Regionalism has long been a difficult topic, provoking ambivalence and anxiety, inextricably bound up with controversial notions of the peripheral, provincial, and parochial. This was especially true for American architects of Yeon’s generation (he was born in 1910), schooled in Emersonian self-reliance and mindful of their country’s emergence as a global superpower, yet shaped by longstanding beliefs in European cultural supremacy. Even as late as the 1950s, Americans tended to weigh their nation’s art and architecture against that of Europe, leading some to lament its derivativeness and mediocrity and others to make exaggerated claims for its originality and importance. Never was this more true than in the decades between the world wars, when tensions over the definitions and national origins of “modern architecture” became a significant part of the American intellectual atmosphere. [...]
But the internationalist impulse would prove short-lived. Consolidating its power as a cultural pace-setter, MOMA again signaled a shift when, in 1936, Holger Cahill, former acting director of the museum and new director of the Federal Art Project, announced that American artists and arts institutions were “declaring a moratorium on [their] debts to Europe and returning to cultivate [their] own garden.” One year later, MOMA trustee Nelson Rockefeller wrote to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, urging him to support more shows on American architecture. Indeed, between 1938 and 1941, 18 of the 22 exhibitions organized by the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design focused on American topics. 9 In making this shift, MOMA was reflecting and appealing to a sensibility spreading rapidly across the nation, one visible in everything from the popularization of terms like “the American Dream” and ‘”the American way of life” to the passage, in 1940, of the Alien Registration Act and the eventual detention of Japanese-American citizens in internment camps. In a turbulent era that saw multitudes grappling with economic depression and unemployment, with communism, fascism, and foreign imperialism, and with the coming of war, the U.S., like other nations, grew increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic. These attitudes quickly entered the artworld and were amplified by it. [...]
It’s notable — as the examples above suggest — that the new regionalist architecture of mid-century America was limited almost exclusively to a single building type: the free-standing, private house. Yeon’s and Belluschi’s Portland houses of the late 1930s and ’40s, for example, were called regionalist, but Belluschi’s larger-scaled skyscraper and office designs — such as the much-lauded Equitable Building of 1944 — were not. Precisely because the single-family house serves a small user group and limited range of functions, it is a prime vehicle for expressions of identity and place, freighted with cultural associations and symbolic potential. [...]
In other words, regionalist modernism was bounded more by time than by geography: it was the architecture of an era first, and of a place only second. After all, the regionalist ethos was emerging not in 1840, when months of perilous travel separated the east and west coasts and when regional distinctions were undeniable and profound, but in 1940, when the country was connected by near-instantaneous communications and ever-more rapid transportation and distribution networks. And when regionalist modernism was becoming a national “style,” a geographically broad-ranging, historically situated mode of thinking and practice.
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