Kathleen James-Chakraborty presented her paper ‘Revisiting the Reception of Modern Architecture: International Exhibition’ at the colloquium The Making of Technocelebrity: Intermediaries of the Modern Movement (25–26 September 2025, Leuven).

That the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition played a seminal role in the importation of interwar European architecture to the United States has little basis in fact, no matter how often it is repeated in classrooms and in peer-reviewed scholarship, not to mention the professional press and blog postings. The details of its reception in the national press are now easily recoverable thanks to the new facility with which one can search digital archives of the country’s newspapers. They reveal that many of the reviews of it were written not when it was on view in New York, but when it toured much of the country afterwards. Moreover, most of this coverage was written by women who served as art critics for their local newspapers. Long before Ada Louise Huxtable was appointed to her prestigious position at the New York Times in 1963, women were writing about architecture as part of their fine arts brief. Those who reviewed the Modern Architecture exhibition included Helen Appleton Read and Pauline Pincus at the Brooklyn Eagle, Lilian Semons of the Brooklyn Daily Times, Ruth Faxon Macrea of the Chattanooga Sunday Times, Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Tribune, Grace Kelly of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Mary L. Alexander of the Cincinnati Enquirer. These women and others like them played an important up through at least the 1960s in introducing a general middle-class public in the United States to the latest architectural developments. In the 1970s Sarah Booth Conroy of the Washington Post and Jane Holz Kay at the Boston Globe continued this tradition, while profiles of Chloethiel Woodard Smith by female journalists writing for the women’s pages played a major role in fostering her professional success as an architect. Focusing on the reviews women published of the Modern Architecture exhibition demonstrates how familiar female art critics of the day were already with what came to be known as the International Style and how curious they were about it, as well as why some were more receptive to it than others. That a typesetter could embarrass Jewett by referring to Miss van der Rohe as the architect of the Tugendhat House, in what was almost certainly the first mention in a Chicago paper of the man who would soon play such a large role in the city’s architecture culture demonstrates as well the degree to which these women paved the way for the eventual jump from women shaping the way new architectural trends were received to Jeanne Gang’s ability to have an impact upon the city’s skyline.

Beatriz Colomina famously argued in her 1998 book Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, that modern architecture needs to be understood in terms of its engagement with mass media, but except for her own work on Playboy, most of the scholarship that has followed from her assertation has focused on the monthly magazines targeting the architecture profession that are easy to find in the libraries of the better architecture schools and now also on the internet. My work suggests that if we want to understand how taste was formed, and thus how architecture was received by the broader public, we need to turn elsewhere, which thankfully the digitization of newspapers and periodicals has made it much easier to do. Despite the deep-seated misogyny that characterized the architecture profession in the United States for most – indeed arguably all – of the twentieth century, women were responsible for much of the most widely read architecture criticism, and much of this writing was directed at other women. It is thus hardly surprising that in the 1960s and 1970s Jane Jacobs and Denise Scott Brown would become the two strongest voices in the country’s architectural community, not least because they took seriously the views about architecture of ordinary people, by which they often meant specifically other women.