Lewis Mumford, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the Rise of “Bay” Regionalism

Abstract

In the fall of 1949, the San Francisco Museum of Art held Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region. As an illustrated manifesto of Lewis Mumford’s regional stance, the exhibition epitomised one of the major turning points in the postwar debates surrounding the question of the autonomy of a truly American modern tradition. Unlike Mumford’s 1941 first sight appreciation of the complex reality of Northern California –resulting in an enduring love affair with several generations of its architects, urban planners and social reformers, from William Wurster to his Telesis protégés–, Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s evaluation of West Coast architecture was not very high, and his early elucidation evolved through ambivalent considerations. However, as this study tries to demonstrate, the 1949 show would contribute to mellowing the Eastern critic’s strict formal and visual criteria delimiting his and Philip Johnson’s International Style definitions, which ultimately led him chair the 1962-66 Modern Architecture Symposia at Columbia University to reassess the American reception of European modernism. Conversely, this paper aims to examine the extent to which the conflict of perceptions and interests between the two Coasts brought about the 1949 show as part of a well-orchestrated campaign that had begun around a decade before Mumford wrote his renowned 1947 New Yorker piece triggering a controversy on the existence of a ‘Bay Region style’. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that this exhibition was a delayed reaction to the 1948 MoMA symposium organised by Johnson to refute Mumford’s opinions, or that it merely tried to make the most of the national polemic, the exhibition was part of a coherent regionalist agenda whose main success was, precisely, that Mumford, Hitchcock and other influential actors in the United States were exposed, indoctrinated and/or seduced by the so-called Bay Area School and its emphasis on social, political and environmental concerns.