The International Style: Architecture Since 1922

New York: W. W. Norton, 1932. A near-fine copy with a few small areas of discoloration to cloth, in a very good price-clipped jacket with losses at ends of spine and at lower rear panel. 4to. 240 pages. 82 full-page photographs of contemporary buildings, accompanied by plans. Cloth; dust jacket. Provenance: Samuel M. Nickerson (pencil inscription dated Sept. 11 1934 on front free endpaper), possibly a descendent of Samuel M. Nickerson (1830-1914) of Chicago, banker and owner of the famed Gilded Age Nickerson House, now the home to the Richard H. Driehaus Museum. FIRST EDITION of this seminal book on Modernist architecture, designed by Werner Helmer. The book illustrates buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, J. J. P. Oud, Mies van der Rohe, Raymond M. Hood, Howe & Lescaze, Richard J. Neutra, and other architects. It was published on the occasion of MoMA's exhibition "Modern Architecture, International Exhibition," and includes an introduction by the museum's director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. "[T]he exhibition introduced an emerging architectural style characterized by simplified geometry and a lack of ornamentation; known as the 'International Style,' it was described by Johnson as 'probably the first fundamentally original and widely distributed style since the Gothic.' The exhibition, along with an accompanying catalogue, laid the principles for the canon of Modern architecture" (Arch Daily). Scarce with the dust jacket, in any condition.