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sion was added to architectural discourse. Most of these events were not in and of themselves spectacular, but even modest initiatives attained a greater influence by virtue of their innovative spirit. The New York “Machine Age Exposition” of 1927 was pioneering in many ways: devoted to the American and European avant-garde, it confronted the American public for the first time with the concept that the machine could provide a formal aesthetic code. It also displayed photographs and models of European avant-garde buildings that bespoke a machine aesthetic.129 The exposition conveyed the close relationship between developments in modern art and advancing industrialization in Europe and the United States. It emphasized work 2.8 Advertisement, included in the catalogue for the “International Exhibition of Modern Art” from Germany, Russia, and the United at the Brooklyn Museum, 1926. (Photo: Barry States; German architecture was only poorly Friedman.) represented in the accompanying text, but the fact that reviewers often mentioned its impressive formal quality implies that the visual material of the show balanced the textual inadequacies and allowed the audience to gain some insight into the work.130 Walter Gropius’s work, including the Bauhaus atelier, the masters’ houses in Dessau, and the city theater of Jena, comprised a significant portion of the architecture selected for exhibition and illustration. The curators had undoubtedly recognized the value Gropius attributed to the machine and its influence on the new architecture. Only four years earlier, following the reorientation of the Weimar Bauhaus to the “unity of art and technology,” he had asserted: “We want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast motor cars, an architecture whose function is clearly recog-
126 Grant
Hildebrand, Designing for Industry.
127 Sigrid
Weltge Wortmann, Bauhaus Textiles, 195.
128 Carl
W. Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture, 215.
129 See
“Machine-Art Exposition.” The exposition ran from 16 May to 28 May 1927 in a building at 119 West 57th Street.
130 Herbert
Lippmann, “The Machine-Age Exposition,” 325.