Review: Flintstone Modernism, or The Crisis in Postwar American Culture, by Jeffrey Lieber

Abstract

Jeffrey Lieber Flintstone Modernism, or The Crisis in Postwar American Culture Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018, 296 pp., 21 color and 19 b/w illus. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780262037495 Anxiety stimulates creativity. In his new book Flintstone Modernism , Jeffrey Lieber explains how mid-twentieth-century anxiety over a perceived cultural crisis shaped modernist architecture in the United States. Lieber ingeniously relates buildings to fashion photography, advertising, and Hollywood's “sword-and-sandal” epics about the ancient world. He draws upon all of these to analyze International Style structures and the more decorative, historicist buildings of the late 1950s and early 1960s by Eero Saarinen, Edward Durrell Stone, and others. Until recently, these works—the latter in particular—were often dismissed or castigated as retreats from modernism's core values and aesthetics, or as more troubling symptoms of a larger cultural crisis. Lieber frames his narrative with Hannah Arendt's warning about the perceived cultural crisis in her 1958 book The Human Condition .1 Arendt deplored the rise of a technology-obsessed society that masked its totalitarian tendencies with a thin veneer of humanism, resulting in a debased “mass culture.” Lieber asks, “What are some expressions of the crisis in culture?” (2). He finds the answers in buildings, movies, and other related media, though he is not fully clear about the contradiction at the heart of his project. What Arendt saw as expressions of the cultural crisis were actually the solutions offered by government, business, and media to the same problem she saw. Like Arendt, many in these sectors believed their culture was in crisis. To help solve the dilemma, they formulated an architecture that crossed modernism with ancient-world precedents, calling it a new humanism (a goal of many postwar architecture cultures). For example, Rome's Colosseum inspired Stone's United States Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Such enthusiasm for the ancient world extended far beyond architecture: Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 film The Ten Commandments , for instance, told a …