New Formalism

New Formalism is an architectural style that emerged in the United States in the mid 1950s and reached its widest popularity between the 1960s and 1980s, characterized by a return to Classical elements including strictly symmetrical elevations, careful proportion and scale, classical columns and highly stylized entablatures and colonnades. Its three principal architects, Edward Durell Stone, Philip Johnson and Minoru Yamasaki, had each built their early reputations working within the International Style before turning toward new materials and more overtly decorative, classically inflected forms. Edward Durell Stone, who lived from 1902 to 1978, is credited with the style's symbolic starting point in his design for the United States Embassy in New Delhi, completed in 1954, which blended architectural motifs of the east with modern western construction. Stone became an early and prominent pioneer of the New Formalist approach, whose classically inspired forms and materials were conceived in deliberate contrast to the stark minimalism of the International Style that had dominated American architecture in the preceding decades.