The Modern Movement and International Style

The Modern Movement of the 1920s and 1930s produced the International Style, an architecture of clean volumes, open plans, and rejection of ornament that spread worldwide.

Definition

The study of the interwar modern movement and the International Style, the dominant idiom of twentieth-century modern architecture.

Scope

This topic covers the consolidation of modern architecture between the world wars, including the doctrines of functionalism and rationalism, the formation of CIAM, and the codification of the International Style by Hitchcock and Johnson. It examines characteristic features—volume rather than mass, regularity, and the elimination of applied decoration—and the movement's ambitions for housing, the city, and social reform.

Core questions

• What principles defined the Modern Movement?
• How did Hitchcock and Johnson define the International Style?
• What were the social and urban ambitions of modernism?
• How and why did the International Style spread globally?

Key theories

Three principles of the International Style

Hitchcock and Johnson's formulation of the new architecture as governed by the expression of volume rather than mass, regularity rather than axial symmetry, and the avoidance of applied ornament.

Architecture and social reform

The interwar conviction, expressed through CIAM and figures such as Le Corbusier and Gropius, that rational modern architecture and planning could solve problems of housing and urban life.

History

Crystallizing in the 1920s in the work of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and others, modern architecture was promoted through CIAM and named the 'International Style' by Hitchcock and Johnson in their 1932 exhibition and book; after the Second World War it became the dominant mode for corporate, institutional, and housing architecture worldwide.

Debates

Style versus social program

Critics debate whether reducing the Modern Movement to an 'International Style' of formal features betrayed its deeper social and political aims, as figures like Hitchcock and Johnson were later accused of doing.

Key figures

• Henry-Russell Hitchcock
• Philip Johnson
• Le Corbusier
• Walter Gropius

Seminal works

• hitchcockjohnson1932
• frampton2007
• curtis1996

Frequently asked questions

Who named the International Style?

The term was popularized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in a 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and the accompanying book.

What was CIAM?

CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) was an international organization of modern architects, active from 1928, that promoted functionalist architecture and planning.