The Look.

World War II indirectly brought modern architecture to the United States. Modern architecture emphasized function over form and simplicity over elaboration and embraced new materials and metals. The cool surfaces of glass and metal characteristic of what Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock called the International Style captured the modern fascination with technology and applied it to big and small structures alike. One center of modernist architecture was the Bauhaus in Germany, which gained notoriety in the 1930s through its principle designers Peter Bejrems, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer. Their "monuments to modernism" owed nothing outwardly to traditional and local architectural vocabularies but instead emphasized the inseparability of structure (materials used and the foundations of the structure) and form (style).

New Arrivals.

One important and immediate effect of the war on American architecture came in...