SECOND PHASE INTERNATIONAL
The Second Phase International Style is the immediate successor to the International Style from which it emerged. The style shows various influences including that of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other architects associated with the Bauhaus, notably Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. These and other Modern architects were forced to flee Germany in the 1930s and their presence in this country was dominant influence on contemporary architecture of the period.
There is also a relationship to the history of American Modern architecture including the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra. Other residential architects of this period working in the Second Phase International Style include Philip Johnson, Craid Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, and Charles Eames. Many of the houses in this style show a combination of these European and American influences reconciled in a single building.
Conceptually, this style encompasses functionalism and reductivism in which the design of the house was derived from a set of functional concerns expressed with austere simplicity.
Some of these houses may also be described as Miesian in style, referring to the later work done in this country by Mies in which buildings are little more than skeletal frameworks filled in with glass.
The first International Style could be seen as traditionally sited “machines for living” as distinguished from the Second Phase, which was more concerned with sculptural volumes, often dramatically or picturesquely sited.
The term is derived from “International Style,” coined in the 1930s by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson.
Defining Characteristics:
• Horizontally oriented but with strong secondary verticals
• Uniform handling of the walls
• Large areas of clear of tinted glazing
• Glass and metal curtain walls
• Rectilinear conception of building’s volumes
• No ornament
• Walls eaveless
• Use of the cantilever
• Flat and unorthodox roofs
Information and some images from Historic Denver guide books, including
"A Guide to Denver's Architectural Styles and Terms."
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