Der Internationale Stil 1932

The Unbearable Lightness of Building—A Cautionary Tale

“…For at the same time as he was working on the Barcelona pavilion, Mies was planning the Tugendhat villa in Brno, Czechoslovakia, which shares many of the same design elements and is almost as celebrated an icon in the modernist architectural canon (Hitchcock described it in his 1966 foreword to The International Style as "one of the two finest houses in the new style," the other being Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye). 18 But in the case of the Tugendhat villa, events every bit as bizarre as those Koolhaas imagines for the Barcelona pavilion really did happen. Mies first surveyed the Brno site in September 1928, and Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, who both came from prominent local textile-manufacturing fami-lies, were able to move into their completed house in December 1930.…”

Shared Heritage Revisited

“…Argued here is that the outstanding value of the White City reaches far beyond its whitewashed façade, or the regionalist version of modernism found in the over 4000 buildings of the International Style which the city is famous for. The term "International Style" for modern architecture, such as the architecture implemented in Tel Aviv, was created at the MoMA in New York in 1932 by the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the architect Philip Johnson to describe this new modern style, displaying new trends of architecture built of steel, reinforced concrete, and glass (Hitchcock and Johnson 1985). The International Style transformed the skylines of many major cities around the world, and can be connected to the international wish for peace after World War I, where neutral architecture was a means to describe globalism, removing borders, and abandoning a nationalist way of life.…”