Modernism: The Other French Connection | A Tale of Ambition + Intrigue + Suppression

Abstract

In the history of modern architecture, Mark Twain’s maxim “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”1 may well have a place. If one examines the development of architecture since the early twentieth century, two divergent lines can be discerned. The first of these lines is the one with which we are all familiar, mainly written by the “victors” of the interna-tional style debate, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Sigfried Giedion. The architectural and written works of these men loom large in the history of modernism and were chronicled in Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s famous book, The International Style.2 Even today, it is this version of modernism that is universally studied in the history and theory of modern architecture. However, there has always been one piece of this puzzle that does not fit in an otherwise neatly organized historiography. Ironically absent from this list of titans is another equally famous architect, Alvar Aalto, whose divergent modernism is at odds with the International Style of Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies. Aalto’s architectural and theoretical works seem to emanate from a modern regionalism based on the ver¬nacular architecture and landscape of his home country, Finland. A consideration of Aalto leads us to a second line of development in modern architecture, one that starts with a little known French architect, AndréLurçat, passes through Aalto, and completes itself in the Midwestern town of Columbus, Indiana with the built and written work of the architect, Harry Weese.