The broad movement out of which functionalism arose in the 1920s was based on the rejection of the artistic principles of post-war romanticism and expressionism and on the struggle against academic schemes. The bearer of this tendency was mainly the younger generation, who began their creative activity after the First World War. The departure from the aesthetic norms of the past towards simplified forms, and now it was still associated with a change in purely artistic attitudes, but it was already based on a collective desire to reform the relationship to space, to the expediency of form and construction, understanding architecture as a social phenomenon.
The initial impetus to this movement was given immediately after the end of the First World War, French architecture and, above all, the work of Le Corbusier; the Dutch Style movement, the German Bauhaus and Soviet constructivism.
Although these individual and collective movements developed in different directions, they had some common features. In addition to the declaration of rationalism, they include the fact that the creators of the new aesthetic criteria of architecture were both architects and artists, that they expressed their ideas in a surprisingly vivid and peculiar form. The beginning of the third decade is also characterized by the emergence of many new utopian proposals and manifestos, which, although they could not give a complete idea of the future of architecture, played the role of its philosophical basis, from which architecture to this day draws not only ideas, but also finds programmatic support.