The International Style and Modernist Urban Planning

Review questions and answers covering the International Style, modernist urban renewal, highway expansion, and public housing.

What are the core physical characteristics of the "International style" of architecture?

Utilitarian, minimalist, flat buildings made up of steel, glass, & concrete.

What global narrative and historical shift did the International Style aim to symbolize?

It created a "unifying narritave" to "build the would anew" in the $20^{\text{th}}$ century, symbolizing societal progress and a step away from the chaos & violence of WWII.

According to the notes, when was the United Nations founded, and what does it represent?

Founded in $1952$, it served as a capital dedicated to global peace + prosperity and stands as an example of the "International Style."

How was the architectural principle "Form Follows Function" defined?

Buildings made with simple, rational material, with design existing only out of necessity in producing.

What three actions outlined the modernist approach to "clearing out the rot" of old cities?

1). Move people out of the streets into the suburbs; 2). Industrialize the city and build new architecture to house the new workforce; 3). Destroy homes/old architecture to make highways and continue making the automobile the dominant way of life.

What is the historical significance of the Cross-Bronx Highway?

It was the first automobile highway ever built and the primary example of "hacking through an overpopulated metro-politic with a meat-axe."

What were the primary outcomes of the National Interstate Highway: Defense Act ($1956$)?

It added $41{,}000\,\text{miles}$ of interstate highways across the country as a form of industrialization and displaced people living in poor, urban areas of cities.

How is "Technocracies" described in the context of urban planning?

Leaving government decisions to the needs of urban development.

What does the concept of "killing the street" refer to?

Making streets irrelevant through new architecture by bulldozing inner-city slums for roads and flashy "modern" anchors, while building homes on the outside of cities to move wealth out and keep poverty in.

How was the International Style applied in "The Expressway World"?

As social progress through tech & design, where modernist architecture creating international order also meant giving opportunity to the lowest income part of the country.

What was the utopian ideology of modernist public housing, and what happened to it?

Non-discriminatory housing to provide opportunity for all (e.g., Bonche Hall, Dakstra Hall), which died with the $1960\text{s}$, marking the end of modernist architecture.