Initially, the leading interwar architects of Modernism, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Wright, and Aalto, continued to dominate the scene. In the United States, Gropius, with Breuer, introduced modern houses to Lincoln, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, and formed a group, the Architects Collaborative, the members of which designed the thoroughly modern Harvard Graduate Center (1949–50). Mies became dean of the department of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology at Chicago in 1938 and designed its new campus. Crown Hall (1952–56) marked the apogee of this quarter-century project.

Beginning with private houses by Hood, Lescaze, Edward Stone, Neutra, Gropius, and Breuer during the 1930s, American Modernism gradually supplanted the historical styles in a range of building types, including schools and churches; for example, Eliel Saarinen’s simple, brick Christ Lutheran Church (1949–50) at Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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After World War II, big industry turned to modern architects for distinctive emblems of prestige. The Connecticut General Life Insurance Company hired one of the largest modern firms, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to design their new decentralized headquarters outside Hartford, Connecticut (1955–57). Lever Brothers turned to the same firm for New York City’s Lever House (1952), in which the parklike plaza, glass-curtain walls, and thin aluminum mullions realized the dreams of Mies and others in the 1920s of freestanding crystalline shafts. Designed by Eliel Saarinen’s son Eero, the General Motors Technical Center (1948–56) at Warren, Michigan, was compared with Versailles in its extent, grandeur, and rigorous conformity to an austere, geometric aesthetic of Miesian forms. The Harrison and Abramovitz’s tower for the Aluminum Company of America at Pittsburgh (1954) advertised its own product, as did Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Inland Steel Building at Chicago (1955–57). Perhaps the most chaste of all was the Seagram Building (1954–58) at New York City, designed by Mies and Philip Johnson. Wright alone avoided the rectilinear geometry of these office buildings. In 1955 he saw his Price Tower rise at Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a richly faceted, concrete and copper fulfillment of the St. Mark’s Tower he had designed more than 25 years earlier.

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About 1952 there was a significant shift within Modernism from what had come to be called Functionalism, or the International Style, toward a monumental formalism. There was increasing interest in highly sculptural masses and spaces, as well as in the decorative qualities of diverse building materials and exposed structural systems. Wright’s Guggenheim Museum is a manifestation of this aesthetic. Those who had focused their attention on the rectilinear portions of Le Corbusier’s Savoye House and Unité d’Habitation apartments at Marseille (1946–52), tended to ignore the plastic sculpture on the roofs of those buildings; to such people, Le Corbusier’s highly individual buildings at Chandigarh, India (begun 1950), and the cavernous space in the lyrical church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1950–55) at Ronchamp, France, seemed to be examples of personal whimsy. Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy gave structural integrity to the complex curves and geometry of reinforced-concrete structures, such as the Orbetello aircraft hangar (begun 1938) and Turin’s exposition hall (1948–50). The Spaniard Eduardo Torroja, his pupil Felix Candela, and the American Frederick Severud followed his lead. Essentially, each attempted to create an umbrella roof the interior space of which could be subdivided as required, such as Torroja’s grandstand for the Zarzuela racetrack in Madrid (1935). Mies constructed rectilinear versions of such a space in Crown Hall and in his Farnsworth House at Plano, Illinois (1946–50), while Philip Johnson allowed a single functional unit, the brick-cylinder utility stack, to protrude from his precise glass house at New Canaan, Connecticut (1949). Other designers used curvilinear structural geometry, best indicated by Matthew Nowicki’s (1910–49) sports arena at Raleigh, North Carolina (1952–53), in which two tilted parabolic arches, supported by columns, and a stretched-skin roof enclose a colossal space devoid of interior supports. In 1949 Nowicki had challenged Louis Sullivan’s precept, form follows function, with another, form follows form; this dictum helped free architecture from programmatic expression. Hugh Stubbins’s congress hall at Berlin (1957) and Eero Saarinen’s Trans World Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City (1956–62), were outstanding examples of these dynamically monumental, single-form buildings the geometric shapes and silhouettes of which were derived from mathematical computation and technological innovation. International competitions for the opera house at Sydney (1957) and a government centre at Toronto (1958) were won by the Dane Jørn Utzon and the Finn Viljo Revell, respectively. Both architects were exponents of the new monumentalism.

These designs posed problems in structural engineering and in scale, but many architects, such as the American Minoru Yamasaki in the McGregor Building for Wayne State University at Detroit (1958), attempted to make structure become decorative, while the decorative screen, as used by Edward Durell Stone at the United States embassy in New Delhi (1957–59), offered a device for wrapping programmatic interiors within a rich pattern of sculptured walls.

In the United States, after 1959, office buildings for administrative headquarters of large corporations followed the 1955–57 suburban-campus model of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Connecticut General Life Insurance Company or, if urban, the towerlike form, often with strong structural expression (e.g., Torre Velasca, Milan, by Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and Rogers, 1959) or the slab form, usually emphasizing glazed walls (e.g., Mannesmann Building, Düsseldorf, Germany, by Paul Schneider-Esleben, 1959), but they rarely achieved an urban composition such as the 1962 Place Ville-Marie, built at Montreal by the Chinese-born American architect I.M. Pei.

Air transportation, trade exhibitions, and spectator sports summoned the often awesome spatial resources of modern technology. Rome’s Pallazzi dello Sport done by Nervi (1960), Eero Saarinen’s Dulles International Airport at Chantilly, Virginia (1958–62), and Chicago’s exposition hall, McCormick Place, by C.F. Murphy and Associates (1971) are examples of the colossal spaces achieved at the time in reinforced concrete or steel and glass. International exhibitions seldom offered comparable architecture. At the New York World’s Fair (1964) the Spanish pavilion by Javier Carvajal was a building of merit. There were also several notable examples at Montreal’s Expo 67: the West German pavilion by Frei Otto, the United States pavilion by R. Buckminster Fuller, and the startling Constructivist apartment house, Habitat ’67, by the Israeli Moshe Safdie, in association with David, Barott, and Boulva, whose 158 precast-concrete apartment units were hoisted into place and post-tensioned to permit dramatic cantilevers and terraces. World’s fairs continued to provide a setting for occasionally distinguished examples of modern structures that demonstrated innovations in building technology.

Much significant architecture in the postwar period was sponsored by cultural centres and educational institutions, such as Berlin’s philharmonic hall (1963) by Hans Scharoun. Louis I. Kahn, in his design for the Richards Medical Research Building (1960), gave the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia a linear programmatic composition of laboratories, each served by vertical systems for circulating gases, liquids, and electricity. Paul Rudolph’s art and architecture building (1963) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, gathered its studios, galleries, classrooms, and light wells on 36 interpenetrating levels distributed over six stories. The Morse and Stiles colleges (1962), also at Yale, were designed by Eero Saarinen and set a new standard for multiple-entry urban dormitories. Even the traditionalist campuses of New England preparatory schools gained modern architecture, such as the art building and science building at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, by Benjamin A. Thomson (1963) and the dormitories at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, by Edward Larrabee Barnes (1965).

The innovations in educational architecture were international. In England, distinctive educational architecture arrived at Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk (1949–54), by Peter and Alison Smithson. An example of what became known as the New Brutalism, this building was influenced by Mies van der Rohe. Most New Brutalist buildings, however, owed more to Le Corbusier’s late work—for example, the gray concrete masses of Denys Lasdun’s University of East Anglia, Norfolk (1962–68)—while Sir James Stirling’s History Faculty, Cambridge (1964–67), brought a neo-Constructivist element to the Brutalist tradition. Canada gained the Central Technical School Arts Center by Robert Fairfield Associates (1964) and Scarborough College by John Andrews, with Page and Steele (1966), both at Toronto. Italian innovative educational architecture is exemplified in Milan’s Instituto Marchiondi (1959) by Vittoriano Viganò.

Some of the new educational settings proposed solutions to what was undoubtedly the mid-20th century’s greatest problem, its urban environment. The high-rise, dense campus at Boston University by José Luis Sert and the skyscraper towers of MIT’s earth-sciences building (1964) by I.M. Pei, were imaginative single buildings responding to urban circumstances. The Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois (1965), both by the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Walter A. Netsch as the principal designer (1956), and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California, by Louis I. Kahn (1966), all offered intimations of a new city built around a cultural, educational centre.

No comparable concentration of intensive, harmonious urban architecture was achieved for cities, even though after 1955 the building of new cities produced some remarkable examples, such as Vällingby, Sweden; Brasília, the new capital of Brazil; and Cumbernauld, in Scotland; and some remarkable renovations of old cities, as in Eastwicks in Philadelphia (Reynolds Metals Co.; plans by Constantinos Doxiadis, 1960) and Constitution Plaza in Hartford, Connecticut (e.g., Charles DuBose, with Sasaki, Walker & Associates 1964), and New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (1962). By this time, however, it was beginning to be felt that the application of Modernist principles had caused visual damage to historic cities and had also failed to create a humane environment in new cities. It was at this moment that the postmodernist era began.