The City of the Avant-Garde. The Tall Building

In architecture, the avant-garde has particular characteristics compared to other arts owing to its specific nature: a realistic, positive, collective art, which is required to interpret shared values and represent them using forms. On the other hand, it could be argued that quality architecture is almost always an avant-garde art since it interprets demands and cultural changes which it transposes into projects for the future city. In what way have architecture, suggestions, objectives and themes of the avant-garde of the 1900s turned into principles of construction of the city? Did the tall building, a theme explored in different ways by Expressionism, Constructivism, and Futurism, only have expressive and formal interpretations, or did it become an urban theme? We can pursue this in Mies Van Der Rohe’s research in America.