Aesthetic Judgment in Modernism’s Margins: The Case of Lois Welzenbacher

• In Event: Social Science Expertise Between the United States and Habsburg Austria

Abstract

In 1932, the American curators Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson selected architect Lois Welzenbacher (1889-1955) to represent the country of Austria in the Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition of modern architecture. Alongside works by modernist giants such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, the curators included photographs of Welzenbacher’s 1930 Treichl apartment house in Innsbruck to help demonstrate the global spread of the style, which prioritized functionalism and formal simplicity. In the book The International Style: Modern Architecture since 1922, which functioned as an exhibition catalog, Hitchcock and Johnson critiqued both Welzenbacher’s work and that of many others, including architects from across Central and Eastern Europe. Using Welzenbacher’s inclusion as an entry point, this paper identifies and theorizes trends in the curators’ aesthetic judgments as communicated in the Hitchcock and Johnson’s book.

Author

• Sophie Higgerson, Brown U