Styles and Movements
International Style
Modern
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The name given by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition and book, to the shared language of the new European architecture: volume rather than mass, regularity rather than symmetry, and no applied ornament. After the Second World War it became the default dress of the corporate office tower, the glass and steel box seen in every city.
Facts
PeriodThe naming exhibition, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in February 1932; the buildings it gathered dated from the previous decade. PeriodMarks when the style's dominance of modern architecture gave way to postmodern and other critical reactions; some International Style buildings continued to be designed after this point. Origin RegionEurope, named in New York 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Influenced By
The 1932 exhibition's name for the shared language of the European modern movement.
Why this is disputed. Wright's 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio reached European architects including early modernists, and historians widely note the connection, but how much it actually shaped International Style design as opposed to running in parallel with independent European developments is genuinely argued rather than settled.
Notable Examples
A canonical work of the 1932 exhibition's International Style and of the wider modern movement.
Sources
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