International Style (architecture)

Cover of The International Style (1932, reprinted 1996) by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson

Kiefhoek housing, Rotterdam, by Jacobus Oud

The International Style is the name of a major architectural style that was developed in the 1920s and 1930s and was closely related to modernism and modern architecture. It was first defined by Museum of Modern Art curators Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932, based on works of architecture from the 1920s.

It is defined by the Getty Research Institute as "the style of architecture that emerged in Holland, France, and Germany after World War I and spread throughout the world, becoming the dominant architectural style until the 1970s. The style is characterized by an emphasis on volume over mass, the use of lightweight, mass-produced, industrial materials, rejection of all ornament and color, repetitive modular forms, and the use of flat surfaces, typically alternating with areas of glass."^[1]

Background

Around 1900 a number of architects around the world began developing new architectural solutions to integrate traditional precedents with new social demands and technological possibilities. The work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde in Brussels, Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Otto Wagner in Vienna and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, among many others, can be seen as a common struggle between old and new. These architects were not considered part of the International Style because they practiced in an "individualistic manner" and seen as the last representatives of Romanticism.

The International Style can be traced to buildings designed by a small group of modernists, of which the major figures includes Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jacobus Oud, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra and Philip Johnson.^[2]

The founder of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius, along with prominent Bauhaus instructor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, became known for steel frame structures employing glass curtain walls.  One of the world's earliest modern buildings where this can be seen is a shoe factory designed by Gropius in 1911 in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germay, called the Fagus Works building.  The Bauhaus (Dessau, Germany; 1925–26), and thereafter the Harvard Graduate Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts; 1949–50) also known as the Gropius Complex, exhibit clean lines^[3] and a "concern for uncluttered interior spaces".^[2]

Marcel Breuer, a recognized leader in Béton Brut (Brutalist) architecture and notable alumni of the Bauhaus,^[4] who also pioneered the use of plywood and tubular steel in furniture design,^[5] and who after leaving the Bauhaus would later teach alongside Gropius at Harvard, is as well an important contributor to Modernism and the International Style.^[6]

Prior to use of the term 'International Style', some American architects—such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Irving Gill—exemplified qualities of simplification, honesty and clarity.^[7] Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio had been exhibited in Europe and influenced the work of European modernists, and his travels there probably influenced his own work, although he refused to be categorized with them. His buildings of the 1920s and 1930s clearly showed a change in the style of the architect, but in a different direction than the International Style.^[7]

In Europe the modern movement in architecture had been called Functionalism or Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), L'Esprit Nouveau, or simply Modernism and was very much concerned with the coming together of a new architectural form and social reform, creating a more open and transparent society.^[8]

The Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, Germany (1927)

The "International Style", as defined by Hitchcock and Johnson, had developed in 1920s Western Europe, shaped by the activities of the Dutch De Stijl movement, Le Corbusier, and the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus. Le Corbusier had embraced Taylorist and Fordist strategies adopted from American industrial models in order to reorganize society. He contributed to a new journal called L'Esprit Nouveau that advocated the use of modern industrial techniques and strategies to create a higher standard of living on all socio-economic levels. In 1927, one of the first and most defining manifestations of the International Style was the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, overseen by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was enormously popular, with thousands of daily visitors.^[9][10]

1932 MoMA exhibition

Philip Johnson co-defined the International Style with Henry-Russell Hitchcock as a young college graduate, and later became one of its practitioners.

The exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition ran from February 9–March 23, 1932, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in the Heckscher Building at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in New York.^[11] Beyond a foyer and office, the exhibition was divided into six rooms: the "Modern Architects" section began in the entrance room, featuring a model of William Lescaze's Chrystie-Forsyth Street Housing Development in New York. From there visitors moved to the centrally placed Room A, featuring a model of a mid-rise housing development for Evanston, Illinois, by Chicago architect brothers Monroe Bengt Bowman and Irving Bowman,^[12] as well as a model and photos of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau. In the largest exhibition space, Room C, were works by Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J.J.P. Oud and Frank Lloyd Wright (including a project for a house on the Mesa in Denver, 1932). Room B was a section titled "Housing", presenting "the need for a new domestic environment" as it had been identified by historian and critic Lewis Mumford. In Room D were works by Raymond Hood (including "Apartment Tower in the Country" and the McGraw-Hill building) and Richard Neutra. In Room E was a section titled "The extent of modern architecture", added at the last minute,^[13] which included the works of thirty seven modern architects from fifteen countries who were said to be influenced by the works of Europeans of the 1920s. Among these works was shown Alvar Aalto's Turun Sanomat newspaper offices building in Turku, Finland.

After a six-week run in New York City, the exhibition then toured the USA – the first such "traveling-exhibition" of architecture in the US – for six years.^[14]

Definition

Hitchcock and Johnson's exhibition catalog identified three principles of the style: volume of space (as opposed to mass and solidity), regularity, and flexibility.^[15]

Hitchcock and Johnson identified three principles: the expression of volume rather than mass, the emphasis on balance rather than preconceived symmetry, and the expulsion of applied ornament.

Common characteristics of the International Style include: a radical simplification of form, a rejection of ornament, and adoption of glass, steel and concrete as preferred materials. Further, the transparency of buildings, construction (called the honest expression of structure), and acceptance of industrialized mass-production techniques contributed to the international style's design philosophy. Finally, the machine aesthetic, and logical design decisions leading to support building function were used by the International architect to create buildings reaching beyond historicism. The ideals of the style are commonly summed up in three slogans: ornament is a crime, truth to materials, form follows function; and Le Corbusier's description: "A house is a machine to live in".^[18][19]

The following architects and buildings were selected by Hitchcock and Johnson for display at the exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition:

Architect	Building	Location	Date
Jacobus Oud	Workers Houses (house blocks Kiefhoek)	Rotterdam, The Netherlands	1924–1927
Otto Eisler	Double House	Brno, Czech Republic	1926–1927
Walter Gropius	Fagus Factory	Alfeld, Germany	1925
	Bauhaus School	Dessau, Germany	1926
	City Employment Office	Dessau, Germany	1928
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe	Apartment House, Weissenhof Estate	Stuttgart, Germany	1927
	German pavilion at the Barcelona Expo	Barcelona, Spain	1929
Tugendhat House	Brno, Czech Republic	1930
Le Corbusier	Villa Stein	Garches, France	1927
	Villa Savoye	Poissy, France	1930
	Carlos de Beistegui Champs-Élysées Penthouse	Paris, France	1931
Erich Mendelsohn	Schocken Department Store	Chemnitz, Germany	1928–1930
Frederick John Kiesler	Film Guild Cinema	New York City, USA	1929
Raymond Hood	McGraw-Hill building	New York City, USA	1931
George Howe & William Lescaze	PSFS Building	Philadelphia, USA	1932
Monroe Bengt Bowman & Irving Bowman	Lux apartment block	Evanston, USA	1931
Richard Neutra	Lovell House	Los Angeles, USA	1929
Otto Haesler	Rothenberg Siedlung	Kassel, Germany	1930
Karl Schneider	Kunstverein	Hamburg, Germany	1930
Alvar Aalto	Turun Sanomat building	Turku, Finland	1930

• 
  Villa Savoye, Paris, Le Corbusier
• 
  Bauhaus, Dessau, Walter Gropius
• 
  Fagus Factory, Alfeld, Walter Gropius
• 
  Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe
• 
  Villa Tugendhat, Brno, Mies van der Rohe
• 
  Rothenberg Siedlung, Kassel, Otto Haesler
• 
  Lovell House, Los Angeles, Richard Neutra
• 
  McGraw-Hill Building, New York, Raymond Hood
• 
  PSFS Building, Philadelphia, George Howe and William Lescaze
• 
  Turun Sanomat, Turku, Alvar Aalto

Before 1932

Architect	Building	Location	Date
Johannes Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet	Zonnestraal Sanatorium	Hilversum, Netherlands	1926-1928
Robert Mallet-Stevens	houses on Rue Mallet-Stevens	Paris, France	1927
	Villa Cavroit	Croix, France	1929
Eileen Gray	E-1027	Cap Martin, France	1929
Alvar Aalto	Paimio Sanatorium	Turku, Finland	1930
Leendert van der Vlugt	Van Nelle Factory	Rotterdam	1926–1930
Joseph Emberton	Royal Corinthian Yacht Club	Essex	1931

1932–1944

The Glass Palace, Heerlen, Netherlands, Frits Peutz (1935).

The gradual rise of the Nazi regime in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, and the Nazis' rejection of modern architecture, meant that an entire generation of avant-gardist architects, many of them Jews, were forced out of continental Europe. Some, such as Mendelsohn, found shelter in England, while a considerable number of the Jewish architects made their way to Palestine, and others to the USA. However, American anti-Communist politics after the war and Philip Johnson's influential rejection of functionalism have tended to mask the fact that many of the important architects, including contributors to the original Weissenhof project, fled to the Soviet Union. This group also tended to be far more concerned with functionalism and its social agenda. Bruno Taut, Mart Stam, the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, Ernst May and other important figures of the International Style went to the Soviet Union in 1930 to undertake huge, ambitious, idealistic urban planning projects, building entire cities from scratch. In 1936, when Stalin ordered them out of the country, many of these architects became stateless and sought refuge elsewhere; for example, Ernst May moved to Kenya.^[22]

"White Tel Aviv", Dizengoff Circle, by Genia Averbouch, 1934

The White City of Tel Aviv refers to a collection of over 4,000 buildings built in the International Style in the 1930s. Many Jewish architects who had studied at the German Bauhaus school designed significant buildings here.^[23] A large proportion of the buildings built in the International Style can be found in the area planned by Patrick Geddes, north of Tel Aviv's main historical commercial center.^[24] In 1994, UNESCO proclaimed the White City a World Heritage Site, describing the city as "a synthesis of outstanding significance of the various trends of the Modern Movement in architecture and town planning in the early part of the 20th century".^[25] In 1996, Tel Aviv's White City was listed as a World Monuments Fund endangered site.^[26]

Villa in Södra Ängby in western Stockholm, Sweden, Edvin Engström (1938).

The residential area of Södra Ängby in western Stockholm, Sweden, blended an international or functionalist style with garden city ideals. Encompassing more than 500 buildings, most of them designed by Edvin Engström, it remains the largest coherent functionalist or "International Style" villa area in Sweden and possibly the world, still well-preserved more than a half-century after its construction in 1933–40 and protected as a national cultural heritage.

With the rise of Nazism, a number of key European modern architects fled to the USA. When Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer fled Germany they both arrived at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in an excellent position to extend their influence and promote the Bauhaus as the primary source of architectural modernism. When Mies fled in 1938, he first fled to England, but on emigrating to the USA he went to Chicago, founded the Second School of Chicago at IIT and solidified his reputation as a prototypical modern architect.

Architect	Building	Location	Date
Ove Arup	Labworth Café	Essex	1932–1933
Leendert van der Vlugt	Sonneveld House	Rotterdam	1932–1933
Hans Scharoun	Schminke House	Lobau, Germany	1933
Frits Peutz	Glaspaleis	Heerlen	1933
Oscar Stonorov and Alfred Kastner	Carl Mackley Houses	Philadelphia	1933–1934
Edvin Engström	Södra Ängby	Stockholm, Sweden	1933–1939
Wells Coates	Isokon building	London, England	1934
Berthold Lubetkin	Highpoint I	London, England	1935
Maxwell Fry	Sun House	London, England	1935
Neil & Hurd	Ravelston Garden	Edinburgh, Scotland	1936
Walter Gropius	Gropius House	Lincoln, Massachusetts	1937-1938
William Ganster and William Pereira	Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium	Waukegan, Illinois	1938-1939

1945–present

Seagram Building, New York, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1958)

After World War II, the International Style matured; Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (later renamed HOK) and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) perfected the corporate practice, and it became the dominant approach for decades in the US and Canada. Beginning with the initial technical and formal inventions of 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago its most famous examples include the United Nations headquarters, the Lever House, the Seagram Building in New York City, and the campus of the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as well as the Toronto-Dominion Centre in Toronto. Further examples can be found in mid-century institutional buildings throughout North America and the "corporate architecture" spread from there, especially to Europe.

Tower C of Place de Ville, the tallest building in Ottawa

In Canada, this period coincided with a major building boom and few restrictions on massive building projects. International Style skyscrapers came to dominate many of Canada's major cities, especially Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, and Toronto. While these glass boxes were at first unique and interesting, the idea was soon repeated to the point of ubiquity. A typical example is the development of so-called Place de Ville, a conglomeration of three glass skyscrapers in downtown Ottawa, where the plans of the property developer Robert Campeau in the mid 1960s and early 1970s—in the words of historian Robert W. Collier, "forceful and abrasive, he was not well-loved at City Hall"—had no regard for existing city plans, "built with contempt for the existing city and for city responsibilities in the key areas of transportation and land use".^[27] Architects attempted to put new twists into such towers, such as the Toronto City Hall by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. By the late 1970s a backlash was under way against modernism—prominent anti-modernists such as Jane Jacobs and George Baird were partly based in Toronto.

The typical International Style or "corporate architecture" high-rise usually consists of the following:

1. Square or rectangular footprint
2. Simple cubic "extruded rectangle" form
3. Windows running in broken horizontal rows forming a grid
4. All facade angles are 90 degrees.

In 2000 UNESCO proclaimed Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas in Caracas, Venezuela, as a World Heritage Site, describing it as "a masterpiece of modern city planning, architecture and art, created by the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and a group of distinguished avant-garde artists".

In June 2007 UNESCO proclaimed Ciudad Universitaria of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), in Mexico City, a World Heritage Site due to its relevance and contribution in terms of international style movement. It was designed in the late 1940s and built in the mid-1950s based upon a masterplan created by architect Enrique del Moral. His original idea was enriched by other students, teachers, and diverse professionals of several disciplines. The university houses murals by Diego Rivera, Juan O'Gorman and others. The university also features Olympic Stadium (1968). In his first years of practice, Pritzker Prize winner and Mexican architect Luis Barragán designed buildings in the International Style. But later he evolved to a more traditional local architecture. Other notable Mexican architects of the International Style or modern period are Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Augusto H. Alvarez, Mario Pani, Federico Mariscal, Vladimir Kaspé, Enrique del Moral, Juan Sordo Madaleno, Max Cetto, among many others.

In Brazil Oscar Niemeyer proposed a more organic and sensual^[28] International Style. He designed the political landmarks (headquarters of the three state powers) of the new, planned capital Brasilia. The masterplan for the city was proposed by Lucio Costa.

Architect	Building	Location	Date
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe	Illinois Institute of Technology campus (including S. R. Crown Hall)	Chicago	1945–1960
	860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments	Chicago	1949
Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Harrison & Abramovitz	United Nations Building	New York City	1950s
Michael Scott	Busaras	Dublin, Ireland	1945–1953
Kemp, Bunch & Jackson	Eight Forty One	Jacksonville	1955
Ron Phillips and Alan Fitch	City Hall, Hong Kong	Victoria City, Hong Kong	1956
John Bland	Old City Hall	Ottawa	1958
Emery Roth & Sons	10 Lafayette Square	Buffalo, New York,	1958–1959
Kelly & Gruzen	High School of Graphic Communication Arts	Manhattan, New York City	1959
Arne Jacobsen	SAS Royal Hotel	Copenhagen, Denmark	1958–60
Stanley Roscoe	Hamilton City Hall	Hamilton	1960
John Lautner	Chemosphere	Los Angeles	1960
I. M. Pei	Place Ville-Marie	Montreal	1962
Charles Luckman	Prudential Tower	Boston	1964
George Dahl	First National Bank Tower	Dallas	1965
Abugov & Sunderland	CN Tower	Edmonton	1966
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe	Toronto-Dominion Centre	Toronto	1967
	Westmount Square	Montreal	1967
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill	Equitable Building	Atlanta	1968
Hermann Henselmann et al.	Berlin TV Tower	Berlin	1969
Michael Manser	Capel Manor House	Horsmonden	1971
Campeau Corporation	Place de Ville	Ottawa	1967–1972
Crang & Boake	Hudson's Bay Centre	Toronto	1974
Pedro Moctezuma Díaz Infante	Torre Ejecutiva Pemex	Mexico City	1982

Criticism

In 1930, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: "Human houses should not be like boxes, blazing in the sun, nor should we outrage the Machine by trying to make dwelling-places too complementary to Machinery."^[29]

In Elizabeth Gordon's well-known 1953 essay, "The Threat to the Next America," she criticized the style and associated it with totalitarianism and communism.^[30]

In 1966, architect Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,^[31] essentially a book-length critique of the International Style. Architectural historian Vincent Scully regarded Venturi's book as 'probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture.^[32] It helped to define postmodernism.

Best-selling American author Tom Wolfe wrote a book-length critique, From Bauhaus to Our House, portraying the style as elitist.

One of the strengths of the International Style has been said to be that the design solutions were indifferent to location, site, and climate; the solutions were supposed to be universally applicable; the style made no reference to local history or national vernacular. This was soon identified as one of the style's primary weaknesses.

In 2006, Hugh Pearman, the British architectural critic of The Times, observed that those using the style today are simply "another species of revivalist", noting the irony.^[33] The negative reaction to internationalist modernism has been linked to public antipathy to overall development.^[34][35]

In the preface to the 2007 fourth edition of his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Kenneth Frampton argued that there had been a "disturbing Eurocentric bias" in histories of modern architecture. This "Eurocentrism" included the USA.^[36]

Architects

See also

• New Objectivity (architecture)
• Functionalism (architecture)
• Modern architecture
• Neomodern

References

Further reading

• Stefan Boness, Tel Aviv: The White City, Jovis, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-939633-75-4
• Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and The Museum of Modern Art, Rizzoli, New York, 1992
• John Elderfield (ed), Philip Johnson and the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998
• Gabriel Gössel, Functional Architecture. Funktionale Architektur. Le Style International. 1925–1940, Taschen, Berlin, 1990
• Baharak Tabibi, Exhibitions as the Medium of Architectural Reproduction - "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition", Department of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, 2005

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to International style.

• How Chicago Sparked the International Style of Architecture in America, Architectural Digest