Studio Matrx Monthly · Volume 1 · Issue 2 · July 2026
Amogh N P
✦ In loving memory of Amogh N P — Architect · Designer · Visionary ✦
The Fagus Works at Alfeld (Walter Gropius, 1911) — one of the first buildings with a glass curtain wall, its corners dissolved into glass; an early landmark of the Modern Movement.
Unit IVHistory of Architecture - IV

The Modern Movement

Ornament falls away and architecture rebuilds itself around function, space and the machine — the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Mies.

≈ 42 min + study taskBy Amogh N. P

In the 1920s a generation decided to start over. They swept away ornament, historical style and the whole weight of the past, and asked what architecture should be if it were built honestly for the machine age, from the frame and its freedoms. The answers came fast and confident: the Bauhaus united art and industry, Le Corbusier called the house "a machine for living in" and wrote down his Five Points, and Mies van der Rohereduced building to steel, glass and space with two words — "less is more."

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to — mapped to the course outcomes for History of Architecture IV:

1
CO4 · Understand

Explain the core principles of the Modern Movement — functionalism, honesty of structure, and the rejection of ornament and historical style.

2
CO4 · Understand

Describe the aims of the Bauhaus and its union of art, craft and industry under Walter Gropius.

3
CO4 · Analyse

State and explain Le Corbusier's Five Points of a New Architecture through the Villa Savoye.

4
CO6 · Analyse

Explain Mies van der Rohe's 'less is more' and how the International Style became a shared modern language.

What the moderns believed

The modern credo

Four moves define the movement: subtract the ornament, codify the frame's freedoms into Le Corbusier's Five Points, reduce to essentials with Mies, and — underneath it all — treat architecture as flowing space and volume rather than solid mass.[1, 3]

Le Corbusier's Five Points 1 pilotis 4 ribbon window 2 free plan · 3 free façade 5 roof garden
DiagramLe Corbusier's Five Points on one house: pilotis lifting it off the ground, a free plan, a free façade, a long ribbon window, and a roof garden on the flat roof

Functionalism and honesty

The Modern Movement's first move was subtraction. Adolf Loos had already argued (provocatively) that ornament was a kind of crime — wasted labour dishonest to the modern age. The moderns took the frame's freedom and ran: strip off applied decoration and historical dress, show structure and materials honestly, and let a building's FORM come from its FUNCTION and construction. Beauty was to come from proportion, space and precision, not from carved detail.[1, 3]

Mass vs volume: the modern shift Mass — heavy, carved, solid Volume — thin planes, open space space flows around a few planes
DiagramSolid mass versus modern volume: a heavy carved solid block on the left, and a set of thin floor and wall planes on columns enclosing open flowing space on the right
The free plan Load-bearing — boxed rooms every wall carries load Free plan — columns carry, walls float grid of columns · free partitions
DiagramA cellular load-bearing plan of boxed rooms versus a free plan where a grid of columns carries the load and internal partitions curve and float freely
Bauhaus, Corbusier, Mies, De Stijl

The movement built

See the credo become buildings: Gropius's Bauhaus at Dessau, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye floating on its pilotis, Mies's weightless Barcelona Pavilion, and the pure abstraction of De Stijl — all gathered, in 1932, under one name: the International Style.[1, 2]

Art, craft and industry united

The German Werkbund (1907) argued that good design and industrial production should join forces; Peter Behrens designed factories and products alike. Out of this, Walter Gropius founded the BAUHAUS (1919), the century's most influential design school. Its aim: reunite art, craft and industry and design for mass production. Gropius's own Bauhaus building at Dessau (1926) is a manifesto — a glass-curtain-walled workshop wing, asymmetrical interlocking volumes, flat roofs, and no ornament at all.[1, 3]

The Bauhaus building at Dessau (Gropius, 1926) — a glass curtain-walled workshop wing, interlocking asymmetrical volumes and flat roofs, with no ornament.
PhotoThe Bauhaus building at Dessau (Gropius, 1926) — a glass curtain-walled workshop wing, interlocking asymmetrical volumes and flat roofs, with no ornament.JensKunstfreund · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) — a flat roof floating on chrome columns over planes of marble, glass and water; pure flowing space.
PhotoMies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) — a flat roof floating on chrome columns over planes of marble, glass and water; pure flowing space.Ashley Pomeroy at English Wikipedia · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
De Stijl: architecture as sliding planes independent planes, straight lines, primary colour — Rietveld, Mondrian
DiagramA De Stijl composition of independent overlapping rectangular planes and straight lines with blocks of primary red, blue and yellow, in the manner of Rietveld and Mondrian
At a glance

Old mass vs new volume

AspectOneThe other
Where beauty comes fromBefore — carved ornament and historical styleModern — proportion, space, structure and precision
The building asOlder — solid mass, carved and heavyModern — thin planes enclosing flowing volume
Le Corbusier'A house is a machine for living in'The Five Points: pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon window, roof garden
Mies van der Rohe'Less is more'; 'God is in the details'Steel + glass grid, free-flowing open space
ReachEarlier styles — tied to place and craftInternational Style — one portable modern language, worldwide
Vocabulary

Key terms

The Modern Movement

The 1920s–30s architecture built on functionalism, honesty of structure, and the rejection of ornament and historical style.

Functionalism

The principle that a building's form should follow from its function and construction, not from inherited style.

Bauhaus

The German design school (1919, Gropius) that united art, craft and industry and shaped modern design worldwide.

Pilotis

Slender columns that lift a building off the ground, freeing the space beneath — the first of Le Corbusier's Five Points.

Free plan

An interior freely arranged because the frame, not the internal walls, carries the loads.

Ribbon window

A long horizontal window running the full width of a wall, made possible by the load-bearing frame.

Less is more

Mies van der Rohe's dictum — beauty achieved through reduction to essential structure, space and fine detail.

International Style

The name (MoMA, 1932) for the modern architecture of volume-not-mass, regularity, and no ornament, as it spread worldwide.

Apply it

Study task

Take a small everyday house plan (your own home, or any simple one) and redraw it as a free plan: place a regular grid of columns to carry the loads, then rearrange the internal partitions freely — open up the living space, curve a wall if you like. Then list which of Le Corbusier's Five Points your redesign now uses, and which it doesn't.

Check your understanding

Self-assessment

1. Which is NOT one of Le Corbusier's Five Points of a New Architecture?

2. The deepest idea shared across the Modern Movement is that architecture is about —

3. The Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius, aimed to —

In a nutshell

Recap

The Modern Movement of the 1920s stripped away ornament and historical style and rebuilt architecture around function, honesty of structure, and the frame's freedom.
The Bauhaus (Gropius) reunited art, craft and industry; Le Corbusier called the house 'a machine for living' and set out his Five Points, built at the Villa Savoye.
Mies van der Rohe reduced building to steel, glass and flowing space — 'less is more' — while De Stijl and Constructivism pushed pure abstract composition.
Named the International Style at MoMA in 1932 — volume not mass, regularity, no ornament — modern architecture became a portable language that spread worldwide, India included.
The evidence

References & further reading

  1. [1]Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (4th ed.). London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
  2. [2]Francis D.K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek & Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture (3rd ed.). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
  3. [3]William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (3rd ed.). London: Phaidon, 1996.
  4. [4]Villa Savoye and gatehouse — UNESCO World Heritage Centre (The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, inscribed 2016). https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1321/
  5. [5]Bauhaus sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau — UNESCO World Heritage Centre (inscribed 1996, extended 2017). https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/729/

Further reading

  • Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (Vers une architecture). Dover / Frances Lincoln.
  • William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900. Phaidon.
  • Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Architectural Press.

Sources gathered and fact-checked June 2026. Published values vary by source, sample and method — treat as indicative and confirm against the cited standard before structural use.

The road ahead

Where this course goes next

The International Style promised one honest, universal architecture. Unit V asks what happened when that promise met the real, plural world — Brutalism, Postmodernism, High-Tech, Deconstructivism and Critical Regionalism — and follows the modern story into independent India, from Le Corbusier's Chandigarh and Kahn's Ahmedabad to Correa, Doshi and today's sustainable practice.