Modern Movement

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Modern Movement is the great renewal of architecture and design that took hold in Europe between the two world wars. The name was popularised by the historian Nikolaus Pevsner in his book Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), which traced its origins from William Morris to Walter Gropius. It was not a group with a single manifesto but a body of architects, schools and magazines united by a few strong ideas. The styles of the past had to be rejected, form had to arise from function, and new materials and industrial production were to be put at the service of everyone.

The roots

The groundwork was laid at the end of the nineteenth century. In Chicago, Louis Sullivan wrote in 1896 that "form ever follows function". In Vienna, Adolf Loos, in his famous essay Ornament and Crime, attacked decoration as a waste of labour and material. In Germany, the Deutscher Werkbund and Peter Behrens showed that art and industry could work together. The avant-gardes did the rest: De Stijl in the Netherlands and Constructivism in Russia reduced form to lines, planes and primary colours.

The 1920s: Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies

In 1923 Le Corbusier published Vers une architecture, in which he defined the house as "a machine for living in". A few years later he set out his five points: pilotis, roof garden, free plan, ribbon window and free façade, which found their most complete form in the Villa Savoye (1928–1931). In 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, the school that brought these ideas into everyday design. There, in 1925, Marcel Breuer designed the Wassily armchair in tubular steel. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the architect of "less is more", built the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929, together with the chair that bears its name.

The defining moment came in 1927. In Stuttgart the Werkbund built the Weissenhof Estate: 21 buildings with 60 dwellings, designed by 17 architects, all white, with flat roofs and large windows. The following year, at the Swiss castle of La Sarraz, CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, was founded; until the end of the 1950s it debated minimum housing, the city and urban planning.

From Europe to the world

Each country interpreted the Modern Movement in its own way: in Italy it was the Rationalism of Giuseppe Terragni and Gruppo 7, in Finland the warmer, more organic architecture of Alvar Aalto, with the Paimio Sanatorium and his bent-wood seating. In 1932 an exhibition at New York's MoMA introduced it to Americans under the name International Style. With the rise of Nazism and the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, many of its leading figures emigrated: Gropius and Breuer taught at Harvard, Mies in Chicago. After the Second World War the modern language became the style of office towers and of reconstruction all over the world.

Crisis and legacy

From the 1960s many began to criticise it as cold, repetitive and remote from people. The critic Charles Jencks dated its "death" to 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis was demolished, and from that crisis Postmodernism was born. Yet much of what we take for granted today, such as the open plan, large glazed walls, mass-produced furniture and the idea that an object should above all work well, comes from the Modern Movement.