ABSTRACT
Like a seesaw, global debates about architecture in the interwar period swung between two ideas: ornamentalism and minimalism. Through analyses of the Schröder House and the Villa Savoye—embodying minimalism—and the Hephzibah House in Lagos, Nigeria, Taliesin West, and Fallingwater—trumpeting ornamentalism—this chapter will show how the interwar period had an ideological war of its own on a global stage. At times, participants (such as renowned Afro-Brazilian masons in Lagos and the American architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright) and even buildings brought about a momentary armistice, employing the formal language of the other in a way that showed how the war between the two ideas of minimalism and ornamentalism took interesting turns. This essay on architecture in the interwar period then is about the battle for two ideas as well as the architectural consequences of that war.
