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Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
BOOKUntimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31741
A novel exploration of the idea of nonlinear time and its place at the heart of modern art and architecture

Through much of the twentieth century, a diverse group of thinkers engaged in an interdisciplinary conversation about the meaning of time and history for modern art and architecture. The group included architects Louis Kahn, Everett Victor Meeks, James Gamble Rogers, Paul Rudolph, and Eero Saarinen; artists Anni and Josef Albers; philosopher Paul Weiss; and art historians Henri Focillon, George Kubler, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Vincent Scully. These figures were unified by their resistance to the idea that, to be considered modern, art and architecture had to be of its time, as well as by the pivotal role that Yale University held as a backdrop to their thinking.

These thinkers sponsored a new kind of approach, one that Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen terms “untimely,” emphasizing a departure from a sequential course of events. Ideas about temporal duration, new tradition, the presence of the past, and the shape of time were among the concepts they explored. With an interdisciplinary focus, Pelkonen reveals previously unexplored connections among key figures of American intellectual and artistic culture at midcentury whose works and words would shape modern architecture.

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Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Print publication date July 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300263954
EISBN 9780300278231
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Illustrations 105
Print Status in print
Publisher (in print)
WorldCat
Google Books

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List of illustrations

  • Payne Whitney Gymnasium, Yale University
  • Pierson College, Yale University
  • Eero Saarinen with a scale model of the New Colleges (later named the Samuel F. B. Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges)
  • Art and Architecture Building
  • Architecture studios in Louis I. Kahn’s annex to the Yale University Art Gallery
  • Cover of Perspecta 3
  • Cover of Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition
  • Everett Victor Meeks
  • World War I Memorial Cenotaph
  • Everett Victor Meeks with his students in front of Weir Hall, Yale University
  • Architecture library (top) and drafting room (bottom) at Weir Hall, Yale University
  • Gallery of Fine Arts, Yale University
  • Prize-winning entries to the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design competition
  • Entries to the 1922 Chicago Tribune competition by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood (left), Eliel Saarinen (middle), and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (right)
  • Sterling Law Building, Yale University
  • Cover of Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches
  • Sketch made during a lecture at Columbia University, October 1934, which contrasts engineering architecture (top) and academic Beaux-Arts architecture (bottom)
  • Aerial view of the Princeton University campus
  • Sketch Plan for Future Development of Yale University and Environs
  • Model of Harkness Memorial Quadrangle, Yale University
  • Wrexham Tower in the Harkness Memorial Quadrangle, Yale University
  • Harkness Memorial Quadrangle, Yale University, traceried windows above a moat wall along Elm Street
  • Harkness Tower, Yale University
  • Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
  • Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
  • Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
  • Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, first-floor plan
  • Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
  • Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Linonia and Brothers Reading Room
  • Sterling Memorial Library main entrance viewed from across the campus
  • Bridge connecting the Yale University Art Gallery to the existing Street Hall housing at the School of Fine Arts
  • Gate to the Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven
  • Art vs. Yale University: Challenging Yale’s Girder Gothic and Its Builders
  • Art vs. Yale University: A Discussion of Yale’s Physical Expansion, and an Arrangement of Its Buildings
  • Art vs. Yale University: A Discussion of Yale’s Physical Expansion, and an Arrangement of Its Buildings
  • Henri Focillon at the Sorbonne
  • Untitled
  • Embouchure de l’oder à quimper
  • Henri Focillon (left) aboard the SS Paris
  • USA
  • Germans on Faculty at Black Mountain School; Josef and Frau Albers Named Instructors in Art There
  • Plaster casts on display in the 1920s at Street Hall, the home of the Yale School of Fine Arts
  • Katherine S. Dreier in the Société Anonyme exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery
  • Poster for the exhibition Modern Art from the Collection of the Société Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art
  • Modern Exhibition—Painting and Architecture, Yale University Art Gallery
  • Modern Exhibition—Painting and Architecture, Yale University Art Gallery
  • Invitation to Modern Exhibition—Painting and Architecture, Yale University Art Gallery
  • The Modern House Comes Alive exhibition, Yale University Art Gallery
  • Structural Constellation: Transformation of a Scheme No. 12
  • Drawing of envelopes for Josef Albers’s Basic Drawing course, Yale University
  • Paris, Notre Dame, 16.V.55
  • Article reporting on Susanne Langer’s lecture titled Art Symbol and Symbolism in Art
  • Anni Albers cardweaving at Black Mountain College
  • Open Letter
  • Diagram showing modified and composite weave
  • Illustration accompanying essay Monumentality (1944) depicting a section of Beauvais Cathedral after Auguste Choisy and a pointed arch of his own design
  • Louis Kahn (right) working with his student Bliss Woodruff on a student assignment for the UNESCO headquarters at Yale University
  • Newspaper article entitled Retiring Yale Professor Honored by Colleagues at Party
  • Plastics in Art and Industry exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery
  • Yale University Art Gallery, perspective drawing
  • Yale University Art Gallery, façade facing Chapel Street
  • Unidentified art student constructing a geodesic dome out of cardboard on top of Weir Hall under R. Buckminster Fuller’s guidance, Yale University
  • Series of ceiling elevations depicting integrated environmental systems within the tetrahedral ceiling of the annex to the Yale University Art Gallery
  • Article reporting on Paul Weiss’s lecture at the Yale University Art Gallery
  • Cartoon accompanying the transcript of the panel On the Responsibility of the Architect
  • Cartoon accompanying the transcript of the panel On the Responsibility of the Architect
  • Yale Center for British Art, perspective drawing of the courtyard
  • Duomo of Casale Monferrato
  • Arch Argument: St. Louis Memorial Starts Architectural Squabble
  • Eero Saarinen with a model and sketches of arches
  • Sketch depicting a weighted catenary arch juxtaposed with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man
  • Entrance to the Temple of Warriors, Chichén-Itzá, Yucatán, Mexico
  • Cranbrook Academy of Art and School for Boys
  • Gateway Arch, St. Louis, under construction
  • Sketches depicting the history of architecture
  • First Christian Church, Columbus, Indiana
  • Cover of Where Today Meets Tomorrow
  • Original pencil sketch for the David S. Ingalls Hockey Rink, Yale University
  • New Colleges (later named the Samuel F. B. Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges), Yale University, site plan
  • New Colleges (later named the Samuel F. B. Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges), Yale University
  • César Pelli looking over a stone wall during the full-scale model construction of the New Colleges (later named the Samuel F. B. Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges), Yale University
  • Double House, New Hope, Pennsylvania
  • George Kubler's notes on the Focillon method
  • A Modern Architect’s Own House: The Eero Saarinen Remade House, Victorian Outside, Modern Inside
  • Jewett Art Center, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, perspective rendering
  • Page from article The Six Determinants of Architectural Form
  • Mayor Richard C. Lee on a bulldozer in downtown New Haven
  • New Haven showing the Oak Street connector with parking lots in the front and Yale University in the background
  • Temple Street Garage, New Haven
  • Temple Street Garage, New Haven
  • Art and Architecture Building
  • Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, site plan
  • Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, third-floor plan
  • Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, section
  • Art and Architecture Building
  • Art and Architecture Building
  • Statue of Minerva being moved from the Yale University Art Gallery to the Art and Architecture Building
  • Art and Architecture Building with plaster casts on the third floor
  • Vincent Scully selecting images in the slide room at Street Hall, Yale University
  • Vincent Scully lecturing at the Sterling Law School Auditorium, Yale University
  • Piazza d’Oro, Hadrian’s Villa (left), and Philip Johnson’s Wiley House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1953 (right)
  • Annex to the Yale University Art Gallery, interior
  • Page from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
  • Cover of The Shingle Style Today: Or, The Historian’s Revenge
  • Glazebrook House, Starksboro, Vermont
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Contents
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Contents
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31742
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Acknowledgments
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
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
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31743
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Prolegomenon to Untimely Moderns
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
History is, in general, a conflict among what is precocious, actual or merely delayed.
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.1-21
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31744
Chapter subject tags:Architecture--Study and teaching--United States--20th centuryCampus planning--United States--20th centuryYale University. School of Art and ArchitectureGothic revival (Architecture)--United States--20th centuryGiedion, S. (Sigfried), 1888-1968Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 1903-1987Architects--United States--20th centuryPhilosophers--United States--20th centurySchools of architecture--United States--20th centuryArt--History--United States--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th century

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1. Everett Victor Meeks: Usable Past
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
An undated photograph shows the slightly stodgy Everett Victor Meeks dressed in a dapper Edwardian-style three-piece suit on the deck of an ocean liner (fig. 8). A scion of a wealthy New York family and a 1901 graduate of Yale College, Meeks represented the old Yale, which catered to the sons of old East Coast families whose bespoke...
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.24-42
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31746
Chapter subject tags:Meeks, Everett V. (Everett Victor), 1879-1954Yale University. School of Art and ArchitectureArchitecture--Study and teaching--United States--20th centuryLe Corbusier, 1887-1965Architecture, Modern--20th centurySaarinen, Eero, 1910-1961

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2. James Gamble Rogers: Modern Gothic
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
When Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier lectured at Yale in 1935, the architectural setting—the eight-hundred-seat auditorium of the Sterling Law Building, executed in the highly ornate Collegiate Gothic style—was the elephant in the room. The building’s completion date, 1931, made it one of the latest Gothic...
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.43-65
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31747
Chapter subject tags:Rogers, James GambleGothic revival (Architecture)--United States--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th centuryYale University. School of Art and ArchitectureLe Corbusier, 1887-1965Ruskin, John, 1819-1900Cram, Ralph Adams, 1863-1942Harkness Tower (Yale University)Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library

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3. Henri Focillon: Liquid Temporalities
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Around the time that Yale’s last neo-Gothic buildings were being completed, the university hired two prominent French scholars of medieval art, Henri...
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.68-80
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31749
Chapter subject tags:Focillon, Henri, 1881-1943Gothic revival (Architecture)--United States--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th century--PhilosophyArt historians--United States--20th centuryBenjamin, Walter, 1892-1940Giedion, S. (Sigfried), 1888-1968

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4. Josef and Anni Albers: New Beginnings
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
The 1933 headline announcing the arrival of two German artists, Josef and Anni Albers, in North Carolina read: “Germans on Faculty at Black Mountain School;...
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.81-101
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31750
Chapter subject tags:Albers, JosefAlbers, AnniBlack Mountain College (Black Mountain, N.C.)Yale University. School of Art and ArchitectureSociété anonymeArt, Modern--20th centuryArt--Study and teaching--United States--20th centuryCassirer, Ernst, 1874-1945Greenberg, Clement, 1909-1994Yale University. Art Gallery

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5. Louis I. Kahn and Paul Weiss: Presence of the Past
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
When asked in 1946 to comment on the state of architectural education at Yale, Charles H. Sawyer, the leading candidate to succeed Everett Victor Meeks as dean of the School of Fine Arts at that time, offered his verdict in no ambiguous terms:
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.104-123
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31752
Chapter subject tags:Kahn, Louis I., 1901-1974Weiss, Paul, 1901-2002Architecture--Study and teaching--United States--20th centurySawyer, Charles Henry, 1868-1954Architecture, Modern--20th centuryYale University. School of Art and ArchitectureArt, Modern--20th centuryPerspectaAlbers, AnniAlbers, Josef

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6. Eero Saarinen and George Kubler: Shaping Time
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Eero Saarinen’s winning entry to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial design competition in 1948, titled “Gateway to the West,” launched his independent career in a spectacular manner: the thirty-eight-year-old architect’s team beat his seventy-five-year-old father, Eliel Saarinen, in the final round by proposing a 560-foot-high...
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.124-148
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31753
Chapter subject tags:Saarinen, Eero, 1910-1961Kubler, George, 1912-1996. Shape of timeKubler, George, 1912-1996Architecture, Modern--20th centuryArt historians--United States--20th centuryGateway Arch (Saint Louis, Mo.)Saarinen, Eliel, 1873-1950Campus planning--United States--20th centuryCollege campuses--United States--20th centuryFocillon, Henri, 1881-1943

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7. Paul Rudolph and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Time Machines
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
When considering Paul Rudolph’s meteoric rise to fame, one thinks of George Kubler’s statement that “without a good entrance, [an artist] is in...
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.149-167
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31754
Chapter subject tags:Rudolph, Paul, 1918-1997Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, 1903-1971Architecture, Modern--20th centuryArchitecture--Study and teaching--United States--20th centuryYale University. School of Art and ArchitectureWittkower, RudolfUrban renewal--United States--20th centuryPlaster casts

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8. Vincent Scully: The Historian’s Revenge
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Known for his animated—and animating—lecture style, architectural historian Vincent Scully spent his career finding traces of the past in modern architecture. After gaining both...
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.168-182
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31755
Chapter subject tags:Scully, Vincent, Jr., 1920-2017Architecture--Study and teaching--United States--20th centuryYale University. School of Art and ArchitectureJung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961Architecture and philosophy--United States--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th centuryBloom, Harold

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Postscript: Time Today
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Sigfried Giedion captures the dilemma at the heart of twentieth-century architecture—how to balance continuity and change—in his 1957 book The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art. A Contribution on Constancy and Change as follows:
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Related print edition pages: pp.183-185
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31756

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Index
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Index
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31757
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Illustration Credits
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Description: Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
Illustration Credits
Author
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2023 by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31758
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Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past
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