Goodbye to Modern Architecture.

American architects gained international stature in the 1950s and 1960s with their gleaming high-rise buildings of reflecting glass and steel. The generation of architects trained by Mies van der Rohe put modern architecture, the International Style as it was known, on the map. These building designs were simple, unadorned, and built with modern materials that expressed their structure. The cardinal rules of modernism were that less is more and form follows function. The International Style maintained that the same building could be built anywhere — New York, Lagos, or Stockholm. These buildings made no reference to history or to the cityscape around them.

Hello, Postmodernism.

By the late 1960s a handful of innovative architects turned away from the cool distance of modern architectural design. Tired of glass-box monuments in the cityscape, younger architects wanted to break the...