Modern architecture
近代建築（モダニズム建築）
A 20th-century current in architecture that set aside historical styles and ornament and took function as its starting point, using industrial materials such as glass, steel, and reinforced concrete.
01About
From the late nineteenth century, new materials and engineering such as steel frames, glass, and reinforced concrete challenged historical styles and made taller, lighter, more open buildings possible. Modern architecture took these industrial materials as its starting point: form follows function, and ornament is rejected. A 1932 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the first of its kind, gave the movement the name International Style, coined for its catalogue by a historian and an architect; Tate describes the look as rectilinear, undecorated, asymmetrical, and white. In Germany, a large group of these architects came out of the Bauhaus, the school Walter Gropius founded in Weimar in 1919. In Japan, the Kyoto Modern Architecture Festival opens modern buildings across the city to the public at the same time, and its list runs from residences, banks, schools, and churches to contemporary architecture and national treasures; Docomomo Japan works to record and preserve buildings of the Modern Movement.
02In the gallery
Pick one wall of a building and find where ornament could have gone: is the plain surface there concrete, glass, or metal?
Wall label terms in Japanese
- 近代建築
- Modern architecture
- モダニズム建築
- Modernist architecture
- インターナショナル・スタイル
- International Style
- 機能主義
- Functionalism
- 鉄筋コンクリート
- Reinforced concrete
03Notes
Modern architecture is shaped by materials and function rather than ornament.
In front of a building, which do you notice first: its structure, its materials, or its decoration?