104 West 40th Street is a 200,000 square foot building located in the dynamic Bryant Park submarket. Conveniently located near both Grand Central Station and Penn Station, 104 West 40th Street also enjoys views of Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. Recently under new ownership, the building is scheduled to undergo a major lobby and elevator cab renovation and upgrade.

Modernity: The International Style

The physical nature and holistic style of 104 West 40th Street falls squarely in the tradition of Modern architecture generally, and of the International Style in particular.

Modernism represents the cultural movement of progressive art and architecture, music, literature and design which emerged in the decades leading to the First World War. It reflected the goals of a class of artists and designers who sought to rebel against late nineteenth-century academic and historicist traditions in order to embrace the emerging economic, political and social aspects of the modern world. Observers typically classify the era into both modern and postmodern periods (with the close of World War II as an axial turning point between the two), but also according to the component styles that have been constitutive of the larger movement.

Some observers of history see the evolution of Modern architecture as a social phenomenon, intricately related to the project of Modernity and by extension to the Enlightenment, which itself was a result of social and political revolutions. Other historians regard Modernism as a matter of taste and a reaction against both eclecticism and the lavish stylistic excesses of the Victorian Era and Edwardian Art Nouveau.

For more information on Modernity: The International Style, please see [Modernity: The International Style]

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