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.Their broad interests and sharp sense of the new served these journalists and corre-spondents well.Art and art history journals also focused more on the Bauhaus as insti-tution than on its individual protagonists.In summary, the magazine-propagatedreception of the Bauhaus between 1919 and 1936 began immediately following theBauhaus s founding.A broader influence was first apparent some time later, however:in the case of Gropius around 1928, the year in which he left the Bauhaus and visitedAmerica for the first time; and in the case of Mies around 1930, the year in which hebecame the director of the Bauhaus and the Tugendhat house in Brno was completed.Another source of information on the Bauhaus was, and continues to be, thedaily newspapers in the United States, especially the New York Times, Chicago Tribune,and others published where the Bauhaus s protagonists settled.Their influence variedregionally, however, their authors and readers were not always within the sphere ofprofessional reception, and most began to offer a special architecture section quite lateas opposed to their literary sections.These factors make it difficult to assess their con-tribution to reception within the profession.Books In the period between the Bauhaus s founding and the immigration ofGropius and Mies, a number of books appeared on the American market thatcontributed to the Bauhaus s growing fame and helped create a framework for an un-derstanding of its ideas.One of the first of these was Erich Mendelsohn s 1926 Amerika.Bilderbuch eines Architekten, a photographic diary that recorded the buildings and lifeof the great American metropolises from the perspective of a European avant-gardist.The book was written in German but nonetheless became famous in the States.In 1927 came Richard Neutra s Wie baut Amerika?, in which he presented hisfuturistic vision of the Rush City Reformed. The largely theoretical conclusion dis-cusses new methods of construction, including building with standardized concrete 61 EXPLICIT INFORMATION ABOUT THE BAUHAUSpanels and steel or reinforced-concrete frames.At that time, Neutra s attitude towardmaterials and construction was closer to the experiments of the Dessau Bauhaus thanto the traditional wood-frame and masonry construction common in America.95 Theintellectual and aesthetic relationship between the designs in Rush City Reformed and avant-garde European architectural visions is especially apparent in the design foran office building that Neutra described as the opposite of the monumental officetower, with a ground floor obstructed by wind-resistant cores. He cites the stiffframe, amenable to horizontal extension and the cantilevered floor slabs along thecolumnless short front 96 as characteristic of the building.This project s formal andconstructional commonalities with Mies van der Rohe s early project for an officebuilding in concrete are as follows:the revealing of the constructional system on the facade;ª%its cubic, horizontal massing and exterior dimensions;ª%its cantilevering floor slabs on the narrow sides and set-back columns;ª%the elimination of any concluding cornice line;ª%the alternation of horizontal glass and concrete bands in the facade.ª%In the text of Wie baut Amerika?, Neutra discusses themes that were also thesubject of the Bauhaus architects work, including the need to affirm the present andthe given conditions of the era which are imposed on the creative worker like hisfate ; this translated into an urgent need to come to terms with the machine and therequirements of mass society.97 The book was published by the noted house of JuliusHoffmann.The 4,400-run first edition was immediately sold worldwide and garneredenthusiastic reviews in Europe and America.It made an interpretation of Modernismand its expression in architecture accessible to an American audience, as PaulineSchindler said.98 The term interpretation describes precisely the way in which infor-mation was assimilated by most of the book s audience: only a minority could read theGerman text, so that most were limited to the visual information.The same year sawthe English translation of Le Corbusier s Vers une architecture,99 a book that described thefundamentals of European avant-garde architecture.Henry-Russell Hitchcock s Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration,published in 1929, offered the first comprehensive presentation of the European move-95 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, How America Builds (review), 594.96 Henry-Russell Hitchcock included the design in Modern Architecture (plate 58).The originalillustration is in Richard J.Neutra, Wie baut Amerika?,73, plate 95.97 Neutra, Wie baut Amerika?, 1, 13.98 See Thomas S.Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, 64ff
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