International Style
The pared-down modern architecture of the 1920s to 1960s: flat roofs, smooth walls, open plans and long bands of glass, built alike worldwide.
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About
Through the 1920s architects in Germany, France and the Netherlands dropped ornament and heavy masonry in favour of light volumes carried on frames of steel or concrete. Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau (1926), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1931) are early landmarks. In 1932 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson named the tendency in a New York exhibition and its accompanying book.
Look for flat roofs, white or glazed surfaces with no cornice, windows that turn corners, cantilevered floors and interiors that flow. The style travelled quickly: Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler built in California, Alvar Aalto finished his Paimio Sanatorium in Finland in 1933, and Oscar Niemeyer gave it curves in Brazil. After 1945 it became the language of corporate towers, such as Mies's Seagram Building (1958) in New York. Its uniformity later drew the criticism that fed Postmodernism.
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