1932 - Architecture, Real Estate

Architecture, Real Estate

An exhibition of the new International Style architecture opens in February at New York's Museum of Modern Art (architects Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock have coined the term International Style for the show); it features designs by Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, and other Europeans but includes also designs by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose new book The Disappearing City envisions a utopia in which every citizen will own an acre of country land. At the urging of his third wife, Olgevanna, Wright establishes the Taliesin Fellowship, charging apprentices $650 per annum (tuition will rise to $1,000 beginning next year) to work on his Taliesin complex and study under the master.

Philadelphia's Savings Fund Society building at 12 South 12th Street is the first major International Style skyscraper to be built in America. Designed by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, 36, the 36-story structure has 32 office floors which are visually separate from a vertical circulation spine, floor and spine floating on a curved-corner base.

Nebraska's State Capitol building is completed at Lincoln to designs by the late Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.

A Home Loan Act passed by Congress July 22 establishes 12 federal home loan banks that will lend money to mortgage loan institutions. The measure is designed to rescue the banks that are being forced to close. The controller of the currency orders a moratorium on first-mortgage foreclosures August 26 (see 1933).

Construction contractor Mohammed Bin-Awad bin Laden gains prominence in Saudi Arabia, whose new king Abdul Aziz has reportedly taken a liking to him after he suggested ways to facilitate moving about his property in the royal wheelchair. Bin Laden was an itinerant bricklayer in 1925 when he walked out of southern Yemen's Hadramawi mountains to begin a 1,000-mile trek northward to the Hejaz region of what has become Saudi Arabia; royal patronage will make him a billionaire.

Town and regional planning pioneer Patrick Geddes is knighted and dies at Montpelier, France, April 17 at age 77.