Modern Architecture
近代建築
Dictionary entry
- International Style 1920s–1960s / Style
Strips ornament and aims at a universal architectural language crossing borders: the box, the free plan, steel, concrete and glass.
- High-Tech Architecture 1970s– / Style
Turns the building inside out — ducts, structure, elevators and joints exposed — presenting it as a great machine.
- Postmodern Architecture 1960s–1990s / Style
Rebels against modernism's universality, reintroducing historical quotation, ornament, sign, color and irony to city and building.
- Prairie School 1893–1920s / Style
An architecture of the horizontal line answering the midwestern prairie: deep eaves, ribbon windows, low roofs and continuous interiors — the first American modern house independent of imported European styles.
- Expressionist Architecture 1910s–1920s / Style
Architecture that speaks emotion and symbol through sculptural curves and brick detail — Mendelsohn's streamlines, the Amsterdam School's undulating housing — modernism's other road, unabsorbed by functionalism.
- Case Study Houses 1945–1966 / Style
The experimental housing program commissioned by Arts & Architecture for the postwar shortage: steel and glass from off-the-shelf parts, popularizing an image of bright modern living open to the California climate.
- Brutalist Architecture 1950s–1970s / Style
The postwar ethic of public building that shows raw concrete — béton brut — as it is and hides neither structure nor services. Bound to the welfare state's ideals, and now the object of preservation campaigns.
- Latin American Modernism 1940s–1980s / Style
Latin America's modern architecture rewrote the International Style with local color, light and emotion — Barragán's colored walls and water, Niemeyer's curves proving that modernism too could carry a region's feeling.
- Parametricism 2008– / Style
The style that organizes architecture through continuous parametric relations among all elements — flowing surfaces and gradient change. Named by Schumacher, implemented across Zaha Hadid Architects' work.
- Italian Rationalism 1926–1943 / Style
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.
- Stripped Classicism 1920s–1950s / Style
The manner of government and memorial building in which classical architecture is shorn of ornament, leaving only proportion, axis and the rhythm of the columns. That it still reads as classical without ornament made it a cheap means of speaking authority. Important as a case in which the minimal and the intimidating live together.