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Modern 1930-1940 Building Styles At the peak of the Period Revival’s popularity, the American public received a glimpse of a new kind of architecture, an architecture that rejected historicism. The new architecture, as it was called by its European pioneers, soon became known in this country as “modern architecture.” Its American premier was not without controversy. The first glimpses came in the form of a number of European entrants to the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition. The architects of these designs seized the opportunity to apply their theories of modern design to that uniquely American building type—the skyscraper. The winning design, however, was a tower in the Gothic Revival style, and American architecture did not assimilate modern European design ideas for almost a decade. By 1923, one of the foreign entrants in the competition, Eliel Saarinen, had permanently settled in the United States. The same year also saw the immigration of a young Viennese architect, Richard Neutra, to southern California. Before the decade ended, Neutra’s design for Dr. Lovell’s Health house in the Hollywood Hills presented America with its first major residence in the International style of modern architecture. In Europe, a number of significant events took place during the 1920s that affected the future of modern design. Architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, a new school of design in Germany, in the early 1920s. By 1926, a new school facility designed by Gropius became symbolic of both the new architecture and the school’s philosophy. In 1925 Paris hosted the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes–the origin of the name of the popular Art Deco style. The 1927 League of Nations Competition also brought to public attention a number of modern European architects, in particular the French-Swiss Le Corbusier, who had previously been known for his elegant, modern country villas. Also in 1927, his work and the work of a number of other modern European architects appeared at the highly influential housing settlement of Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, Germany. Sponsored by the German Werkbund, it was the first
