I'm not fussy, but…

international-style

It’s not as egregious as the errant statistics in last week’s New Yorker, but my heart sank just a little bit when I read the following in Peter Boyer’s unremarkable story on the US auto industry: 

The engineering and research facility, designed by Eero Saarinen, was considered a triumph in the Internal Modern style, with its low glazed-brick buildings and interiors that featured suspended granite stairways with stainless-steel spindles. 

Saarinen, of course, designed in the International Modern style. It’s odd, in any case, to use that phrase. The famous 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock, was titled “The International Style”. That came to describe a particular variant of Modern architecture. There’s something not quite right, even slightly archaic, about International Modern as a phrase. To say nothing about Internal Modern.

4 thoughts on “I'm not fussy, but…

  1. David Derrick

    Andrew Cover, whom you may remember, has coined the name Roman Internet to describe postmodern neoclassical. I think that’s a great architectural term and deserves wide circulation.

    Reply

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