Skyscraper Economies, The Call of the Blood: The International Style As Redemption by Fascism, 1930-1939

While American modernist architecture in its early years is often identified with Lewis Mumford’s left-liberal populism, Philip Johnson’s work in the 1930s for a fascist-populist economy’s architecture casts modernism’s dynamic of utility, public service, avant-garde form and social coordination in an unsettling light. Philip Johnson’s advocacy of modernism in the early 1930s evolved simultaneously with his convictions as a fascist ideologue, and the “skyscraper style,” “modern” according to Manhattan architecture culture, was the target and root of both. A flood of popular writings in 1929-30 celebrated the technical and economic power behind the skyscraper, but Johnson and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr argued that Art Deco towers, as instruments and aesthetic correlatives of economic power, showed elites’ misapplication of their might to ugly, trivial ends. A growing preoccupation with the economic matrix of this situation led Johnson to the irrationalist elitism of American fascist Lawrence Dennis (bankrolled by Johnson) and Third Reich economist Werner Sombart. In 1939 Johnson translated Sombart’s “World View, Science, and Economy,” which claimed National Socialism had replaced capitalism with policies that aestheticized the Volk’s will. Dennis’s books advanced a paradigm of elite-driven economic irrationalism for the management of society, turning the industrial economy toward celebration of (racially purified, dictator-directed) national greatness. Johnson’s first free-standing work of design was fascist: a 1936 grandstand for the right-wing populist Charles Coughlin. It serves as an example of how machine architecture could give noble expression to a Leader’s sway over the masses.