The role of the journal Perspecta during the decade of the 50s in the historical validation of the International Style and its contribution in the elaboration of postmodernity

Abstract

The appearance of Perspecta in 1952 is key to understanding the revision of modern architecture in the fifties. It is a magazine that is born linked to Yale University at a time when the institution wants to recover history in its academic curriculum and whose community of students and professors is interested in knowing the work of the three masters of modernity without giving up to a critical review, although through figures, many of them bound to the university itself such as Louis Kahn, George Howe, Vincent Scully, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson or Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who regularly published in its pages, whereas they develop a professional career in parallel, which doubles their ability to influence the future of architecture, operating from the academic and professional realms. Through the publication of a large number of articles, many of them with the ambition to recover that critical look at the International Style and the recent history of modern architecture, Perspecta magazine serves as an initial historical validation tool for the architecture of the following decade, including postmodernist drift.