UC Berkeley

Chapter 4 examines how politically driven interpretations of modernism during the 1930s facilitated its utilization in the context of the Cold War. While the Stalinist cultural revolution in the USSR rejected modernity as bourgeois, two exhibitions by New York’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated the American and international potential of the “International Style” modernism. The influx of Bauhaus masters to the US further reinforced these claims. Following the defeat of the Third Reich, West German designers employed International Style modernism as a means of visual denazification. In the Soviet Union, architectural modernity was selectively embraced as a symbol of socialist progress under Khrushchev’s leadership. Mass-produced housing using Western construction methods addressed the housing crisis, while bespoke monuments showcased the achievements of state socialism. International expositions served as platforms for showcasing the architectural prowess of the First and Second World powers. A novel postwar application for architectural modernism was exhibited, quite literally, in the West German city of Hannover at the 1951 Constructa building exposition. The cold war was not only a geopolitical contest, as anthropologist Katherine Verdery notes, but also “a form of knowledge and a cognitive organization of the world”. While useful as a chronological marker, the cold war presents problems when used to define architectural periods. As an analytical tool, “cold war modernism” is weakened when used as a catch-all for everything built during the 45 years following World War 2. The terms and tools of engagement mobilized on the cold war’s architectural front trace their origins to the Interwar era and can be fully understood only within this genealogical context. At the height of the cold war, as Socialist Realist monuments rose across the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe in a wave of Stalin-era reconstruction, Philip Johnson declared neoclassicism dead.