“A Nation of Immigrants,” that old cliché! And yet it applies . . . to architecture. American architecture was transformed, the story goes, by Bauhaus émigrés who fled Nazi Germany. True enough, but less obvious is that many—most—of the leading figures of the postwar decades were also architects who came from elsewhere, not necessarily Germany.
The Gold Medal of the AIA, its highest honor, can serve as an imperfect metric. In the 1930s and 1940s, only three immigrants received the medal: Paul Philippe Cret, Eliel Saarinen, and Charles Donagh Maginnis. Between 1959, when Walter Gropius received the medal, and 1982, when it was awarded to Romaldo Giurgola, ten of the recipients were immigrants. During that same period, four native-born Americans—Wallace Harrison, William Wurster, Buckminster Fuller (!) and Philip Johnson—received the medal; four medals went to foreign masters—Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Pier Luigi Nervi, Kenzo Tange—and in six of these years no medal was awarded.
The ten immigrant architects included Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, as well as Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, Pietro Belluschi, Richard Neutra, I. M. Pei, Josep Lluís Sert, and Giurgola. Note the variety of origins: Scandinavia, Hungary, Estonia, Italy, China, and Spain. Some of the architects were trained in their home countries, and some were educated here. Many became prominent teachers as well as builders, and all brought with them shades of different places and cultures that enriched their work—and America.