Note 443 — CHAPTER 22 THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH

That is, Barr proposed the title The International Style for the book prepared by myself and Philip Johnson to go with this Exhibition, drawing the word ‘international’ from the title of Gropius’s Internationale Architektur. For various reasons the name ‘International Style’ has often been castigated since 1932; yet it is still recurrently used, with or without apology, by many critics. The term is, for example, used in English and in a rather unflattering sense by Gillo Dorfles in L’ Architettura moderna—one chapter is entitled ‘“L’lnternational Style” ed i nuovi regionalismi’—with no indication of its origin. Since this term had rather generally acquired a pejorative meaning, I avoided using it as far as possible in this book, preferring the vaguer but less controversial phrase ‘modern architecture of the second generation’ despite its clumsiness. For the possible claim that the original meaning of ‘International Style’, as used by Barr, Johnson, and myself, still retained some validity in the early fifties, see my article ‘The “International Style” Twenty Years After’, Architectural Record, CX (1952), 89-97. (See Epilogue.)