Modern Architecture - International Style

International Style

In 1932 (prior to World War II), the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Philip Johnson and collaborator Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew together many distinct threads and trends in architecture, identified them as stylistically similar and having a common purpose, and consolidated them into the International style. This was a turning point. However, for the remainder of the Interwar period, the Moderne styles would overshadow this movement.

With the labeling of modernist art and architecture in Germany as degenerate, followed by World War II, important figures of the Bauhaus and New Objectivity fled to the United States: Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design (the former becoming part of a group known as the "Harvard Five"), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Chicago, with others going to Black Mountain College. Still others would flee to British Palestine, contributing to the design of the White City of Tel Aviv.

While high-style modernist architectural design never became dominant in single-dwelling residential buildings in the United States, in institutional and commercial architecture Modernism became the pre-eminent, and in the schools (for leaders of the architectural profession) the only acceptable, design solution from about 1932 to about 1984.

Architects who worked in the International style wanted to break with architectural tradition and design simple, unornamented buildings. The most commonly used materials are glass for the facade (usually a curtain wall), steel for exterior support, and concrete for the floors and interior supports; floor plans were functional and logical. The style became most evident in the design of skyscrapers. Perhaps its most famous manifestations include the United Nations headquarters (Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Sir Howard Robertson), the Seagram Building and the Toronto-Dominion Centre (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and Lever House (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill).

In the United States, a prominent early residential example was the Lovell House in Los Angeles, designed by Austrian expatriate Richard Neutra in the 1920s. Other examples include the Case Study Houses. Commissioned between 1945 and 1966, the twenty or so homes that were built primarily in and around Los Angeles, designed by architects such as Neutra and Americans Charles and Ray Eames (the Eames House) have attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors since their completion, and have influenced many architects over the years. These and other Modern residences tend to focus on humanizing the otherwise harsh ideal, making them more livable and ultimately more appealing to real people. Many of these designs use a similar tactic: blurring the line between indoor and outdoor spaces. This is achieved by embracing "the box" while at the same time dissolving it into the background with minimal structure and large glass walls, as was particularly the case with the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe and the Glass House by Philip Johnson, the later part of a set of residences by the "Harvard Five" in New Canaan, Connecticut. Some critics claim that these spaces remain too cold and static for the average person to function, however. The materials utilized in a large number of Modern homes are not hidden behind a softening facade. While this may make them somewhat less desirable for the general public, most modernist architects see this as a necessary and pivotal tenet of Modernism: uncluttered and purely Minimal design.