The American architectural educator Joseph Hudnut (1886–1968) lived long enough to know the place he would occupy in history: the man who brought Walter Gropius to Harvard. The founding dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) had indeed recruited the creator of the Bauhaus to head the school’s department of architecture in 1937 as part of his own crusade to wipe out Beaux-Arts methods in the United States. By the time both men retired in the 1950s, they had long been at odds. Yet the “recruiter” role was a logical one for Hudnut in a historiography where the modernist “White Gods” (as Tom Wolfe satirically called them)—Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer—had supposedly brought a fully honed International Style methodology into a fossilized American architecture culture. Such scholars as Anthony Alofsin, Joachim Driller, and Isabelle Hyman have done a great deal in recent years to rewrite this story. In this new climate Hudnut demands fresh attention.

In her essential 1997 essay in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, “Joseph Hudnut’s Other Modernism at the ‘Harvard Bauhaus,’” Jill Pearlman retold the story of “Gropius’s Harvard” in terms of Hudnut’s hopes for an evolving American modernism. In Inventing American Modernism Pearlman expands her earlier research into something like a biography of Hudnut. Her primary research parallels that of Alofsin on the history of architectural and planning education at Harvard, with some new and enlightening material (Anthony Alofsin,The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture and City Planning at Harvard, New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). She makes good use of Driller’s Breuer Houses (London: Phaidon, 2000), Hyman’s Marcel Breuer, Architect (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), Winfried Nerdinger’s very critical Walter Gropius (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1986), and especially architect Klaus Herdeg’s 1983 attack on Gropius’s GSD, The Decorated Diagram (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983). The reader gets a very good idea from Pearlman’s book of what happened during the GSD’s first fifteen years, and why.

Pearlman casts Hudnut as the unknown founder of American modernist education. Gropius was the “better salesman” (4), but Hudnut, in Pearlman’s estimation, did the real groundwork. Moreover, had he been more in the foreground, he could have been the hero of a better American design culture than the Europeans émigrés managed to make. This conceptual framework is frustratingly inadequate to her rich material. The approaches in Alan Colquhoun’s and Gwendolyn Wright’s recent survey texts, with their close attention to modernism’s diverse intellectual and institutional frameworks (which were often mutually exclusive), might have allowed a more instructive context for Hudnut’s work (Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Gwendolyn Wright, USA: Modern Architectures in History, London: Reaktion Books, 2008). More importantly, it is not clear from Pearlman’s book that Hudnut could have been the hero she envisages.

The son of a Michigan husband-and-wife team of builders and manufacturers, Hudnut was versatile and conscientious in many architectural disciplines, from specification-writing to teaching history, but was personally uncharismatic and an often inaudible lecturer. After a period of employment in the Midwest with German city planner Werner Hegemann and a stint of teaching at the University of Virginia, Hudnut abandoned his traditionalist architectural practice and returned to Columbia University, where he had earned an M.Arch. degree, to teach architectural history. Hudnut became dean of Columbia’s architecture school in 1934 after a year as acting dean. In this post he emerged rather abruptly as a leading partisan of the new. In his history courses, he had begun to critique Beaux-Arts architecture culture, and to accept European modernism as a valid evolutionary development. After 1933, the combination of his administrative acumen at Columbia, suddenly enlisted on behalf of modernism, and his colorfully written print-media attacks on the Beaux-Arts visibly crippled the old order from within mainstream architectural education. By 1936 Hudnut’s admirers ranged from the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr to Harvard’s reforming president James Bryant Conant. With the support of both, Hudnut made the calculated decision to bring Gropius to the design school at Harvard he had just begun for Conant.

Pearlman reveals Hudnut as a less than wholehearted convert to modernism. His views owed less to the modernist movement than to Hegemann, whose work and thought, formed before 1914, bridged German Reform Socialism and the American Progressive Movement. Pearlman quotes Hudnut’s assessment of Hegemann’s cause: to subsume architecture into city planning, in the service of “a reasonable and humane structur[ing] of society” (28), an ideal Hudnut embraced. Like Hegemann, Hudnut had no comprehension of avant-garde cultural paradigms, despite the idol-smashing pyrotechnics of his own essays. Pearlman could have done more to show how this lack of understanding led him to misinterpret Gropius, and the way in which Gropius, before and just after the war, had absorbed avant-gardism—especially Expressionism—into his agenda for reforming architecture. Despite this omission, Pearlman valuably centers her discussion of Gropius’s Harvard curriculum on his attempt, to Hudnut’s chagrin, to establish something like the Bauhaus Basic Course, with its extension of Expressionist doctrines of abstraction and empathy from painting into all form-making. Pearlman’s emphasis on this issue, so vital to both men, permits a more personal story than Alofsin’s treatment of Harvard’s Gropius era in The Struggle for Modernism.

Yet Pearlman has not quite explained Hudnut’s failures. Pearlman notes that others at the GSD criticized the short-sighted functionalism of Gropius’s design pedagogy, his growing acceptance of the formalism Breuer brought to the school, and his parroting of tired Weimar-era slogans. But Gropius could point to his own past work, and that of his fellow Europeans of the heroic period, as examples of what could be done with his methods. Hudnut, Pearlman confesses (127), hardly ever described any contemporary work of architecture as the embodiment of, or take-off point for, his own goals. Hudnut enjoyed expounding the idea of technologized building in service to society; a colleague remembered that Hudnut “‘liked larger concepts and imagery to explain them’” (12). Perhaps less impressed with any building than he was with his own prose (the study where he wrote his essays was dubbed the Love Nest), he found little to say about any designer more cutting-edge than Eliel Saarinen. The dumbfounded reader asks, did Hudnut really never say anything about Frank Lloyd Wright?

Rather like his mentor Hegemann, who was above all a journalist, Hudnut could put more enthusiasm into saying what others were doing wrong than in describing anything done right. Pearlman describes how Hudnut’s 1940s essays blast modernists for driving memory and feeling out of design—without reconciling this with a letter she quotes earlier, in which Hudnut looks forward to a diminished importance of permanence and aesthetics in architecture. The impression is not of Hudnut’s “postmodern” prescience, but of self-righteousness that prevents full awareness of one’s actions. Hudnut shone only where he could preach to lay audiences unversed in modernism, like competition juries and general-interest magazine readers. By contrast, within the major modernist groups and polemics in Hudnut’s orbit that Pearlman discusses, like the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne or the debate on monumentality, he seems oddly marginal, even inert. This raises interesting issues about not just Hudnut’s limitations but about the nature of American modernist milieus.

Aside from what he took from Hegemann, more an attitude than a corpus of ideas, it is hard to see whether Hudnut’s thought really cohered. Perhaps he is best discussed, like Lewis Mumford, as an eclectic product of Progressive Era ideologies. Pearlman stresses Hudnut’s devotion to John Dewey’s vision of a democratic culture in a constant state of evolutionary flux, and Hudnut’s most energetic writing is about the evolving multiverse limned by Dewey and by Alfred North Whitehead. Pearlman’s less than full attention to Hudnut’s use of Dewey is regrettable. She does not show which of Dewey’s works Hudnut read, and she seems to avoid discussion of recent Dewey scholarship. With some attention to Dewey’s aesthetic thought, Pearlman could have related Hudnut’s professed Deweyite beliefs to his early interest in Arthur Wesley Dow’s aesthetics, described by Pearlman, and said more about Gropius’s fascination at the GSD with the supposedly Dewey-derived perception experiments of Adelbert Ames. (Joan Ockman’s 1996 Columbia University conference paper on émigré museologist Alexander Dorner, “The Road Not Taken” [published in Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, ed. R. E. Somol, New York: Monacelli Press, 1997], also deals with Dewey’s ideas in Gropius’s orbit in the 1940s.) It is possible that Hudnut merely picked up Dewey’s ideas at Columbia and never read him. Except for Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s Crow Island School, Hudnut never identified any architecture à la Dewey. Oscar Niemeyer, Frederick Kiesler, Cedric Price, Aldo van Eyck, even Archigram—all of them enactors of the democratic flux and provisionality Hudnut hymned, practicing in Hudnut’s lifetime—apparently never claimed his attention. Likewise, although Hudnut’s concerns about heritage, civic symbolism, public life, and domesticity surfaced during his last years in the work of figures like Robert Venturi and Jane Jacobs, there was no interchange between them and Hudnut either.

Mumford’s pickings from Progressive Era thought were pulled into useful shape through subordination to Patrick Geddes’s theory and practice. Neither Hegemann’s reformist ideology of planning nor Dewey’s faith in democratic thought had any such organizing function for Hudnut. They fed instead into abstract, vaguely technocentric, but humanistic-sounding “theory” (as Hudnut’s not-always-comprehending admirers called it). Hudnut’s platitudes meshed with Gropius’s own post-1930 declension into platitudes, as the latter expounded “unity in diversity” compromises between conflicting visions of modernity by ignoring the difficult parts. The brief union of Gropius’s and Hudnut’s truisms gave Americans a crash course in modern design. It is irrelevant that Hudnut realized, too late, that Gropius’s platitudes were not the same as his. This is, perhaps, not the story Pearlman intended to tell, but she tells it in fascinating detail. American modernism was not created with the finger-touch of the arriving White Gods. It was half-consciously improvised through the high hopes, vague ideas, and clever, pragmatic networking of men like Joseph Hudnut.