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Regionalism and Modernity: Architecture in Western Europe 1914–1940

Lost and Found: Regional Modernism in Europe There has been a quiet resurgence in the discourse of architectural regionalism in recent years, beginning with the publication in 2003 of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis’s Critical Regionalism, followed by my Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition in 2007. In 2008, Leuven University Press’s Sources of Regionalism in the Nineteenth Century (the precursor to the book under review) introduced the older tradition of regionalism in European thought and practice with a consideration of architecture, art, and literature in the nineteenth century. Since then activity has continued in articles, essays, and book publications.1 Much of this work has been historical, covering the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, with the aim of documenting the long tail of this recurrent yet neglected tendency in architectural thought and practice. As such, Regionalism and Modernity, is an apt, rewarding, yet difficult contribution to this discourse as it is more likely to be attractive to other historians and scholars than designers for whom it could also prove influential. The editors’ specific intent is to flesh out architectural developments in the years between the two world wars in Europe via a historiography of architecture and regionalism in France, Italy, Germany, England, and Belgium focused on the years between 1914 and 1940. More clearly, they aim to introduce architectural regionalism as a movement and approach that is more continuous and synthetic with modernist principles than in conflict with them. In Architectural Regionalism, I posited that the relationship between modernism and regionalism in the American context was typified by either conflict or maturation. By conflict, I referred to the faction of discourse that saw modernism and regionalism as antithetical to each other. By maturation, I referred to the theorization and projects that sought to reconcile the best characteristics of an emerging modern architecture (functionality, antihistoricism, embrace of emancipatory technology) with local conditions and understanding—resulting in a regional modernism. With Regionalism and Modernity, we get a more full and European perspective that suggests that in Europe maturation was dominant but also more complex. European regionalism, assert the editors, was a “strategy for ensuring continuity within a modernizing society which compensates for the increasing loss of landscape and tradition” (p. 8). As an edited volume, Regionalism and Modernity is a thorough, detailed, and uneven account due to the variety of authors, differential topical coverage, and attendant distinct deployment of terminology. The book consists of eleven chapters, with six devoted to Belgian history, two to France, and the remainder of one each to Britain, Italy, and Germany. Of these, the strongest are Chapter 1 by Jean-Claude Vigato, which covers regionalism in France as manifest in debates between writers, architects, and critics that include Vaillat, Clozier, Umbdenstock, Mauclair, and LeCorbusier; Chapter 4 by Leen Meganck, one of the editors, thoroughly discusses Belgian regionalism such that it serves as a microcosmic case study for the debates, dilemmas, and developments across all of western Europe; Chapter 10 by Vanessa Berghe, which discusses the British approach to regionalism via the work of Oliver Hill, who (like William Wurster and Harwell Hamilton Harris in the United States) was both prolific and influential in his time yet forgotten in subsequent historiography. And while much is shared between the American and European contexts, the history and culture of Europe during this time included large-scale urban migrations, rapid modernization of work and lifestyle, the displacement and traumas associated with world wars, postwar reconstruction, and the rise of various factional nationalisms. It provided a differentiated but fertile ground for the regional and modernist debates that go beyond those familiar to an American audience. It also provides a more serious basis for these debates, which were less about aesthetics than about meaning and cultural and collective identity. In the United States, interwar regionalism was a cultural and political movement mounted by artists and intellectuals, who sought inspiration and a degree of preservation in the diversity of America’s regions. It was a reaction against the rising commercialism and consumerism that accompanied the emerging metropolitan culture and the hegemony over taste and quality that appeared to be becoming centralized in the so-called cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles. In Europe, part of the regionalist debate shared the concerns of the American regionalists but was often also more a part of nation-building or nationalist agendas and had more profound consequences that hinged on racial, tribal, ethnic, or national distinctions that also contributed to wars, racism, and ethnic cleansing.