Flintstone Modernism: or The Crisis in Postwar American Culture

by Jeffrey Lieber

Overview

Ancient history, midcentury modernism, Cinemascope, humanism and monumentality, totalitarianism and democracy: transformations in American culture and architecture.

In Flintstone Modernism, Jeffrey Lieber investigates transformations in postwar American architecture and culture. He considers sword-and-sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s—including forgotten gems such as Land of the Pharaohs, Helen of Troy, and The Egyptian—and their protean, ideologically charged representations of totalitarianism and democracy. He connects Cinemascope and other widescreen technologies to the architectural “glass curtain wall,” arguing that both represented the all-encompassing eye of American Enterprise. Lieber reminds us that until recently midcentury modern American architecture was reviled by architectural historians but celebrated by design enthusiasts, just as sword-and-sandal epics are alternately hailed as cult classics or derided as camp.

Lieber's argument is absorbing, exuberant, and comprehensive. Following Hannah Arendt, who looked for analogies in the classical past in order to understand midcentury's cultural crisis, Lieber terms the postwar reckoning of ancient civilizations and modern ideals “Flintstone modernism.” In new assessments of the major architects of the period, Lieber uncovers the cultural and political fantasies that animated or impinged on their work, offering surprising insights into Gordon Bunshaft's commonsense classicism; Eero Saarinen's architectural narratives of ersatz empire and Marcel Breuer's mania for Egyptian monoliths; and Edward Durell Stone's romantic “flights of fancy” and Philip Johnson's wicked brand of cynical cultural and sociopolitical critique.

Deftly moving among architecture, film, philosophy, and politics, Lieber illuminates the artifice that resulted from the conjunction of high style and mass-cultural values in postwar America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262037495
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/09/2018
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jeffrey Lieber is a historian of art and architecture. He has taught at Harvard University, the New School, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His essays on Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, and Hannah Arendt have appeared in such journals as Harvard Design Magazine, Design and Culture, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He also writes about film and regularly curates film series.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 The Cult of Immaculate Form 39

2 Architecture, Mass Culture, and Camp 111

3 The Useless Monument 183

Epilogue 213

Notes 227

Select Bibliography 253

Index 269

What People are Saying About This

Stefan Al

Jeffrey Lieber offers a dazzling account of mid-century modernism as a confluence of Cold War imperialism, corporate 'glass boxes,' lifestyle magazines, sword-and-sandal movies, and intellectuals' anxieties about a 'crisis' in culture.

Timothy Brittain-Catlin

Some monuments of mid-century corporate architecture have baffled critics, historians, and occasionally even their own architects. Lieber weaves theories of glamour, failure, 'uselessness,' and camp to uncover surprising hidden meanings.

Endorsement

Jeffrey Lieber offers a dazzling account of mid-century modernism as a confluence of Cold War imperialism, corporate 'glass boxes,' lifestyle magazines, sword-and-sandal movies, and intellectuals' anxieties about a 'crisis' in culture.

—Stefan Al, architect and urban designer; Associate Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania; author of The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream

From the Publisher

Some monuments of mid-century corporate architecture have baffled critics, historians, and occasionally even their own architects. Lieber weaves theories of glamour, failure, 'uselessness,' and camp to uncover surprising hidden meanings.

—Timothy Brittain-Catlin, University of Kent; author of Bleak Houses

Jeffrey Lieber offers a dazzling account of mid-century modernism as a confluence of Cold War imperialism, corporate 'glass boxes,' lifestyle magazines, sword-and-sandal movies, and intellectuals' anxieties about a 'crisis' in culture.

—Stefan Al, architect and urban designer; Associate Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania; author of The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream

Editorial Reviews

Flintstone Modernism is a highly original, thought-provoking addition to the scholarship on postwar American architecture. It is valuable for considering material across many related fields, especially in light of recent thinking about queer culture. Lieber's idiosyncratic account gives others permission to write about the postwar era in a similarly free and passionate manner.—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians—

From the Publisher