Architecture-Building & Construction

While the International Style continued to dominate the world of architecture through the 1960s, only in the 1970s did it become apparent that the International Style and modern architecture were not necessarily the same. Indeed, the work of such diverse architects as Aalto, Barragán, Tange, and many others reveals that modern architecture has never been limited to a single style. Among the architects who produced important variants are Pier Luigi Nervi and Aldo Rossi of Italy, and Louis Kahn of the United States. Nervi’s vast airplane hangars (1936-1941) and sports arenas (1932, Florence; 1960, Rome) demonstrate the pure poetry of modern forms in reinforced concrete. At the other end of the spectrum, the Torre Velasca in Milan, Italy (1958) by the Italian architectural firm Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers (BBPR) reveals the resilient appeal of medieval tower design transformed into a 20th-century skyscraper. Rossi and Kahn explored the architectural potential of elementary building blocks,... drawn from history as well as from the geometry of the cube, sphere, and cylinder. This approach is exemplified by Kahn’s highly original designs from the 1960s for government buildings in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh. While clearly modern, Rossi’s and Kahn’s architecture was rooted in a respect for older traditions, which they transformed through new combinations into highly personal poetic statements. This is especially visible in Rossi’s Bonnefanten Museum (1990) in Maastricht, Netherlands, and in Kahn’s Salk Institute (1959) in La Jolla, California.

In the 1970s a new movement known as postmodernism began to challenge long-held modernist principles. The architects who led the movement asserted that the use of historical references in architecture was not only permissible but desirable. To the dictum of Mies van der Rohe, "Less is more," American architect and leading postmodernist Robert Venturi replied, "Less is a bore." Arguing that the modernist aesthetic was stifling to creativity, disliked by the masses, and uninteresting to design, postmodern architects celebrated diversity, color, and historical references in their designs. Venturi articulated many of these ideas in his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Other leading voices of postmodernism include Americans Charles Moore, Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, and Frank Gehry. Moore's design for the Piazza d'Italia (1975-1978) in New Orleans, Louisiana, is a boldly colored, open-air plaza celebrating the city’s Italian community, for which Moore playfully arranged fragments of classical columns and other traditional forms, along with images drawn from a delicatessen.

Graves’s design for the Portland Public Services Building (1982) in Portland, Oregon, is a striking example of postmodernist architecture. Garlands over windows, a giant keystone, and a statue of a mythical figure adorn this 15-story celebration of color and ornament. Surrounded by modernist high-rise towers of steel and glass, Graves’s building is a startling insertion in the cityscape and a strong statement against the austere terms of modern architecture.

One of the most exuberant expressions of postmodern freedom came in the design of the Guggenheim Museum (1997) in Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry. The originality of its undulating metal forms relate to the organic expressionism of Antoni Gaudí’s designs of a century earlier, also in the Catalan region of northern Spain.

But even as postmodernism thrived, modernism did not disappear. The dramatic and elegantly understated Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) by American architect Maya Lin dates from the same year as Graves’s Portland Building. Another premier example of modernism, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, by American architect Richard Meier, was completed the following year. Meier went on to design the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities (1997, Los Angeles, California), a paragon of elegantly spare modernist design. Indeed, variety is the most consistent characteristic of the architecture built since the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s.

In the 1980s a variation on postmodernism emerged, known as deconstruction, which sought to demonstrate the arbitrariness of all previous cultural assumptions. Deconstructivist architects applied these analytical, abstract ideas to the design of buildings. Leading practitioners included Zaha Hadid of England, Peter Eisenman of the United States, and Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi. In Eisenman’s design for the Wexner Center for the Arts (1989) in Columbus, Ohio, the architect used local conditions in generating a seemingly arbitrary mechanism to govern his design. One wall of the art center is aligned with an adjacent building, another wall with a nearby football gridiron, and a third with the flight path of planes that regularly pass overhead. After a brief flurry of interest in the late 1980s, interest in deconstruction faded, and only a handful of buildings were ever constructed to represent it.

Much more significant, in the United States and in the rest of the world, was a resurgence of interest in regional traditions and materials, and a greater willingness to meld features of rationalist modernism with elements from many other traditions, especially vernacular architecture. Emblematic of this is the work of Antoine Predock in the American Southwest. In his Nelson Fine Arts Center (1989) in Tempe, Arizona, Predock presents a modern vision inspired by the warm colors, stucco surfaces, and square cutout windows of local Spanish and Native American traditions. Others who approach architecture with a comparable openness to historical and local practices and produce designs of extraordinary sensitivity include Sam Mockbee in Alabama; Carlos Jiménez, a Costa Rican architect based in Texas; Enrique Norten in Mexico; Liangyong Wu in Beijing, China; and Ada Karmi-Melamede in Israel. Their work points toward an architecture that focuses less on debates among competing movements and more on buildings that are economical, environmentally responsible, and beautiful.


Contributed By:
Diane Ghirardo

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