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An influential modernist style in architecture that developed in Europe and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, characterized chiefly by regular, unadorned geometric forms, open interiors, and the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete.
Term applied to architecture of the MODERN MOVEMENT after 1932. That year the first architectural exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, was held following a visit to Europe by historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, Director of Architecture at MOMA; the term was enshrined in the title of the accompanying book and catalogue The International Style: Architecture since 1922. Buildings selected for inclusion in the exhibition, with some notable exceptions (see below), had certain formal characteristics in common, being mostly rectilinear, undecorated, asymmetrical and white.
See the Abbreviations for further details.
For more information on International Style, visit Britannica.com.
The term ‘International Style’ denoted the spread of Modernism as it became more widely disseminated through the attention paid to progressive educational institutions such as the Bauhaus, the increasing number of avant-garde books, magazines, and manifestos, and organizations such as the CIAM ( Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne). Although Walter Gropius had published Internationale Architektur in 1925 of greater significance was the Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1932. Their accompanying book was entitled The International Style: Architecture since 1922. There were many notable (though never very widespread) examples of the style built during the 1930s despite a fierce antipathy to its radicalism expressed by Fascistic and totalitarian regimes that sought to employ an architectural language geared to their overtly national or imperialistic aims. In the decades immediately following the Second World War the International Style was widely used for the corporate buildings, offices, interiors, and furnishings of multinational companies.
An architectural style that is minimalist in concept, devoid of regional characteristics, stresses functionalism, and rejects all nonessential decorative elements; it emphasizes the horizontal aspects of a building; developed during the 1920s and 1930s, in western Europe principally in the Bauhaus school, and also in America. Buildings in this style are usually characterized by simple geometric forms, often rectilinear, making use of reinforced concrete and steel construction with a nonstructural skin; occasionally, cylindrical surfaces; unadorned, smooth wall surfaces, typically of glass, steel, or stucco painted white; a complete absence of ornamentation and decoration; often, an entire blank wall; often a cantilevered upper floor or balcony; open interior spaces; a flat roof without a ledge; eaves that terminate at the plane of the wall; large areas of floor-to-ceiling glass or curtain walls of glass; metal window frames set flush with the exterior walls, often in horizontal bands; casement windows; sliding windows; glass-to-glass joints at the corners, without framing; plain doors that conspicuously lack decor rative detailing. Houses are commonly asymmetric; in contrast, commercial buildings in this style are not only symmetric, but appear as a series of repetitive elements.
Bibliography
See H.-R. Hitchcock and P. Johnson, The International Style (1932, repr. 1966).
The International style was a major architectural style of the 1920s and 1930s. The term usually refers to the buildings and architects of the formative decades of Modernism, before World War II. The term had its origin from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson written to record the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1932 which identified, categorised and expanded upon characteristics common to Modernism across the world. As a result, the focus was more on the stylistic aspects of Modernism. Hitchcock's and Johnson's aims were to define a style of the time, which would encapsulate this modern architecture. They identified three different principles: the expression of volume rather than mass, balance rather than preconceived symmetry and the expulsion of applied ornament. All the works which were displayed as part of the exhibition were carefully selected, as only works which strictly followed the set of rules were displayed.
Alvar Aalto: Turun Sanomat building, Turku, Finland 1930
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret: Stein house,
Garches, Near St. Cloud 1928
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret: Villa
Savoye, Poissy-Sur-Seine 1930
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret: De Beistegui
Pent House, Champs-Elysees, Paris 1931
Otto Eisler: Double House, Brno, Czechoslovakia 1926
Walter Gropius: Bauhaus School, Dessau, Germany 1926
Walter Gropius: City Employment Office, Dessau, Germany 1928
Erich Mendelsohn: Schocken Department Store, Chemnitz, Germany 1928-1930
Mies Van Der Rohe: Apartment House, Weissenhof Siedlung, Stuttgart
1927
Mies Van Der Rohe: German pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition, Spain
1929
Mies Van Der Rohe: Tugendhat House, Brno, Czechoslovakia 1930
Jacobus Oud: Workers Houses,(Seidlung, Kiefhoek), Hook of Holland 1924-1927
Karl Schneider: Kunstverein, Humburg, Germany 1930
Around 1900 a number of architects around the world began developing new architectural solutions to integrate traditional precedents with new social demands and technological possibilities. The work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde in Brussels, Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona, Otto Wagner in Vienna and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, among many others, can be seen as a common struggle between old and new.
The international style as such blossomed in 1920s Western Europe. Researchers find significant contemporary common ground among the Dutch de Stijl movement, the work of visionary French/Swiss architect Le Corbusier and various German efforts to industrialize craft traditions, which resulted in the formation of the Deutscher Werkbund, large civic worker-housing projects in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, and, most famously, the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was one of a number of European schools and associations concerned with reconciling craft tradition and industrial technology.
By the 1920s the most important figures in modern architecture had established their reputations. The big three are commonly recognized as Le Corbusier in France, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany.
The common characteristics of the International style include: a radical simplification of form, a rejection of ornament, and adoption of glass, steel and concrete as preferred materials. Further, the transparency of buildings, construction (called the honest expression of structure), and acceptance of industrialized mass-production techniques contributed to the international style's design philosophy. Finally, the machine aesthetic, and logical design decisions leading to support building function were used by the International architect to create buildings reaching beyond historicism.
The ideals of the style are commonly summed up in four slogans: ornament is a crime, truth to materials, form follows function, and Le Corbusier's description of houses as "machines for living".
In 1927, one of the first and most defining manifestations of the International Style was the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, built as a component of the exhibition "Die Wohnung," organized by the Deutscher Werkbund, and overseen by Mies van der Rohe. The fifteen contributing architects included Mies, and other names most associated with the movement: Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, J.J.P. Oud, Mart Stam, and Bruno Taut. The exhibition was enormously popular, with thousands of daily visitors.
The town of Portolago (now Lakki) in the Greek Dodecanese island of Leros represents some of the most interesting urban planning from the fascist regime in the Dodecanese; an extraordinary example of city takeover in the International style known as Italian rationalist. The symbolism of the shapes is reflected with exemplary effectiveness in the buildings of Lakki: the administration building, the metaphysical tower of the market, the cinema-theatre, the Hotel Roma (now Hotel Leros), the church of San Francesco and the hospital are fine examples of the style. Many of its ideas and ideals were formalized by the 1928 Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne.
The same striving towards simplification, honesty and clarity are identifiable in US architects of the same period, notably in the work of Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. As well as the west-coast residences of Irving Gill. Frank Lloyd Wright's career in the 1900s and 1910s parallels and influences the work of the European modernists, particularly via the Wasmuth Portfolio, but he refused to be categorized with them.
In 1922, the competition for the Tribune Tower and its famous second-place entry by Eliel Saarinen gave a clear indication of what was to come.
The term International Style came from the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Philip Johnson, and from the title of the exhibition catalog for that exhibit, written by Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock. It addressed building from 1922 through 1932. Johnson named, codified, promoted and subtly re-defined the whole movement by his inclusion of certain architects, and his description of their motives and values. Many Modernists disliked the term, believing that they had arrived at an approach to architecture that transcended "style," along with any national or regional or continental identity. The British architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner commented, "to me what had been achieved in 1914 was the style of the century. It never occurred to me to look beyond. Here was the one and only style which fitted all those aspects which mattered, aspects of economics and sociology, of materials and function. It seems folly to think that anybody would wish to abandon it.[1]
Johnson also defined the modern movement as an aesthetic style, rather than a matter of political statement. This was a departure from the functionalist principles of some of the original Weissenhof architects, particularly the Dutch, and especially J.J.P. Oud, with whom Johnson maintained a prickly correspondence on the topic.
The same year that Johnson coined the term Internation Style, saw the completion of the world's first International Style skyscraper: Philadelphia's PSFS Building. Designed by the truly "international" team of architects, George Howe and William Lescaze, the PSFS Building has become an integral element of the Philadelphia skyline.
The gradual rise of the National Socialist regime in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, and the Nazi's rejection of modern architecture, meant that an entire generation of architects were forced out of Europe. When Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer fled Germany, they both arrived at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in an excellent position to extend their influence and promote the Bauhaus as the primary source of architectural modernism. When Mies fled in 1936, he came to Chicago, and solidified his reputation as the prototypical modern architect.
After World War II, the International Style matured, HOK and
SOM perfected the corporate practice, and it became the dominant approach
for decades. Perhaps its most famous/notorious manifestations include the United
Nations headquarters and the Seagram Building in New
York.
The typical International Style high-rise usually consists of the following:
1. Square or rectangular footprint
2. Simple cubic "extruded rectangle" form
3. Windows running in broken horizontal rows forming a grid
4. All facade angles are 90 degrees.
One of the strengths of the International Style was that the design solutions were indifferent to location, site, and climate. This was one of the reasons it was called 'international'; the style made no reference to local history or national vernacular. They were the same buildings around the world. (Later this was identified as one of the style's primary weaknesses.)
American anti-Communist politics after the war, and Philip Johnson's influential rejection of functionalism, have tended to mask the fact that many of the important contributors to the original Weissenhof project fled to the east. This group also tended to be far more concerned with functionalism. Bruno Taut, Mart Stam, the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, Ernst May and other important figures of the International Style went to the Soviet Union in 1930 to undertake huge, ambitious, idealistic urban planning projects, building entire cities from scratch. This Soviet effort was doomed to failure, and these architects became stateless persons in 1936 when Stalin ordered them out of the country and Hitler would not allow them back into Germany.
In the late 1930s this group, and their students, were dispersed to Turkey, France, Mexico, Venezuela, Kenya and India, adding up to a truly international influence.
In 2000, UNESCO, proclaimed Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas in Caracas, Venezuela, as World Cultural Heritage site, describing it as "a masterpiece of modern city planning, architecture and art, created by the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and a group of distinguished avant-garde artists" being the only university campus designed in the 20th century that has received such recognition by UNESCO.
Also in July, 2003, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, proclaimed The White City of Tel Aviv as a World Cultural Heritage site, describing the City as "a synthesis of outstanding significance of the various trends of the Modern Movement in architecture and town planning in the early part of the 20th century".
Although it was conceived as a movement that transcended style, the International Style was largely superseded in the era of Postmodern architecture that started in the 1960s. In 2006, Hugh Pearlman, the architectural critic of The Times, observed that those using the style today are simply "another species of revivalist," noting the irony.[2]
See Arts & Architecture magazine online [3]
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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