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Research Articles

No. 1 (2019): The Beginnings

The Survival of the International Style in the History of Architecture

Submitted
May 16, 2019
Published
2019-07-04

Abstract

It is undeniable that even nowadays, almost ninety years after the exhibition hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932 with the name “The International Style: architecture since 1922”, architects around the world tend to identify the International Style with a kind of architecture which still is particularly modern and part of our contemporariness. The confusion is both in terms of the materialization but also from a historiographical point of view and this paper aims to find the reasons why this, for some, not very fortunate label, has survived for almost one century going through all kind of reviews and people revisiting the event and the architecture linked to the momentum. A close up look at the histories of architecture since then might help to clarify how historians, starting with Henry-Russell Hitchcock himself, one of the curators of the exhibition together with Philip Johnson, have been very critical with the term and its negative consequences but yet, the term has survived partially thanks to its ability to merge and be confused with the more general label of modern architecture.

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