The 'Search for Form' in Postwar American Architecture

Abstract

In 1954 the architectural historian Vincent Scully drew attention to the appearance of “very ‘formal’ forms” in recent American architecture. By this time the ‘search for form’ had become a common refrain and was popularly associated with a diverse group of architects classed together as ‘form-givers’, their contributions enshrined in a major exhibition of the same title in 1959. Yet despite is centrality to American architecture in the postwar decades, the issue of form has never been thoroughly studied. Examining the discourse on form and practice of three leading ‘form-givers’, this dissertation posits that the embrace of form was nothing less than a foundational moment in the history of modern architecture in the United States. What form meant to architects in the 1950s was nurtured by discourses external as well as internal to architecture. Clive Bell and Roger Fry’s phrase “significant form” was re-launched into popular discourse and form acquired additional associations through the writings of the philosopher Susanne Knauth Langer and the art historian Henri Focillon. Several of these threads came together at Yale University, where discussions about the ‘significance’ of form in architecture were especially intense. The individuality and originality of the architect as an artist also returned to center stage. For Philip Johnson, the ‘search’ was a game in which the architect cast a wide net for formal sources. Johnson’s interest in history deepened in the 1950s and was more fully integrated with what he would call ‘pure form’ in the Roofless Church, New Harmony, Indiana (1957-60). If the integration of form and feeling was a largely unconscious goal in Eero Saarinen’s early Womb Chair (1945-48), the architect was acutely aware of his motivations in the Auditorium and Chapel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (1950-55). It was Louis Kahn, however, who carried form into the 1960s. Absorbing and then reacting to the ideas debated around him, Kahn significantly deepened what form meant. This dissertation therefore can be read as a map and analysis of the architectural culture that produced the architect who was arguably the last great form-giver of the twentieth century.