International style

The international Style is current in Architecture which opened out between the Années 1920 and the end of the Années 1980 in the whole world. This style, which marks the arrival of the ideas of the modern Mouvement with the the United States, in particular via Philip Johnson in Moma in New York and of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, results from the marriage of the ideas of the school of the Bauhaus and the techniques of construction steel and glass of the the United States. It characterizes most of the architecture of the glorious Thirty. Its principal characteristics are to build buildings in total rupture with the traditions of the past. Its architects decide to emphasize volumes by smooth external surfaces and without ornamentation. They wish to apply the principle of regularity and to use for that all the possibilities offered by the Béton, steel and glass. The international Style is thus presented in the form of a resolutely modernistic tendency and seeks the examination in decoration.

Historical context

The international Style is resulting from the modern Mouvement , animated by the pioneers of the Années 1920 - 1940: the school of the Bauhaus in Germany, Le Corbusier and the New Esprit in France (“Five points of the modern architecture” of Le Corbusier - 1926) characterizes the beginnings of the modern architecture in radical rupture with the style Art schools of the 19th century, but in the prolongation of the functionalist ideas of Purple-the-Duke and of the Art nouveau. The transformation of the modern Mouvement into international Style will be done after the diffusion of the ideas of the Bauhaus to the the United States, in particular via Philip Johnson which organized an exposure on the modern architecture in 1932 to the MoMA with New York, then arrival of the architects of Bauhaus driven out of Germany by the Nazis, and in particular of the teaching of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with I.I.T in Chicago.

The ideas of the modern Mouvement will thus dominate most of architecture during the Glorious Thirty.

The expression “Style international” appears for the first time in 1932 in a work of the historian of art Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, written following an exposure of the MoMA of New York entitled Modern Architecture . It then indicated in the United States the architecture of the European modern movement of the Thirties, the " term; modern style" there being already used for the Art nouveau, but in Europe, one tends to in general distinguish the modern Mouvement, which characterizes the stylistic renewal of the architecture, but also from the applied arts and the industrial design starting from 1910 pennies the influence of Peter Behrens then of Bauhaus, and the international Style, which characterizes more blooming of the modern Mouvement in its only architectural expression, after its arrival and that of the Masters of Bauhaus in the United States, then especially during the thirty glorious ones.

This work founder of the style, thus published at the time of this New Yorkean exposure, contains 138 photographs representing of the sights interior and external as well as plans classified alphabetically of the names of the architects in order to present any national presentation. The foreword is of Alfred Barr. The text does not make a presentation of each building, its approach is very different: it aims at determining a style, in the direction of the formal analysis of the history of art, in an inductive way starting from the common characters of the new architecture. The fundamental thesis of the work can be stated as follows: the exposed achievements represent the contemporary architectural style into force, and this style is characterized by its unit and its totality, with the image of the historical styles which are the Gothic and the Baroque for example.

In 1933, the school of the Bauhaus closed its doors in Germany under the constraint of the Nazi S, his artists pursued had to often flee in the United States in particular in Chicago whereas their works were, in Germany, systematically destroyed.

The “international Style” is the result of reflections of CIAM and the Charte of Athens. It defines the few points which make it possible to give a cohesion, a force, with a new wave of modern architect.

Achievements

In the United States

The first emblematic achievements of the international Style in the United States are the achievements of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, the Technical center of General Motors of Eero Saarinen in Détroit, Seagram building of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and to raise It House of Skydmore, Owings and Merrill in New York.

The building of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS) presents an original plan in capital form of T and exploits the effects of dissymmetry. Its originators, George Howe and William Lescaze, managed to make an effect clean to the international style, an effect of skin tended on a metal skeleton. The horizontal frontage and the large panels of glass of MoMa of New York also take part of this tendency.

The head office of UNO in New York is the most remarkable illustration of the international style after 1945. It was built along the East River on a ground acquired thanks to a donation of John Davison Rockefeller Junior. It was inaugurated the January 9th 1951 and becomes the symbol of internationalism and progress. It applies the design of buildings separated according to their function. The skyscraper sheltering the secretariat of the United Nations culminates with 164 meters and is presented on two faces like a curtain wall of glass and aluminum, whereas the other sides are covered with marble plates. Lastly, the period of the post-war period is marked by works of the Finn Eero Saarinen whose eclecticism appears in the Kresge auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute off Technology (1956), the arch of Saint Louis (1967) or in its work on the terminals of the airports of New York and Washington DC. The German Walter Gropius, founder of Bauhaus, teaches architecture in Harvard and built with Pietro Belluschi the discussed building of the Pan Am in New York (1963). It trains the great architects of the following generation. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe arrives at the United States in 1937 and applies its designs of the modernistic classicism to New York (Seagram Building, 1958), Chicago (university with South Side). He is the most fertile architect of all.

The modernistic current largely used the Béton in architecture, leaving it in a rough state in several works of the years 1960 and 1970: the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts on the campus of Harvard is the only building drawn by Le Corbusier in the United States. The most famous representatives of the tendency brutalist are Paul Rudolf, Marcel Breuer, Bertrand Goldberg and Louis Kahn.

Random links: