy-Nagy did not explicitly refer to de Beauvoir, but the argument is strikingly similar. 47 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Muddled Matriarchs’, 6. 48 Ibid., 10. 49 Ibid., 11. 50 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Hattula, 19 December 1966 (HMN). 51 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Hattula, 11 April 1970 (HMN). 52 Interview with Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Ann Arbor, 28 April 2003. 53 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Lydia Rubio de Garcia, 19 September 1970. 54 Notes from 30 December 1956 (0573–0575 – roll 946). 55 Belle Derks, Colette Van Laar and Naomi Ellemers, ‘The Queen Bee Phenomenon:

Why Women Leaders Distance Themselves from Junior Women’, The Leadership Quarterly, Special Issue: Gender and Leadership, 27, no. 3 (1 June 2016): 456–69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.12.007. 56 Letter of Seymour Howard to the author, Paris, 9 May 2002. 57 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Hattula, 2 August 1965 (HMN). 58 Letter of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Hattula, 5 November 1967 (HMN). 59 Moholy-Nagy, ‘The Diaspora’, p. 25. She quoted from Giedion, Architecture, You and

Me, 87. 60 Giedion, Architecture, You and Me, 87. 61 Marta Lésniakowska, ‘Szymon and Helena Syrkus’, Culture.pl, https://culture.pl/en/

artist/szymon-and-helena-syrkus, accessed 7 August 2018. 62 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, ‘Musings about the Woman Engineer as a Muse’, in

Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s–1990s, ed. Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, 12 (London: Routledge, 2003), xiv–xv. 63 Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism, 2. 64 DeKoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’. 65 Anne E. Fernald, ‘Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism’, Modern

Fiction Studies; Baltimore, 59, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 230. 66 Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History, Themes in Twentieth-Century

Literature and Culture (Cambridge, MA; Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 5. 67 Ibid., 41. 68 Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of

German Modernism (London: Tauris, 1999). 69 Pollock, ‘The Missing Future: MOMA and Modern Women’, 34.

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70 Ibid., 38. 71 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (1932), revised

edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). 72 Penny Sparke and Mitchell Owens, Elsie De Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior

Decoration (New York: Acanthus Press, 2005). 73 Isabel Bauer, Architekturstudentinnen in der Weimarer Republik: Bauhaus und

Tessenow Schülerinnen (Kassel, 2003); Hélène Damen and Anne-Mie De Volder, Lotte Stam-Beese 1903–1988 (Rotterdam: De Hef, 1993); Inge Hansen-Schaberg, Wolfgang Thöner and Adriane Feustel, eds, Entfernt: Frauen des Bauhauses während der NS-Zeit: Verfolgung und Exil, Frauen Und Exil, Bd. 5 (München: ET+K, Edition Text + Kritik, 2012). 74 Ulrike Müller, Ingrid Radewaldt and Sandra Kemker, Bauhaus Women: Art,

Handicraft, Design, English-language edition (Paris; London; Flammarion, Thames & Hudson [distributor], 2009); Baumhoff, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus. 75 Schuldenfrei, ‘Images in Exile’. 76 Elizabeth Otto, ‘A “Schooling of the Senses”: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the

Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt’, New German Critique, no. 107 (2009): 89–131. 77 T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design

(Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 78 Jennifer Knox-White, Anni Albers (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications,

1999); Nicholas Fox Weber, Martin Filler and Paul Warwick Thompson, Josef + Anni Albers: Designs for Living (London; New York: Merrell Publishers, 2004). 79 Stephanie Barron, Exiles + Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los

Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), an exhibition catalogue, for example, deals solely with men. 80 Hendrik Petrus Berlage, ‘Over Moderne Architectuur (1911)’, in ‘Dat Is Architectuur’:

Sleutelteksten Uit de 20ste Eeuw., edited by Hilde Heynen, André Loeckx, Lieven De Cauter and Karina Van Herck (Rotterdam: 010, 2001), 67–71. 81 McLeod, ‘Undressing Architecture’, 38–123. 82 Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (1923), Nouv. éd. rev. et augm, Champs

Collection Architectures 611 (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 196. 83 Karina Van Herck, ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends, Does Humanity Begin”: On the

“Coldness” of Avant-Garde Architecture in the Weimar Period’, in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, 123–44; Bruno Taut and Manfred Speidel, Die neue Wohnung: Die Frau als Schöpferin (1924) (Berlin: Mann, Gebr., 2001). 84 Merrill Schleier, ‘Lewis Mumford’s Gendered and Classed Modernism’, Architectural

Theory Review, 3, no. 2 (1 November 1998): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/132648 29809478341. 85 Merrill Schleier, Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 86 Hilde Heynen, ‘A Feminist in Disguise? Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Histories of

Architecture and the Environment’, in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies,

A CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE

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Economies, Technologies, vol. 13, ed. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2017), 39–48. 87 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’, 18. 88 Peech, Children’s Children, 45; Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous

Architecture, 23. 89 Moholy-Nagy, ‘Steel, Stocks and Private Man’. See also the discussion of this article in

Chapter 2. 90 Moholy-Nagy, ‘On the Environmental Brink’. 91 Quoted in Carol J. Adams, ed., Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum,

1993), xi. 92 Françoise d’Eaubonne, Le féminisme ou la mort, Femmes en mouvement 2 (Paris:

Horay, 1974). 93 Beate Littig, Feminist Perspectives on Environment and Society, Feminist Perspectives

Series (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2001), 9. 94 Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Ecofeminism’, in Carol J. Adams (ed.) Ecofeminism and

the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 1995), 21. 95 Stratigakos and Moholy-Nagy, ‘Hitler’s Revenge’, Places Journal. 96 Neil McLaughlin, ‘How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements

and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm’, Sociological Forum, 13, no. 2 (1998): 217. 97 Ibid., 219. 98 Chicago-based architect Harry Weese, in an oral history interview with Betty Blum,

recalled that she was an ‘East German opera singer’ and a ‘very aggressive lady’ who took on after his death all of Moholy’s ‘characteristics and his drive and all that, gave lectures everywhere, taught school’. When Blum insisted that ‘she turned out to be a pretty good art historian’, Weese’s reaction was the briefest of affirmations, followed by another snide remark: ‘Yes. The other thing that she carried over from the opera days was her voice, which was rather penetrating’. (‘Oral History of Harry Weese/Interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Compiled under the Auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Department of Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago Architects Oral History Project’, http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/ cdm/ref/collection/caohp/id/12846, accessed 12 August 2018, p. 62.) I encountered a similarly demeaning attitude towards Moholy-Nagy in an interview with New York– based architect Ulrich Franzen, who called her ‘the Dresden stripper’. (Interview of Ulrich Franzen by author, 21 January 2008). 99 Treib, ‘The Measure of Wisdom: John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996)’, 381.

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Moholy-Nagy, Hattula. ‘The Rediscovery of Moholy-Nagy’s Color Photography’. In László Moholy-Nagy. Color in Transparency. Photographic Experiments in Color 1934–1946, edited by Jeannine Fiedler and Hattula Moholy-Nagy, 7–14. Berlin: Steidl and Bauhaus-Archiv, 2006. Moholy-Nagy, László. Vision in Motion. Chicago, IL: Paul Theobald, 1947. Moholy-Nagy, László. Von Material Zu Architektur. Faksimile der 1929 Erschienenen Erstausgabe. Berlin: Mann Verlag, 2001. Moholy-Nagy, László. The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. First edition 1938. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005. Mohr, Christoph, and Michael Müller. Funktionalität und Moderne: Das Neue Frankfurt und Seine Bauten, 1925–1933. Originalausg. Köln: Ed. Fricke im R. Müller Verlag, 1984. Monteyne, David. ‘Boston City Hall and a History of Reception’. Journal of Architectural Education, 65, no. 1 (2011): 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1531–314X.2011.01171.x. Morrison, Hugh. Early American Architecture. From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Muller, Herbert J. The Uses of the Past. Paperback; Original edition Oxford University Press, 1952. Mentor Books MS112. New York: New American Library, 1954. Müller, Ulrike, Ingrid Radewaldt and Sandra Kemker. Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design. English-Language edition. Paris, London: Flammarion and Thames & Hudson [distributor], 2009. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Paperback edition. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. Mumford, Eric Paul. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Nerdinger, Winfried. ‘From Bauhaus to Harvard: Walter Gropius and the Use of History’. In The History of History in American Schools of Architecture 1865–1975, edited by Gwendoly Wright and Janet Parks, 89–98. New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Centre, 1990. Neves, Isabel Clara, João Rocha and José Pinto Duarte. ‘Computational Design Research in Architecture: The Legacy of the Hochschule Für Gestaltung, Ulm’. International Journal of Architectural Computing, 12, no. 1 (2014): 1–25. https://doi. org/10.1260/1478–0771.12.1.1. O’Brien, Rita Cruise. ‘Matrix of Man’. Journal of Development Studies, 6, no. 9 (July 1969). Ockman, Joan. ‘Looking Back at the 1960s Looking Back: History and Historiography at the Modern Architecture Symposia’. In MAS, The Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962–1966. A Critical Edition, edited by Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Joan Ockman and Nancy Eklund Later, 17–43. New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Centre, 2014. Odgers, Jo, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr, eds. Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture. 1st edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Oliveira, Olivia de. Lina Bo Bardi: Built Work, Lina Bo Bardi: Obra Construida. Reprint. 2G Books. Barcelona: Gili, 2010. Oliver, Paul. ‘Evolution of Cities’. Books and Arts, Nature, 8 March 1969. https://doi. org/10.1038/221977a0. Otto, Elizabeth. ‘A “Schooling of the Senses”: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt’. New German Critique, no. 107 (2009): 89–131.

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Pahl, Juergen. ‘Book Review of Carlos Raul Villanueva Und Die Architektur Venezuelas by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. Db, no. 6 (1965). Paine, Judith. ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: A Complete Life’. Archives of American Art Journal, 15, no. 4 (1975): 11. Pampe, Joerg, ed. ‘Architekturtheorie. Internationaler Kongress in der TU Berlin 11. Bis 15. Dezember 1967’. Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur. Berlin: TU Berlin, 1968. Pfeiffer-Belli, Erich. ‘Der Rueckzug Der Architekten’. Sueddeutsche Zeitung (31 January–1 February 1959). Pickering, E. ‘A Basic Approach. Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. Progressive Architecture, 39, (April 1958): 216+. Placzek, Adolf K. ‘Obituary’. American Society of Architectural Historians. Newsletter, 15, no. 2 (April 1971): 4–6. Pollock, Griselda. ‘The Missing Future: MOMA and Modern Women’. In Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz, 28–55. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Powers, Alan. Serge Chermayeff: Designer, Architect, Teacher. London: RIBA Publications, 2001. Pyne, Kathleen A., and Georgia O’Keeffe. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkeley, Santa Fe, Atlanta: University of California Press, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, High Museum of Art, 2007. Reed, Christopher, ed. Not at Home – The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Rogers, Ibram H. ‘The Black Campus Movement: The Case for a New Historiography’. The Sixties, 4, no. 2 (1 December 2011): 171–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/17541328.201 1.625195. Rohan, Timothy M. The Architecture of Paul Rudolph. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Rosenberg, Harold. The Tradition of the New. New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1965. Rossi, Aldo. L’architettura Della Città. Padua: Marsilio Editori, 1966. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. Oppositions Books. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982. Rudolph, Paul. ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. Architectural Forum, 134, no. 5 (June 1971): 29. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. ‘Ecofeminism’. In Ecofeminism and the Sacred, edited by Carol J. Adams. New York: Continuum, 1995. Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Hannelore. Kunstwerk eines Lebens: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Rekonstruktion des biographischen Verlaufs einer Deutschen Emigrantin. Oldenburg: BIS-Verl. der Carl-von-Ossietzky-Univ, 2008. Sabatino, Michelangelo. ‘The Primitive in Modern Architecture and Urbanism Introduction’. The Journal of Architecture, 13, no. 4 (1 August 2008): 355–64. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13602360802327943. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Art and Letters. New York: New Press, 2000. Scarff, John H. ‘Humble Architecture. Book Review of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’, 1957. Schleier, Merill. ‘Lewis Mumford’s Gendered and Classed Modernism’. Architectural Theory Review, 3, no. 2 (1 November 1998): 1–16. https://doi. org/10.1080/13264829809478341.

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Schleier, Merill. Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Schuldenfrei, Robin. ‘Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy’. History of Photography, 37, no. 2 (May 2013): 182–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2013.769773. Schuldenfrei, Robin, and Annika Fisher. ‘Lilly Reich: Questions of Fashion’. West 86th, 21, no. 1 (1 March 2014): 102–20. https://doi.org/10.1086/677870. Schultz, Dagmar. ‘The Status of Women and Women’s Studies in West German Universities’. Women’s Studies International, no. 3 (1984): 22–5. Schulze, Franz. Philip Johnson: Life and Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Schwartz, Cowan Ruth. ‘Musings about the Woman Engineer as a Muse’. In Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s–1990s, edited by Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, xiii–xvi. Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, 12. London: Routledge, 2003. Schwartz, Frederic J. ‘The Disappearing Bauhaus. Architecture and its Public in the Early Federal Republic’. In Bauhaus Construct. Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, edited by Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, 61–82. London: Routledge, 2009. Schwarzer, Mitchell. ‘History and Theory in Architectural Periodicals: Assembling Oppositions’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 58, no. 3 (1999): 342–8. https://doi.org/10.2307/991527. Schweiger, Detlef, and Martin Steude. Einhundertzehn Jahre Künstlerhaus: DresdenLoschwitz 1898–2008. Güstrow : QUMA-Verl., 2008. Scotti, Francesca. Lafayette Park, Detroit: la forma dell’insediamento = the Form of the Settlement. Milano, Italy : Libraccio, 2010. Scully, Vincent. ‘Early American Architecture from the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period Hugh Morrison’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 12, no. 2 (1953): 29–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/987545. Segal, Walter. ‘And What’s Her History? Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment, by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Pall Mall Press, 90s’. The Architects’ Journal, 23 (April 1969). Sharp, Dennis, Steve Szokolay, Dean Hawkes and Simos Yannas. ‘Jeffrey Cook: 1934–2003’. Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly; Cambridge, 7, no. 1 (March 2003): 7–9. Shen, Ted. ‘From Bauhaus to Her House’. Chicago Reader. Accessed 5 April 2018. https:// www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/from-bauhaus-to-her-house/Content?oid=908358. Siemonsen, Axel. ‘Anregung in Braunschweig’. Baumeister, (July 1965): 713. Siemonsen, Axel. ‘Ueber Zwei Professoren. Gast in Quarantaine’. Omnibus, 11 (1965): 41. Smith, T’ai. Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design. 1st edition. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Sparke, P. ‘Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist’. Journal of Design History, 18, no. 2 (1 June 2005): 216–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epi027. Sparke, Penny, and Mitchell Owens. Elsie De Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration. New York: Acanthus Press, 2005. Stephens, Suzanne. ‘Voices of Consequence: Four Architectural Critics’. In Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, edited by Susana Torre, 142. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977. Stern, Robert A. M., Alan Plattus and Peggy Deamer. [Re]Reading Perspecta: The First Fifty Years of the Yale Architectural Journal. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.

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Steude, Wolfram. ‘Der Erbauer des Loschwitzer Künstlerhauses, Martin Pietzsch, als Mensch und Künstler’. In Einhundertzehn Jahre Künstlerhaus Dresden-Loswhitz 1898–2008, 6–14. Güstrow: QUMA-Verl., 2008. Stirling, James. ‘“The Functional Tradition” and Expression’. Perspecta, 6 (1960): 88–97. Stratigakos, Despina, and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. ‘Hitler’s Revenge’. Places Journal, no. 2015 (16 March 2015). https://doi.org/10.22269/150316. Summerson, John. ‘On the Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture’. RIBA Journal, (June 1957): 307–10. Tafuri, Manfredo. Theories and History of Architecture. London and New York: Granada, 1980. Taut, Bruno, and Manfred Speidel. Die neue Wohnung: Die Frau als Schöpferin (1924). Berlin: Mann, Gebr., 2001. Treib, Marc. ‘The Measure of Wisdom: John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996)’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55, no. 4 (1996): 380–491. https://doi. org/10.2307/991179. Tyrnauer, Matt. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, documentary film, 2017. Tzonis, Alexander, and Liane Lefaivre. ‘In the Name of the People/In de Naam van Het Volk’. Forum, no. 3 (1976): 5–33. Upton, Dell. ‘Outside the Academy: A Century of Vernacular Architecture Studies, 1890–1990’. In The Architectural Historian in America, edited by MacDougall, 199–213. Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1990. Van Herck, Karina. ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends, Does Humanity Begin”: On the “coldness” of Avant-Garde Architecture in the Weimar Period’. In Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, edited by Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, 123–44. London: Routledge, 2005. Venturi, Robert, and Denise Scott Brown. ‘A Signficance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas’. The Architectural Forum, 132, no. 2 (1968): 37–43. Von Eckardt, Wolf. ‘Moholy-Nagy, Sybil. Matrix of Man’. Library Journal, 15 (December 1968). Waldheim, Charles, ed. CASE-Hilberseimer/Mies van Der Rohe, Lafayette Park Detroit. CASE Series. Munich, New York, Cambridge, MA: Prestel and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2004. Weber, Nicholas Fox, Martin Filler and Paul Warwick Thompson. Josef + Anni Albers: Designs for Living. 1st edition. London and New York: Merrell Publishers, 2004. Weinberg, Kurt. ‘Evolution toward Atavistic Barbarism’. The Hartford Courant, 17 (February 1946): D12. Whiffen, Marcus. ‘History, Theory and Criticism. The 1964 AIA-ACSA Teacher Seminar. Abstracts and Extracts’. AIA Journal, XLII, no. 5 (November 1964): 29–40. Whiffen, Marcus, ed. The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1965. Wilhelm, Karin. ‘Atmosphäeren Aus Uebersee’. In Gesetzt Und Freiheit. Der Architekt Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer (1907–1990), 74–87. Jovis: Berlin, 2007. Wilhelm, Karin, and Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, eds. Gesetz Und Freiheit: Der Architekt Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer (1907–1990). Berlin: Jovis, 2007. Wilson, Robert. ‘Simple to the Core’. In Those Who Can ... Teach! Celebrating Teachers Who Make a Difference, edited by Lorraine Glennon and Mary Mohler, 92–3. Berkeley, CA: Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999. Wright, Gwendolyn, Janet Parks, eds. The History of History in American Schools of Architecture, 1865–1975. Buell Center Books in American Architectural History,

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no. 1. New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and Princeton Architectural Press, 1990. X. ‘LSD: A Design Tool?’ Progressive Architecture, 47, no. 8 (August 1966): 147–53. X. ‘Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of the Urban Environment’. The Nation, 23 (December 1968), 701. X. ‘Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment’. Interior Design, July 1969. X. ‘Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Planning’. Liturgical Arts, November 1969. X. ‘Peter Zumthor’. Klatmagazine, 6 March 2013. http://www.klatmagazine.com/en/ architecture-en/peter-zumthor-interview-back-to-the-future-07/33335. X. ‘Professor Jeffrey Cook’. The Independent, 31 March 2003. http://www.independent. co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-jeffrey-cook-36388.html. X., ‘The New York City that Never Was: Grand Central Terminal Towers’. Untapped Cities, 22 December 2016. https://untappedcities.com/2016/12/22/the-new-york-city-thatnever-was-grand-central-terminal-towers/. X. ‘Vom Göttlichen Professor. Ein Gespräch mit Professor Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. Omnibus, 11 (1965): 3–6. X. ‘Walt Whitman: The Great City’. Accessed 27 February 2018. http://www.sojust.net/ poems/whitman_great_city.html. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt, for Love of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Zeiger, Mimi. ‘Remembering Whitney M. Young Jr.’s Landmark Speech’. Architect. The Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 2018. http://www.architectmagazine. com/practice/remembering-whitney-m-young-jrs-landmark-speech_o. Zevi, Bruno. Towards an Organic Architecture. London: Faber and Faber, 1950.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF SIBYL MOHOLY-NAGY

Cherson, Samuel B. ‘Los Falsos Profetas y Los Verdaderos Objetivos En La ReHumanizacion Del Ambiente Urbano. Dialogo Con La Senora Sybil Moholy-Nagy’. Urbe. Arquitectura – Urbanismo – Ingeniera – Construccion 14, no. 42 (September 1970): 17–20. Heynen, Hilde. ‘Zondag 13 Mei 1945. Dagboeknotities van Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’. Feit En Fictie 4, no. 4 (2000): 129–39. Johnson, Philip. ‘Art Gallery. A Conversation between the Architect and Sibyl MoholyNagy’. Arts & Architecture 80, no. 8 (August 1963): 18+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review: Novalis, “The Novices of Sais”, with Sixty Drawings by Paul Klee’. Magazine of Art 43, no. 3 (March 1950): 117. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Dead Man in Ambulance’. Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture, no. 9 (1950): 5–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Documented Seeing’. Occident, (Spring 1950): 38–40. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality. 1st edition. New York: Harper and Bros, 1950. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Dadaism We Forgot’. Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture, no. 8 (1950): 1+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Making of a Constructivist’. Copy; Today’s Better Fiction 1, no. 1 (Spring 1950): 81–6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Idea and Pure Form’. Arts and Architecture 68, no. 3 (1951): 24+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor’. College Art Journal 10, no. 3 (1951): 270–2. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Modern Art and Modern Dance’. Impulse (1951): 3–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Moholy-Nagy: Photographer’. American Photography 45, no. 1 (January 1951): 41–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Retreat from the Model’. College Art Journal 10, no. 4 (Summer 1951): 370–6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Flying Buttress – Flying Saucer’. Transformation: Arts Communication Environment. A World Review 1, no. 3 (1952): 156–8. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Spurious Ancestors. Book Review of Towards Modern Art, or King Solomon’s Picture Book’. Progressive Architecture, no. (September 1952): 165–6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Heritage of Cézanne’. Progressive Architecture 33, no. (August 1952): 104+.

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The Art of Ancient Peru by Heinrich UbbelohdeDoering’. College Art Journal 12, no. 2 (Winter 1953): 191–2. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘History in Structures. Book Review of the Uses of the Past by Herbert Muller’. Progressive Architecture XXXIV, no. 5 (May 1953): 168+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Introduction’. In Pedagogical Sketchbook, by Paul Klee, 7–12. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1953. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Mexican Critique’. Progressive Architecture 34, no. (November 1953): 109+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Issue of Integration’. Progressive Architecture 34, no. (February 1953): 77+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’. Progressive Architecture 34, no. (April 1953): 18+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Oeuvre Complete 1946-1952 (Vol. 5) by Le Corbusier: Apparent-Genius’. Progressive Architecture 35 (March 1954): 176+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Survival through Design by Richard Neutra’. College Art Journal 13, no. 4 (Summer 1954): 329–31. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Design against Nature. Book Review of Climate and Architecture by Jeffrey Ellis Aronin’. Saturday Review 37 (20 February 1954): 16–17. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Environment and Anonymous Architecture’. Perspecta 3, no. 1 (1954): 2–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter: Counter-Critique’. Progressive Architecture 35, no. (March 1954): 20+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Monumental Encyclopedia. Book Review.’ Progressive Architecture, no. (February 1954): 164+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Rapport, Rationale and Mrs. Murphy. Letter to the Editor’. Progressive Architecture, no. (December 1954): 19–20. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Reciprocal Volumes’. Progressive Architecture, no. (May 1954): 178+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Reply to Ad Reinhart’. College Art Journal 14, no. 1 (1954): 60–1. https://doi.org/10.2307/773180. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Style and Materials’. Progressive Architecture 35, no. (October 1954): 93–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Artists’ Masters. Book Review of Art Under a Dictatorship by Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt’. Saturday Review 37 (19 June 1954): 24–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Where the Great City Stands’. Architectural Record 115, no. (January 1954): 24. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The Moscow Kremlin by Arthur Voyce: A Nation’s Essence in Blueprint’. Saturday Review of Literature 38, no. 18 (June 1955): 21. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of World Geo-Graphic Atlas: A Composite of Man’s Environment by Herbert Bayer’. College Art Journal 14, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 177–8. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Future of U.S. Home Design Calls for Mating of Science with Study of Historic Regional Buildings’. The Wisconsin Architect (August 1955): 5–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Images of Our Dilemma. Book Review of The Passport by Saul Steinberg’. Progressive Architecture, no. (March 1955): 220+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Materiali Indigeni Nell’Architettura Dei Coloni Americani’. Casabella 204 (February 1955): 76–82. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Partial Integration. Book Review.’ Progressive Architecture, no. (June 1955): 198+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architecture of East Germany’. Architectural Forum 105 (July 1956): 152–5.

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Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Berlin’s International Building Exhibition 1957’. Progressive Architecture 37 (August 1956): 89–93. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Art in European Architecture by Paul Damaz: Challenging Thesis’. Progressive Architecture 37 (August 1956): 206+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Church Architecture in New France by Alan Gowans: Forgotten Lore’. Progressive Architecture 37 (July 1956): 170+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Latin American Architecture since 1945 by Henry-Russel Hitchcock: Dispassionate Appraisal’. Progressive Architecture 37 (April 1956): 178+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Sun and Shadow by Marcel Breuer: Heir of the Bauhaus’. Saturday Review 39 (August 4th, 1956): 21. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Why Families Move by Peter H. Rossi: Incidence to Something’. Progressive Architecture 37 (March 1956): 196+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: Design Averages vs. Peaks’. Architectural Forum 105, no. (November 1956): 68+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Survey Continued. Book Review of The Art and Architecture of Japan by Robert Treat Paine and Alexander Soper, and Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages by Lawrence Stone’. Progressive Architecture 37, no. (February 1956): 198+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architecture – Art or Design?’ Progressive Architecture 38 (January 1957): 13–14+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Art Isms and Architecture in the 20th Century’. Goucher College Bulletin 24, no. 1 (July 1957). Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Art in European Architecture by Paul Damez’. College Art Journal 16, no. 3 (Spring 1957): 264–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics by Le Corbusier: Magnificent Folly: The Architect as Novelist.’ College Art Journal 16, no. 3 (Spring 1957): 187–91. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. New York: Horizon Press, 1957. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘American Adobe’. AC. Revue Internationale d’amiante-Ciment / Internationale Asbestzement-Revue / International Asbestos-Cement Review, no. 9 (1958): 35–54. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Best Seen and Not Read. Book Review of Greek Architecture’. Progressive Architecture 39, no. 2 (February 1958): 212+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The New Landscape in Art and Science by Gyorgy Kepes’, 1958, 28–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Brussels for the Dilettante’. Progressive Architecture 39 (August 1958): 24–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Functional Modification. Book Review of Willem M. Dudok’. Progressive Architecture XXXIX, no. 7 (July 1958): 194+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: The Beginning of the End’. Progressive Architecture 39, no. (February 1958): 20+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Sheer Delight. Book Review of Chinese Art by William Willetts’. Progressive Architecture, no. (October 1958): 250+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Steel, Stocks and Private Man’. Progressive Architecture 39, no. (January 1958): 128–9+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Double Standard’. Art in America 46, no. (Summer 1958): 68–71.

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Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architektur – Kunst oder Konstruktion? Ein Vortrag, gehalten an Deutschen Hochschulen’. Bauwelt 50, no. 1 (January 1959): 4–8. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Brasilia: Majestic Concept or Autocratic Monument’. Progressive Architecture 40 (October 1959): 88–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Der Selbstmord der modernen Architekten’. Stuttgarter Zeitung (24 January 1959). Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘F.L.W. and the Ageing of Modern Architecture’. Perspective (1959): 40–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘F.L.W. and the Ageing of Modern Architecture’. Progressive Architecture 40 (May 1959): 136–42. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Frank Lloyd Wright 1889-1959. Die Metamorphose der Modernen Architektur’. Bauwelt 50 (1 June 1959): 659–69. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Testament’. College Art Journal 18, no. 4 (Summer 1959): 319–29. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘La Tecnica e Frank Lloyd Wright’. Casabella 227, no. (May 1959): 11–14. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: On Michigan Remodelling’. College Art Journal 18, no. 3 (Spring 1959): 246. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: Quantity vs. Quality’. Progressive Architecture 40, no. (May 1959): 59+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Moholy-Nagy Und Die Idee Des Konstruktivismus’. Die Kunst 57, no. 9 (1959): 330–3. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Selection versus Chronicle. Book Review’. Progressive Architecture, no. (May 1959): 262+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Crisis in Abstraction’. Arts 33, no. (April 1959): 22–4. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Doctor/Patient Relationship Restated’. Progressive Architecture 40, no. (March 1959): 132–3. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Mother Lode of Western Styles. Book Review of The Pelican History of Art Edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, and Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture: 800-1200 by Kenneth John Conant’. Progressive Architecture 40, no. (December 1959): 185+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Origin and Destiny of Abstraction’. Royal Architectural Institute of Canada 36, no. (July 1959): 247–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘A Report on the MIT Seminar: Theory and Criticism in Architecture and City Planning’. AIA Journal 34 (October 1960): 58–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Bauten Under Tropischer Sonne. Zum Werk Des Venezolanischen Architekten Villanueva’. Bauwelt 51, no. 24 (13 June 1960): 679–84. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Ein Panorama Südamerikanischer Architektur’. Bauwelt (8 February 1960): 147–57. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Foothill College – Critique’. Progressive Architecture 41 (November 1960): 158–61. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘If Shopping Centers Must Be. Book Review of Shopping Towns, U.S.A.: The Planning of Shopping Centers by Victor Gruen and Larry Smith’. Progressive Architecture, no. (September 1960): 204–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘On Teaching the Unteachable’. Asterisk 10 (1960): 14–17. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Prestige Payola in Collection Volumes. Book Review of Modern European Architecture by A. Dorgelo’. Progressive Architecture, no. (July 1960): 190. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Some Aspects of South American Architecture’. Progressive Architecture 41, no. (April 1960): 135–40.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF SIBYL MOHOLY-NAGY

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Some Aspects of South American Planning’. Progressive Architecture 41, no. (February 1960): 136–42. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Bauhaus and Modern Typography. The “Masters” Liberate the Typographic Image’. Print 14, no. (January/February 1960): 45–8. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Villanueva and the Uses of Art’. Arts 34, no. (September 1960): 46–51. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Villas in the Slums’. The Canadian Architect 5, no. (September 1960): 39–46. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Ville Tra i Tuguri. 1. Che Cos’e Un Ambiente Urbano?’ L’Architettura. Cronache e Storia 6, no. 8 (December 1960): 552–3. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age by Reyner Banham: An Overestimation of Theory’. Progressive Architecture 42 (April 1961): 200–4. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: Thanks a Millon’. AIA Journal 35, no. (March 1961): 6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Modern Architecture, Modern Art and the Doctrine of “Less Is More”’. The Bulletin of the National Institute for Architectural Education 38, no. 1 (November 1961): 8–10. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘New Cities of the Twentieth Century’. The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 35, no. (March 1961): 104–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Of Planners and Primadonnas’. AIA Journal 35, no. (October 1961): 59–63. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Responsibilities Unmet. Book Review of Arts of the United States: A Pictorial Survey’. Progressive Architecture, no. (March 1961): 199. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Teaching More than Design’. The Canadian Architect 6, no. (March 1961): 39–42. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Future of the Past’. Perspecta 7, no. 1 (1961): 65–76. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Role of the Architect in the Federal City’. Potomac Valley Architect (AIA Chapter of Maryland) 5, no. 8 (May 1961). Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Roosevelt Memorial Competition’. Arts Magazine 35, no. (May/ June 1961): 30–4. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Roosevelt Memorial Competition’. Oculus 32, no. 6 (1961): 3. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Ville Tra i Tuguri. 2. Per Chi Ricostruiamo?’ L’Architettura. Cronache e Storia 6, no. 9 (gennaio 1961): 628–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Villa Tra i Tuguri. 3. Ricostruire Secondo Una Tipologia Sociologica.’ L’Architettura. Cronache e Storia 6, no. 10 (February 1961): 700–1. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Ville Tra i Tuguri. 4. Contro La Speculazione, Qual e Il Compito Dell’architetto?’ L’Architettura. Cronache e Storia 6, no. 11 (March 1961): 772–3. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Washington – a Critique of “The Plan for the Year 2000!”’ Architectural Forum 115, no. (December 1961): 126–31. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of American Architecture and Other Writings by Montgomery Schuyler’. AIA Journal XXXVII, no. 4 (April 1962): 96–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford’. Pratt Planning Papers 1 (February 1962): 2+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: In Defense of Architecture’. Architectural Forum 116, no. (April 1962): 19. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Reply to a Letter to the Editor’. Pratt Planning Papers I, no. 2 (May 1962): 2. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Future and the Past in American Architecture’. The Charette 42, no. 4 (April 1962): 18–22.

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Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Indivisibility of Design’. Art Journal 22, no. 1 (Fall 1962): 12–14. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Indivisibility of Design’. In Serge Chermayeff, Heinz Von Foerster, Ralph Caplan, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. A Panel Discussion., edited by Edward J. Zagorski, 56–65. Industrial Design Education Association, 1962. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Von Planern Und Primadonnen’. Bauwelt 53, no. (July 1962): 789–91. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architecture and the Moon Age’. Architectural Forum 118 (February 1963): 90–2. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor’. Arts and Architecture 80, no. (October 1963): 33–4. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: Beauty and the Beast’. Progressive Architecture 44, no. (November 1963): 6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor: Squared Paper and the SAH Assailed’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 22, no. 2 (3 May 1963): 107. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Unplanned City’. Lecture presented at the Intercollegiate Conference of Urban Affairs, Long Island University, 8 March 1963. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architektur- Und Kunstschule Der Yale Universitaet’. Bauwelt 55, no. 7 (17 February 1964): 189–95. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The Beginnings of Architecture by Sigfried Giedion’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians XXIII, no. 4 (December 1964): 216–17. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Carlos Raul Villanueva und die Architektur Venezuelas. Stuttgart: Hatje, 1964. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘City Planning and the Historical Perspective’. Arts and Architecture 81 (December 1964): 22+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘History: Picture Book and Treatise’. Journal of Architectural Education XIX, no. 3 (December 1964): 41–3. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘History: Picture Book and Treatise. Book Review of Key Moments of the History of Architecture Edited by Henry A. Millon, and Beginnings of Architecture by Sigfried Giedion’. AIA Journal 42 (December 1964): 79–81. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘In Lieu of Ivy’. Pratt Alumnus 66, no. 3&4 (Spring/summer 1964): 18–19. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Intelecto Arquitectonico’. Boletin del Centro de Investigaciones Historicas y Esteticas, no. 1 (January 1964): 43–50. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘L’Architecture Américaine Prend Une Nouvelle Orientation’. Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui 35, no. 113–14 (April 1964): 82–95. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Quality and Profit in Building Design’. Podium (Connecticut Chapter AIA), 1964. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Yale’s School of Art and Architecture. The Measure’. Architectural Forum 120, no. (February 1964): 76–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Berufung Oder Beruf?’ Bauwelt Zeitung, no. 13–14 (29 March 1965): 359–61. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Escuela de Arte y Arquitectura de Yale’. Punto, no. 23 (June 1965): 44–6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Formgliederung – Urprinzip der Architektur’. Baumeister 62, no. 12 (December 1965): 1409–22. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘In Barcelona, an Architectural Heritage Is Transformed into a Modern Tradition’. Architectural Forum 123, no. (July/August 1965): 52–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Le Modulor – The Folly of Greatness’. (Bombay), 1965, 28–32.

252

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF SIBYL MOHOLY-NAGY

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor’. Journal of Society of Architectural Historians 24, no. 3 (October 1965): 255–6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Nouveau Campus de l’Université d’Illinois, Chicago’. L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 35, no. 122 (November 1965): 10–13. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Reaction to Major Space Issue’. Progressive Architecture 46, no. 8 (August 1965): 6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Take a Second Look’. Charette 45, no. (March 1965): 20–2. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Achievement of Le Corbusier’. Arts Magazine 40, no. 1 (November 1965): 40–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Canon of Architectural History’. In The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture. Papers from the 1964 AIA-ACSA Teacher Seminar, Cranbrook., edited by Marcus Whiffen, 37–46. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Diaspora’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 24 (March 1965): 24–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Betrayed and Abandoned’. Image 4 (1966): 82–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘“Chicago Circle:” Grossstadt Campus der Universität Illinois’. Baumeister 63 (May 1966): 525–36. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Constructivism from Kasimir Malevitch to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’. Arts and Architecture 83, no. 5 (June 1966): 24–8. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘El Arquitecto En La Historia’. Cuadernos de Arquitectura: Publicionen del Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Cataluna y Baleares, no. 63 (1966): 6–8. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘History and Psyche: A Reply to A.E. Parr’. Arts and Architecture 83, no. 4 (May 1966): 17. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Moholy-Nagy und der Konstruktivismus’. Die Kunst und das Schöne Heim, no. (November 1966): 57–60. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Review of Perspecta 9/10: The Yale Architectural Journal Edited by Robert A.M. Stern: Architects without Architecture’. Progressive Architecture 47, no. (April 1966): 234+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Some Psychedelic Comments’. Progressive Architecture 47, no. 10 (October 1966): 6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Rear End of the Xerox or How I Learned to Love That Library’. Architectural Forum 124, no. 4 (May 1966): 60–1.w Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architectural History and the Student Architect: A Symposium’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26, no. 3 (October 1967): 178–81. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architecture Is: (Photos by SMN)’. Pratt Alumnus 69, no. 1 (January 1967): 1–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture by Peter Collins’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26 (December 1967): 316–18. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Crafts of the Weimar Bauhaus 1919-1924 by Walter Scheidig’. Architectural Forum 127 (November 1967): 64+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Expo ’67’. Bauwelt 58 (July 1967): 687–96. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Expo ’67, Montréal’. L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui 38, no. 133 (September 1967): 9+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Konstruktivismen fran Malevich till Moholy-Nagy’. Paletten, no. 2 (1967): 24–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘On Protesting’. The Prattler 29, no. 4 (30 October 1967): 4. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Aging of Modern Architecture’. ARK, Finnish Architectural Review, no. 7–8 (1967): 19–20.

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Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Four Environments of Man’. Landscape 16, no. 2 (Winter 1967): 3–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Living Architecture Romanesque by Raymond Oursel’. Architectural Forum 128 (May 1968): 80–1. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Changing Concepts in Architectural Space’. The Structurist 8 (1968): 35–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Continuidad Conceptual en el Diseno Asiatico-Americano’. Boletin del Centro de Investigaciones Historicas y Esteticas, no. 9 (April 1968): 198–214. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Die Stadt Als Schicksal: Geschichte Der Urbanen Welt. München: Callwey, 1968. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Hitler’s Revenge’. Art in America 56 (September/October 1968): 42–3. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Matrix of Man. An Illustrated History of Urban Environment. New York: Praeger, 1968. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘On the Environmental Brink’. Landscape 17, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 3–6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Walter Creese, Spiro Kostof, Marcus Whiffen. Professeurs d’Histoire d’Architecture Dans Des Universités Américaines’. Architecture Mouvement Continuité 7. Bulletin de La Société Des Architectes Diplômés Par Le Gouvernement (SADG 167), no. 167 (1968): 1–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘What’s Wrong with Architectural Education?’ Architectural Forum 129, no. (July/August 1968): 59. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘America and Urban Crisis’. Architecture: Formes et Fonctions 15 (1969): 40–9. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architecture through Improvisation? John Johansen’s Goddard Library’. Architectural Forum 131 (September 1969): 41–6. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Architecture’s Young and the Real Reality’. AIA Journal 52 (October 1969): 53–4. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Boston’s City Hall: It Binds the Past to the Future’. Architectural Forum 130 (January/February 1969): 44–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’. In Moholy-Nagy, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 14–18. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1969. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Submits Resignation’. The Prattler 30, no. 23 (20 May 1969). Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Making of Non-Architects’. Architectural Record 146, no. (October 1969): 149–52.w Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of Architecture since 1945, Sources and Directions by Juergen Joedicke’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29, no. 4 (December 1970): 360. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The Bauhaus – Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago by Hans M. Wingler: The Encyclopedic New History of the Bauhaus’. Architectural Forum 132 (January/February 1970): 19+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Book Review of The Future of the Future by John McHale’. Architectural Forum 132 (April 1970): 90+. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Cesar Pelli. Public Architect’. Architectural Forum 132 (March 1970): 42–7. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Einleitung’. In Bauten Und Projekte: Paul Rudolph, ed. Paul Rudolph. Stuttgart: Hatje, 1970.

254

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF SIBYL MOHOLY-NAGY

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Introduction’. In The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, ed. Paul Rudolph, 7–29. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Letter to the Editor’. Progressive Architecture 51, no. 4 (April 1970): 8. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Maass for Measure’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29, no. 1 (March 1970): 60–1. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Recensione Del Libro The Bauhaus – Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago’. Controspazio II, no. 4–5 (April 1970): 127. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘The Arcology of Paolo Soleri’. Architectural Forum 132, no. 4 (May 1970): 70–5. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Urbanismo y Sociedad: Historia Illustrada de La Evolucion de La Ciudad. Barcelona: Blume, 1970. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘Introduccion’. In La Arquitectura de Paul Rudolph, by Paul Rudolph. Barcelona: Gustavo Gill, 1971. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘(Untitled)’. Architecture: Formes et Fonctions 16 (1971): 50–3, ill 333–41. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. ‘USA’. Architecture: Forms et Fonctions 16 (1971): 333–41. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Ein Totalexperiment. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1972. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture in North-America. New York: Schocken, 1976. Peech, S. D. Children’s Children. New York: H. Bittner and Company, 1945. Peach, Sibyl. ‘Wanderschmiere’. Das Leben. Die Grosse Welt. Der Die Das 8, no. 11 (May 1931): 35–6. Peech, Sibyl. ‘Women Are Misunderstood’. The Atlantic Monthly 165, no. 6 (June 1940): 752–7. Pietzsch, Sibylle. ‘Die Welt Der Mädchen. Zwischen 16 Und 18’. Uhu 9, no. 2 (November 1932): 38–45. Pietzsch, Sibylle. ‘Er Macht Einen Ausflug Mit Ihr’. Uhu 9, no. 5 (February 1933): 73–8. Whiffen, Marcus. ‘History, Theory, and Criticism. The 1964 AIA-ACSA Teacher Seminar. Abstracts and Extracts’. Journal of Architectural Education 19, no. 1 (1964): 1–12. X. ‘Moholy-Nagy: Molder of “Big City Students” (Interview with Sibyl Moholy-Nagy)’. The Prattler 29, no. 4 (30 October 1967): 7.

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INDEX

A&A building 126, 227 Aalto, Alvar 1, 25 Abraham Hasbrook House (New Paltz, New York) 68, 69 abstract expressionism 95–6, 106 acropolis of Pergamon 151, 152 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 17–18, 91 advocacy planners 158, 199 advocacy planning 193, 194, 204 n.83 aesthetic collectivism 93, 104 AIA Journal 179, 213 Albers, Anni 225 Albers, Joseph 94 Aldor, George 170 n.98 Alexander the Great 150–1 Alhambra plan 79 Amarna (Egypt) 150 American architecture 121–7 American cities, views on 161 American Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) 180 American Institute of Architects (AIA) 180, 196 Anderson, Stanford 181, 182 anonymous architecture 66–71, 75, 76 concreteness and directness to 71–2 Anselevicius, George 192–3 Antigua (Guatemala) 139 Antioch, city of 151 Appolodorus of Damascus 152, 153 Archigram, Plug-In city 148, 149 Architectural Forum (journal) 39, 41, 43, 97, 98, 103, 124, 166 n.21, 168 n.68, 192, 198 architectural historians 4, 39, 54, 148, 178, 179, 181, 182, 187, 212

architectural history 6, 57, 60, 61, 74–6, 78, 80, 107, 108, 119, 144, 158, 174–8, 184–8, 192, 211, 213, 227 courses 207–8 opting for 54–6 role and relevance of 178–83 teaching 174–8 Architectural League 86 n.36, 126, 127, 214 architectural physiognomy 81–2 Architectural Record 39, 76, 135 Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (French periodical) 40, 121 Architecture without Architects (Rudofsky) xv, 70, 77, 88 n.69, 227 Arendt, Hannah 41, 52 n.146, 163, 164–5, 171 nn.99–101 Armstrong, Tim 222 Arno, Enrico 38 Arnold Brunner research grant 56 Arp, Jean 112 Arts 110, 113 Arts and Architecture (journal) 39, 40, 95, 157 Arts and Crafts movement 135 Arts Magazine 119 art-space symbolism 180, 183 Ashbee, C. R. 135, 165 n.1 Atlantic Monthly, The (magazine) 26 Augenfeld, Felix 38 ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’ (Greenberg) 77 avant-garde movements 106, 182, 225 Babylon 150 Bacon, Mardges

76

Baker, Herbert 153 Banham, Reyner 1, 180, 181, 227, 231 n.26 Barr, Alfred 223, 224 Bartning, Otto 100 Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (Giedion) 76 Bauhaus, The 3, 5, 13, 18, 19, 92, 94, 99, 104–7, 117, 118, 121, 131 n.64, 178, 180, 182, 210, 219, 220, 224 functionalism 146 modernism xv, 121, 211, 213 Baumeister (German periodical) 107 Bauwelt (German journal) 40, 104, 110, 111, 114, 212 Bayer, Herbert 76 Behrens, Peter 80, 81 Belluschi, Pietro 213 Benjamin, Walter 91, 163, 164 Berkeley, Ellen Perry 124 Berlage, H. P. 225 ‘Berlin’s International Building Exhibition 1957’ 100 Berman, Marshall 7 n.8 Bernini 123 Bildung, idea of 12 Blake, Peter 41, 43, 198, 210, 231 n.26 Bletter, Rosemarie Haag 131 nn.63–4 Blum, Betty J. 49 n.103, 234 n.98 Bo Bardi, Lina 1 Boston 154 Boston City Hall 125, 126, 227 Brandt, Marianne 224 Brasilia, critique of 110, 136–7, 139 Breger, William 174, 200 n.8 Breuer, Marcel 23, 121, 122, 158, 200 n.9, 210, 211, 213–14, 224 Brodey, Warren M. 146, 167 n.38 Brooks, H. Allen 186 Burckhardt, Jacob 181 Burns, James T. 208 cabbalistic sign (Magreb, Africa) 160 Caesar, Julius 151 Calder, Alexander 111, 112 Campodoglio (Rome) 160 Canberra 137, 139 ‘Canon of Architecture, The’ (MoholyNagy) 180

cantus firmus 80 Caracas (Venezuela) 139 Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela (MoholyNagy) 40 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard 119, 122 Casabella (Italian magazine) 40, 59, 114 ‘Central Brooklyn Neighborhood College’ 193 Century of Progress Exhibition Electrical Building (Chicago) 82 Chermayeff, Serge 33, 180, 181, 201 n.35, 208, 229 Chicago 3, 5, 11, 24, 25, 26, 35, 41, 49 n.109, 54, 55, 56, 75, 82, 91, 114, 117, 118, 141, 154, 158, 164, 201 n.35, 207, 209, 210, 218 Children’s Children (Moholy-Nagy) 28–32, 148, 226 CIAM 154, 155, 220 conference (Bergamo, Italy) 106, 219 Cirincione, Gary 175 city, as matrix 156 city and civic culture 135, 156–9 environments of man and 144–7, 148 housing and 141–3 Matrix of Man 148–56 neighbourhoods and 140 public buildings and 143–4 urban condition and 159–65 urban planning in Latin America and 136–9 City in history, The (Mumford) 157, 159, 162–3 City Shaped (Kostof) 148 Classicism, admiration for 183 Clausen, Meredith 213 Claussnitzer, Anne 4, 21, 45 n.19 clustered environments 145, 154–5 Cold War setting 97–104 collective identity 143 College Art Association (CAA) 184 College Art Journal 131 n.52 Collins, George 202 n.43, 214 Collins, Peter 40, 41, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 191, 208, 214, 231 n.37 Cologne 154 Colquhoun, Alan 1

INDEX

257

Columbia University 43, 174, 177, 190, 198 concentric environment 144–5, 149–50, 151, 152 Conference for American Historiography (1967) 188 Conrads, Ulrich 40 constructivism 18, 93, 95, 97, 104, 126 controversial figure 207–8 alliances and 208–14 feminism and modernism and 221–7 matriarchy and motherhood and 214–21 Cook, Jeffrey 173, 207 Copy: Today’s Better Fiction (magazine) 93 cosmopolis (universal city) 151 Costa, Lucio 110, 136, 137, 153 Cott, Lee 207 Cracow 151 Cranbrook seminar (1964) 180, 181, 183, 213 ‘Crisis of Abstraction, The’ (MoholyNagy) 95 Crowther, Jim 24 cubism 93, 223 Cubism and Abstract Art (Barr) 223 Curtis, William 1 Das Neue Frankfurt 11 Davis, Kingsley 167 n.51 Dearstyne, Howard 118, 131 n.66, 186, 210, 229 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs) 2, 156, 159, 162 d’Eaubonne, Françoise 226 de Beauvoir, Simone 215, 232 n.46 de Garcia, Lydia Rubio 217 Demeter (Greek Goddess) 146, 151, 226 Deutsche Architektur (journal) 101 Dewey, John 105 ‘Diaspora, The’ (Moholy-Nagy) 117, 121, 210, 219, 229 diffusionism 85 n.16, 160, 165, 188–9 Dinocrates 151 Dodd, Martha 32 double house (New Hope, Pennsylvania) 65, 67–8 Doxiades, Constaninos 148, 158

258

INDEX

Dresden 12–15, 98–9 Drexler, Arthur 55 Dreyfuss, Carl 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 91 Dreyfuss-Herz, Ellen 17 Duarte, José Pinto 129 n.35 Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 185 Dutch oven (Senate House, Kingston-onHudson, New York) 65, 66, 68 dynamic unity 179 Early American Architecture. From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (Morrison) 57, 85 n.17 Easton, David 173 ecofeminism 226 Ecologie-Féminisme 226 Edelman, Harold 174, 200 n.8 Egli, Ernst 159 Egypt, ancient 150 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt) 41 empathy 111 geocentric 115 lack of 198 Europa (film company) 22 Eyck, Van 88 n.69 Feild, Robert 192 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 214, 216 feminism xvi, 2–3, 6, 8 n.13, 214–15, 217–21, 228 first wave of 214 and modernism 221–7 second wave of 190, 214 field service work practice 193 Finsterlin, Hermann 106 Fitch, James Marston 186 folk culture 71 Fontainebleau hotel, Miami Beach (Florida) 127 footnote test 85 n.18, 187–8 form and function, interplay between 63 form-giver, architect as 156 Fortress La Ferière (Haiti) 61, 62, 63 Fortuna Redux (Tyche of Antioch) 146–7, 151, 226 Forty, Adrian 72 Foster, George M. 71

Fountainhead, The (Rand) 225 Frampton, Kenneth 1, 83, 231 n.26 Frank, Ellen 19, 20, 21 Franzen, Ulrich 234 n.98 free-form plan 100 Freimuth, Emil 98 Friedan, Betty 214, 216 Frobenius, Leo 74 Fromm, Erich 227 Fry, Maxwell 23, 36 Fuller, Buckminster 77, 106, 148, 158, 186 functionalism 63, 76, 80, 92, 106, 121, 123–5, 127, 146, 147, 174, 226 ‘Future of the Past, The’ (MoholyNagy) 80–3 G (periodical) 106 Gabo, Naum 95 Galantay, Ervin 162, 189 Gardi, René 88 n.69 Gemeinschaft, idea of 71 gendered awareness 147 gendering, of environment 226 geomorphic environment 144, 147, 149, 151, 152 Germany x, 2, 4, 11, 14, 15, 17–19, 21, 22–4, 26, 30–2, 36–41, 43, 46 n.53, 74, 91, 97–100, 102, 103, 104, 106–7, 117, 131 n.66, 174, 186, 200 n.12, 211–12, 214, 222, 224–5, 228, 229 Giedion, Sigfried 5, 37, 54, 76, 77, 97, 106, 132 n.75, 179, 181, 182, 201 n.38, 218–19, 220, 229 Giedion-Welcker, Carola 218 Gill, A. Theodor 45 n.29 Gisbertz, Olaf 130 n.36 Goldberg, Bertrand 123 Goodman, Percival 170 n.90, 191 Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University 174 Graham, Bruce 149 Graham Foundation 180 Grand Central Terminal project (New York) 158, 213 Gray, Eileen 1 ‘Great City, The’ (Whitman) 156 Greece, ancient 150 Greenberg, Clement 77

Griffin, Walter 137 Gropius, Ise 19, 47 n.63, 103, 119, 132 n.75 Gropius, Walter 1, 3, 5, 18, 23, 24, 33, 35, 36, 37, 47 n.63, 54, 100, 106, 119–21, 169 n.82, 174, 178, 179, 186, 212, 213, 214, 224, 229 Grossi, Olindo 175, 195 Gruen, Victor 41, 123, 142, 153, 170 n.98 Gueft, O. 76 Gutkind, Erwin A. 159, 163 Habermas, Jürgen 7 n.8, 83 Hansaviertel project 101–2, 103 harmonious contrast 125 Hartman, Chester W. 194, 204 n.85 Harwood, John 181 Haskell, Douglas 166 n.21 Haussmann, Baron 153 Heindel, Richard 191 Helicoide project, for la Roca Tarpeya (Caracas) 112 Hellenist city planning 151–3 Hepworth, Barbara 24 Hernandez, Antonio 211 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 117, 140, 213, 224 historical continuity 177 in city shaping, significance of 145 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 55, 214, 224 Hitler, Adolf 21, 29 ‘Hitler’s Revenge’ (Moholy-Nagy) 121, 213, 227, 231 n.35 Hochmann, John 190 Hoechst Works 81 home as ideal standard, as architect’s first cause 69 Hoppe, Marianne 17–18 Horkheimer, Max 18 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz 167 n.30 House Villanueva 113 Howard, Ebenezer 150, 155 Howard, Seymour 218 Huff, William S. 89 n.91 Hug, Andreas 41, 43 Hug, Daniel 41 Hug, Hans-Ruedi 41 Human Condition, The (Arendt) 164 human environment 145 humanism, of building 126 Hurston, Zora Neal 221

INDEX

259

Huxley, Julian 24 Huxtable, Ada Louise Hypatia 219

2

Image of the City, The (Lynch) 159 Imhotep 185 ‘In Defense of Architecture’ (MoholyNagy) 168 n.68 individualism 115, 136, 144 Institute of Design (Chicago) 3, 5, 75, 94, 208 Institut für Sozialforschung 11 Intercollegiate Conference on Urban Affairs 161 International Style, The (exhibition) 117, 214 Jacal and straw house (Puebla, Mexico) 73 Jackson, John Brinckerhoff 144, 167 nn.30, 35, 229 Jacobs, Jane 1–2, 156–7, 159, 162, 163, 168 n.68 Jacobs, Stephen 180 Jaffe, Norman 149 Jefferson, Thomas 184, 185 John Hancock Tower (Chicago) 158 Johnson, Philip 3, 35, 38, 80, 81, 107, 123, 127, 168 n.68, 186, 210, 211, 212, 214, 224, 230 nn.17–18 Johnson Laboratory Tower 116 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) 40, 57, 85 n.18, 117, 118, 184, 186 Kahn, Louis 80, 83, 89 n.91, 123, 126 Kallmann, Gerhard Michael 125, 227 Kann, Lilly 15 Karlevna, Ilona 17 Katan, Roger 193, 204 n.83 Kaufmann, Edgar Jr. 35, 39, 76, 186 Kepes, Gyorgy 24, 26 Klee, Paul 37, 94 Kleines Künstlerhaus 13 Knowles, Edward 125, 227 Kohse, Petra 18 Koppe, Richard 47 n.68 Kostelanetz, Richard 198 Kostof, Spiro 84 n.6, 148

260

INDEX

Kraemer, Friedrich Wilhelm 98, 107, 108 Krasner, Lee 96 Kubler, George 188, 203 n.68 L’architettura. Cronache e storia (journal) 213 L’architettura della città (Rossi) 159 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles 153 La Deuxième Sexe (Beauvoir) 215 Ladies Home Journal 115 Lafayette Park (Detroit) 140, 141, 161, 210 Lakeshore Drive Apartment buildings, Chicago 117 landscape, significance of 5, 14, 59, 60, 68, 102, 109–11, 114, 127, 136, 139, 144, 229 Landscape: Magazine of Human Geography (journal) 144, 145 Lapidus, Morris 126, 127, 133 n.101, 186, 214 Later, Nancy Eklund 131 nn.63–4 Laurens, Henri 112 Lavedan, Pierre 159 Law of the Indies 139 Lawrence, Denise 87 n.69 Le Corbusier 1, 3, 5, 72, 100, 105, 115, 118–19, 121, 122, 125, 126, 137, 155, 175, 218, 224, 225, 229 Le féminisme ou la mort (d’Eaubonne) 226 Léger, Fernand 112 Levittown speculation house 68, 69 Lichtspiel-Syndikat (film company) 22 Lieber, Jeffrey 171 n.99 light, theme of 93 Lipsius, Constantin 12 Lissitzky, El 95 Lobo, Baltazar 112 ‘log-cabin myth’ 86 n.40 Loos, Adolf 72, 225 Low, Setha 87 n.69 Luckhardt, Wassili 106 Lutyens, Edwin 153 Lynch, Kevin 159 Lyndon, Donlyn 183, 201 n.35 Maass, John 187, 214 McCarthy 164

McCoy, Ester 40 Machu Picchu (Peru) 111, 114, 137, 138, 149 McKinnell, Michael 125, 227 McLaughlin, Neil 227 ‘Making of a Constructivist. The’ (Moholy-Nagy) 93 ‘Making of Non-Architects, The’ (MoholyNagy) 199 Malerei Fotografie Film (Moholy-Nagy, László) 18–19 Malevich, Kasimir 93, 95 managerial revolution 161 Mansfield, Katherine 221 Marinetti, Filippo 105 Marseille block 155 MARS group 23 MAS symposia 131 nn.63–4, 185, 186, 202 n.43 Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment (MoholyNagy) xv, 5, 42, 136, 144, 147, 148–56, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 170 n.97, 184, 189, 226, 227 Maurer, Laurie 200 n.15, 210 May, Ernst 11 Mayan peoples 138 Mennonite barn (Lancaster County, Pennsylvania) 64, 67 Mensing, Carl 14, 45 n.18 Mercato interior 153 Mesopotamia 150 Metal, Martin 34, 36, 209, 221 metric form 80, 81 Meyer, Adolf 99 Meyer, Hannes 105 Michelangelo 160 Michels, Doug 192 Mies Van der Rohe, Ludwig 1, 3, 5, 55, 78, 100, 105, 115, 116–18, 121, 137, 140, 142, 175, 186, 209–10, 213, 224–5 229 Miller, Donald L. 168 n.70 Millon, Henry A. 179–80, 181, 182, 213, 214, 231 n.37 Milwaukee shopping center interior 152, 153 Mock, Elisabeth 76 modern, meaning of 114

modern architecture 1, 3, 55, 60, 66, 67, 75–8, 80, 97, 106, 107, 117, 119, 181, 182, 210, 214, 224–6, 229 American 121–7 concreteness and directness as absent from 71–2 in South America 109–14 struggle for 88 n.71 suicide of 211 symposia on 185 views on 72 modernism xv, 2–5, 6, 7 n.8, 11, 54, 77, 91, 96–7, 144, 178, 207, 211, 213 embodying gravitas and repudiating functionalism 127 feminism and 221–7 and historical forces 91–127 primitivism of 74–5 reluctant 164 modernity 2–3, 7 n.8, 91, 164, 179, 222 Modern Movement xiv, xvi, 1, 7 n.8, 76, 105, 117, 125, 144, 179, 182, 183, 207, 211 modular grid plan (Rome) 154 modulation and modification 180, 183 Modulator (Corbusier) 118 Moholy-Nagy, Claudia 24, 25, 34, 37, 41, 44, 228 Moholy-Nagy, Hattula 4, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 34, 35–6, 41, 44, 47 n.63, 188–9, 190, 195, 197, 216–17, 219 Moholy-Nagy, László 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 18–19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 33, 35, 47 n.56, 53, 70, 75, 87 n.48, 91–2, 94, 113, 117, 182, 229 biography of 35 death of 33 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. See also vernacular architecture; See also individual architects as actress 15, 91, 229 as beachcomber of history 183–90 as controversial figure 6 (see also controversial figure) as critic 39–44, 55, 104, 140–4, 155, 156–8, 185, 187, 194 family background 11–15 death of 43, 199

INDEX

261

in defence of architecture 156–9 divorce from Dreyfuss 46 n.51 early life of 2, 3, 11 establishing family 18–23 guardianship of late husband’s artwork 36 Harvard manuscript and Children’s Children 28–33 insecurity of 22 intellectual legacy of 93–7 interest in archaeology 161 lectures of 104–9, 161, 191–2, 211 London and Chicago migration 23–8 marriage to Dreyfuss 17 on meanings of modern 114 on modernist city planning 155 as Moholy’s widow 33–7 passion for urbanity 5 profession, in search of 15–18 as professor 6, 37–9, 54, 94 (see also teaching as vocation) resignation from Pratt Institute 42, 52 n.146, 195, 197–8 as scenario writer 22 School of Design and 26 South American visit by 109–14 on technology and collectivism 105 themes in writings of 139 view on modernism in architecture 5 Moholy-Nagy. Experiment in Totality (Moholy-Nagy) 18, 19, 20, 22, 35, 39, 47 n.60, 87 n.48, 92, 94, 95 Moholy, Lucia 18, 23–24 Mondriaan, Piet 93 monumental axis (Brasilia) 136 Moore, Henry 24 Morrison, Hugh 57, 60, 85 n.17, 86 n.40 ‘Muddled Matriarchs’ (Moholy-Nagy) 215 Muller, Herbert J. 55 Mumford, Lewis 144, 149, 157, 159, 162, 170 n.95, 225 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York) 76, 96, 222, 225 Muthesius, Hermann 99, 225 Nagy, Jenö 130 n.46 National Autonomous University (UNAM) Central Library building, Mexico 110

262

INDEX

Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (Moholy-Nagy) xv, 5, 39, 40, 58, 59, 60, 61, 70, 74, 76, 78, 85 n.18, 88 n.81, 109, 114, 136, 139, 142, 163, 184, 207, 217, 226, 227 Neubauer, Theodor 23 Neves, Isabel Clara 129 n.35 New Bauhaus 25, 209 New Milford church and parsonage (Connecticut) 142–3 New Monumentality 69 New York 11, 25, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 65, 66, 69, 76, 96, 118, 120, 122, 123, 126, 154, 158, 174, 210, 213, 222 New York Landmarks Preservation Commission 214 Nicholson, Ben 24 Niemeyer, Oscar 100–101, 110, 111, 136 Ockman, Joan 131 nn.63–4, 185, 202 n.43 Oeuvre Complète (Corbusier) 118 O’Gorman, James 181 Oliver, Paul 162 ‘On the Environmental Brink’ (MoholyNagy) 145–6, 226 operative criticism 182 organic village society 144 orthogonal-connective cities 154 orthogonal environment 145, 150–1, 152, 154 Oslo Embassy, Norway 81 otherness 73–4 Oud, J.J.P. 224 Paepcke, Walter 26 Palitana 150 Palladini, Kathy 204 n.96 Pan Am Building (New York) 120, 213 Pedagogical Sketchbook (Klee) 37, 94 pedigreed architecture 70 Pei, I. M. 123, 141 Perkins, Charlotte Gilman 221 Perriand, Charlotte 1 Perspecta (journal) 59, 60, 69, 76, 80, 83 Pevsner, Antoine 112 Pevsner, Nikolaus 182 Pfeiffer-Belli, Erich 106 Philadelphia 123, 143, 144, 154 Pietzsch, Claus 14, 15, 21, 30, 32

Pietzsch, Eva 14, 15, 21, 36, 39, 41, 45 nn.18–19, 84 n.4 Pietzsch, Hertha 14, 15, 31, 39, 41 Pietzsch, Martin 2, 12–13, 21, 30, 41, 42, 45 n.18 Pietzsch, Sibylle see Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl Placzek, Adolf K. 43, 202 n.43, 208 political humanism 164–5 Pollock, Griselda 222 populism 126, 127, 193 Postcard Berlin-Stalinallee 102 postmodernism 127, 211 pre-emptive strike against 83 Praeger, Frederick A. 170 n.96 Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, New York) 6, 37, 42, 94, 144, 174, 175–76, 190, 193, 194, 207, 211, 218, 228 crisis at 195–9 Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED) 193 primitivism, in architecture 71–5 modernist architecture and 75 Pritchard, Jack 23, 24 privacy, concept of 79 Progressive Architecture (journal) 37, 38, 39, 55, 78, 97, 103, 104, 109, 110, 111, 114, 162, 166 n.21, 191, 213 proto-orthogonal concepts 150 public realm 164 Pynoos, Jon 194, 204 n.85 quasi-fascist system 148 queen bee phenomenon 218 Rand, Ayn 225 rationality 5, 83, 147, 174, 222, 225–6 Read, Herbert 24, 36 Redfield, Robert 72 regionalism 69, 97, 116, 121, 124, 125 regionalists 137 Reich, Lilly 1 relational spaces 80 Rhys, Jean 221 Richards Memorial Laboratories 123 Rietveld, Gerrit 126 Rocha, João 129 n.35 Rodchenko, Alexander 95 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan 40

Rogers, Ibram H. 204 n.96 Rogier, Francesca 102 Rosenberg, Harold 97 Rosenblatt, Arthur 214 Rossi, Aldo 159, 166 n.24 Rotunda front elevation (University of Virginia) 184 Rowan, Jan C. 38 Rowe, Colin 181, 231 n.26 Rudofsky, Bernard xv, 70, 77, 88 n.69, 227 Rudolph, Paul 3, 35, 42–3, 43, 80, 81–2, 123–5, 127, 149, 171 n.99, 199, 208 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 226 Rüttgens-Pohlmann, Hannelore 12, 14, 19, 28, 45 n.24, 48 n.91, 74, 200 n.12 Saarinen, Eero 3, 80, 81, 121, 125 Sabatino, Michelangelo 88 n.69 Salvadori, Mario 191 Salzman, Stanley 174, 200 n.8 Sao Paolo (Brazil) 139 satellite development 36 Saunders, Frances 36, 102, 104 Scala Regio (Vatican) 123 Scharoun, Hans 100, 125 Schulz, Lucia 18, 19, 23, 224 Schütte-Lihotzky, Grete 1 Schwartz, Frederic J. 107 Schwarz, Ruth Cowan 220 Scott, Bonnie Kime 221 Scott, Felicity 77 Scott Brown, Denise 126, 133 n.99, 159, 169 n.83 Scully, Vincent 57 second feminist wave 214 Segal, Walter 162 Sekler, Eduard 231 n.26 Sert, José Luis 37, 106, 121–2 settler architecture 38, 39, 57, 59, 68, 76 Howard, Seymour 200 n.9 Shen, Ted 47 n.63 Shiffman, Ron 193, 194, 204 nn.83, 95, 204 n.100, 207 Shopping Town, U.S.A. (Gruen and Smith) 142 Shri-Yantra meditation pattern 160 Situationist International 106

INDEX

263

Smith, Larry 142 Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) 183–4, 185, 188, 214 soft architecture 146 ‘Some Aspects of South American Planning’ (Moholy-Nagy) 137 South America, modern architecture in 109–14 Space, Time and Architecture (Giedion) 97, 106 space-form continuity 180, 183 space progression 180, 183 Spanish Steps (Rome) 149, 150 spatial continuity 119, 122, 126, 127 Stadtkrone 149 Stalinallee (under construction, 1960) 98, 101 Stam, Mart 88 n.71 ‘Steel Stocks, and Private Man’ (MoholyNagy) 78, 148, 209 Stein, Gertrude 221 Steinberg, Saul 39 Stephens, Suzanne 208 Stevens, Sam 231 n.26 Stirling, James 76 Stoller, Ezra 55 Stölzl, Gunta 224 stone house, (Otomi Region, Hidalgo, Mexico) 63, 67 Stratigakos, Despina 132 n.79 streetscape (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) 67 structured planning 180, 183 Stuttgarter Zeitung 41 sugar cane mill (Buccaneer Plantations, St. Croix, Virgin Islands) 61, 62, 67 Sumeria 150 Syrian Carchemish 150 Syrkus, Helena 219–20 Tafuri, Manfredo 182–3, 202 n.44, 213, 228 Tatlin, Vladimir 95 Taut, Bruno 149 Tobis (film company) 18, 20, 22 teaching as vocation 173 architectural history and 174–83 crisis at Pratt Institute and 195–9 ‘Teaching More than Design’ (MoholyNagy) 178 technocratic illusion 148

264

INDEX

technological planning 139 Theories and History of Architecture (Tafuri) 182 Tillich, Paul 45 n.29 Towards an Organic Architecture (Zevi) 212 Treib, Marc 167 n.30 Tunnard, Christopher 191 Typenprojektion 99 Ulbricht, Walter 99 Ulm School of Design 129 n.35 Ungers, Oswald Matthias 159, 169 n.84, 231 n.26 Unité d’Habitation 155 universalists 137 University of Caracas Aula Magna 111, 112 Unwin, Raymond 155 Upton, Dell 57 urban crisis 158, 162 urbanity 5, 121, 142, 144, 155, 165, 193 urban plan/planning 5, 100–2, 110, 114, 118, 151, 153, 154, 156, 159, 162, 193 in Latin America 136–9 urban renewal process 141–3, 161, 213 Uses of the Past, The (Muller) 55 Utica museum 81 Uxmal (Mexico) 114, 138, 150 Vällingby 144 Van de Velde, Henry 99 Varnhagen, Rahel 164 Vasarely, Victor 112 Venturi, Robert 126, 133 n.99, 159, 169 n.83 vernacular architecture 56–8 anonymous qualities of 70–1 as counter-image for modern 66–70 documenting 58–66 double critique of 75–8 future of past and 78–83 native qualities of 70 primitive qualities of 71–5 Vers Une Architecture (Corbusier) 105 verticality 125, 180, 183 ‘Victories and Defeats of Modern Architecture’ (Moholy-Nagy) 55 Villanueva, Carlos Raúl 40, 109, 111, 112, 113, 188, 203 n.68, 212

‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (Wollstonecraft) 215 Vision in Motion (Moholy-Nagy, László) 75, 91, 92 Von Material zu Architektur (A New Vision) (Moholy-Nagy, László) 19, 92 Wachsmann, Konrad 106 Wandervogel movement 14 Weber, Max 170 n.89 Weese, Harry 141, 234 n.98 Weimar Germany/Republic 2, 11, 21, 31, 35, 74, 91, 107, 222, 225, 229 Wellesley Art Center 82 ‘Western Hemisphere’ 77 ‘Where The Big City Stands’ (Whitman) 161 Where the Great City Stands (Ashbee) 135 ‘Where the Great City Stands’ (MoholyNagy) 135 Whiffen, Marcus 201 n.35 Whitman, Walt 135, 156, 161, 165 n.1 Wiener, Paul 38 Wilhelm, Karin 130 n.36 Wilk, Christopher 7 n.8 Wilson, Robert 173 Wisconsin Architect, The 69

Wisconsin Architects Association Convention (1955) 69 Wittkower, Rudolf 185 Wolff, Robert Jay 26 Wölflinn, Heinrich 181 Wollstonecraft, Mary 215 ‘Women Are Misunderstood’ (MoholyNagy) 215 Woolf, Virginia 221 World Trade Towers (New York) 158 Wren, Christopher 137 Wright, Frank Lloyd 5, 35, 40, 114–16, 118, 121, 123, 124, 131 n.52, 137, 175, 185, 212 Wurster, Catherine Bauer 166 n.21 Yale Art Gallery 123 Yale School of Art and Architecture 124 Yamasaki, Minoro 158 Yelton, Robert 192 Young, Whitney 196 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 52 n.146

123,

Zevi, Bruno 159, 166 nn.21, 24, 169 n.82, 178, 179–80, 181, 182, 212–13, 227 Zumthor, Peter 173 Zürich 41, 154, 211, 218

INDEX

265