If the term modern architecture is understood to consist of a particular form-vocabulary (the International Style) embodying a certain philosophy (functionalism), then the term cannot be used to signify all the architecture produced in the modern epoch, but only one architectural tradition extending backward and forward from an accepted year of conception (1922). Frank Lloyd Wright's so-called Prairie Style clearly foretells the International Style, as do the contemporaneous concrete designs of Perret and Garnier in France.

In another vein the Art Nouveau movement of the 1890s also sought to produce an innovative modern style using the industrial materials of metal, glass, and concrete; only its sculptural, biological form-vocabulary separates it from the buildings of 30 years later. Art nouveau, in turn, represented the culmination of a search for a new style adapted to new materials and new institutions that commenced around 1830 with the work of romantic rationalist architects in Great Britain, France, and Germany. Going back in time even further, unconsciously direct expressions of materials and function in works of engineering can be discerned in the mills and iron bridges of England dating from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s.

The fact that such pioneering movements of modern architecture can be identified as much as two centuries ago indicates that modern architecture did not primarily evolve out of the conditions and demands of modern society. As with most other artistic traditions, its aesthetic and philosophical roots can be traced back through a long line of artists and theorists who did not always or necessarily reflect a broad-based consensus on the "demands" of modern building.

Modern architecture claimed to be based on a logical expression of the spatial and structural facts of building, yet its practitioners have rarely approached the structural ingenuity of conceptual technicians such as R. Buckminster Fuller. Similarly, although its apologists claimed that modern architecture represented a democratic style expressing the taste of the general public, its works often have been seen as aloof and oversophisticated by their residents. Finally, modern architecture's efficacy in solving the problems of redesigning cities into finely tuned social organisms has been questioned by those who see it as the destroyer of cohesive neighborhoods through wholesale urban renewal.



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