¥ ÒIf the next
25 years are less disturbed by depressions and wars than the last
have been, I suspect that our architecture will grow more diverse in
kind. But I doubt if we will, for
the next generation or more, lose contact altogether with the International Style, if
that be interpreted as broadly as it was meant to be in 1932.
¥
¥ The International Style was not
presented, in the 1932 book which gave first currency to the phrase, as a
closed system; nor was it intended to be the whole of modern architecture, past, present, and
future. Perhaps it
has become convenient now to use the phrase chiefly to condemn the
literal and unimaginative application of the design clichŽs of 25 years
ago; if that is really the case, the term had better be forgotten. The Òtraditional
architecture,Ó which still bulked so large in 1932, is
all but dead by now. The living
architecture of the twentieth century may well be called merely ÔmodernÕ.Ó