The Modernist Housing Project
in the United States
Vision of the Futurist City
by Antonio Sant’ Elia,
c. 1914
LeCorbusier, Ville Contemporaine, c. 1922
LeCorbusier,
Ville Contemporaine,
c.1922
Weissenhofseidling,
Stuttgart, Germany,
c.1927
Frank Lloyd Wright, St. Mark’s in the Bowery Tower, project for social
housing, ca.1929
Frank Lloyd Wright, Price Tower,
Bartlesville, Oklahoma, c1950
Minoru Yasmaski, Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project, St. Louis MO, c1961
Modernism in crisis in the 1960s raised numerous questions, for
instance:
• Is it possible to pursue a social agenda through architecture?
• Is a social agenda the same thing as social engineering?
•What is the relationship of modern architecture to history and
tradition?
• Did modern architects hoodwink corporate America into
accepting a socialist vocabulary to house the institutions of
capitalism?
• Should architecture derive its theoretical stance from sociopolitical theory and philosophy or is architecture capable of
establishing its own agenda as a self-sufficient discipline?
• Does form follow function or do function and form have some
other relationship?
• Is beauty a thing of the past and no longer a value we can
pursue?