Interior and Exterior of the Seagrem Building in New York City
Elements of Architecture, the International Style.
After World War I, increased exchanges between modernist architecture led to the development of a common formal language, transcending national boundaries, which came to be known as the International Style. The term gained wide currency as a result of a 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized by architectural historian Henry-Russel Hitchcock and the architect and curator Philip Johnson, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922”. The two of them identified three fundamental principles of the style.
1. “The conception of architecture as volume rather than mass”. The use of a structural skeleton of steel and ferroconcrete made it possible to eliminate load-bearing walls on both the exterior and interior. The building could instead be wrapped in a skin of glass, metal or masonry. This created an effect of enclosed space (volume) instead of dense material (mass). This meant that the exterior gave the interior a sense of open space and flexibility how the space could be used.
2. “Regularity rather than symmetry as the chief means of ordering design”. The Avoidance of classical balance also encouraged an asymmetrical disposition of the building’s components.
3.“Rejection of arbitrary applied decoration”. The new architecture depended upon the intrinsic elegance of its materials and the formal arrangement of its elements to produce harmonious aesthetic effects.
Mies van der Rohe designed school, apartments, and office buildings including the Seagrem Building in New York City which he designed together with Philip Johnson.
Mies’s buildings are distinguished by his attention to detail. Tall, narrow windows with discreet dark glass emphasize the skyscraper’s height.
Postmodernism manifested itself first in architecture, in the work of Robert Venturi. In the pioneering publication of Complexity and Contradiction in architecture (1966), Venturi argued that the problem with Mies van der Rohe and other International Style architects was their impractical unwillingness to accept the modern city for what it is: a complex, contradictory, and heterogeneous collection of “high” and “low” architectural forms.
