Acknowledgments

Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa

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Acknowledgments

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past

Untimely Moderns bears traces of several previous research projects on individual artists and architects, which at one point began to form an intellectual group biography. The seed was planted during the “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future” curatorial research project in the early 2000s. I thank Robert A. M. Stern...

Author

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31743

Acknowledgments

Untimely Moderns bears traces of several previous research projects on individual artists and architects, which at one point began to form an intellectual group biography. The seed was planted during the “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future” curatorial research project in the early 2000s. I thank Robert A. M. Stern for his support throughout the process and for inviting me to give the opening lecture, “(Un)timely Saarinen,” at Yale in 2010, which Cynthia Davidson generously offered to publish in Log 19 later that year. Timothy Rohan and Stanislaus von Moos helped me expand my inquiry into American mid-century architecture to include two of Saarinen’s close friends, Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn. Brenda Danilowitz made me aware of Louis Kahn’s relationship with Josef and Anni Albers, which subsequently led to my writing about their work and legacy. Thomas Weaver’s invitation to write a piece, “Reading Aalto through the Baroque,” for AA Files (2013) led to my interest in art historical formalism, which forms the intellectual backbone of this book. Eliana Sousa Santos hosted two talks, on George Kubler at the Gulbenkian Museum (2016) and on Henri Focillon at the University Institute of Lisbon (2021), which deepened my understanding of the topic. Two panels on “Time Travel” chaired with Mari Lending at the international meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Dublin in 2016 helped set the book project in motion. Paul Stirton’s subsequent invitation to present a paper at the “Revivalism in the Age of Modernism” conference at the Bard Graduate Center in 2018 led me to reconsider various modalities of historical revivalism in twentieth-century architecture and, subsequently, the panel “Remembering Vincent Scully,” moderated by Humberto Rodríguez-Camilloni at the Society of Architectural Historians’ annual international conference in Providence in 2019, offered a platform to do a trial run of this book’s last chapter, “Vincent Scully: The Historian’s Revenge,” which Bruno Gil and Armando Rabaça included in a special issue of Joelho magazine (2022) on time and memory. Finally, Jorge Mejia Hernández’s invitation for a Theories of Architecture Fellowship at TU Delft in fall 2021 allowed me to get productive feedback at the very end of the writing process.

This book can be read as a meditation on the unique, time-bending architecture culture I encountered at Yale University, which has been my intellectual home for the past thirty years. Upon my arrival in the early 1990s, I found its late Gothic campus completely anachronistic, and I was equally shocked by Vincent Scully’s seemingly arbitrary visual comparisons across space and time. I first learned to question my fixed ideas about what it meant to be “modern” when my thesis adviser, Karsten Harries, made me aware that words—including the word “modern”—do a rather bad job of characterizing complex phenomena, all while three former deans, Thomas Beebe, Alexander Purves, and Robert A. M. Stern, challenged me to rethink what type of architecture should be included under that label. Friendships with three remarkable art historians I have met while teaching at Yale—Romy Golan, Nicola Suthor, and Chris Wood—have enriched my personal and intellectual life throughout the years. It is also at Yale that I met my now-husband, Turner Brooks, who occupies a dual role in this book project: daily companion and historical subject.

The intellectual journey has been less lonely thanks to conversations with many colleagues over the years, among them Tim Anstey, Tom Avermaete, Anna Bokov, Eva Branscome, Peter Brooks, Craig Buckley, Peggy Deamer, Isabelle Doucet, Kenneth Frampton, Murray Fraser, Mari Hvattum, Theodossis Issaias, Petteri Kummala, Helena Mattsson, Mary McLeod, Morgan Ng, Joan Ockman, Spyros Papapetros, Martino Stierli, Dirk van den Heuvel, Anthony Vidler, Stanislaus von Moos, Georg Vrochliatis, and Albena Yaneva.

At Yale University Press, Katherine Boller believed in the project from the very beginning, and Heidi Downey and Laura Hensley’s editorial comments were always spot on. The book is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

I dedicate this book to Turner and our two daughters, Ida and Miia Brooks.

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