Although many traditional building styles are still in use, the appearance of buildings and the way in which they are built changes as outside influences are brought to bear on their architects and builders. Naturally, buildings are based on shapes that give the strongest structures: rectangles, cylinders, triangles and domes. In the search for new forms, architects have often looked back to the past. In the fourteenth century in Italy, for example, designers rediscovered the architecture of ancient Rome and neo-classical (“new” classical) buildings in the subsequent centuries were built all over the world, especially where a building was meant to embody power, learning and dignity. New buildings today still combine recent ideas with traditional motifs.
Modernism could be described as one of the most optimistic styles in architectural history, drawing from notions of utopia, innovation, and the reimagination of how humans would live, work, and interact. As we reflected in our AD Essentials Guide to Modernism, the philosophy of Modernism still dominates much of architectural discourse today, even if the world that gave rise to Modernism has changed utterly.
As we say goodbye to 2019, a year that saw the centenary of the Bauhaus, we have collated a list of key architectural styles that defined Modernism in architecture. This tool for understanding the development of 20th-century design is complete with examples of each style, showcasing the practice of Modernism that lay behind the theory.
The Modern Era is broadly defined in the United States as the period from 1930 through the 1970s. Buildings or sites of the period often looked to the future without overt references to historical precedent; expressed functional, technical or spatial properties; and was conscious of being modern, expressing the principles of modern design. The architecture produced during this period took on many forms and represented a range of complex ideology. The terms included here represent a means of categorizing these disparate resources based on design similarities, but are in no way intended to limit or fully define them.
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