Cover Stories: The Utility of Architectural Heroes to the Corporate Elite

Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1996

Unlike architectural publications, popular magazines are prime sites of what Jane Tompkins terms 'cultural work'; they represent the efforts of an inner circle to influence the public-at-large. This paper investigates the utility of architects and architecture in one such popular venue: the covers and cover stories of TIME magazine. Fourteen architects appeared on TIME covers between 1926 and 1979; four were featured in the post-World War II era: Richard Neutra (1949), Wallace Harrison (1952), Eero Saarinen (1956), and Edward Durell Stone (1958).

Close readings of these four cover images, cover stories, titles, preceding and succeeding cover subjects, thematic advertising, and the nation-building actions and statements of Time Inc. founder and TIME editor Henry Luce suggest that architectural heroes served as an additional form of cover. These architectural icons were utilized as pictorial records that inhabited a category of celebrity shaped for mass consumption on terms agreeable to the corporate elite producing the magazine.