By Hope Svenson
This M.E.D. thesis considers the historical significance of the exhibition Visionary Architecture, curated by Arthur Drexler and held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1960. A modestly sized exhibit, it displayed the drawings and models of twenty-eight unbuilt projects by a range of modern architects from Le Corbusier to Michael Webb. With Visionary Architecture, Drexler privileged the architectural idea over the built form, registering the dissolution of a prevailing modernist aesthetic, and propelling MoMA toward a reassessment of its own highly codified version of modern architecture. Within the Museum, the show served as a rupture from a history of architecture exhibitions that emphasized style and practicality, while it remained loyal to a central tenet of modernism in its faith in architecture as a socially redemptive force. But the exhibition also reflected an increasing fragmentation and critical rethinking of the modern canon that characterized the professional avant-garde of the 1950s. Apparent in Visionary Architecture is architectural culture’s dissatisfaction with—and yet entrenchment in—a modern paradigm that MoMA itself had been so instrumental in constructing.