Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson

The International Style: Architecture since 1922

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New York (Museum of Modern Art) · 1932 · English

Summarised and illustrated here; the text is not reproduced.

The book that accompanied MoMA’s 1932 exhibition of modern architecture and gave the new European architecture its American name, reducing it to three visual principles.

Hitchcock, a historian, and Johnson, then a young curator, surveyed the work of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies, Oud and others and argued that it amounted to a coherent new style. They identified three principles: architecture as volume rather than mass (thin planes enclosing space, not solid walls); regularity rather than axial symmetry (order from the structural grid and repeated elements); and the avoidance of applied decoration. The book was criticised for turning a social and technical movement into a matter of appearance, but its label stuck.

The book, part by part

I Three principles

Volume, regularity, no applied ornament.

Rules: Volume, regularity, no ornament

Rules drawn from The International Style

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.

Cite this page Chris Paton, “Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/source/hitchcock-johnson. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.