Among the architects who developed the International Style, the Germans formed the largest and initially the most important group, commonly called the Bauhaus. By 1918 a group of radical designers, centered in Berlin, had emerged as the champions of an architecture featuring astylistic shapes in steel and glass and based on an industrial and socialist ethic that had as its primary goal the overthrow of 19th-century Eclecticism. The strong intuitive flavor of this so-called expressionism in turn triggered a reaction led by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who accepted steel-and-glass construction and pure geometric forms as ideals but sought to use these elements with scientific logic and precision.

The chief theorist of what its adherents called the Neue Sachlichkeit, or the new factualism, was Gropius, from 1919 the director of what had formerly been the Weimar Art School, and was now known as the Bauhaus. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, Gropius implemented his theories in the buildings he designed for the new site. After Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928 to go into private practice, the leading light of the movement became Mies van der Rohe, who had demonstrated both the practicality and the formal unity of the new architecture in supervising the design of the Weissenhof Siedlung housing project (1925-27) in Stuttgart. Then, in his own German Pavilion at the Barcelona Trade Fair of 1929, Mies carried the features of the International Style to their furthest limit of abstraction.

The Bauhaus architects' final step from expressionism to the Neue Sachlichkeit is widely credited to the influence of two contemporary art movements: Dutch Neoplasticism, usually called De Stijl, and Soviet Constructivism. The Neoplasticist group was assembled in 1917 by the poet-painter Theo van Doesburg, who also founded the group's magazine, De Stijl (1917-31). Van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren outlined the Neoplasticist ideal in a 1922 Paris exhibition of a series of house projects whose asymmetrical arrangements of colored planes resembled the paintings of abstract artist Piet Mondrian made three-dimensional. This rigorously abstract conception was realized most fully in Gerrit Rietveld's Schroder House (1925) in Utrecht.

Constructivism was initiated in the Soviet Union with the nonobjective sculptor Vladimir Tatlin's execution in 1918 of a model for a hypothetical Monument to the Third International, in which a series of glass volumes were to rotate within a spiraling steel tower meant to express the triumph of the new technology over traditional masonry construction. Once brought to Germany by emigres such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the constructivist concept of a building as a technical mechanism in motion soon assumed a key role in European architectural theory, especially through the influential writings of Sigfried Giedion.


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