The poisonous fruits of modern architecture

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Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, László's second wife, by emigrating to the United States in the 1930s, was involved in the New Bauhaus in Chicago. After her husband’s death, she became an important critic of American architectural functionalism. She argued that American public architecture should reflect the cultural specificity of the country rather than imitate European models and believed that modern architecture was a threat to American architectural identity, highlighting the defeatist power of functionalism. Her analysis highlighted modernism's failure to create liveable urban environments, and her disappointment with its consequences was combined with a firm belief in the potential of architecture.

Moholy-Nagy offered her interpretation of how rationalism and functionalism spread and profoundly influenced American architectural practice. One of the key points of her research was the decisive role played by European architects who emigrated to the United States, such as Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, as well as those who taught at that school: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who directed it between 1930 and 1933, and Marcel Breuer, who was also a student at that school. The architectural works created by these European exponents of the Modern Movement, together with those of their American followers, changed the American urban landscape and influenced entire generations of architects. The Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe in Manhattan in 1958, certainly contributed to spreading European influence on American architecture, which had already begun in 1932 with a famous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Through her research, writings, and lectures, Moholy-Nagy highlighted how the presence of these émigré architects paved the way for what has been defined since that 1932 exhibition as the International Style. In his view, this was a stylistic graft implemented in contrast to a building tradition that had helped define the civic role of American architecture.