Discuss some of the prominent themes of modern and postmodern of architecture.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The ideal answer should include:
- The International Style dominated post-World War II modern architectural tastes.
- The International Styles is characterized by pure forms, severe, flat surfaces, and lack of ornamentation.
- One of the principal practitioners of International Style was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose aesthetic use of refined austerity was summed up by the phrase "less is more."
- Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is a conscious counterstatement to the International Style and Mies van der Rohe's severe rationalist geometry.
- The Guggenheim Museum's organic forms echo the natural world and represents the spirit of architectural innovation-what we have come to call postmodernism-that still pervades the practice of architecture to this day.
- It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when "modernism" in architecture ended and "postmodernism" began, but the turning point came in the late 1960s. Architects began to reject the pure, almost hygienic uniformity of the International Style to favor more eclectic architectural styles that were anything but pure.