Definitions for "International Style"
An architectural style that emerged in several European countries between 1910 and 1920 that joined structure and exterior design into a non-eclectic form based on rectangular geometry and growing out of the basic function and structure of the building.
Whereas Modernism refers to a complete break with the past, which was not so much a movement as a way of thinking, 'International Style' was the name of an exhibition in New York in the thirties and the name promptly stuck. Buildings by Le Corbusier, such as his Villa Savoie at Poissy near Paris and Walter Gropius' Bauhaus art school had flat roofs and large expanses of glass and were labelled as being international style.
A term coined by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell-Hitchcock for an exhibition at the MOMA in New York. It defined modern architecture's characteristics as absence of ornament, purity of form and the use of the flat roof.