Much history penned by the American generation that came of age during (and since) the 1960s deploys the narrative mode of a struggle between two binaries. Anthony Alofsin’s new history of design education at Harvard University goes so far as to include the word in its title. For Alofsin, the study of what is one of America’s leading institutions for architecture, landscape, and planning education revolves around a struggle for modernism. Importantly, the ultimate outcome of that skirmish was not the various attitudes that followed modernism, sundry posts, and their ilk, but instead an essential hijacking of America’s inevitable professional modernization within the various programs at Harvard. This occurred through a shifting of the concept of collaboration, endemic in that school’s sundry design programs, which were fully implemented over the first third of the century and finally unified in the 1930s. Alofsin’s argument is that valuable opportunities were missed, or, alternatively, hijacked, when Walter Gropius arrived at Harvard, for with him came a European, rather elitist dynamic dependent upon the technician/artist—who was primarily an architect. This vision, and the various confrontations and compromises involved in attempts to integrate it with earlier, innate visions, eclipsed ongoing American efforts at pedagogically producing various sorts of professionals who could collaborate with each other as well as with outsiders to the design professions.

Alofsin’s story begins, however, not with Gropius’s 1936 arrival at the newly formed Graduate School of Design (GSD), with its soon-to-be seminal triumvirate that numerous schools took as a model during the next three decades or so, but instead nearly forty years earlier, when professional education in design-related fields first began at the venerated private university. The portion of the book that for many readers will most likely be emblematic of modernism—that is, the book’s middle part, covering the period from the 1930s until the 1950s, entailing the confrontation between Architecture Department Chairman Gropius and GSD Dean Joseph Hudnut—lurks in the background of the even more fascinating earlier chapters, when the book is arguably at its best. The period covered in these sections coincides with the modernization of architectural practices in America, and involve not only earlier efforts to found professional societies, dating from as far back as the 1860s, but also efforts to establish a secure roost in the complex web of educational institutions that made up higher education in America. Harvard, of course, did not get there first—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just down the road, beat them to it nearly thirty years earlier, in 1868, and there were seven others as well by 1895, when Harvard’s School of Architecture was formed. As Alofsin relates the tale, however, the fledgling school rose to prominence quickly, taking its place in the early decades of the twentieth century among the select set of leading American architecture schools housed in universities.

The book is decidedly disappointing in the final, shorter third section covering the period from the late 1950s to the present. Alofsin, however, should not be held responsible for this aspect of the book’s unevenness; due to Harvard’s fifty-year hold on administrative records, the wealth of material he had access to for the first two sections was unavailable for the final portion. The close proximity of this final era to our time also contributes to uncertainty about to how to encapsulate the narrative of an institution such as the GSD, which like many others in America foundered during the late 1960s and early 1970s, unsure of the relevance and reliability of earlier visions. It is no wonder that Alofsin, who first educated himself at Harvard during that tenuous but heady time in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department founded by Dean Jose Luis Sert, resorts to the theme of internal struggle so common to characterizations of that era.

Yet the uniformity of treatment in the first two sections does mar their respective merits, despite the high quality of Alofsin’s effort. As a book on architecture education primarily, it makes sense to treat these first two periods, before and during Gropius’s involvement, analogously. Yet given the background of education in America, where the development of the research university out of the diverse network of technical colleges and institutes, private moneyed institutions, and public land-grant and state schools was basically rewriting the rules of the game at the beginning of the Great Depression, this continuity remains unquestioned. Consideration of its complexity would have provided additional counterpoint between the two sections, for the book is interesting but a bit static during the lengthy middle section. The prominence given to the struggle predating Gropius’s appointment, then, between art and science, or between, on the one hand, landscape/architectural design and city planning as a technique employed by scientifically minded, progressive professionals and, on the other, design as an artistic practice that has its own immanent logic, overshadows how an entirely different sort of struggle later emerged from it. Ultimately, this renders the longue durée of the book unevenly served but nevertheless compelling overall.

First-hand, up-close, and in-depth examinations of the early American architecture, landscape, and city-planning schools as the complex entities they were during the first half of the twentieth century in America are sadly lacking. Alofsin’s study decidedly raises the bar. Full of precise details, his prose is smooth, and the book is amply and informatively illustrated. Paying equal attention to faculty, curriculum, students and their work, and administrative politics, as well as the larger university and national context, his book is in many ways exemplary. The vagaries of the three primary divisions that were united to make the School of Design, their individual formations, mergings, division, and changing status (school, department, division, and course), are all laid out carefully; no amount of further analysis on Alofsin’s part could have simplified it, and the chronological overview at the end of the book is invaluable for anyone studying design education in America.

It is thus a disappointment that the book will be of markedly less appeal for anyone interested in American professional education in general than for those in architectural education proper. For while professional design education experienced a significant struggle during the 1930s, one central to Alofsin’s concerns—the case of one particular Ivy League school and the complex institutional skirmishes among administrators, educators, and the interested professions—cannot serve to encapsulate the intricate field of a national network and produce an ethical tale useful for either this moment or a moment yet to come. This is a loss. For it is precisely the interdisciplinary opportunities for professionals working in America, tied as they are to pragmatist pedagogy such as John Dewey’s, with its firm belief in coordinated action toward community goals as the apotheosis of individual achievement, that are central to the narrative Alofsin constructs and of interest beyond the limited purview of design education. Not connecting the narrative to larger patterns, then, is a missed opportunity, which could have given the tale of an institution such as Harvard, revered and disparaged alike (nowadays more than ever), all the more poignancy and consequence. Given the recent rise of stock in all things architectural in American media and life, with the star system in architects and the interest in ongoing developments surrounding the former World Trade Center site, design education has a sizable stake in the matter of connections between professional education and social reality.

It has recently been argued, most clearly by Julie A. Reuben in her The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), that the nineteenth-century American institution of higher education was transformed from its basis in belief in moral rectitude and practices of judgment to a more modern, scientific institution concerned primarily with specialization of knowledge and the pragmatic application of the life of the mind to contemporary life. Professional design education only crystallized once this change was basically a fait accompli, but much has changed in the ensuing hundred years. Further developments—particularly those Alofsin relates, involving the suppression of innate American visions of professional social integration by administrators and pedagogues such as Gropius, as well as failings “on the ground” concerning training necessary for the smooth transformations entailed by these visions—are central to the stories that remain to be told about design education and whether its particular history is endemic of professional education in general or not. Alofsin’s book is a start, and will hopefully end up on the shelf in an expanded field of similar studies.