Reformation of the American Architectural Institution under the Ethos of Mass Production:The Institutional Project of ″The Architect and the Industrial Arts″ Exhibition (1929)

Abstract

This dissertation looks into the institutional transition of American architecture implied in the 1929 exhibition ″The Architect and the Industrial Arts″ held by the Metropolitan Museum of New York. The establishment of an architectural institution by the Beaux–Arts movement in the late nineteenth century was one of academic professionalism, positioning the architect as master artist in the realm of high art. However, in the changed society of the early twentieth century marked by scientific management, ethos of mass production, and the emergence of industrial design, a different institutional model was on display in the Metropolitan show, which featured interior spaces fully furnished in the prevailing Exposition Style. Engaged in the design of everyday interior environments of urban life, in a fashionable style of the market and defining themselves in a pragmatic approach, architects brought forth to the public a new professionalism serving a broader culture market as arbiter of public demand, in the process revealing the possibilities and limits of such institutional reformation.