Styles and Movements
Modernist Architecture
Also Known As The Modern Movement
Modern Movement
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The broad twentieth century movement that rejected historical styles and applied ornament in favor of forms derived from function, structure and the new materials of steel, glass and reinforced concrete. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright are its central figures; its ideas reshaped cities on every continent and provoked every major movement that followed it.
Facts
Disputed
PeriodThe replacement by postmodern architecture as the leading style for institutional and corporate buildings was gradual rather than a single sharp date; modernist design continued in narrower forms afterward. PeriodCirca; the movement consolidated in the 1920s, with roots in the industrial building and theory of the two decades before. Origin RegionEurope and the United States 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The polemic against applied ornament underlies the modern movement's plain surfaces, though Loos himself never joined the modernist mainstream he anticipated.
Influenced
A late development within the modern movement, from Le Corbusier's raw concrete manner.
The 1932 exhibition's name for the shared language of the European modern movement.
Critiqued Here
Influence by reaction: the movement defined itself against modernist austerity.
Notable Examples
Wright's organic strain of modernism, not the International Style he disdained.
Sources
1. Encyclopedia Britannica
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture, lead paragraphQuote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture, lead paragraph
The movement emerged in the first half of the 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Official Site
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