ABSTRACT
Modern architecture, especially as indicated bysuch phrases as International Modernism or Canonical Modernism, has come to mean the lean, crisp, sharp-edged, boxy buildings, exploiting industrial building materials such as concrete, steel, and glass, designed in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. This design type came to be epitomized by the glass boxes designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the 1950s and ’60s in the Unites States. Yet this use of the word modern wholly ignores other forms of modernism evident in a far wider range of buildings in the developed West, including examples representing Expressionism, Classicism, and national vernacular or national romanticism during
the twentieth century. All these idioms or styles need to be understood if we are to appreciate the complex intermix of multiple “moderns” that developed in the twentieth century.
