Sibyl Moholy-Nagy called herself a late bloomer. No argument there: she was 47 when she launched her career as an architectural historian and critic. Her book Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, a biography of her husband László, the Hungarian-born artist and photographer who had been a teacher and central figure at the Bauhaus, appeared in 1950, four years after his death from leukemia. It demonstrated her gift for writing, her strong analytical skills, and knowledge of design. Shortly before his death, Sybil began teaching at the Institute of Design that Moholy- Nagy, who had fled Berlin, established in Chicago. He had come to Chicago to set up a school, the New Bauhaus, in 1937, but it only lasted one year. The second venture, first called the School of Design, then the Institute of Design, started up in 1939. But after 1946, Serge Chermayeff led it through its merger with the Illinois Institute of Technology, in 1949. By that time, Sibyl, a Germanborn mother of two, had moved to San Francisco to teach architectural history at the Schaeffer School of Design and at the University of California, Berkeley, before landing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1951. Until 1969, Sibyl taught architectural history there and had such a strong reputation that she was a magnet for attracting students.
At the same time, her writings in Progressive Architecture and Architectural Forum, as well as her subsequent books—Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (1957) and Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment (1968)—secured her a strong position in the critical firmament on topics not necessarily in the main-stream. Native Genius, which emphasized how attention to site, local materials, and climate generated a strong vernacular tradition, sprang forth at a time when machine-made glass, steel, and concrete architecture had seized the day. Matrix of Man, which explored the physical forms of cities (such as orthogonal, linear, or concentric) from classical Greece to the present day, argued for the place-based generation of large-scale communities, at a time when many planners were imposing a one-concept-fits-all approach to city planning and urban renewal.
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