Modernist architecture is the style that dominated Western building design between roughly the 1930s and 1960s, and its signature look—flat roofs, open floor plans, curtain windows, and minimal ornament—was never meant as mere aesthetics. As Architectural Digest's guide to the movement explains, architects of the era were guided by the rule that "form follows function," which prompted them to consider what a building should achieve for the user before what it should look like. The visual features, in other words, were the visible output of a philosophy about improving daily life.
What is Modernist Architecture?
Modernism emerged in the early twentieth century as a deliberate break with historical styles and ornament. In Britain, the term Modern Movement describes the rigorous modernist designs of the 1930s to the early 1960s, with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier identified by the Royal Institute of British Architects as the movement's pioneers. Le Corbusier in particular had a profound impact on the design of many public housing schemes in Britain.
The style's defining features, as catalogued by RIBA, include functional design, asymmetrical compositions built from geometric forms, flat roofs, an emphasis on horizontal lines, and light-filled open-plan interiors with a feeling of spaciousness. Ornamentation was minimal or absent, with a tendency toward a white or neutral palette. The materials were equally modern: reinforced concrete, steel frames, curtain walls, and ribbon windows.
What separates Modernism from earlier revivals is that these choices were analytical. Architectural Digest characterizes the approach as functional rather than decorative, and the movement was, in its own telling, deeply intertwined with social and political philosophies aimed at improving everyday living conditions.
Principle 1: Form Follows Human Function
The phrase "form follows function" was coined in 1893 by Louis Sullivan, the influential Chicago School architect and mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and it became a central tenet of the modernist movement. But the deeper reading of Sullivan's idea, preserved in Hugh Dalziel Duncan's introduction to Chicago's Famous Buildings, is that the function in question was not mechanical but human. Sullivan asked: "What is the proper form for a democratic architecture, and what kinds of human relationships will be possible in this new architecture?"
By this account, the architect's task was not simply to manage traffic flow, air circulation, heating, or lighting, but to ask how the building could enhance the human satisfaction of acting within it and within the communities it shapes. That is a demanding brief: it treats a floor plan as a social instrument, not just an efficient diagram.
Walter Gropius carried a parallel conviction into the Bauhaus. As a history of modernist principles recounts, Gropius saw the futility of fighting the machine, and under his leadership the Bauhaus taught that everything people make should follow nature's rules and derive its form from the demands of its function and the character of the materials used. The practical result in buildings was the open-plan interior: spaces freed from unnecessary partitions so that use, not convention, dictated the layout.
