Design: A Boost for Good Old Modernism

Two pioneers share a top architecture prize

Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier may have dreamed up modernist architecture in Europe during the 1920s, but it took architects of the next generation, working in the wide-open, up-and-at-'em Western hemisphere, to make European functionalism a ubiquitous International Style during the 1950s and '60s. Two of the most fluent and influential New World apostles were the U.S.'s Gordon Bunshaft and Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer. This week in Chicago the two unrepentant old modernists will share the tenth annual Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pritzker is by far the field's most prestigious award and, with its $100,000 honorarium, the most generous. The...

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