International Style vs Latin American Modernism
インターナショナル・スタイル / ラテンアメリカ近代建築
Both sit in Modern Architecture, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
International Style
Strips ornament and aims at a universal architectural language crossing borders: the box, the free plan, steel, concrete and glass.
Latin American Modernism
Latin American modern architecture rewrote the International Style in local color, light and feeling. Barragán's colored walls and water, and Niemeyer's curves, proved that modern building too could carry the emotion of a place.
| International Style | Latin American Modernism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1920s–1960s | 1940s–1980s |
| Family | Modern Architecture | Modern Architecture |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Rectangular volumes / Glass planes / No ornament / The free plan | Walls of vivid color / Staged light and water / Thick walls and stillness / Modernism rooted in place |
| Best used for | Corporate headquarters and civic buildings that must earn trust through proportion, not ornament. · Long life offices and galleries whose partitions move as programs change. | Giving a white modern building strong feeling through local color and light · Making stillness in a hot climate house with courtyards and water |
| Type | Align sans serif signs to the column grid, flush with the wall. | Sink signage into the wall color and let shadow make it readable |
| Composition | Carry floors on columns so plan and facade both stay free. | Close the outside with thick walls, opening only to courtyard and water |
| Material | Steel and concrete frame, white rendered planes, large sheets of glass. | Rough plaster in one vivid color, with the hour's light calculated in |
| Caution | 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. | Painting walls in vivid color without designing openings and shadow makes the color glare evenly, giving loudness instead of the intended stillness. |