American Architecture

Borrowing the term deconstruction and aspects of its meaning from French literary studies, some architectural theorists developed the idea of deconstruction in architecture in the late 1970s. In theory and in early designs, deconstruction involved the dismantling of architectural elements and the rearrangement of their constituent parts. In these designs architects did not concern themselves with the physical laws of the real world, and most of their early proposals were unbuildable. Later on, actual buildings resulted from some of these ideas, and the architects had to address the realities of construction and the weight of materials. The resulting buildings were typically disjointed in form, and they dramatically contradicted standard conventions of design and construction.

Architect Frank Gehry has enjoyed the playfulness deconstructivism allows. Gehry’s designs range from a kind of austere modernism in the early 1970s to increasingly irregular compositions in the late 1980s and 1990s, with colliding angular forms and other unusual juxtapositions. As the geometries of his buildings became more complex and he introduced compound curves, Gehry and his staff relied increasingly on computer-aided design, adapting software developed in France for aircraft design.

The intriguing forms of Gehry’s architecture attracted worldwide attention, and he received a commission for the Vitra International furniture assembly plant and museum (1987-1989) in Weil am Rhine, Germany. The museum portion of the building provides a good example of Gehry’s use of curving and intersecting volumes and spaces. A second facility for Vitra (1988-1894) near Basel, Switzerland, also incorporates curving forms, with portions covered in sheets of zinc metal.

Gehry’s approach culminated in his striking design for a branch of the Guggenheim Museum (1991-1997) in Bilbao, Spain. The computer became an integral part of the design and construction process by simultaneously solving design problems, developing construction details, working out structural technologies, and keeping track of building costs. Rare titanium metal came on the market as the Russian government sold its titanium reserves to raise urgently needed funds. As a result, Gehry could acquire this costly metal and have it fashioned into thin sheets to cover the curving surfaces of the Bilbao Guggenheim. The lightweight and reflective titanium surface accentuates the building’s sculptural masses, which shimmer in sunlight.

Mainstream modernism of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was concerned primarily with office towers, corporate headquarters, and elegant showpiece houses for the upper economic classes. It showed little concern for humane urban planning or well-designed housing for other groups. Moreover, mainstream modernism was minimalist in style, with its lack of decoration and absence of references to the architectural experiences or preferences of the general public. By 1980 and the appearance of postmodernism, it had become clear that the public understood and appreciated historic references as a visual link to the past. The unchecked sprawl of most American cities had caused people to tire of bland, big-box buildings surrounded by acres of parking lots, of the enormous amount of space devoted to highways, and of the dispersal of everyday services that had once been grouped together within walking distance of home. This sprawl was especially pronounced in the so-called Sun Belt in the Southern tier of states where hundreds of thousands of Americans had migrated. In urban planning, too, a reaction set in.

A small vacation community called Seaside, on the coast of the Florida panhandle between Pensacola and Panama City, demonstrated clearly what a new kind of town planning could offer. The husband-and-wife architectural team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk laid out the basic plan of Seaside in the late 1970s. They designed the town to serve as a model of what larger communities could be, with a clear focus on a town center, an emphasis on landscape design, and requirements that buildings be kept low and in scale with the town as a whole. Special emphasis was placed on enabling residents to walk about the town so that they did not have to rely on automobiles. Individual houses and other buildings of Seaside reflected simple local building types adapted to the warm climate and thus not sealed and completely reliant on air conditioning. The architects wanted Seaside residents to be connected with one another and with the natural environment, rather than at the mercy of their machines. Duany and Plater-Zyberk thereafter drew up plans for a number of residential communities following these principles, and other architects and planners followed similar principles in a number of new communities around the United States.

American architecture at the beginning of the 21st century has avoided the single-style sterility that International Style modernism threatened to impose. Instead it remains open to a myriad of design approaches, suitable to a wide variety of locations, functions, and symbolic messages.