Emotional Architecture vs International Style
情感の建築 / インターナショナル・スタイル
Both sit in Modern Architecture, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Emotional Architecture
Building that raises unbroken walls as sculptural mass and works on feeling through color, direct sun and stillness alone. Goeritz gave it the name in the 1953 manifesto he wrote for El Eco, against the functionalism of his day.
International Style
Strips ornament and aims at a universal architectural language crossing borders: the box, the free plan, steel, concrete and glass.
| Emotional Architecture | International Style | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1953- | 1920s–1960s |
| Family | Modern Architecture | Modern Architecture |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | A single large wall left without windows / Surfaces painted through in one flat color / Planes of shadow cast by direct sun / Mass read as sculpture rather than as building | Rectangular volumes / Glass planes / No ornament / The free plan |
| Best used for | Giving a white modern building strong feeling through local color and light · Making stillness in a hot climate house with courtyards and water | Corporate headquarters and civic buildings that must earn trust through proportion, not ornament. · Long life offices and galleries whose partitions move as programs change. |
| Type | Sink signage into the wall color and let shadow make it readable | Align sans serif signs to the column grid, flush with the wall. |
| Composition | Close the outside with thick walls, opening only to courtyard and water | Carry floors on columns so plan and facade both stay free. |
| Material | Rough plaster in one vivid color, with the hour's light calculated in | Steel and concrete frame, white rendered planes, large sheets of glass. |
| Caution | Painting walls in vivid color without designing openings and shadow makes the color glare evenly, giving loudness instead of the intended stillness. | A white box alone misses the structure, free plan, industrial materials and social program, and ornament stripped without tuned proportion and detail reads as cheapness, leaving openings with no reason for their position. |