Modernism architecture

Modern architecture emerged as a movement in the 1920s, grounded in new construction technologies, above all glass, steel, and concrete, and in the principle that form should follow function. After World War II it became the dominant mode in architecture and urban planning. Modernism is the umbrella term, and it spans several currents described separately here: functionalism, the International Style, mid-century modern, brutalism, and the large-scale late modernism of the 1960s and 70s.

On the street you recognize it by flat or shallow roofs, smooth facades without ornament, and windows placed where the rooms need light, often asymmetrically, in horizontal bands, or wrapped around corners once concrete frames had freed the outer walls from carrying loads. Pilotis lifting the building off the ground, open floor plans, and roof terraces complete the repertoire.

Germany was the movement’s development center. The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1925, and its 1926 school building remains a canonical work. Le Corbusier formulated his five points of architecture in 1927 and built Villa Savoye in Poissy in 1928-1931, while CIAM, founded in 1928, served as the movement’s international voice. Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 belongs to the same canon, and together with Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto these architects influenced virtually all building of the twentieth century.

Modernism’s dominance waned during the 1970s and 1980s as postmodern architecture emerged in reaction to its austerity. The judgment has softened since: the postwar stock has reached retirement age, heritage bodies have begun to protect it, and buildings long dismissed as monotonous are being reassessed as cultural history.