Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard

Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Hardcover. G+ (Ex-art library, with spine label, i.d. marks on book block edges and outermost pages; pages are lightly tanned overall, few instances of pencilings in text and margins; otherwise clean.). Turquoise cloth, blue & illus. dust jacket in mylar cover, 276 pp., BW illus. "From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the Harvard Graduate School of Design played a crucial role in shaping a new modern architecture and the modern city. Architects, planners, teachers, and students from all over the world looked to the new GSD, with its celebrated faculty and curriculum, for the path to modern design. While the school's significance is widely recognized by architectural historians, most studies have concentrated on the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and his transformation of Harvard's old Beaux-Arts School of Architecture into a 'Harvard-Bauhaus,' a radically new school with a single outlook. [This book] argues that Gropius did not effect these changes alone and, further, that the GSD was not merely an offshoot of the Bauhaus. [It] offers a crucial missing piece to the story -- and to the history of modern architecture -- by focusing on Joseph Hudnut, the school's dean and founder." (dj).