International Style

Stuttgart, 1927. A whole housing estate is built as an exhibition. The Deutscher Werkbund stages the exhibition Die Wohnung, the dwelling, and the city pays. The artistic director is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Seventeen architects from several countries show thirty-three houses. Walter Gropius is there. Hans Scharoun. Le Corbusier.

In four months half a million people come to look. What they see is like nothing they grew up with.

The year after, Le Corbusier receives a letter. Pierre and Eugénie Savoye want a weekend house in Poissy outside Paris. He designs it with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and the house becomes a manifesto in five points. Columns that lift the house off the ground. A free façade. Ribbon windows. An open plan. A roof terrace.

But the style has no name yet. It gets one in New York. In 1932 the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the architect Philip Johnson present the new European architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, with a book to match. They call it the International Style.

And they boil it down to three principles. Architecture as volume – thin surfaces enclosing a space, not a heavy mass. Regularity instead of symmetry. No applied ornament.

Then the style moves to the United States in earnest. Mies van der Rohe ends up in Chicago. There he designs the apartment towers on Lake Shore Drive, finished in 1951 – the prototype for everything that follows. In New York he gets a commission from the distiller Seagram. Its head, Samuel Bronfman, chooses his architect with the help of his daughter Phyllis Lambert.

The Seagram Building is finished in 1958. Thirty-eight storeys of bronze and tinted glass, set back from the street behind a plaza with fountains. Nobody in the blocks around it has done that before. The building even changes the city's zoning rules.

The manifesto itself fares worse. The Villa Savoye is badly damaged during the war and then becomes a farm. In 1958 the town of Poissy buys the plot to build a school, and it takes a minister of culture – André Malraux – to save the house. Since 2016 it has been a World Heritage Site.

Functionalism. The same modernism, different names. In Sweden we say functionalism, or funkis, for the pale houses of the 1930s. International Style is the Americans' word from 1932 – and is often associated with the post-war office tower in glass and steel.

Bauhaus. A school, not a style. But its teachers stand in the middle of the story: Gropius builds at Weissenhof in 1927, and Mies van der Rohe directs the whole exhibition.