The construction of the Weissenhofsiedlung is widely regarded as a seminal event in the history of modern architecture, as the first international manifestation of the Modern Movement at the urban scale. While historians have often noted the ‘great publicity’ surrounding the exhibition, its mediatization has rarely been examined systematically. This article reframes the Weissenhofsiedlung not only as an architectural milestone but as a media event shaped by mass media logic. Drawing on a corpus of 83 previously unexamined articles published in the popular press, assembled from digitized archives across Europe, North America, and Australia, it reconstructs the reception in the mass media of the 1927 Werkbund exhibition and analyzes the mechanisms through which media visibility contributed to its canonization. These included a coordinated publicity campaign, the deliberate invitation of already prominent architects such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, and an architectural aesthetic particularly suited to photographic reproduction. The personalization of the Modern Movement through recognizable figures, together with the international circulation of press photography, transformed the Weissenhofsiedlung into a widely legible image of modern architecture. By tracing these processes, the article positions the exhibition as an early and formative moment in the mediatization of architecture, demonstrating how modernism’s legitimacy was negotiated not only through buildings and theory but through the media environments that rendered it visible to a global public.
