Diefendorf, Jeffry “I Love That City, But Which City?”
“Gehryism: American Architecture and the Cultural Authority of Art”
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the peculiar place of architecture in American cultural history, as it has been promoted from a minor genre of interest primarily to architects and art historians to a central American expressive form. The transformation began in the late 1950s and the 1960s, when scholars such as Willard Connely, Norris Kelly Smith, and William H. Jordy began to interpret Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as exemplars of American culture closely and self-consciously linked to canonical literary figures of the nineteenth century such as Emerson and Whitman. It culminates, perhaps, in the present, a time in which many forms of high culture suffer declining audiences and prestige in the United States, but in which architecture leads a charmed life. Prominent architects enjoy a celebrity status not known since Frank Lloyd Wright's heyday, while avant-garde architecture serves as an index of urban status in the way that exceptionally tall buildings once did.
Yet the trajectory of architectural--and urban--historical study over the past thirty years has been to undermine the premises on which much of the contemporary popular adulation of architecture and architects is based. A second thread of the argument examines the ways that new studies of material culture and consumption, a more sophisticated understanding of the political economy of the built environment, an acute sense of the diversity of the American landscape, and the loss of faith in American exceptionalism all work to dissolve the cultural authority accorded to architecture, as it has to canonical literary and visual art forms. Not only do they undermine the romantic story of artistic creation, they cast doubt on architecture's very status as an art form in the conventional sense of the word, and demand a new account of the nature of creation and the role of architecture in culture and landscape.
Session I, Keynotes: The History of the History of the Built Environment