Far Eastern University

Institute of Architecture and Fine Arts

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Week 15.
Topic: MAN AND THE NEW SOCIETY: INTERNATIONAL STYLE

Overview
This lecture explains the historical developments that paved the way for the blossoming of modern architecture and
the different styles that arose out of it, specifically the International style. Included in the lecture will be notable artists,
architects, builders and pioneers of the early 20th century decorative arts movement and proto-modern architecture
and design and their contributions. An in-depth discussion on the architectural types during this period will likewise be
included.

Objectives
At the end of this lesson, the learner should be able to:
• Analyze and explain the characteristics of modern architecture;
• Draw and write about notable architectural types/examples from 19th century Modern Architecture; and,
• Identify and discern stylistic features of different architectural types/examples built during this period.

References
• Burden, Ernest E., Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture. New York: McGraw-Hill, c2012.
• Ching, Francis, A Visual Dictionary of Architecture. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, c2012.
• Cruickshank, Dan, Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture (Twentieth Edition). Oxford: Architectural
Press, c1996
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Week 15.
Topic: MAN AND THE NEW SOCIETY: INTERNATIONAL STYLE

The objectives of the discussion are to tackle the following:

1. Introduction
2. Origins and Development
3. Reasons why it came
4. Characteristics
5. Regions
6. Architects behind their notable works

What is international style?

• In architecture, the term "International Style" describes a type of design that
developed mainly in Germany, Holland and France, during the 1920s, before
spreading to America in the 1930s, where it became the dominant tendency
in American architecture during the middle decades of the 20th century. Although it
never became fashionable for single-family residential buildings in the United
States - despite the efforts of William Lescaze (1896-1969), Edward Durrell Stone
(1902-78), Richard Neutra (1892-1970)
• The International Style was especially suited to skyscraper architecture, where its
sleek "modern" look, absence of decoration and use of steel and glass, became
synonymous with corporate modernism during the period 1955-70. It also became
the dominant style of 20th century architecture for institutional and commercial
buildings, and even superseded the traditional historical styles for schools and
churches.

Origins and Development

The International Style emerged largely as a result of four factors that confronted
architects at the beginning of the 20th century:
(1) Increasing dissatisfaction with building designs that incorporated a mixture of
decorative features from different architectural periods, especially where the resulting
design bore little or no relation to the function of the building;
(2) The need to build large numbers of commercial and civic buildings that served a rapidly
industrializing society;
(3) The successful development of new construction techniques involving the use of steel,
reinforced concrete, and glass; and
(4) A strong desire to create a "modern" style of architecture for "modern man". This
underlined the need for a neutral, functional style, without any of the decorative
features of (say) Romanesque, Gothic, or Renaissance architecture, all of which were
old-fashioned, if not obsolete.

International Style is the phase of the modern movement that emerged in Europe and in United
States during 1920s and 1930s. The term was first used by Philip Johnson and henry- Russell
Hitchcock in connection with a 1932 architectural exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York City. Architects working in the international style gave new emphasis to the
expression of structure, the lightening of mass and the enclosure of dynamic spaces.
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• The aim of Hitchcock and Johnson as to define a style that would encapsulate modern architecture, and
they did this by the inclusion of specific architects.
• The Three Principles:
• First is Expression of volume rather than mass.
Second is Emphasis on balance rather than pre-conceived symmetry.
Third is Expulsion of applied ornament.

Reasons why the International Style came about

1. People were tired of overdone ornamentation of buildings.

2. Society was changing and evolving rapidly with industrialization.
3. New technology had revolutionized the construction industry.
4. The advent of the Nazis, with their disdain for modernism and their anti-
Semitic policies, led many leading European architects and designers to
flee the continent and go to USA.

Characteristics

The typical characteristics of International Style buildings includes:

• Rectilinear forms;
• Plane surfaces that are completely devoid of applied ornamentation;
• Open, even fluid, interior spaces.
• This early form of minimalism had a distinctively "modern look", reinforced
by its use of modern materials, including glass for the facade, steel for
exterior support, and concrete for interior supports and floors.
• Plain façade
• Use of glass
• Steel and Reinforced Concrete
• Simple clear and functional forms
• Neutral Colors
• Square and rectangular form
• Form Follows function and structural engineering
• Uncluttered Interior
• Use of sliding panels
• Use of windows in horizontal form, grid like rows
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Regions
Europe

In Europe the Three Most Important Figures in Modern Architecture:

1. Le Corbusier, France
2. Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe, Germany
3. Walter Gropius, Germany

Le Corbusier
• Real name: Charles Edouard Jeanneret- Gris
• Most responsible for formalizing International Modernism.
• Father of International Style.
• Fortunate enough to work in the offices of both Peter Behrens and Auguste
Perret.
• He and his friend Amedee Ozenfant setup a magazine entitled: Espirit
Nouveau, which underlined the need for a new architecture in tune with the
developments of machine age.
• “A house is a machine for living in”
• His fascination with machines in general and cars in particular appeared to
be implemented on his ideas.
• The Villa Savoye at Poissy (1928- 1929) neatly summarized his self
proclaimed
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“Five Points of Architecture”
• Free Plan,
• Free Façade
• Pilotis (supports that lift the building above the ground or water)
• A terrace
• And Ribbon Windows

Due to the dominance of the Beaux-Arts system, the design innovations taking place in other parts of Europe and in
the United States had only minimal resonance in France. For modernism to develop it needed someone who could
break through France’s cultural isolation and provide a suitable alternative. That person was Charles-Édouard
Jeanneret-Gris, who later changed his name to Le Corbusier (1887–1965), a Swiss-born architect who worked briefly
in the offices of Auguste Perret and Peter Behrens and then moved permanently to Paris at the age of twenty-nine, in
1916. Le Corbusier’s articles in L’Esprit nouveau as well as his epochal book, Vers une architecture (Towards a New
Architecture, 1923), became the most significant summary statements of the ideals of the modernist movement to
appear since World War I.

Villa Savoye, Poissy, near Paris (1928- 1929)

• In the 1920s, Le Corbusier designed a series of houses in Paris and its suburbs that explored and
demonstrated the possibilities of his Five Points. The Maisons La Roche-Jeanneret (1923), which now houses
the Foundation Le Corbusier, was a combined set of houses for two different clients.
• Le Corbusier responded to the spatial demands of the different households by designing interweaving layers
of spaces connected by a central court. The house was painted white, but on the inside, walls were painted
in a variety of soft hues of red, yellow, and blue, as well as white.

New York Headquarters, New York,

Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Sir Howard and Robertson, 1947-53
“Providing office accommodation for 3,400 employees, the United Nations Secretariat is a 39 story building with an
aluminum grille to conceal the equipment of the roof. The narrow end walls are of white marble; the other two elevations
are surface with green-tinted glass. Floors devoted with mechanical equipment divide these glass facades into three
parts…”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

• In 1927, the Werkbundheld a housing exhibition at Stuttgart which was overseen by Mies Van der Rohe, and
contributors included the rarified group of Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, J.J.P. Oud, Mart
Stam, and Bruno Taut.
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He worked in the family stone-carving business before he joined the office of Bruno Paul in Berlin.

Having worked for Peter Behrens(like Le Corbusier) Mies developed a design approach based on advanced structural
techniques and Prussian Classicism.

• He borrowed from the post and lintel construction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel for his designs in steel and glass.
• Third and last director of the Bauhaus
• “Less is more”

Weissenhof Apartments at Stuttgart, Germany, 1927

• One of the first and most defining manifestations of the International Style.

Barcelona Pavilion (German Pavilion) at Barcelona, Spain, 1928-9

• Built for the 1929 Barcelona exhibition
• Comprised a series of planes at angles to each other
• Vertical panels of travertine and glass were capped by the slab of the roof, and two pools acted as
reflectors.

H. Lange and J. Esters House at Krefeld, Germany, 1928

• Residential houses built between 1928 and 1930 in the Bauhaus style. The houses have now been
converted into museums for Contemporary art.
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Tugendhat House at Brno, Czech Republic, 1930

Walter Gropius
• The son of an architect, he studied at the Technical Universities in Munich
and Berlin.
• He joined the office of Peter Behrens in 1910 and three years later
established a practice with Adolph Meyer.
• For his early commissions, he borrowed from the Industrial Classicism
introduced by Behrens.
• In March 1919 he was elected chairman of the Working Council for Art and a
month later was appointed First Director of the Bauhaus.
• He was forced to leave Germany for the United States, where he became a
professor at Harvard University.
• He created innovative designs that borrowed materials and methods of
construction from modern technology.
• Believed in teamwork and an acceptance of standardization and
prefabrication
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• Introduced a screen wall system (curtain wall system) that utilized a structural steel frame to support the
floors and which allowed the external glass walls to continue without interruption.
• Curtain wall -an outer covering of a building in which the outer walls are non-structural, but merely keep out
the weather
• When glass is used as the curtain wall, a great advantage is that natural light can penetrate deeper within
the building.
• designed to resist air and water infiltration, sway induced by wind and seismic forces acting on the building,
and its own dead load weight forces

Fagus Works Shoe Factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, 1910-1

• One of the first truly modern buildings, the Fagus Works was essentially a cubic block incorporating glass
curtain walling that extended around corners with no need for additional support.
• The glass curtain walls demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function and Gropius’
concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class.

Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany, Walter Gropius, 1919-33

• an avant-garde school of art and design
• It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty that
included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and
Wassily Kandinsky
• Its core objective was a radical concept: to re-imagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts.
• architecture, sculpture, painting, cabinetmaking, textile workshop, metalworking, typography workshop, etc.
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Bauhaus- “house for building”

1925: The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house the school.
This building contained many features that later became hallmarks of modernist architecture, including steel-frame
construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan, throughout which Gropius distributed studio,
classroom, and administrative space for maximum efficiency and spatial logic.

The Glass Palace (Glaspaleis), a celebration of transparency, in Heerlen, Netherlands (1935)

• Formerly a fashion house and department store

• The architectural style is known as het Nieuwe Bouwen, which corresponds roughly to Modernism, Bauhaus
and International style in Netherland.
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• The visually most distinguishing aspect is the free-standing glass that covers three sides, which makes it
even more transparent than the famous Bauhaus building in Dessau and is part of the natural climate
control.

Sodra Angby Residential Area at Western Stockholm, Sweden, Edvin Engstrom, 1933-40
• Encompassing more than 500 buildings
• Blended an international or functionalist style with garden city ideals with influences from cubism
• Le Corbusier-inspired

Regions
North America

International style I (early Modern 1929- 1940)

International style II (early Modern 1945- 1970)
• Many European architects came to the United States in the
period preceding World War II (1939-45), bringing their new
ideas about modern design with them. In the 1930s American
architects began experimenting with the International style,
building upon the early 20th century American trends like the
Commercial, Bungalow and Prairie styles, and the
development of skyscrapers.

Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) Building, George Howe

and William Lescaze, 1932
• World’s first International skyscraper
• Designed by Swiss-born William Lescaze and American
George Howe
• 32 story tower with a skeleton of structural steel and ribbon-
like bands of windows

Ribbon windows are row of windows separated by vertical post, called mullions. Ribbon window can be used up high
on wall to bring added light to a room. Windows installed near the ceiling like this are called clerestory windows.

Architects who fled to United States:

• Marcel Breuer (Harvard Graduate School of Design)
• Walter Gropius (Harvard Graduate School of Design)
• Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe (Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology)
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And Architects that are already notable in United States:

• Louis Sullivan
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Irving Gill
• Philip Johnson

Marcel Breuer
• Breuer's early projects in the United States were largely domestic, but in 1952 he worked with Nervi and
Zehrfuss as architect for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. This prestigious work carried his practice into
the international field.
• His works were distinguished by an attention to detail and a clarity of expression.
• Cesca (a) and Wassily chairs (b)
His works are:
• Breur House I at Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1939
• Frank House at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1939
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Philip Johnson
• Real name: Philip Cortelyou Johnson
• Philip Johnson's buildings were luxurious in scale
and materials, featuring expansive interior space
and a classical sense of symmetry and elegance.
• Studied architecture under Marcel Breuer
• Was honored with the first Pritzer Architecture
Prize in recognition of "50 years of imagination and
vitality embodied in a myriad of museums, theaters,
libraries, houses, gardens and corporate
structures."
• A museum director, writer, and, most notably, an
architect known for his unconventional designs
• Embraced many influences, from the neoclassicism
of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and to the modernism of
Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.
• Studied architecture under Marcel Breuer
• “Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”

Philip Johnson’s Glass House at New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949

• A residence designed during his master degree thesis.
• Has been called one of the world's most beautiful and yet least functional homes
• An essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection
• His most famous work

His other works are:

• AT & T Headquarters, New York, 1984
• Transco Tower, Houston, TX, 1984
• Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, CA, 1980
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860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments at Chicago, Illinois, 1948-51

• skyscraper apartment towers, multi-family housing
• skyscraper –a building that seem to touch the sky and define the skyline of many prominent cities in the
world
• has to have a height of 500 ft (152 m) or more
• Beyond structural clarity and open plan, they set the standard for tall building design, as seen in Bunshaft’s
Lever House (1952) in NYC and, later, Mies’ Seagram building.
• Each building alone is symmetrical, comprised of 21’ square bays (5 across, 3 deep) with a total of 288
apartments
• The 38-story structure combines a steel moment frame and a steel and reinforced concrete core for lateral
stiffness. The concrete core shear walls extend up to the 17th floor, and diagonal core bracing (shear
trusses) extends to the 29th floor.
• Used 1,500 tons of bronze during construction
• Another interesting feature of the Seagram Building is the window blinds.
• Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions –fully open, halfway open/closed, or
fully closed to reduce the disproportionate appearance it makes when people using different windows will
draw blinds to different heights.
• Seagram Building at New York, New York, Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, 1954-1958
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His other works are:

• Gropius House at Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1937
• Harvard Graduate Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950

Tel Aviv (White City)

• Is the second most populated city in Israel

• Has the largest collection of buildings built in the International Style, anywhere in the world. Bauhaus
architecture flourished in Tel Aviv (as elsewhere in the country) in the 1930’s due in great part to the fact
that 17 former Bauhaus students, worked locally as architects.
• There are roughly 4,000 Bauhaus style buildings in Tel Aviv.
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• Arieh Sharon, Dov Carmi, Zeev Rechter, Pinchas Hueth, Josef Neufeld, Genia Averbuch Richard
Kauffmann and Erich Mendelsohn

• A large proportion of the buildings built can be found in the area planned by Patrick Geddes, whose plan
was to create a garden city.
• Laid out the streets and decided on block size and utilization
• Architects took advantage of the absence of established architectural conventions to put the principles of
modern architecture into practice.
• Citrus House, Karl Rubin, 1936 -1938
• First office block built on a steel frame in Tel Aviv

Assuta Hospital, Yosef Neufeld, 1934-1935

• Elongated buildings with flat roofs, rows of horizontal windows, smooth plastered walls and ledges of steel
piping
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Cooperative Workers Housing, Arieh Sharon, 1934-36
• Was built in the centre of Tel Aviv for the Histadrut housing company on a plot which had been especially
re-planned for the purpose

Modern Architecture
• Use of modern materials, adaptation of methods based on functionality planning, and the abandonment of
traditional methods that made the construction style very urban.
• Modern architecture is also popularly known by the names "neo-traditional architecture" and "functionalism“.
• Adjacent high-rises in Chicago, Illinois,IBM Plaza(right), by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, is a later example of
the clean rectilinear lines and glass of the International Style, whereas Marina City (left), by his student
Bertrand Goldberg, reflects a more sculptural Mid-Century Modern aesthetic.

Themes of Modern Architecture:

• The notion that “Form follows function”, a dictum originally expressed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s early mentor
Louis Sullivan, meaning that the result of design should derive directly from its purpose
• Simplicity and clarity of forms and elimination of “unnecessary detail”
• Visual expression of structure (as opposed to the hiding of structural elements)
• The related concept of “Truth to materials” –the true nature or natural appearance of a material ought to be
seen rather than concealed or altered to represent something else
• Use of industrially-produced materials; adoption of the machine aesthetic
• Particularly in International Style modernism, a visual emphasis on horizontal and vertical lines
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Early Modernism: In the United States

Frank Lloyd Wright
• Welsh American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures
and completed 500 works
• Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a
philosophy he called organic architecture.
• This philosophy was best exemplified by his design for Falling water (Kaufmann house- 1935), which has
been called "the best all-time work of American architecture"

Edgar J. Kaufmann had made a fortune made on his department stores. On the advice of his son, who was a student
at the Taliesin School of Architecture, he engaged Wright in 1935 to design a family weekend and summer retreat on
their woodland property at Bear Run in western Pennsylvania. (Their permanent residence was in Pittsburgh.) Unlike
the bread-and-butter Usonian houses, Falling water (1936–37) is a dramatic statement on the possibilities of reinforced
concrete expressed most memorably by a triple set of deeply overhanging cantilevered terraces that appear to float
over a dramatic waterfall. The Kaufmanns had asked for a house from which they could look at the waterfall, but Wright
built them one that was literally over the waterfall instead. A stair in the living room leads down to the top of the waterfall
and to a small platform where people can sit and dangle their feet in the water.

Wright’s justifications for his design lay in his conception of “organic architecture,” a decidedly subjective term that for
him indicated a building integrated into its site and context in the form of a sympathetic counterstatement. The diagonal
plan and stepped section, for example, is a response to the contours of the site, a point particularly important to Wright
and anticipated in part in earlier projects like the Freeman House.
(1924–25). Here the ornamenting of the building’s surface has given way to rustic, horizontally coursed yellowish stones
that contrast with the smooth, stuccoed surfaces of the balconies and rooflines. Windows are hidden in recesses, with
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thinly mullioned glazing capturing some of the spaces in between the floor and roof to create indoor outdoor rooms.
When viewed from below the waterfall, the house seems to hover provocatively over the site, its straight lines
contrasting with the huge boulders, and the white balconies contrasting with the forest’s rich foliage. The stone walls
that anchor the cantilevers mimic the stratified pattern of the rock ledges and rise up into the house in the form of
towers that anchor the composition and seem almost like ancient ruins. Since the site is quite remote, Wright built a
separate servants’ quarter and garage just up the hill from the house. Today the site today is much more forested than
it was originally, concealing the building more than Wright probably would have liked.

The Larkin Administration Building in 1906

• The five story dark red brick building used pink tinted mortar and utilized steel frame construction. It was noted
for many innovations, including air conditioning, stained glass windows, built-in desk furniture, and suspended
toilet bowls

The Robie House, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois.

• Renowned as the greatest example of his Prairie style, the first architectural style that was uniquely American.

Early Modernism in Italy: Futurism

• Futurist Architecture
• Early 20th Century in Italy
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• Characterized by anti-historicism, strong chromaticism, long dynamic lines, suggesting speed, motion,
urgency and lyricism

Lingotto factory in Turin. With its test track on the roof, was recognized in 1934 as the first futurist invention in
architecture.
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Early Modernism in Russia: Constructivism
Melnikov house near Arbat Street, Moscow by Konstantin Melkinov

• Following the1917 revolutions in Russia, the societal upheaval and

change was coupled with a desire for a new aesthetic, one more in
keeping with the Communist philosophy and societal goals of the new
state, in contrast to the ornate Neoclassicism that had prevailed prior.
• Combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly
Communist social purpose
• Fell out of favor around 1932

Early Modernism in Western Europe: Arts and Crafts Movement

The AEG Turbinenfabrik ("turbine factory"), 1909, designed by Peter Behrens

• As a result of isolation during World War I, an art and design movement developed unique to the
Netherlands, known as De Stijl (literally"the style"), characterized by its use of line and primary colors. While
producing little architectural design overall, its ideas would go on to impact the architects and designers of
the 1920s

Early Modernism in Western Europe: Expressionism

The Second Goetheanum, 1924-1928, in Basel, Switzerland

• An architectural movement that developed in Northern Europe during the first decades of the 20th century in
parallel with the expressionist visual and performing arts
• Notable use of sculptural forms and the novel use of concrete as artistic elements
• Characterized by an early-modernist adoption of novel materials, formal innovation, and very unusual
massing, sometimes inspired by natural biomorphic forms.
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Early Modernism in Western Europe: Modernism reaches critical mass

The Bauhaus building at Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius
• It was at this time, during the 1920s, that the most important figures in Modern architecture established their
reputations.

Early Modernism Style Moderne: tradition and modernism

Greyhound Bus Station in Cleveland, Ohio, showing the Streamline Moderne Aesthetic.
• Following WWI, a stylistic movement would develop that embraced ideas of both modernism (or at least
modernization) and traditionalism.

Early Modernism: Wartime innovation

Quonset huten route to Japan
• World War II (1939–1945) and its aftermath was a major factor in driving innovation in building technology,
and in turn, architectural possibilities. The wartime industrial demands resulting in a supply shortage (of
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such things as steel and other metals), in turn leading to the adoption of new materials, and advancement or
novel use of old ones. These factors would accelerate experiments with prefabricated building.

Later Modern Architecture: Mid-century Reactions

Saint John's Abbey Church, Collegeville, Minnesota, United States, by Marcel Breuer, 1958-1961

• As the International Style took hold, others architects reacted to or strayed from its purely functionalist
forms, while at the same time retaining highly modernist characteristics.
• Mid-century modernism or organic modernism, was very popular, due to its democratic and playful nature.
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Later Modern Architecture: Neo-Formalism
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, illustrating an example of "New Formalism
• Another stylistic reaction was "New Formalism" (or "Neo-Formalism", sometimes shortened to "Formalism").
Like the pre-war "Stripped Classicism", "New Formalism" would blend elements of classicism (at their most
abstracted levels) with modernist designs.

Later Modern Architecture: Brutalism and Monumentality

Boston City Hall, part of Government Center, Boston, Massachusetts (Gerhardt Kallma)

• 1950s to the Mid 1970s

• Term derived from the use of "Béton brut" ("raw concrete"), unadorned, often with the mold marks remaining
• Would ultimately be applied more broadly to include the use of other materials in a similar fashion, such as
brickwork

Later Modern Architecture: Tube Architecture

John Hancock Center, designed in 1965 and completed in 1969, introduced the trussed tube structural
design
• a three dimensional space structure composed of three, four, or possibly more frames, braced frames, or
shear walls, joined at or near their edges to form a vertical tube-like structural system capable of resisting
lateral forces in any direction by cantilevering from the foundation.
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Later Modern Architecture: Post-Modern Architecture (The New International Style)

Portland Public Services Building, Oregon, Michael Graves, 1979-82

• People were becoming bored and alienated by the severe cubic shapes and abstract geometry of
Modernism. It was too uniform and lacked any sort of historical reference which could provide a feeling of
continuity –an idea of place, time and, above all, identity.
• Employment of columns, pediments and rustication and use of primary colors
• Coined in the 1970s by the architectural critic Charles Jencks
• Described as theatrical, kitschy and playful
• An example is AT & T headquarters by Philip Johnson
• Draws upon influences and styles as varied as Classical, Egyptian, and Art Deco.

Later Modern Architecture: Neo-modern Architecture

One World Trade Center (2013)
Tour First (2011)
• Neo-modernism is a reaction to Postmodernism and its embrace of pre-modern elements of design.
Examples of modern architecture in the 21st Century include One World Trade Center (2013) in New York
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City and Tour First (2011), the tallest office building in the Paris Metropolitan area. Emporis named
Chicago's Modern Aqua Tower (2009) its skyscraper of the year.

Examples of contemporary modern architecture

Borgata (2003) in Atlantic City.
Trump International Hotel and Tower (2009) in Chicago.
Eureka Tower (2006) in Melbourne.