ABSTRACT
This final chapter discusses some of the Pan-American precedents for “modernism” and
describes how architects and urbanists in the Americas participated in the development
of new approaches to design in the first decades of the 20th Century. This chapter argues
that the “modernism” as canonized by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 “International
Style” exhibition in New York City emerged from a global context rich with opportunities
to exchange techniques and ideas about building design, engineering, and city planning.
Unlike the eclectic historicism that still dominated most public and private building pro-
