What we can learn from the world’s obsession with midcentury modern architecture

Midcentury modern architecture, it seems, will never go out of style. After suffering a blip of critical revulsion in the 1980s and early ’90s, this movement based in artful simplicity, functionality, and modernity roared back and hasn’t faded since. But what does modernism—midcentury or otherwise—offer that makes us keep returning to it? What did its practitioners know? 

A new book, Modernist Icons: Midcentury Houses and Interiors, proposes a few answers. This is not a book that scholars of the period will look to for great new revelations. It doesn’t levy many worthwhile indictments of the movement­—malignant tendencies like obliterating historical contexts, favoring (like most architecture) the white and well-connected, and in its worst cases losing touch with the human experience in favor of cold, top-down grandiosity. But it effectively captures the spirit and attributes of the movement—a spirit that arguably has as much resonance today as it did during the Modernist movement’s beginnings in the early twentieth century.

Perhaps the least surprising of modernism’s still-relevant traits is its elegant simplicity and practical functionality (all the more important today, when a constant cacophony of information and imagery bombards our senses). While many preceding styles had foregrounded historical styles and intricate applied ornament, modernism’s merger of art and industry, focus on structural honesty, and almost complete rejection of the past, made it something altogether new. 

Paging through the book is a mostly calming experience, filled with simple forms and lines, straightforward use of materials like steel, concrete, plate glass, plastic, and aluminum. Just look at two of the most famous modernist houses of all time: Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949) and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1951). These immaculate, rectangular structures consist almost exclusively of glass and steel, and contain minimal, uncluttered furniture. These are not fussy buildings; they are pared down vessels intended to accentuate their industrial materials and accentuate their bucolic surroundings, creating, as the book says, “a fluidity between interior and exterior spaces.”