The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
Rules · Theory · Façades · Ornament
Volume, regularity, no ornament
Treat architecture as volume enclosed by thin planes rather than as solid mass; order it by the regular rhythm of the structure rather than by axial symmetry; and avoid applied decoration.
Hitchcock and Johnson distilled the work of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies and Oud into these three visual principles for the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1932. White rendered walls stretched like paper over the frame, windows flush with the surface, and a composition balanced about no single axis became the signs of the style across the world.
Related rules
Omit applied ornament from buildings and everyday objects: it wastes work, money and material, dates quickly, and adds nothing that fine material and exact workmanship cannot give.
With a concrete frame, a house should stand on pilotis, have a free plan and a free façade, be lit by horizontal ribbon windows, and carry a garden on its flat roof.
pilotis · free plan · free façade · ribbon window · roof garden
Set the columns back from the edge of the slab, so that the outer wall carries nothing and can be opened, closed or glazed at will.
cantilever of slab beyond column line ≈ ⅕–⅓ of the bay
Run the windows in a continuous horizontal band from one end of the façade to the other, lighting the room evenly across its whole depth.
Check the proportions of a façade with a few geometric lines (diagonals of similar rectangles, the golden section) so that its parts share one order and nothing is arbitrary.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Volume, regularity, no ornament”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/international-style. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.