Quiz

20th-century Modern Architectural Style

• The International Style is a major architectural style developed in the 1920s and 1930s that was closely related to modernism and modernist architecture.

• The style is characterized by an emphasis on volume over mass, the use of lightweight, mass-produced, industrial materials, and the rejection of all ornament and colour.

• The International Style can be traced to buildings designed by a small group of modernists, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jacobus Oud, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, and Philip Johnson.

• The founder of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became known for steel frame structures employing glass curtain walls.

• The exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition ran from February 9 to March 23, 1932, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in the Heckscher Building at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in New York.

• The exhibition excluded other contemporary styles that were exploring the boundaries of architecture at the time, including Art Deco, German Expressionism, and the organicist movement.

• The gradual rise of the Nazi regime in Weimar Germany in the 1930s meant that an entire generation of avant-gardist architects, many of them Jews, were forced out of continental Europe.

• The White City of Tel Aviv is a collection of over 4,000 buildings built in the International Style in the 1930s.

• The residential area of Södra Ängby in western Stockholm, Sweden, blended an international or functionalist style with garden city ideals.

• The rise of Nazism caused a number of key European modern architects to flee to the US.

• After World War II, the International Style matured, and it became the dominant approach for decades in the US and Canada.

• International Style skyscrapers came to dominate many of Canada's major cities, especially Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, and Toronto.International Style Architecture

• The Place de Ville skyscrapers in Ottawa were built with disregard for existing city plans.

• The International Style high-rise typically includes certain design features.

• Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas in Venezuela and Ciudad Universitaria of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México are examples of International Style architecture.

• Mexican architect Luis Barragán designed buildings in the International Style before switching to a more traditional local architecture.

• Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer created a more organic and sensual version of the International Style.

• Criticism of the International Style includes accusations of impracticality and a lack of consideration for local history and climate.

• Architect Robert Venturi's book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was a critique of the International Style and helped define postmodernism.

• Author Tom Wolfe wrote a book-length critique of the International Style.

• The International Style's supposed strength of universality has been criticized as a weakness.

• Architectural critic Hugh Pearman has observed that those using the International Style today are simply "another species of revivalist."

• The history of modern architecture has been criticized for a "disturbing Eurocentric bias."

• Notable architects of the International Style include Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.