International Style architecture: how to identify it

what it is

International Style buildings have a structural frame of steel or reinforced concrete that carries the floors, so the outer walls bear no weight and can be thin panels or continuous glass. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson defined it in 1932 by three principles: volume enclosed by thin surfaces rather than solid mass, regularity in place of symmetry, and no applied ornament. Typical features are flat roofs, rectangular forms, ribbon windows and, in later towers, curtain walls (outer walls of glass and metal that carry no load).

Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Poissy, outside Paris (1928-1931), is raised on thin columns and has a ribbon window on all four sides. Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) uses freestanding walls of marble and glass under a flat roof. In New York, Lever House (1952), by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has a green glass and stainless steel curtain wall, and Mies's Seagram Building (1958) has bronze-clad mullions on its glass facade. Unlike Art Deco towers, they have no setbacks or ornament.

how to spot one

Curtain wall An outer wall of glass and metal panels hung on a building's steel or concrete frame, carrying only its own weight. It keeps out weather on most office towers built since the 1950s. Ribbon window A continuous horizontal row of windows across a facade, separated only by thin mullions (upright bars). It relies on interior columns carrying the floors and is common on modernist buildings. Flat roof A roof that is level or nearly level, often edged by a low wall called a parapet. It is standard on modernist buildings and on Pueblo adobe buildings of the American Southwest.

Also look for

Piloti Exposed structure Corner window Horizontal emphasis Modular repetition

history

The style developed in western Europe in the 1920s, mainly in Germany and France, in the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and J. J. P. Oud. Its name came from the exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February 9 to March 23, 1932. Alfred H. Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson organized it, and Hitchcock and Johnson published the book The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 the same year.

European architects who emigrated in the 1930s, including Gropius and Mies, brought the style into American universities and practice. After World War II it became the usual choice for corporate and government buildings. The United Nations Secretariat in New York (1952) was the city's first high-rise with a glass curtain wall, and Lever House was the second. The style dominated large commercial building until the 1970s, when postmodern critics attacked it. Charles Jencks dated the end of modern architecture to the 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis.

where to find it

The Seagram Building and Lever House in New York, Villa Savoye near Paris, and mid-century office districts everywhere.

architects

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Le Corbusier Walter Gropius Philip Johnson

easy to confuse with

Bauhaus Flat-roofed white boxes, ribbon and corner windows, and zero ornament.

Stahl House, an example of Mid-Century Modern

Mid-Century Modern Post-and-beam houses with walls of glass, flat or butterfly roofs, and easy flow between indoors and out.

Centre Pompidou, an example of Structuralism / High-Tech

Structuralism / High-Tech The building turned inside out: exposed frames, ducts and elevators on the outside, painted in bright colors.