The International Style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932 is often cited as the beginning of modernism in America. Curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the exhibition attempted to codify European trends alongside examples of the modern style in America. This International Style—characterized by white walls, flexible plans and a glass-and-steel industrial aesthetic—became the prevailing architectural style in the United States following the Second World War.

Meanwhile, in prominent schools of architecture, European architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius transformed American architectural education into atelier-based institu-tions that embraced the tenets of the European modernist tradition.

In the 1950s, glass box modernism became the preferred style for American corporations, institutions and universities; examples include works by Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. At the same time, American architects embraced brutalism, based on the later Le Corbusier and the philosophical discourses of authenticity. This style is exemplified by Louis I. Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery (1951) and Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture building at Yale (1964).

The bombastic nature of Rudolph’s building served as a point of rebellion for the student followers of architects such as Robert Venturi, who favored a more pluralistic approach, or what he called a “messy vitality,” over the bland formalism of high modernist practice. With the publication of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, these sentiments were championed by colleagues like Robert A.M. Stern and Charles Moore.

Venturi’s ideas were further elaborated in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which celebrated the stylistic collision of the Las Vegas strip, and described the specific kitsch of the area as a form of American vernacular. This eclecticism became known as postmodernism in architecture, and rapidly took hold in both the academy and the corporate realm. The pervasive nature of post-modernism is evidenced by the erstwhile modernists who embraced this style, for instance Philip Johnson’s AT&T building in Manhattan (1983) or Michael Graves’ Portland Public Services building (1982).

At the same time as Venturi’s historicist critique, New York intellectuals and academics reacted against what they derisively called modern “style” during the 1960s.

Following global events of May 1968, a split emerged in the architectural profession between the academy and the corporate milieu in the United States. Under the teachings of British architectural historian Colin Rowe—whose reconceptualization of architectural history advocated a typological understanding of historical form—influential figures such as the New York Five (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier) transformed the intellectual climate of American schools of architecture. Because of their belief in autonomous architecture with its own series of generative rules, the teachings of the New York Five exacerbated the division between universities and the profession, creating a perceived split between architectural theory and practice. While corporate firms such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill were designing the John Hancock Tower of 1970, for example, Peter Eisenman was questioning notions of domesticity with a divided bedroom in his House VI in Connecticut.

Eisenman’s efforts to question architectural norms through formal manipulation gradually became deconstructivism, which attempted to link architectural discourse and post-Derridean literary theory The pinnacle of this movement—characterized by tipping walls and non-orthogonal geometric organizations—was exemplified by Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center (1994) in Columbus, Ohio. The hermeticism of this academic architecture suffered a crisis of legitimacy during the 1990s with increasing globalization and the pressure of market forces.

Another trend in American architecture that characterized the immediate postwar cultural context was the persistently American vernacular style that took hold, particularly in the Midwest and West Coast, as a form of regionalist architecture using traditional materials and methods of construction. The largely residential works of architects such as William Wurster and Bruce Goff, were dismissed in academic circles for their embracement of prefabricated materials and organicism. Frank Lloyd Wright, often regarded as the greatest American architect of the twentieth century had by this time departed from his familiar prairie houses. He was designing more formally inspired buildings, as evidenced by his designs for the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1960) and his 1955 skyscraper at Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Wright’s planning models, however, such as Broadacre City, influenced the development of the American suburbs in the postwar period and their dependence on the automobile. Emerging from this trend are figures such as Charles and Ray Eames, who pioneered an era of structural and visual experimentation through their furniture design and film. American regionalism has remained influential through the teachings of Taliesin—founded by Frank Lloyd Wright—and through the work of late twentieth-century architects such as Paolo Soleri and Will Bruder.

While the often unbuilt architecture of the academy has continued on its autonomous trajectory the architecture of the suburbs has followed a more conservative path.

Following the Second World War, the domestic climate was characterized by projects such as Levittown in which entire neighborhoods were designed within strict guidelines that provided specific domestic amenities—attached garage, eat-in kitchen, lawn. The idealization of the nuclear family at home also produced competitive markets to embellish these prescribed desires; thus, the boom of the suburbs supported the car industry, lawn-care suppliers and appliance industries.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the reclamation of Main Street and small-town atmosphere has produced towns such as Celebration and Seaside, Florida, with similar aesthetic guidelines and master planning to control the perceived malaise of suburban sprawl and, ultimately, prescribe a suburban lifestyle. Led by architects such as Andres Duany and Elisabeth Plater-Zyberg, New Urbanism—through typological and stylistic guidelines— is slowly equalizing the suburban ideal through large-scale, planned communities. Other recent trends in American architecture have ranged from the expressionistic work of Los Angeles, CA architects such as Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss and Morphosis to the more reticent work of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and Steven Holl.