Beauty Evolves

At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Louis Sullivan had presented his groundbreaking “skyscraper” concept, followed in 1919 by the founding of the seminal Bauhaus School by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. Change was clearly in the air when, in 1932, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock launched “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, thereby affirming Modernism as a distinct design and cultural movement. Three extant 20th-century architectural icons serve to illustrate Modernism’s enduring appeal: the United Nations building (New York, 1947-1961), the Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1959), and the Sydney Opera House (Australia, 1959-1973).

From the 1960s to the 1980s, architects in Coral Gables rose to the occasion by adapting the “form follows function” Modernist principles to the exigencies of tropical suburban life. See some of their surviving works here to get a better understanding of how we’ve traveled from then to now. In the end, perhaps our architectural evolution was not so much a conundrum as a continuum.