Epitaph for the International Style

The modern architecture of this day is far enough removed from what it wants to be, or what it claimed to be when it first grew up at the turn of the century, that one marvels it has come so far without provoking greater opposition. Perhaps there has always been unspoken opposition among those people who were obliged to test its validity— those people living in public housing, for example, or those working in mid-town Manhattan. But only recently has there been any significant split among architects themselves.

The established architects have for years considered themselves the rightful custodians of the modern movement. They inherited its leadership from the real pioneers: Sullivan and Wright in this country; Behrens, Loos, and Perret in Europe; and have ruled architecture under the title Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne. In their hands the work of the pioneers took on new and unexpected meanings. Whereas in 1910 Adolf Loos had cautioned against allowing the new architecture to degenerate into an applied style, after he and others had battled hard to free it from the dominion of the nineteenth-century Ecole des Beaux Arts, the new generation set about preaching the necessity of a “universal architectural language.” National différences in temperament and ideals, climates, raw materials, habits and history were all neglected in the new buildings going up in every part of the Western world, so anxious were the leaders to usher in a new cultural era extolling the sameness, of all peoples. In time their efforts led to a characteristic way of building we know as the “international style,” epitomized in the UN buildings in New York.

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Mark Ueland

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The modern architecture of this day is far enough removed from what it wants to be, or what it claimed to be when it first grew up at the turn of the century, that one marvels it has come so far without provoking greater opposition. Perhaps there has always been unspoken opposition among those people who were obliged to test its validity— those people living in public housing, for example, or those working in mid-town Manhattan. But only recently has there been any significant split among architects themselves.

The established architects have for years considered themselves the rightful custodians of the modern movement. They inherited its leadership from the real pioneers: Sullivan and Wright in this country; Behrens, Loos, and Perret in Europe; and have ruled architecture under the title Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne. In their hands the work of the pioneers took on new and unexpected meanings. Whereas in 1910 Adolf Loos had cautioned against allowing the new architecture to degenerate into an applied style, after he and others had battled hard to free it from the dominion of the nineteenth-century Ecole des Beaux Arts, the new generation set about preaching the necessity of a “universal architectural language.” National différences in temperament and ideals, climates, raw materials, habits and history were all neglected in the new buildings going up in every part of the Western world, so anxious were the leaders to usher in a new cultural era extolling the sameness, of all peoples. In time their efforts led to a characteristic way of building we know as the “international style,” epitomized in the UN buildings in New York.