Chapter II, Utopia Limited Summary and Analysis

As a result of the Bauhaus, a piece called "The International Style" was written by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson for the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art's catalogue of photographs and models introduced in 1932 to bring Gropius, et al. to New York. Museum catalogue copy is notorious for being pretentious, but "The International Style," was thought to be different. In the piece, the authors distinguished between "architecture" and "building." Bauhaus was "architecture." But Americans were engaged in "building." There was Frank Lloyd Wright, but he was only half-way there and could be forgotten.

The twentieth-century American skyscraper merely amused them with their ridiculous "zigzag trimmings." American architects simply obeyed the customer, whereas Europeans would walk away from commissions rather than debase themselves. "The International Style" analyzed the great "functionalists" which ignored the worker-theme...