The Late Twentieth Century

The international nature of design had begun earlier in the century. Neutra, Lescaze,Eliel Saarinen,
Gropius, Breuer, and Mies vander Rohe had brought the International Style and its variations to Britain
and the United States.

One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most important early projects was built in Japan. After World War II, air
travel, and particularly the advent of jet air travel, enabled movement anywhere on the globe in a matter
of hours. Improved communication, through electronic media as well as printed matter, brought broader
awareness of design, helping to make it a more international profession.

PROPHETS OF DESIGN

 Kahn
Kahn was born in Estonia, graduated from the architectural school of the University of
Pennsylvania, in 1924, and worked as a draftsman and designer in several architectural offices.

His first important building was an art gallery for Yale University (1951–3). The gallery floors
are open spaces made special by ceilings formed by triangular coffers of concrete structural slabs,
with four levels connected by an elevator and stairs housed in a cylindrical enclosure

Kahn was deeply concerned with the expression of materials and with the ways in
which light reveals form and determines the nature of interior spaces.

The First Unitarian church of Rochester, New York (21.4; 1959–69), is a cluster of multipurpose
rooms surrounding a central sanctuary, with light entering from windows high up on roof
projections. The windows cannot be seen from most positions within the church—the light seems
to enter from invisible sources. With its simple, gray masonry walls the space is austere, but is
  César Pelli
César Pelli, born in Argentina, is a more worldly figure—a maker of gigantic
projects with interiors that seem to be a byproduct of massive building structures.
In 1972 he designed the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo,a rectilinear mass clad in mirror glass and
aluminum.
The glass-roofed interior of the Winter Garden (21.5; 1980–8) suggests London’s Crystal Palace
of 1851 (see p.  247).It was damaged, but rebuilt, after the World Trade Center destruction of
September 2001.

The 1995 NTT building in Tokyo by Pelli is a thirty- story tower, basically triangular but
with a curved hypotenuse, giving typical office floors light and a view out over the adjacent
plaza and small service building. The public entrance lobby at plaza level is marble-floored
with a ceiling of perforated aluminum plate.A curving open stair to the mezzanine levelprovides a visual
accent.

HIGH-TECH
The modern movement viewed new technology (steel, concrete, and glass) as one of its
prime bases. In recent decades technology has made vast forward steps, particularly the technology
associated with aircraft, with space exploration, and the associated advances in communication and
computers.

Adding basic structure and mechanical transport (elevators, escalators, and moving sidewalks),
technology becomes the major component of any building or interior.
 Fuller
Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), the American engineer, designer, inventor, and
philosopher whose activities became known as far back as the 1920s. Fuller was the inventor –
designer of projects that were usually called “futuristic” and therefore not implemented beyond
the few prototypes he managed to build.

He coined the word “Dymaxion” (conf ating “dynamic” and “maximum”) to identify such
projects as his Dymaxion house of 1927, its elevated living floor cable suspended from a central
mast. The three-wheeled Dymaxion automobile followed in 1933, as did a factory-made,
prefabricated bathroom, in which fixtures and plumbing were an integral part of a unit that could
be shipped fully assembled to a site.

 Stirling
James Stirling (1926–92), a British architect, began his career as a proponent of
high-tech style but is generally considered a post-modernist, largely on the strength of his
later work, though he himself did not favor the designation.

Early projects include the Engineering Building at Leicester University in England (1959, with
James Gowan as a partner), which attracted wide attention with its glass of ie tower, wedge-
shaped adjacent blocks containing lecture halls, and ship’sfunnel-like ventilator. The exposed
structure and mechanistic qualities of the interior also suggest the engineering-related role of the
building.
 The most widely noted of Stirling’s later work is the addition to the Neue Staatsgalerie
in Stuttgart, Germany (1979–84), which moves away from technology and toward a
more adventurous direction; it is primarily this project that labeled him a post-modernist.
Gallery spaces are set around a circular courtyard (21.9) where marble walls, statuary (from
the museum’s collection), and a portal using stubby versions of Tuscan columns make references
to historic architectural styles

POST-MODERNISM
The term “post-modern” would seem to identify any work that follows the style now called
modern (often Midcentury Modern), but it has come to identify a particular movement
that belongs to the continuum of modernism.

 Robert Venturi
Robert Venturi (b. 1925) developed the theoretical basis of post-modernism in his Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). It suggests that the devotion to simplicity and logic
that was the cornerstone of the modern movement was a limitation, leading ultimately to
dullness and boredom.

The house that Venturi designed in 1964 for his  mother, Vanna Venturi, at Chestnut
Hill, a suburb of Philadelphia, is the first important demonstration of the ideas that characterize post-
modernism (21.10 and 21.11). Its basic symmetry is modified by surprising asymmetries. Interior spaces
have unexpectedly angled forms that upset their routine rectangularity.
THE REVIVAL OF TRADITION
Along with the fantasy and freedom of postmodernism, another, related development was
a return to classicism—not the accurate reproduction of past design that characterized the
eclecticism of the 1920s and 1930s, but an effort to produce new work based on classic principles.

 Stern
Robert A.M. Stern (b. 1939) is generally classified as a post-modernist, although most of his
work stands somewhere between the adventurousness of the post-modernists and the restraints of
classic revivalism.
In interiors, Stern focuses on small details that look back to strict classicism and forward to post-
modern variants.
 DECONSTRUCTIVISM AND MINIMALISM

The term “deconstructivism” has come into use to identify a strain of design practice that
emerged in work of the 1980s and 1990s. The term refers to the works of the Russian
constructivists Tatlin, Malevich, and Rodchenko, who often focused on assembly of broken
fragments, and also to deconstructionism, a theme in French philosophy and literary criticism
that breaks the elements of any  text into its component parts to reveal meaning that is not
apparent on the surface of the narrative.

 Hadid
A student of Rem Koolhaas and later partner in his OMA f rm, Iraqi-born and London-based
Zaha Hadid (b. 1950) is the most prominent woman architect of her generation, and perhaps
the best known to date. She opened her London of ie in 1980.

After mostly unbuilt early work in deconstructivist style, including a celebrated

design for an opera house in Cardif , Wales (1995), the Vitra Fire Station (1994) in Weil
am Rhein, Germany, gained her international attention.

 Gehry
Frank Gehry (b.  1929), a native of Toronto, Canada, moved to the United States and established
his practice in Los Angeles in 1962.

In this and in other residential projects in the Los Angeles area, Gehry brought the seemingly
random and chaotic interplay of common materials and colors inside
INDIVIDUALISTS

 Starck
Some late twentieth-century work of great interest does not f t any of the stylistic designations
devised by critics.
Philippe Starck (b.  1949) f rst became known as a furniture designer, but his work has moved
onward to interiors and architectural projects that are often f amboyant and exotic, putting him in
alignment with the post-modernists.

The Café Costes in Paris (1987; no longer in existence) was dominated by a

staircase that widened as it ascended, facing a gigantic wall clock at its top (21.29). Fantasy
elements appear in his designs for restaurants, nightclubs, and hotel interiors.

OTHER TRENDS

 East–West Crossovers
The emergence of several Japanese architects and designers as prominent f gures in current
practice in Europe and America reflects the growing internationalism of design practice. Earlier,
Western design had exerted its influence in Japan through such projects as
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916–20) or Le Corbusier’s Tokyo National
Museum of Western Art (1955–9).
 Design on a New Playing Field
In the twenty-f rst century, designers are practicing under dramatically altered conditions,
shaped by elements that emerged in the waning years of the twentieth. These elements, and the ensuing
circumstances, have transformed the way humans experience and interact with
the built environment

THE KEY ELEMENTS

 Sustainability
 Technology
 Social Welfare
 Branding
 Collaboration
 Globalism
 Historic Preservation

Sustainability
Sustainability is the term most often used to designate efforts to protect the environment by managing
resources. More than a buzz word, it has emerged as the dominant issue of the century, driven by greater
public concern, increased government legislation, and the growing environmentalist movement which is
now worldwide.

Technology
The world’s fastest-growing industry has given birth to the universal language of computerspeak, with a
new vocabulary, new tools, and ever-proliferating applications. Its impact on design cannot be overstated.
Not only do sophisticated programs enable the design of buildings and interior conf gurations that would
be impossible to render by hand, but their construction is facilitated by translating computer-generated
models into accurate three-dimensional ones via rapid prototyping (also called ALF, Additive
Layered Fabrication).

Social Welfare
In a diverse, multicultural, and longer-living society, designers must confront the needs
of particular segments of the population, with the goal of contributing to the improvement of health,
welfare, and well-being. Using research data that shows how people actually
behave in their environments, evidence-based. design enables designers to plan their spaces for the most
desirable outcomes—in hospitals, schools, even of ies
Branding
The proliferation of well-publicized public projects such as museums, cultural centers,
and multi-use developments by prominent architects and interior designers has made
design a matter of public discourse.
A double-edged sword, this has created the culture of the “starchitect,” a designation coined in
the late twentieth century (its original source remains anonymous) to describe one whose
name alone brings prestige to any project.

Collaboration
The romantic image of the designer as a solo artist at the drawing board is out of date—design
today is a collaborative ef ort by a team of specialists.
The concept of a new building or interior may be the vision of one individual, but its
implementation is the work of many

Globalism
The explosive growth of countries and cities in the Far East and Middle East and other less
developed parts of the world and the ensuing populations of af lent consumers have created opportunities
both good and bad for architecture and interior design. The good lies in commissions for innovative
buildings and building projects, both government-sponsored and privately funded, from grand museums,
opera houses, and cultural centers to universities, hospitals, and massive mixed-use developments.

Historic Preservation
In historically significant structures, it is usually considered more important to preserve
the original features than to make changes that disturb the façade or the defining elements of the interior.
This is either done by meticulously restoring or rebuilding the existing structure, as Hardy Holzman Pfeif
er did with New York’s Central Synagogue after a f re seriously damaged the nineteenth-century
landmark (22.7; 2001), or by combining the restoration with the addition of a new wing
with modern amenities to update the function of the building.

STYLE DIRECTIONS
The new century ushered in a wave of eclecticism. Unfettered by the boundaries of a dominating design
source or a prescribed aesthetic, designers enjoyed the freedom to explore new horizons.

 Mainstream Modernism
Despite the various labels applied to recent design by architectural historians and critics, it is
clear that modernism, in one form or another, has become part of the vernacular in every social
class and country, even in cultures resistant to change. It remains the default design aesthetic for
major expansion projects, such as Yoshio Taniguchi’s Museum
 Color Craftsmanship
International Style modernism rejected color as well as pattern, with the notable exception
of Luis Barragán (1902–88), whose modernist homes were characteristically wrapped in
intense warm hues (see p. 417). Although short-lived, post-modernism played with color and
pattern for provocative effects, the use of color in building exteriors was rare in the twentieth
century.
 BUILDING AND INTERIOR TYPES
In each of the style directions identified above, architecture has traveled along two concurrent
paths: architecture as art form, in convention defying buildings that can be equally viewed
(and experienced) as sculpture, and architecture as socially responsible, in those where
practical considerations take priority over aesthetics.

 Museums
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao became one of the most inf uential designs of the new century,
giving its name to a phenomenon called “The Bilbao Ef ect”—the concept of museum as
architectural showpiece, as well as (and sometimes more than) a place in which to house and
exhibit art. Several earlier modern museum buildings were architecturally distinguished— note
Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum (1972), I.M. Pei’s National Gallery East Wing (1978), and
Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection (1987)—but appearance was always secondary to function, even
for Rogers and Piano’s tradition-shattering Centre Pompidou (see p. 421).
 Hotels
More than merely a comfortable home away from home, today’s hotel is expected to provide a
more extravagant experience—an escape from the routine of everyday life in
an environment that is often too esoteric or exaggerated for anything other than
short-term occupancy.

For much of the twentieth century, hotels tended to follow a standard formula in spatial
configuration, amenities, and color schemes. The most elegant were generally furnished
in Beaux-Arts splendor and, though richly accoutered, were rarely distinctive in the
design of their interiors.
of Modern Art (22.9) or renovations and restorations of public buildings.