De Stijl, Bauhaus, and International Style Architecture. What's the difference?

In the history of Modern Art Class that I am now taking, the instructor projected an image of the Schröder House as an example of the Dutch style, De Stijl.

Schröder House, Gerrit Rietveld, 1924. Utrecht, Netherlands.

I thought  that this example of De Stijl architecture looked a lot like Southern California beach houses. Did this style simply morph into the ubiquitous beach house, or was there a better answer?

 Lovell Beach House, Rudolf Schindler, 1926. Newport Beach, CA

Rudolf Schindler graduated from  the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1911. He moved to Chicago in 1914 and worked for  Frank Lloyd Wright. When wright was in Tokyo working on The Imperial Hotel, Schindler was working on projects in Los Angeles. From1919-1922, he supervised the Hollyhock House, which has Wrights Prairie style stamp all over it. In 1922 Schindler designed the Lovell Beach House, that was completed in 1926 on the Balboa Peninsula of Newport Beach. To me the two houses seem more than similar

The next slide shown was an example of Bauhaus arcitecture – the Barcelona Pavillon designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the  German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. 

Barcelona Pavillon, Mies van der Rohe, 1929.

Interior of Barcelona Pavillon, Mies van der Rohe, 1929.

Recently I saw the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition “How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney”, at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. I thought the Bauhaus building in Barcelona, looked a lot like the Schindler House.

 Schindler House Interior, Rudolf Schindler, 1922, West Hollywood,CA.

Schindler House, Rudolf Schindler, 1922, West Hollywood,CA.

Around Los Angeles, the white Beach House style has a larger more modern version that is perched on the steep slopes of the hills and canyons. The earliest was arguably the Lovell House, designed by Richard Neutra and built from 1927–1929. Neutra attended the Vienna University of Technology and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and later with his friend and future competitor, Rudolf Schindler. Neutra and his family  occupied one of the apartments of the Schindler House while Rudolf Schindler and his wife occupied the other.

Lovell House, Richard Neutra, 1929. Los Angeles 

After Lovell House, Modernist homes slowly started appearing. After WWII with the residential housing boom and new Freeways, they were all over Southern California. Arts & Architecture magazine sponsored a project from 1945 to 1966, the Case Study Houses. The goal was inexpensive residential living space for the housing boom. 27 of the 36 entries were built. All but 3 were around Los Angeles. Julius Shulman, an architecture photographer, photographed most of the Case Study homes. It was his iconic, high contrast black and white photograph of the Stahl House, Case Study #22 that brought California Mid-century Modern to the average person.

   Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960. Pierre

   Koenig, Architect. Photograph, 1960, Julius Shulman.

The lines of the home were simple and the glass made the two young women in cocktail dresses seem like they were floating over the city. I was about 15 or 16 years old when I first saw this image. I still get the sensation of floating over a city when I drive I-40 at night approving Albuquerque from the West. There's about a 700 foot drop From Laguna to the Rio Grande River. Each year the lights of the city move father west into the scrub, but it's still  about 10 minutes of hovering over the lights of the city. It's similar driving I-10 West to Indio, California but the descent is steeper into the Coachella Valley.

                                      Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960. Pierre Koenig, Architect

If the Stahl House looks familiar. it might be because about a dozen movies or TV episodes have been filmed there.

So how is it that these homes look so similar despite the different countries – Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, two Viennese architects living in Los Angeles during the1920's, and an American architect  more than a generation later?

In 1932 the Museum of Modern Art, in New York (MoMA), had an exhibit Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. The title of the catalogue for the exhibit was published as The International Style: Architecture Since 1922. The foreword of the exhibition catalogue gave clarity about this previously unnamed style.

The present exhibition is an assertion that the confusion of the past forty years, or rather of the                past century, may shortly come to an end. Ten years ago the Chicago Tribune competition brought forth almost as many different styles as there were projects. Since then the ideas of a number of progressive architects have converged to form a genuinely new style which is rapidly spreading throughout the world..... Because of its simultaneous development in several different countries and because of its world-wide distribution it has been called the International Style.

The exhibit, curated by historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson was the first architectural exhibit at MoMA. Elements of the new style – emphasis of volume over mass, geometric regularity and repetitive modules, no ornamentation, lightweight mass-produced, industrial materials were  discussed in the catalogue. It was unusual for an institution to name and codify a style. Previously it was the writings, often derogatory, of art critics that named new styles.