International Style

I

Introduction

International Style, an architectural style, developed in the early 20th century, which marked a radical break with traditional building forms. The International Style exploited the structural possibilities of new materials, in particular concrete. It is characterized by rectilinear, often asymmetrical, shapes and flat, undecorated surfaces, pierced by horizontal strips of windows in steel frames. Interiors generally have free, open plans. Although the origins of the style lie in the late 19th century, its first major examples were created in the 1920s by such architects as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, and Le Corbusier. The term became widespread after an architectural exhibition, held in 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for which Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson wrote a book entitled The International Style: Architecture since 1922. An alternative name for the practitioners of the style was the International Modern Movement, while Functionalism denoted the aim of certain Modernist architects to design buildings according to functional, rather than aesthetic, considerations. Although important works continued to be produced in the International Style after World War II, the later part of the 20th century was dominated by other developments.

II

Precursors (to 1914)

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries a number of architectural movements challenged the eclectic, historicizing styles that still dominated Western architecture at that time. One of the most important of these developments was the Arts and Crafts Movement, which anticipated Modernism with its simple architectural forms, restrained decoration, and concern for the role of buildings in society. Despite the modernity of these qualities, Arts and Crafts architects, such as C. F. A. Voysey and Philip Webb, were in other respects highly retrogressive, concerned above all with reviving the craft skills of pre-industrial society. This preoccupation contrasts greatly with the enthusiastic response to technology made by other architects of the period.

The departure from traditional materials was pioneered in the early 20th century by such figures as the Perret brothers (see Auguste Perret) in France, who experimented with reinforced concrete, and Louis Sullivan in Chicago. Sullivan produced a series of memorable steel-framed skyscrapers, culminating in the Carson, Pirie & Scott Department Store of 1899-1904. Sullivan's pupil Frank Lloyd Wright achieved a rather different form of innovation soon afterwards in his “prairie houses” in the suburbs of Chicago. Although inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, the prairie house's low, horizontal forms are remarkably modern in appearance. The most radical position of the time was adopted by Adolph Loos, a Viennese architect who visited Chicago in the early 1890s. On his return to Austria, Loos made an uncompromising attack on architectural ornamentation, particularly the excesses of Art Nouveau, and produced a number of austere, undecorated buildings, such as the Steiner House in Vienna of 1910.

Industrial architecture proved a particularly fertile area for the innovations of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of artists, craftsmen, and architects founded in Munich in 1907. The Werkbund's members included Peter Behrens, who created extraordinary buildings for the electricity company AEG, as well as Hermann Muthesius and Walter Gropius. Muthesius sought to promote industrial design, and to extend the process of mass-production to architecture. He was opposed, however, in 1914 at the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne by the Expressionists, who promoted a freer style of building that would allow the practice of traditional craft skills. The Expressionists were supported by Gropius, although his own work of this period was extremely advanced, both technologically and stylistically. As we shall see, Gropius continued to support the craft aesthetic for much of the next decade. Nonetheless, this period was also marked by the rise of other architects who vigorously promoted the qualities that were to become the hallmarks of the International Style.

III

1914-1932

With the devastation wrought by World War II, the need arose to replace destroyed buildings in Flanders with low-cost mass housing. This necessity resulted in the so-called “Domino system”, a remarkable design by Charles Édouard Jeanneret, a young Swiss architect who, under the name Le Corbusier, was to become the most famous artist of the 20th century. Jeanneret, who had trained with the Perret brothers, proposed to create buildings with concrete skeletons consisting of three horizontal slabs, of which the upper two rested on square posts. These supports acted as cantilevers, allowing the slabs to project well beyond the line of the posts. Given the strength of this form of construction, it was not necessary for the weight of the building to be carried by the outer wall, which could therefore be composed in accordance with purely aesthetic or functional considerations.

Although the Domino system brilliantly anticipated later developments, it was never applied practically. Moreover, for a period Jeanneret's attention was turned away from architecture to painting, following his move to Paris in 1917. Together with Amédée Ozenfant, he founded the movement known as Purism, creating still lifes that combined the flatness of Cubism with a classical sense of harmony. This association of modernity with classicism was to form a constant theme in Le Corbusier's work. In his book Towards an Architecture (1923), Le Corbusier claimed that all architecture, including that of the present day, should contain the primary forms, such as cubes and cylinders, which appear in Classical temples. However, he also advocated a new architectural language for the present day, based on the aesthetic of machines. In his book Le Corbusier brilliantly juxtaposed photographs of Classical temples with motor cars, claiming that these objects authentically expressed their respective ages. The challenge to modern architects, he claimed, was to construct buildings according to the industrial standards of the motor car.

By 1923, therefore, Le Corbusier had formulated the principles which were to determine his brilliant buildings of the later 1920s. The same year was also marked by a remarkable event in the Netherlands, the beginning of the construction of the Schroder House of Gerrit Rietveld in Utrecht. Like Le Corbusier, Rietveld was heavily associated with avant-garde developments in the other visual arts. He was a member of De Stijl, a group founded in Leiden in 1917, which also included the architect J. J. P. Oud and the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg. The rectangular shapes and primary colours, dominated by white and grey, which appear in the painters' works are evident in the Schroder House. The building is also characterized by a successful integration of the architecture with the fixtures, such as the lights and furniture. The other memorable feature of the building is its construction out of intersecting planes, which extend into the surroundings so as to give a memorable impression of weightlessness.

The influence of De Stijl extended beyond the Netherlands and was felt particularly strongly in the early 1920s at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. The Bauhaus was a school of art, design and architecture, founded in 1919 under Gropius's leadership, and was initially biased towards a handcraft, rather than machine-based, aesthetic. In 1922, however, Van Doesburg gave a series of lectures at the Bauhaus, which, together with other influences, led to a decisive change in the orientation of the school. The most dramatic manifestation of the new approach was the building that Gropius created for the Bauhaus itself in 1925-1926, at its new site in Dessau. The simple, unornamented blocks, with their great walls of glass, form one of the most important early achievements of the International Style.

While the Bauhaus flourished under Gropius's leadership, other groups, such as Der Ring, also played an extremely important role in the development of German architecture. Der Ring included such figures as Bruno Taut and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also became Vice-President of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1926. Although Mies van der Rohe had experimented with Expressionism immediately after World War I, from 1923 he developed a rigorous, rational style. His most important works of the period included a temporary structure, the German pavilion at the Barcelona exhibition of 1929, and a housing development at Wiessenhof, near Stuttgart, in 1927. Mies van der Rohe was put in charge of the latter project by the Deutscher Werkbund: as well as himself designing plain, rectilinear buildings for the site, he co-ordinated work by other leading architects, such as Le Corbusier, J. J. P. Oud and Hans Scharoun. Oud contributed houses of characteristic geometric simplicity, while Le Corbusier's building exemplifed his own preference for white cubic forms, raised on stilts (pilotis) and surmounted by a roof garden.

As well as his residential buildings, Le Corbusier also submitted an imaginative design for the League of Nations building in Geneva. Its rejection, which was greeted with great dismay by other avant-garde architects, was one of the factors that led in 1928 to the establishment of the Congrés Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). The foundation of CIAM, which was to survive until 1959, marked the extent to which Modernist architects in different countries had arrived at a consensus as to the forms and purposes of the new architecture.

This process was illustrated particularly clearly by the architectural exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932. Although dominated by the leading Continental European Modernists, the show also contained models of important works by British, Scandinavian, Japanese, and American architects. The British were represented by Joseph Emberton, and the Japanese by Mamoru Yamada, while the Scandinavians included the Swede Erik Gunnar Asplund and the Finn Alvar Aalto. Among the American architects were George Howe and William Lescaze, whose Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building (1926-1931) in Philadelphia combined the architectural form of the skyscraper with the language of the International Style. Another leading American architect in the show was the Viennese émigré Richard Neutra, whose recent buildings had included the Lovell House (1927) in Los Angeles, an example of the adaptation of the International Style to a non-European setting and climate. The most celebrated American to appear in the exhibition was Frank Lloyd Wright, whose House on the Mesa exemplified the use of concrete cantilevers. Although Wright was keen to distance himself from the Modern Movement's “machine aesthetic”, his work of the 1930s does in fact illustrate the extent to which Modernism had developed an international architectural language.

IV

From 1933

The rise of totalitarianism in what was then the Soviet Union and in Germany dramatically halted the development of Modernist architecture in these countries. In Fascist Italy greater tolerance was shown to Modernism, and the movement known as Razionalismo produced such famous buildings as Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio of 1932-1936 in Como. In Germany, however, the rise of Nazism led to the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the emigration of Mies van der Rohe and Gropius, who both arrived in the United States in 1937.

While the Nazi regime sought to rebuild German cities in a monumental, classical style, the Modern Movement turned towards a different form of architectural megalomania. During the inter-war period Le Corbusier produced a series of blueprints for the modern city, which he proposed to divide into zones devoted to different social activities. According to this vision, people were to live in highrise residential blocks separated by areas of greenery. These plans culminated in 1933 in the “Charter of Athens”, issued by the CIAM, under Le Corbusier's inspiration. Although Le Corbusier never fully realized his ideas, they did prove highly influential, particularly on such post-war projects as the construction of Brasília (inauguarated 1960). Even before the war Le Corbusier's model of housing was reflected in such works as Bernard Lubetkin's Highpoint I villas of 1933 in Highgate, London.

Le Corbusier himself had to wait until after the war to create the Unité d' Habitation, a large-scale residential block in Marseille, between 1947 and 1952. This building was to inspire many high-density housing developments, although few of its successors were of comparable quality. Although Le Corbusier reused certain of his familiar architectural forms, such as pilotis and the roof garden, the Unité d'Habitation also introduced a new stage in Le Corbusier's career. This was developed in subsequent works, such as the Parliament at Chandigarh, India, of 1953-1962, in which Le Corbusier created an expressionistic, antirational architecture of bare concrete (béton brut in French). Known as Brutalism, this new style marked the end of Le Corbusier's association with the International Style.

Le Corbusier's late works were highly influential, inspiring such architects as James Stirling and Peter and Alison Smithson, who developed New Brutalism in Britain, as well as the Japanese Kenzo Tange. Nonetheless, despite the success of Brutalism, the International Style still continued with some vigour up to the 1960s. In the United States Philip C. Johnson applied the style of Mies van der Rohe to his own house (1951), an elegant steel and glass box in New Canaan, Connecticut, which he claimed was also inspired by classical sources, such as Schinkel and Palladio. Mies van der Rohe's influence is also apparent in many of the highrise office blocks constructed in the United States and Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. Notable examples were produced by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, while Mies's own work included the Seagram building, an elegant skyscraper of tinted glass, erected in New York in 1957.

During the 1960s a younger generation of architects, such as “the New York 5”, also created white, cubic buildings, modelled on International Style architecture of the 1920s. The 1960s were, however, the final phase in the history of the International Style: in general the architects of the late 20th century abandoned the elegant rationalism of early Modernism. Apart from the development of Brutalism, other movements arose, including High Tech and Postmodernism, which together all but consigned the International Style to the status of a historical tradition.