Modernist architecture—with all its glass, steel, and concrete—baffled America. American artist Alan Dunn, a longtime New Yorker contributor, captured that bewilderment perfectly with his incisive cartoons. In this adapted excerpt of his new book, Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic, Gabriele Neri shows how Dunn elevated the art of cartooning into sharp architectural criticism.
Take one of his earlier drawings in the pages of The New Yorker: In the midst of a forest stands the typical silhouette of a rationalist house made of reinforced concrete, with squared shapes, ribbon windows, and cut-out corners, in the style of architects Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and their colleagues. But here, the maximum geometric “modernity” clashes with an antithetical and unsettling situation: The house is shown in a state of total ruin and abandonment, with dangling window frames and a “for sale” sign. We see that modern architecture, despite the proclamations, already belongs to the past.
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