Early Modern Movement Architecture

The architecture that broke decisively from historical ornament in the first half of the twentieth century, using new industrial materials and structural systems to argue for a building's form as an expression of its function and construction: the Chicago School's early steel-framed commercial buildings, the International Style's spread of unornamented modernism worldwide, Art Deco's streamlined ornament, Constructivism's revolutionary geometry and the Prairie School's horizontal American idiom. Belongs here: any named style whose primary claim is a break from historical revival toward a distinctly modern structural and formal language, dating roughly from the 1880s through the 1940s. Does not belong here: the postwar and later modern styles, grouped under Postwar and Late Modern Architecture, which extend rather than found the modern break.