Form Givers
/Mid-Century Architecture was the subject of the Form Givers exhibit of 1959. The exhibit book is the week’s Book of the Week and is available from Internet Archive. The exhibit was organized and sponsored by Time Magazine for The American Federation of Arts. The Corcoran Gallery of Art was one of the museums to host the exhibit. I was a little surprised that there was no west coast museum (the furthest west was The Minneapolis Institute of Arts) on the list of museums even though there were examples of some west coast structures featured in the photographs.
The quote from Henry R. Luce on the title page (“…and we will succeed in creating the first modern, technological, humane, prosperous, and reverent civilization. This creative response to challenge will be most vividly expressed in and by architecture.”) reflects the optimism about the future in the late 1950s….a time just before I started school.
