Modern architecture is generally agreed to be an identifiable form of building design characterized by the use of unornamented industrial materials--principally steel, glass, and concrete--to form simple, geometric volumes standing free in space. Such buildings, which began to appear around 1922 in Germany, the Netherlands, the \TUSSR\t, and France, were first grouped together under a single stylistic heading in a 1932 exhibition titled "Modern Architecture" held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The exhibition's organizers, the critic Henry-Russell \THitchcock\t and the architect C. Philip \TJohnson\t, detected in a variety of post-World War I buildings from several countries a shared emphasis on volume over form, asymmetrical composition, and avoidance of ornamentation. These elements, Hitchcock and Johnson proclaimed, constituted an \TInternational Style\t in architecture. This style had evolved from a century-long search for an architectural style suited to modern materials and engineering techniques, freed from borrowed forms.

Some of the architects cited by Hitchcock and Johnson as exponents of the International Style resisted this narrow, formal definition. The dissenters asserted that their work was only the direct, logical manifestation of contemporary science and society, that it would change as its preconditions changed, and that architecture had in fact finally escaped the limitations of stylistic fashions. The course of architecture since 1932 has proved both camps correct: if the form-system known as the International Style has been universally accepted as the symbolic expression of modernity in building, it has also been shown to be essentially an artificial construct that is neither the inevitable nor necessarily the most logical reflection of 20th-century conditions.

Founders of Modern Architecture

The Bauhaus.

Among the architects who developed the International Style, the Germans formed the largest and initially the most important group. By 1918 a group of radical designers, centered in Berlin, had emerged as the champions of an architecture featuring astylistic shapes in steel and glass and based on an industrial and socialist ethic that had as its primary goal the overthrow of 19th-century \Teclecticism\t. The strong intuitive flavor of this so-called expressionism in turn triggered a reaction led by Walter \TGropius\t and Ludwig \TMies van der Rohe\t, who accepted steel-and-glass construction and pure geometric forms as ideals but sought to use these elements with scientific logic and precision.

The chief theorist of what its adherents called the Neue Sachlichkeit, or the new factualism, was Gropius, from 1919 the director of what had formerly been the Weimar Art School, and was now known as the \TBauhaus\t. When the Bauhaus moved (1925) to Dessau, Gropius implemented his theories in the buildings he designed for the new site. After Gropius left the Bauhaus (1928) to go into private practice, the leading light of the movement became Mies van der Rohe, who had demonstrated both the practicality and the formal unity of the new architecture in supervising the design of the Weissenhof Siedlung housing project (1925-27) in Stuttgart. Then, in his own German Pavilion at the Barcelona Trade Fair of 1929, Mies carried the features of the International Style to their furthest limit of abstraction.

Neoplasticism and Constructivism.

The Bauhaus architects' final step from expressionism to the Neue Sachlichkeit is widely credited to the influence of two contemporary art movements: Dutch neoplasticism, usually called \Tde Stijl\t, and Soviet \Tconstructivism\t. The neoplasticist group was assembled (1917) by the poet-painter Theo van \TDoesburg\t, who also founded the group's magazine, De Stijl (1917-31). Van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren outlined the neoplasticist ideal in a 1922 Paris exhibition of a series of house projects whose asymmetrical arrangements of colored planes resembled the paintings of abstract artist Piet Mondrian made three-dimensional. This rigorously abstract conception was realized most fully in Gerrit \TRietveld\t's Schroder House (1925) in Utrecht.

Constructivism was initiated in the Soviet Union with the nonobjective sculptor Vladimir \TTatlin\t's execution (1918) of a model for a hypothetical Monument to the Third International, in which a series of glass volumes were to rotate within a spiraling steel tower meant to express the triumph of the new technology over traditional masonry construction. Once brought (1922) to Germany by emigres such as Laszlo \TMoholy-Nagy\t, the constructivist concept of a building as a technical mechanism in motion soon assumed a key role in European architectural theory, especially through the influential writings of Sigfried \TGiedion\t.

Le Corbusier.

The contemporaneous work of the Swiss architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as \TLe Corbusier\t, differed in its premises, if not in its outward appearance, from that of the Germans. His early buildings--the Ozenfant House (1923) in Paris, the Villa Stein (1927-28) in Garches, the Villa Savoye (1929-30) in Poissy--resemble those of Gropius and Mies in their asymmetrical and flowing spatial arrangements, as well as in their unornamented glass and stucco planes.

Le Corbusier's explanation of his art in his immensely influential Vers une Architecture (1923; trans. as Towards a New Architecture, 1927) emphasized that a new and purer classical architecture of forms seen in light could be created by following the logical conceptual processes of the engineer. This organic and somewhat grandiose conception of the new architecture sets Le Corbusier apart from the austere geometricism of the Bauhaus school and indicates that his roots thus lay in the monumental tradition of French architecture as exemplified in the works of his mentors Auguste \TPerret\t and Tony \TGarnier\t.

Le Corbusier also insisted that the reorganization of the city was the first task of modern architecture. His 1922 exhibition entitled "Modern City for Three Million Inhabitants" led eventually to a model apartment tower that he called a Unite d'Habitation, the first of which was erected in Marseille in 1946-52. An overriding concern for \Turban planning\t made him one of the key figures at a 1928 meeting of modern architects that resulted in the formation of the Congres International de l'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Greatly influenced by Le Corbusier, the CIAM architects overruled the aesthetic goals of the expressionists by setting urbanism, rather than design, as the organization's chief concern.

Frank Lloyd Wright.

Also active at the time of the epochal "Modern Architecture" exhibition was another leading exponent of modern architecture, the American Frank Lloyd \TWright\t. Although his work was recognized in the 1932 exhibition, Wright was set apart from the practitioners of the International Style because of his "individualism" and "romantic" attachment to nature. He was also a generation older than his European counterparts and had actually influenced some of their work through the publication (1910) in Berlin of the Wasmuth Portfolio of his work. Wright accepted the machine as an aid to architecture and made early use of such modern materials as reinforced concrete in his compositions of cantilevered roof planes, unornamented surfaces, and flowing spaces. On the other hand, he believed in what he termed the "organic" use of building materials and in the close relationship of a building to its site--19th-century ideas rejected by his European contemporaries. His idea of modern organicism is expressed in such works as the Johnson's Wax Company Headquarters (1937-39) in Racine, Wis., a great space wrapped with brick and fiberglass tubing whose roof is supported by slender, mushroom-shaped columns; and in the dramatically cantilevered concrete-and-glass Kaufmann House, "Fallingwater" (1936-37), at Bear Run, Pa.

Triumph of the International Style

In 1932 the International Style embraced only a small proportion of recent architecture; outside of private houses its influence was limited to certain housing projects in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. The pre-World War I academic-eclectic tradition had also dominated most postwar building of the 1920s and had produced a "modern architecture" of its own in the simplified historicism of Ragnar Ostberg's Stockholm City Hall (1909-23), Bertram \TGoodhue\t's Nebraska State Capitol (1919-28), and the skyscrapers of New York City. During the great Depression of the 1930s, however, the simplicity and economy of the International Style posed a desirable alternative to the extraneous ornamentation and lavish use of space inherent in eclectic architecture, and only CIAM seemed to have any clear solutions to the pressing problem of social housing. This new socioeconomic environment, as much as the aesthetics of modern architecture, paved the way for the triumph of the International Style in France, Great Britain, and the United States, particularly after its German masters were forced into exile by Hitler.

After World War II the International Style provided the basis for the rebuilding of European cities, as can be seen in such developments as van den Broek and Bakema's Lijnbaan (rail terminal; 1953-54) in Rotterdam. In the United States the architects of the building boom of the 1950s and 1960s turned to the International Style in designing technocratic office buildings such as New York City's Lever House (1950-52), by Gordon \TBunshaft\t of the firm of \TSkidmore, Owings, and Merrill\t (SOM).

Equally attracted to the philosophy and the aesthetics of the new architecture were institutions that sought to project a modern image, such as the Air Force Academy, whose Colorado Springs, Colo., campus was designed (1954-57) and built (1956-62) by SOM. Even the New York City headquarters of the United Nations (1947-50) was rendered in the International Style by a team of architects that included Le Corbusier, who had been passed over (1927) for the design of the League of Nations building.

Limits of the International Style

If the term modern architecture is understood to consist of a particular form-vocabulary (the International Style) embodying a certain philosophy (functionalism), then the term cannot be used to signify all the architecture produced in the modern epoch, but only one architectural tradition extending backward and forward from an accepted year of conception (1922). Frank Lloyd Wright's so-called Prairie style (from c.1900; see \Tprairie school\t) clearly foretells the International Style, as do the contemporaneous concrete designs of Perret and Garnier in France.

In another vein the \TArt Nouveau\t movement of the 1890s also sought to produce an innovative modern style using the industrial materials of metal, glass, and concrete; only its sculptural, biological form-vocabulary separates it from the buildings of 30 years later. Art nouveau, in turn, represented the culmination of a search for a new style adapted to new materials and new institutions that commenced around 1830 with the work of romantic rationalist architects in Great Britain, France, and Germany. Going back in time even further, unconsciously direct expressions of materials and function in works of engineering can be discerned in the mills and iron bridges of England dating from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1770s).

The fact that such pioneering movements of modern architecture can be identified as much as two centuries ago indicates that modern architecture did not primarily evolve out of the conditions and demands of modern society. As with most other artistic traditions, its aesthetic and philosophical roots can be traced back through a long line of artists and theorists who did not always or necessarily reflect a broad-based consensus on the "demands" of modern building.

Modern architecture claimed to be based on a logical expression of the spatial and structural facts of building, yet its practitioners have rarely approached the structural ingenuity of conceptual technicians such as R. Buckminster \TFuller\t. Similarly, although its apologists claimed that modern architecture represented a democratic style expressing the taste of the general public, its works often have been seen as aloof and oversophisticated by their residents. Finally, modern architecture's efficacy in solving the problems of redesigning cities into finely tuned social organisms has been questioned by those who see it as the destroyer of cohesive neighborhoods through wholesale urban renewal.

Recent Trends

As these contradictions in modern architecture began to emerge clearly in the 1950s, many architects sought to modify the codes of the International Style so as to create buildings at once modern and monumental, as well as functional and responsive to the needs and expectations of a wide audience. An international group of architects formed (1953) under the name Team X succeeded in 1959 in dissolving CIAM and setting its own goals for a new, more humane system of public housing. Team X members such as Alison and Peter \TSmithson\t and Aldo van Eyck, working from the aesthetic basis of the International Style, evolved from it more visually complex, texturally rich, and physically substantial buildings. Late in his career Le Corbusier himself became a major figure in this development, particularly with his sculptural concrete chapel at Ronchamp, France (1951-55). Another convert was Philip Johnson, the theorist of the International Style, who executed a number of monumental public buildings in rich materials.

If Eero \TSaarinen\t turned the International Style to expressionistic ends in works such as his TWA Terminal (1956-62) at J. F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, his buildings are scarcely more extraordinary than the later works of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose spiraling, concrete \TGuggenheim Museum\t was conceived in 1942 and completed in 1959. Finally, Louis I. \TKahn\t developed a new monumentality that was first expressed in his Yale University Art Gallery (1951-53) and culminated in such buildings as the Exeter Library (1967-72), a symmetrical, almost classical composition of brick, wood, concrete, and glass. Kahn was perhaps the last of the great modern architects. The full emergence of \Tpostmodern architecture\t took place shortly after Kahn's death (1974), and many prominent architects are now pursuing a variety of formal images beyond the doctrinal limitations of the International Style. \TDavid\t AND \TAnn\t \TVan\t ZANTEN

Bibliography: Allsopp, Bruce, A Modern Theory of Architecture (1978); Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 2d ed. (1967); Blake, Peter, The Master Builders, rev. ed. (1976); Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture, 5th ed. (1967); Hatje, Gerd, ed., Encyclopedia of Modern Architecture (1963); Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1958); Jencks, Charles A., The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977); Madsen, S. Tschudi, Art Nouveau (1967); Pehnt, Wolfgang, Expressionist Architecture (1973); Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design (1949); Richards, J. M., Introduction to Modern Architecture, rev. ed. (1970); Richards, J. M., and Pevsner, Nikolaus, eds., The Anti-Rationalists (1973); Sharp, Dennis, Sources of Modern Architecture: A Bibliography (1967); Smithson, Alison and Peter, Without Rhetoric (1973).