Modernism

On this cast

• Recessed ground floorThe ground floor is pulled back behind the columns and wrapped in glass. Its curve follows the turning circle of a car.
• PilotisSlim round columns lift the house off the ground, so the garden runs underneath. Point 1 of Le Corbusier's Five Points.
• Free façadeSmooth white render with no ornament. The concrete frame carries the floors, so the outer wall is just a skin.
• Ribbon windowOne long horizontal window across the whole front, possible only because the wall carries no load.
• Roof gardenA flat roof used as a terrace, its screen walls curved like a liner's funnels. The ground you built on is given back on top.
• Ship railingsThin tubular rails, borrowed from ocean liners, the modernists' favourite machines.

How to spot it from the street

1. Flat roof, smooth white or glass walls
2. Long horizontal ribbon windows
3. No ornament at all
4. Often lifted on slim columns (pilotis)

Where it came from

After the First World War architects in Germany, France and the Netherlands rejected ornament outright. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919, and Le Corbusier set out his 'Five Points of a New Architecture' in the 1920s: pilotis, a free plan, a free façade, the ribbon window and the roof garden. His Villa Savoye (1928–31) is the five points made into a house.

A 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called it the International Style, and after 1945 it spread everywhere, from social housing to corporate glass towers. Its trick is the frame: once columns carry the floors, the walls can be thin, the windows long and the ground floor open.