About CONTEMPORARY Design  
There is some confusion about Contemporary vs. Modern
...as idioms of design. Strictly speaking, the words can have the same meaning, depending on the context but when referring to architecture and design, they can take on other connotations. Modernism really refers to a period of design that began with the Arts & Crafts Movement of 1875 and evolved through several eras until it ended with Post-Modernism of the early 1980's.
Contemporary means, "of the same period, or at the present time" and is, by definition always evolving and changing rather than being fixed to a specific set of aesthetic characteristics or values. What is contemporary today will be history in the future, but modernism refers to the minimal functionalism of the 20th Century.
Modernist Design movements occurred sequentially over the 20th Century. Each was a reaction to or a rejection of the aesthetic, political and lifestyle characteristics that preceded it. Here is a brief outline of some of the important and better-known design movements of Modernism.

Art Nouveau     1880-1910
Sensuous, organic forms, whiplash lines and exaggerated embellishments inspired by nature characterized this movement with influence from the art of Japan. This new ornamentalism, the first popular style of the 20th Century, reached its height in the U.S with the amazing glass work of Louis Tiffany.

Wiener Werkstatte     1903-1933
The Vienna Workshop consisted of one hundred artisans producing hand-made metal craft in a "reductive style" of early minimal modernism. Its evolution to florid, organic elements suggested the origins of what would soon follow in the Art Deco Movement.

Bauhaus School     1919-1933
Was at the core of the modern movement and the fundamentalist design and social ethic of "form follows function." The Bauhaus ideology embraced the notion of straight-forward, honest, functional design and was an extension of the principals of Arts & Crafts, except that it advocated manufacturing for the masses through the use of machine fabrication. The Bauhaus represented the critical connection between the decorative arts and industrial design and projected its pathos into what would become the origins of the modern, glass-walled skyscraper. Walter Gropius, founder of the school, went on to teach architecture at Harvard. Mies van der Rohe, regarded by most as the father of modern architecture, was a product of the Bauhaus and perhaps the most important architect of the modern era, worked in New York and finally in Chicago.

The International Style
The 1950s and 60s rejected the deco eclectic aesthetic for the straight lines, solid geometry and crisp edges. International style was represented by flat roofs and a "straight-forwardness" approach to unconscious style, characterized by egalitarian, pluralist ideals.

Late Modernism     1960s-1983
Was a period of "fast track" ubiquitous modern sameness of mega buildings of minimal style and impersonal office tower architecture. It was fueled by the money of corporate America driven by an obsession with speed and overbuilding scale at the expense of design quality. It was the product of "super-sized" architectural firms like Skidmore, Owens & Merrill, and Johnson Burgee, who needed to keep the design machines fueled with billions of dollars of construction projects. The attempts to reconcile scale, speed and boredom evolved into a vernacular of exaggerated and articulated "sculpturalism" of the "skin & bones." The failure of Late Modernism is typified by the supermarket atmosphere of consumption of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Post-Modernism     1977-1990s
Reacting to sameness, the absence of individualism, humanism and the sense of uniqueness of place, Post-Modernism emerged as a hybrid of Modernism and historical reference. Reintroducing Ornamentalism, color and oftenexaggerated traditional architectural elements, the architects of the late 70s and early 80s evolved a more textural, interesting and humanistic style. Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern, Frank Gary and Robert Ventury lead a host of other talented designers who broke from the machine aesthetic to embrace a style of eclectic historic reference and modern scale. It was a liberating experience for the mid-century modernists universally trained as Miesian disciples.

Contemporary Design
A Continuum
Liberated from the constraints of the modern dogma of functionalism and the machine esthetic, todays contemporary designers reach for new insight from Tech to Tuscan. Contemporary design comes from a spirit of individualism and international influences, from Kenzo to Gary. Contemporary is eclectic, modern, traditional, expressional, urban, environmental, sculptural, cultural and global. It crosses the traditional boundaries of time and space. It is very much a valid hybrid drawn from the "super-abundant" available information and influences of  "The World Village."