Modern Movement in history of architecture is the search for a rational and democratic architecture in the 1920s. In one sense, the ?Modern Movement? in history of architecture was born in Weimar Germany and certainly its enduring principles have a post-war optimistic social flavour. Modernism offered a new possibility of rational utility and democratic comfort, centred on the professional skills of planning and construction in an economic and subtle manner. The strength of these concerns inevitably caused the clamour about style to fade into the background. The visual fixation could, it seemed, be broken, and the frame of reference changed. From then on science and technology became increasingly important, as did the social goals of equality of provision and shelter for democratic freedoms. It was a reduced and limited version of this optimistic programme that some called “functionalism”.

The first design school to teach on “Modernist” principles was the Bauhaus (1919-33), in Weimar, Dessau and then Berlin. It was inspired by Walter Gropius, its first director, who was succeeded by Hannes Meyer and finally by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. However, few original designers were happy with the term “International Style”, coined by Hitchcock and Johnson in the USA, which simply grouped their architecture together by its image. Gropius wrote in 1935: “A Bauhaus style would have been a confession of failure”; Le Corbusier in 1936: “Let us abolish schools ? the Corbu school together with the Vignola school, I beg you!” No-one, however, was more concerned with the visual than Le Corbusier.

Even those least fixated on the visual were concerned with issues of economy, with lightness and the appearance of lightness. The “polemic of objectivity” led to rigorously rational structures, an excitement with the developing possibilities of steel framing (and new welding techniques), new methods of timber framing, lightweight cladding and mass production. At last architects were taking up the ideas developed by 19th-century engineers.

The other stimulus to a new form of architecture was in the need for new housing. By the 1920s and 1930s, housing was a central concern in the developed European countries: the multiple productions of convenient, affordable small dwellings. Massive developments of houses following the Modernist principles outlined above created a completely new type of place, the most outstanding being in Holland and in Germany where, in the late 1920s, much more housing was being built than in France or England.

Model estates like the Werkbund Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart (1927) and the Werkbundsiedlung, Vienna (1932) demonstrated the fundamentally similar intentions of the wide range of contributing designers. Sadly, the subsequent generation of architects, while living in their changed social world, mimicked the forms they remembered from this time ? white, box-like shapes, flat roofs, long windows, building off the ground and “abstract” compositions, but forgot the underlying purpose behind such transitory emblems.