Architectural Rationalism

In architecture, Rationalism is a current that developed mainly out of Italy during the 1920s and 1930s, built on the belief that reason could resolve the most varied problems posed by the real world, and positioned in reaction against nineteenth century historicism and in contrast with Art Nouveau and Expressionism. The term is often used loosely to mean the wider International Style, but its most concentrated expression was the Italian movement of the 1920s and 1930s, organized through groups such as Gruppo 7 and MIAR and closely bound up with the political patronage of the Fascist state, a narrower episode already recorded on this atlas as Italian Rationalism. Rationalist thinking about architecture also has older roots reaching back to Enlightenment France and later echoes in the Neo-rationalism that emerged from the late 1960s onward.