Past, Machine, Region, Idea: Eight Twentieth-Century Answers to How a Building Should Be Made

Pre-war architecture means buildings raised between 1900 and 1939, above all the mid- and high-rise apartment blocks in and around New York City. They are known for spacious rooms, hardwood floors and fine detailing, and are often marketed as luxury rentals or co-op apartments. It is a period label rather than a doctrine, a useful baseline for the more argued-over styles that follow.

The Traditionalist School, called the Delft School in the Netherlands, answered both historicist revival and radical modernism with tidy visible brickwork, minimal decoration and honest materials. Berlage's Beurs van Berlage of 1903 was an influential early example, and after 1945 Marinus Jan Granpre Moliere of Delft gave the school its name and shaped Dutch reconstruction churches and public buildings.

The machine aesthetic is not a style but a trait shared by French purism, De Stijl, suprematism, productivism, Bauhaus constructivism and American precisionism in the first three decades of the century. A concrete case is the horizontal metal-framed window strips of International Modernism, which evoked an ocean liner.

Zigzag Moderne is the 1920s substyle of Art Deco that gave way to Streamline Moderne. It favors stepped central towers, flat roofs without classical or Gothic ornament, and motifs such as zigzags, chevrons and sunbursts. Los Angeles examples completed in 1929 include the Richfield Tower, the Eastern Columbia Building and Bullock's Wilshire, and the Chrysler Building of 1930 is often classed here too.

Northwest Regional style, popular in the Pacific Northwest between 1935 and 1960, adapted the International Style to local terrain and climate by using unpainted redwood, Douglas fir and western red cedar inside and out. Paul Thiry in Seattle and John Yeon in Oregon were among its leading architects, and its warm wood set it apart from the concrete and stucco modernism of California.

Open building grew out of the Netherlands in the 1960s, after John Habraken published Supports, An Alternative to Mass Housing in 1961. It splits a structure into a base building of frame and shared systems and a fit-out layer that occupants can change. The SAR foundation was set up in Eindhoven in 1965, and the CIB W104 commission formed in 1996 to promote the approach worldwide.

Conceptual architecture treats the idea behind a building as more important than the finished object, often expressing it through texts, diagrams or art installations. Peter Eisenman examined it in his 1970 essay Notes on Conceptual Architecture, Towards a Definition, and Diller and Scofidio, Bernard Tschumi, Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas are among the architects associated with it.

Parametric architecture, or parametricism, uses algorithmic and parametric design to produce continuous variation among linked elements. Patrik Schumacher coined the term in 2008 and proposed it as a successor to modernism and postmodernism, a global style for the twenty-first century that rejects both serial repetition and unrelated agglomeration.