ABSTRACT
International Modernism or Canonical Modern -ism, as defined by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932 in their momentous ex - hibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was an architecture of normative standards, of sharp-edged industrial forms built of steel, concrete, and glass, an architecture that rejected the use of axially directed space in favor of random move ment. By the late 1930s this aesthetic was being championed by architectural journals and by many architects who were convinced that this architecture was
the most appropriate for the twentieth century (though there were some who pursued a more personal design path). Aside from a few isolated examples, such as the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building in Philadelphia, this sort of modernism was not widely embraced in the United States before 1940. Then, during World War II, civilian building essentially ceased in Europe and the United States between 1939 and 1945. After peace was achieved, and the European émigrés such as Gropius and Mies van der Rohe among many others were established in the United States, industrially driven modernism was embraced by corporate capitalism in this country and, with the emergence of the United States as a dominant economic and political power after the war, was exported around the globe.
