The conjunction this season of four architecture exhibitions on Midcentury Modernism at its most promising and exuberant seems less a coincidence of timing than proof of a new attitude, telling us much about the present even while illuminating the past. This transcontinental grand slam began in New York in June with Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through September 21); continued in July with Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner, at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum (through October 12), and Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through October 20); and wraps up in the fall with Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, at Minneapolis’s Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center (September 13–January 4, 2009).
Museums often follow trends in academe, where graduate students constantly seek fresh research topics unmined by earlier scholars. At some magic moment the recent past morphs into history, a transition that never ceases to shock those who lived through events under study. Veterans of ages past often find it hard to admit that divergent memories held by others — the Rashomon effect — might be equally valid.
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