Modern Architecture
Forms made possible by steel, concrete and glass, together with the answers architects gave about fitting them to a site and a climate, so a universal style sits beside regional dissent.
Dictionary entry
- Streamline Moderne 1930s–1940s / Style
Gives even stationary things speed and machine-age optimism through streamlines, horizontals, rounded corners and metal.
- Biomorphism 1930s–1960s / ongoing / Style
Extends asymmetric, continuous forms suggesting cells, bones, organs and plants into abstraction, furniture, vessels and space.
- 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.
- Metabolist Architecture 1960s–1970s / Style
Conceives city and building as one vast system that can grow, exchange and renew itself like an organism.
- High-Tech Architecture 1970s– / Style
Ducts, structure, elevators and joints, all of them normally hidden, are pushed to the outside so that the building reads as an enormous machine.
- Tropical Modernism 1940s–1970s / Style
Adapts modern architecture to hot, humid climates through canopies, louvers, ventilation and sun control.
- Organic Architecture 1900s– / Style
Refuses to treat building, furniture, material, terrain and light separately, designing them as one continuum that includes the place and the life lived in it.
- Radical Architecture late-1960s–1970s / Style
Objects to functionalism and consumer society, critiquing architecture's own premises with fictional cities, furniture, photographs and collage.
- Postmodern Architecture 1960s–1990s / Style
Rebels against modernism's universality, reintroducing historical quotation, ornament, sign, color and irony to city and building.
- Googie late-1940s–1960s / Style
Theatricalizes roadside commerce with exaggerated roofs, neon, glass and space-age shapes readable in an instant from a car.
- Prairie School 1893–1920s / Style
An architecture of the horizontal line answering the midwestern prairie. Deep eaves, ribbon windows, low roofs and continuity between inside and out established the first American modern house free of imported European styles.
- Expressionist Architecture 1910s–1920s / Style
Architecture that speaks emotion and symbol through sculptural curves and brick detail. Mendelsohn's streamlines and the Amsterdam School's undulating housing mark modernism's other road, the one functionalism never absorbed.
- Garden City 1898– / Layout
Howard's diagrammed proposal for self-contained towns of planned population joining the advantages of town and country. The concentric diagram materialized at Letchworth and became the template for suburbs and new towns worldwide.
- 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
A postwar ethic of public building that leaves béton brut exposed and hides neither structure nor services. Bound up with the ideals of the welfare state, it is now the subject of preservation campaigns.
- Emotional Architecture 1953- / Style
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.
- Parametricism 2008– / Style
A style that relates every element continuously through parameters and organizes architecture as flowing surface and gradient change. Schumacher named it, and the work of Zaha Hadid Architects became its demonstration.
- 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.