The Epic of the International Style

The International Style is told as architecture searching for a language without a passport, carried from Paris, Berlin and Dessau to New York and named in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Its principles follow in turn: crossing borders, glass and steel, open space, the reduction of applied ornament and less is more, with Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building, the Weissenhof Estate and the United Nations Headquarters as stations. Then the glass city spreads to Asia, Latin America and beyond until office towers begin to resemble one another. The book closes by separating a universal architecture from a world in which every city looks the same.