Exaltation of the American in the late fifties in Architectural Forum: validation of the European and new local codes

Abstract

The decade of the 50s in the last century witnessed a profound critical review of modern architecture as a consequence of the events related to the Second World War. The forced emigration of figures like Mies, who will exert great influence in academic and professional fields, the work of other European architects or the proliferation of avant-garde cultural centres, trigger the displacement of activity and intellectual leadership from a Europe where it was languishing due to the need for urgent reconstruction, to America, where such reconstruction was not necessary. In order to achieve this, it was essential that some American architecture journals created a favourable climate for a modern architecture imported from Europe, but understood in a kinder way, released from the original social programmatic component of the modern movement and its sometimes cryptic abstraction and intellectual side, hard to accept by the American public. Architectural Forum was one of the magazines that enabled the acceptance of a new American architecture that, upon the validation of an imported European architecture, incorporates actual codes from the collective popular imaginary and recovers and exalts Wright as the great historical figure that American architecture needs.