The Victory of the New Building Style

The architect and theorist Walter Behrendt was involved with public housing and urban development as a designer and administrator for the German government after World War I. From 1925 to 1926 he edited the journal Die Form for the German Werkbund and led an articulate and well-orchestrated campaign in support of the Modern Movement. A friend and colleague of Lewis Mumford, he immigrated in 1934 to the United States where he taught courses on city planning and housing at Dartmouth College and the University of Buffalo.
This book--Behrendt's principle theoretical work in German and the precursor to Modern Building--presents a revisionist concept of style that places equal emphasis on form and function. Here, Behrendt calls for architects to return to basic geometries and to articulate explicitly the new social and economic realities. Now available in English for the first time, this incisive treatise boldly advocates international modernism to the general public.

Detlef Mertins, associate professor of architecture at the University of Toronto, is an architect, historian, and critic. Harry Francis Mallgrave translated Otto Wagner's Modern Architecture for the Texts & Documents series, and his most recent book is Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century.