Muschenheim, William.

An early and well-established modernist, architect William Emil Muschenheim viewed the world in which he practiced as different from any world that had existed before. Evidenced in his work, his teaching, and his research is an unwavering faith in the significance of a universal style of architecture based on the cultivation and refinement of rapidly developing technology. At the same time, primary to his thinking was a belief that all cultures are most effectively viewed and understood through ideas dominant in a range of fields -- history, sociology, economics, and philosophy, as well as the built environment. For Muschenheim, it was the interrelationships among these ideas (and between them) that establishes the context in which an architecture functioning wholly in the present can be most authentically and fully realized. Such understanding develops the depth of perception and cultural background necessary to break with the concept of designing buildings as isolated objects and launches an architect's full creative abilities. Muschenheim's interest in an integrated approach to design was pioneering. Throughout his career, for example, he utilized bold color in a functional and modern way, writing in Architectural Forum, July 1933, that "color, in order to create a positive mood, must be handled not as a pleasing decorative element, but for its intrinsic value as a medium having its own laws of rightness, balance, power, just as form and proportion have theirs. In this sense it should not be used as an adjunct, but as an integral part of the architectural whole."

Born in New York City on November 7, 1902, William Muschenheim grew up near Shubert Alley in the heart of the Times Square district in a brownstone attached to the family managed Hotel Astor. He attended Cutler School, graduating in 1919 and studied at Williams College from 1919 to 1921. Leaving Williams to pursue architecture at M.I.T. from 1921 to 1924, he earned the Triglyph Fraternity Prize in 1923 for the design of the Museum Building. Although schooled in an American Beaux Arts tradition, Muschenheim was drawn to the "freshness" of modern European directions, and in 1924 went abroad to study in the architectural atelier of Peter Behrens, Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Prior to beginning studies, he traveled widely, visited the Bauhaus in Weimar, and worked in townplanning with Arthur Korn in Berlin. Muschenheim's visit to the Bauhaus was short, yet he was deeply impressed with what he saw there (particularly the aesthetics inspired by modern painting, accentuating color and abstract forms) and was known as the "Bauhaus student" at Behrens atelier, where the climate encouraged individual expression. Students were expected to develop unique potential and awareness of their relationship to a new era, rather than follow predetermined dogma. In 1927 Muschenheim won the prestigious Behrens prize.

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