Compose styles
Rather than blending styles toward a middle, this gives them roles. The first one carries the structure, the next comes in as the accent, and anything after that shows up in a single detail. Where they fight each other, it says so before you start.
How to divide the work
- Composition
- Follow International Style: Carry floors on columns so plan and facade both stay free
- Type
- Set in International Style's manner (Align sans serif signs to the column grid, flush with the wall), and let Italian Rationalism's lettering (A geometric sans set to the same module as the bays, with the leading derived from the same proportion) appear only where you want the eye to catch.
- Material
- Ground in International Style's material (Steel and concrete frame, white rendered planes, large sheets of glass); bring in exactly one thing from Italian Rationalism (White render against polished marble and plate glass, with reveals deep enough to cast a real shadow line).
- Colour
- Build on #eeece5, #9ca3a5, #252729 and admit one accent from #d2d1c2, #99c2f1, #1b1d1b.
Where they fight
- International Style and Italian Rationalism both belong to Modern Architecture, so the difference is small. Push the roles further apart than feels comfortable.
Caution
- International Style 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.
- Italian Rationalism Keeping the white box and dropping the proportion: without the underlying ratios it is generic modernism, and the whole argument of these buildings was that the ratios were still present.
Image prompt
Produce four original images that take their structure from International Style (style, 1920s–1960s) and their accent from Italian Rationalism (style, 1926–1943). ## What to make Make the kind of thing International Style exists for: corporate headquarters and civic buildings that must earn trust through proportion, not ornament, or long life offices and galleries whose partitions move as programs change. Choose one subject and hold it across all four. ## Structure comes from International Style - Rectangular volumes - Glass planes - No ornament - The free plan Composition: Carry floors on columns so plan and facade both stay free. Type and lettering: Align sans serif signs to the column grid, flush with the wall. ## Accent comes from Italian Rationalism, used sparingly - White volumes and a regular rhythm of bays - Deep overhangs and bands of shadow - Marble set against glass - Classical proportion, translated Let one material quality come from it: White render against polished marble and plate glass, with reveals deep enough to cast a real shadow line. ## Colour and feeling Build the ground on #eeece5, carry the structure in #9ca3a5 and #252729, and let a single accent come from #99c2f1. These are read off real works, so a direction rather than a fixed palette. Feeling to carry: trust, calm, futurity, luxury, technique. ## Where they fight - International Style and Italian Rationalism both belong to Modern Architecture, so the difference is small. Push the roles further apart than feels comfortable. ## What goes wrong - International Style: 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. - Italian Rationalism: Keeping the white box and dropping the proportion: without the underlying ratios it is generic modernism, and the whole argument of these buildings was that the ratios were still present. ## Across the four Keep the roles fixed in all four. Vary the framing, the scale and the arrangement so the set shows what this pairing can do rather than four versions of one picture. ## Constraints - Do not imitate, reference or name any specific artist, studio, brand, character or copyrighted work. - Do not reproduce the composition of an existing work. - Produce original compositions in the general period languages described above.
Related entries
- International Style 1920s–1960s / Style / Modern Architecture
Strips ornament and aims at a universal architectural language crossing borders: the box, the free plan, steel, concrete and glass.
- Italian Rationalism 1926–1943 / Style / Modern Architecture
An Italian movement that set out to make the abstraction of modern architecture and the classicism of the Mediterranean hold at the same time. What looks like a white box is in fact carrying ancient proportion in the rhythm of its bays, the depth of its overhangs and the planes of its marble. A textbook for refusing to set the modern against the traditional.
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