Modern architecture

Modern architecture is a broad term given to a number of building styles with similar characteristics, primarily the simplification of form and the elimination of ornament, that first arose around 1900. By the 1940s these styles had been consolidated and identified as the International Style and became the dominant way of building for several decades in the twentieth century.

Some catchphrases of Modern architecture

• "Form follows function" - first used by sculptor Horatio Greenough, more popularly by Louis Sullivan
• "Less is more" - Mies van der Rohe
• "Less is more only when more is too much" - Frank Lloyd Wright
• "Less is a bore" - Robert Venturi, pioneer of Postmodern architecture; in response to the featureless International Style popularized by Mies van der Rohe

In his 1941 essay "The mischievous analogy" (collected in Heavenly Mansions) the architectural historian Sir John Summerson identified several generalizations and clichés of modern architecture:

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• it arises from an accurate analysis of the needs of modern society;
• it represents the logical solution of the problem of shelter
• achieved by the direct application of means to ends;
• it expresses the spirit of the machine age;
• it is the architecture of industrial living;
• it is based on a study of scientific resources and an exploitation of new materials;
• finally it is organic

Summerson found that the modernist obsession was not with architecture itself, but with its relation to other aspects of life, and investigated the results.

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