Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury

A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern design.

Alloys  looks at a unique period of synergy and exchange in the postwar United  States, when sculpture profoundly shaped architecture, and vice versa.  Leading architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to  sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold,  and Isamu Noguchi to produce site-determined, large-scale sculptures  tailored for their buildings’ highly visible and well-traversed  threshold spaces. The parameters of these spaces—atriums, lobbies,  plazas, and entryways—led to various designs like sculptural walls,  ceilings, and screens that not only embraced new industrial materials  and processes, but also demonstrated art’s ability to merge with lived  architectural spaces.

Marin Sullivan argues that these sculptural  commissions represent an alternate history of midcentury American art.  Rather than singular masterworks by lone geniuses, some of the era’s  most notable spaces—Philip Johnson’s Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van  der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Max Abramovitz’s Philharmonic Hall at  Lincoln Center, and Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius’s Pan Am  Building—would be diminished without the collaborative efforts of  architects and artists. At the same time, the artistic creations within  these spaces could not exist anywhere else. Sullivan shows that the  principle of synergy provides an ideal framework to assess this  pronounced relationship between sculpture and architecture. She also  explores the afterlives of these postwar commissions in the decades  since their construction.

A fresh consideration of sculpture’s  relationship to architectural design and functionality following World  War II, Alloys highlights the affinities between the two fields and the  ways their connections remain with us today.