International Style

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The International Style is the modern architecture that emerged in Europe in the 1920s and spread all over the world after the Second World War. The name was coined in New York in 1932, with the exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, held at the Museum of Modern Art from 9 February to 23 March. It was curated by the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the young Philip Johnson, brought in by the museum's director Alfred H. Barr Jr., and accompanied by the book The International Style: Architecture Since 1922.

A style, not a movement

The exhibition introduced American audiences to the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J.J.P. Oud and others: the Villa Savoye, the Bauhaus building in Dessau, the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat, alongside American architects such as Richard Neutra. Hitchcock and Johnson summed up the new language in three principles: architecture as volume, enclosed by thin surfaces rather than solid masonry masses; regularity instead of symmetry; and no applied ornament.

It was a deliberate choice, and a debated one. For the European Modern Movement, the new architecture was above all a social and technical answer, tied to housing for all and to standardisation. The New York exhibition presented it instead as a style, recognisable by its forms: white volumes, flat roofs, ribbon windows.

In America: glass, steel and offices

A few years later its protagonists arrived in person. After the Bauhaus closed in 1933, Gropius and Marcel Breuer taught at Harvard, while Mies headed the school of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. After the war the International Style became the language of large corporations and institutions. New York gained the United Nations headquarters and Lever House (1952), designed by Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and clad entirely in a glass curtain wall. In 1958 Mies and Johnson completed the Seagram Building, the bronze-and-glass skyscraper that became the model for thousands of office towers. On a smaller scale, the same idea appears in the glass houses: Johnson's Glass House (1949) and Mies's Farnsworth House (1951).

Interiors changed too. From 1953 the American company Knoll held the exclusive rights to produce Mies's furniture, such as the Barcelona chair, alongside the seating of Harry Bertoia and Eero Saarinen's Tulip chair (1956). The modern office, with its desks, task chairs and glass partitions, was born here.

From the world to the critics

The International Style reached everywhere: in Tel Aviv, in the 1930s, European-trained architects built more than 4,000 buildings in what became known as the White City, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yet this very spread also revealed its limits: the same glass boxes, identical in New York, Frankfurt or São Paulo, began to look monotonous and indifferent to their surroundings. In 1966 the architect Robert Venturi answered Mies's motto, "less is more", with a quip that became famous: "less is a bore". It marked the beginning of Postmodernism, and one of the first to change course was Philip Johnson himself, who in 1984 crowned his AT&T skyscraper in New York with a pediment reminiscent of Chippendale furniture.