With new research on building programs in political, religious, and domestic settings in the United States and Europe, this collection of essays offers a fresh look at postwar modernism and the role that architecture played in constructing modern identities.

In the decades following World War II, modern architecture spread around the globe alongside increased modernization, urbanization, and postwar reconstruction—and it eventually won widespread acceptance. But as the limitations of conventional conceptions of modernism became apparent, modern architecture has come under increasing criticism. In this collection of essays, experienced and emerging scholars take a fresh look at postwar modern architecture by asking what it meant to be “modern,” what role modern architecture played in constructing modern identities, and who sanctioned (or was sanctioned by) modernism in architecture.

This volume presents focused case studies of modern architecture in three realms—political, religious, and domestic—that address our very essence as human beings. Several essays explore developments in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and document a modernist design culture that crossed political barriers, such as the Iron Curtain, more readily than previously imagined. Other essays investigate various efforts to reconcile the concerns of modernist architects with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian institutions. And a final group of essays looks at postwar homebuilding in the United States and demonstrates how malleable and contested the image of the American home was in the mid-twentieth century. These inquiries show the limits of canonical views of modern architecture and reveal instead how civic institutions, ecclesiastical traditions, individual consumers, and others sought to sanction the forms and ideas of modern architecture in the service of their respective claims or desires to be modern.

Foreword

Frederick Steiner

Preface

Vladimir Kulić, Timothy Parker, and Monica Penick

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Writing History: Reflections on the Story of Midcentury Modern Architecture

Dennis P. Doordan

Part I. Modernism and the State

Introduction

Vladimir Kulić

1. Bucharest: The City Transfigured

Juliana Maxim

2. The Scope of Socialist Modernism: Architecture and State Representation in Postwar Yugoslavia

Vladimir Kulić

3. Czechoslovakia's Model Housing Developments: Modern Architecture for the Socialist Future

Kimberly Elman Zarecor

4. Sanctioning Modernism and Tradition: Italian Architecture, the Vernacular, and the State

Michelangelo Sabatino

Part II. Making Religion Modern

Introduction

Timothy Parker

5. Uncertainty and the Modern Church: Two Roman Catholic Cathedrals in Britain

Robert Proctor

6. "Humanly sublime tensions": Luigi Moretti's Chiesa del Concilio (1965–1970)

Timothy Parker

7. Modernism and the Concept of Reform: Liturgy and Liturgical Architecture

Richard Kieckhefer

Part III: Modernism and Domesticity

Introduction

Monica Penick

8. "Technologically" Modern: The Prefabricated House and the Wartime Experience of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill

Hyun-Tae Jung

9. "Modern but not too modern": House Beautiful and the American Style

Monica Penick

10. House and Haunted Garden

Sandy Isenstadt

Further Reading