The period has only recently begun to attract historical attention.It has been said that each generation despises the work of its parentsand rediscovers the world of its grandparents. Thirty years ago thisbook would not have been written. The late eclectic and modernistictraditions that are so evident in most of the architecture discussedherein were held in scholarly and professional contempt as recently asthe 1960`s. Architectural historians had come to grips with thenineteenth century, but tended to view it as a prelude to modernarchitecture, created in Europe and America in the 1890s. In thatdecade, the course of architectural development was thought tobifurcate into two channels, one progressive and the other reactionary.A progressive current eschewing the use of historical forms, associatedwith Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States andwith Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Peter Behrens, Victor Horta, Otto Wagner,Auguste Perret, et al., in Europe, developed into the mainstream ofmodern architecture. By the 1930`s the rudiments of this progressivecurrent were being plotted by Lewis Mumford and Henry-Russell Hitchcockin America, and by Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion in Europe.Giedion`s Space, Time and Architecture, first deliveredas the Charles Elliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1938-1939 andclosely following the arrival of Walter Gropius and the other Bauhaus6migr6s, fused American and European modernism into a common tradition.Published in its first edition in 1941, Giedion`s opus separated amainstream of historically important constituent phenomena from a sidecurrent of transient ones. These transient phenomena, of course,included a much larger body of architects and monuments than theconstituent mainstream, a fact that Giedion chose to ignore. His highlyselective account of nineteenthcentury precedents for modernarchitecture did not promote a sympathetic investigation of Victorianarchitecture on its own terms.In fact, although Sullivan andWright had a considerable following in the Progressive Era before WorldWar I, a much larger body of architects remained committed to the habitof historical adaptation, perhaps with more refined taste and greatererudition than their Victorian predecessors--or so they believed. Thislate, post-Victorian Eclecticism dominated American architecture, atleast in a quantitative sense, from the mid-1890`s until the variousstrands of modernism began to appear in the 1930`s. Concurrently in the1930`s, historians began to reassess the preceding century,rediscovering the world of their grandparents.
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