3 Questions: Arindam Dutta on MIT and architectural modernism
MIT is home to the nation’s first academic department of architecture, founded in 1865. But the style of architecture favored at the Institute changed markedly after World War II, from a prewar emphasis on Beaux Arts buildings to a heavy focus on modernism. Now a book examines the nature of MIT-based modernism in new detail, suggesting that MIT’s emphasis on research and technology produced new directions for modernism, pushing it away from more abstract aesthetic considerations and toward more technological paradigms. Meanwhile, MIT’s campus became the site of celebrated modernist buildings by Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, and I.M. Pei, among others. Edited by Arindam Dutta, an associate professor of architectural history at MIT, the book — titled “A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment,” and recently published by MIT Press — collects 24 essays and first-person accounts of the successes, and struggles, of architects at MIT. Dutta calls...