International Style vs Purism
インターナショナル・スタイル / ピュリスム
International Style comes from Modern Architecture and Purism from Modern Design Movements. 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.
Purism
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A movement that attacked Cubism's drift into decoration and called for a return to forms fit for the machine age. Standardized objets-types such as bottles, glasses and guitars are painted within a horizontal-vertical order and a restrained palette. Through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau it became a norm for modern architecture and graphics.
| International Style | Purism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1920s–1960s | 1918–1925 |
| Family | Modern Architecture | Modern Design Movements |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Rectangular volumes / Glass planes / No ornament / The free plan | Silhouettes of standardised everyday objects / Compositions built on horizontals and verticals / A restrained number of colours / Contour lines of overlapping forms |
| 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. | Catalogues and technical magazines that present industrial products quietly as standardized types · Pages introducing buildings and equipment, read for dimension on a horizontal-vertical grid with a restrained palette |
| Type | Align sans serif signs to the column grid, flush with the wall. | A light geometric sans aligned to the horizontals, held to two sizes |
| Composition | Carry floors on columns so plan and facade both stay free. | Set the horizontal and vertical armature first, then overlap silhouettes for shallow depth |
| Material | Steel and concrete frame, white rendered planes, large sheets of glass. | Greys and ochres with a little blue, surfaces painted evenly and matte |
| 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. | Bringing anecdote or ornament back turns the objects from standardized types into picturesque still lifes, and the clarity of the machine age is lost. |