dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
name: Hitchcock
vorname: Henry-Russell
wikidata-repräsentation: Q327323
gnd-repräsentation: 118774557
biografische angaben: * 1903 in Boston, MA; † 1987 in New York, NY
Architectural historian and Smith College professor; coined the term “International School” of modern architecture. Hitchcock attended the Middlesex School and Harvard University. At Harvard he wrote for the avant garde newspaper Hound & Horn which Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) had founded. There he also met the group of young intellectuals who would launch modernism in the United States. Among them were A. Everett “Chick” Austin, Philip Johnson, the musicologist Virgil Thomson (1896-1989), and Edward Warburg. Hitchcock received his A.B. in 1924 and M.A. in 1927. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. asked Hitchcock to mount a show on modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, together with Johnson. Johnson and Hitchcock traveled to Germany in 1930 to study modern architecture for the Museum of Modern art. The show, called “The International Style,” launched the term applied to Bauhaus-style architecture. The exhibition and book were revolutionary because it drew from social thinkers, such as Lewis Mumford as much as art and architectural (stylistic) theory. Hitchcock was director of the Smith College Museum of Art from 1949 to 1955. He was asked by Nikolaus Pevsner to write the volumen on modern architecture for the Pelican History of Art series, which appeared as Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in 1958. In 1968, he moved to a town house on the Upper East Side of New York City, teaching at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. His 1976 book, Temples of Democracy, written with William Seale, was a critical/historical view of American state capitols. In 1984, he publicly and strongly criticized Peter Palumbo's plan to build a Mies van der Rohe skyscraper in London. He died of cancer at age 83. His students included Vincent Scully [at Yale, though he did not have a permanent appointment there].
Hitchcock was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a former president of the Victorian Society of America. His books on Victorian architecture helped to rehabilitate a neglected field. As an architectural historian, he remained noticeable apart from the debates of post-modernism. David Watkin termed Hitchcock’s scholarly work “thorough and workman-like though lacking in the kind of conceptual or intellectual interest which characterizes the work of German-inspired art historians.” Hitchcock’s methodology viewed the individual as the shaper of architecture more than broad social forces. His architectural histories focused on the formal aspects of buildings rather than on political, economic or social phenomenon. Architectural history for him was genealogical, a linear progression architects, (both major and minor) directly influence each other and the discipline. Hitchcock was criticized especially in later years, for failing to situate buildings in their larger context. His methodology contrasted the ideological/political approach of contemporaries, such as Donald Drew Egbert.