MODERN MARVELS

From monumental plazas to space-age banks, the US East Coast is home to many of the world’s finest Midcentury Modernist buildings. SAM LUBELL takes a nostalgic road trip.

A look at the finest Midcentury Modernist buildings found on the US East Coast.

The East Coast became the world hub of Modernist design after World War II, when the United States was achieving seemingly boundless ascendancy. Key Modernists such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, IM Pei and Louis Kahn had fled the poverty and strife of Europe and the Far East for America’s wealth and future-obsessed open-mindedness. The East Coast was their closest American shore, and it embraced Modernist design – its practical, egalitarian ethos, stripping away the ornament and symbolic baggage of the past.

At the same time American architectural stars were rising, among them

Paul Rudolph, Edward Durell Stone, Philip Johnson and Wallace K Harrison. Most were educated at the East Coast’s highly regarded architecture schools and they ushered Modernism to unlikely locales, from the woods of Georgia to the tip of Florida, from private homes to city halls, space-age banks and revolutionary schools.

But this phenomenal assemblage remains twodimensional until you experience it in person. It’s the journey that unlocks the magic in this collection of achievements. On several road trips, photographer Darren Bradley and I marvelled at the beauty and technical prowess of Modernist masterpieces and felt their emotional clout. We absorbed the currents of the mid-century – its futuristic ethos and emphasis on middle-class opportunity and innovation; and also its destructive urban renewal campaigns, its reign of cars,

highways and suburbs, and its uniform prescriptions for planning and living.

This architectural adventure proved for us an inspiring experience. Midcentury Modernist architecture, of course, delivers a nostalgic journey into the past, but it also reflects an era in which the future was valued above all else. Americans were thrilled by what was ahead of them and eager to right the wrongs of the past.

Of course, not all worked out as envisaged. Nothing ever does. What started as a visionary, socially concerned undertaking became, to many, a symbol of the arrogant, insensitive status quo. But the bold optimism of Modernism, and the earnest ambition to construct well for everyone, delivers something we’re sorely lacking now. We began to spot the best Midcentury buildings not just because of their materials or forms, but also because of their audacity, energy and heart.

Here are a few of the

250 Modernist destinations that inspired us.