International Style. Modernist Architrcture from 1925 to 1965

The years from 1925 to 1965 were marked by an optimistic belief that the new technologies of industrialization, spread by applying rational ideas to architecture and urbanism, would produce a qualitatively better world. This "Project of Modernity" was concerned with social agenda as well as form, an aspect that is now sometimes forgotten. The expressions of modern architecture were characterized by a number of different twentieth-century movements, dominated by the International Style. In the 1920s several strands of modernism - Expressionism, Futurism, Functionalism, to name only three of the "isms" - converged into an approach to architecture that is termed internationalist. It was an approach that was global not only in its aspirations and its concerns but also in the presentation of its architecture.