Architecture (building)

Despite such noteworthy exceptions—including such later works of Wright as New York City’s Guggenheim Museum (completed 1959)—the style initiated by the Bauhaus architects and termed the International Style gradually prevailed after the 1930s. The theory and practice of the new style was introduced in the United States largely through the efforts of Philip C. Johnson, one of Gropius’s students at Harvard University. In the hands of its most gifted exponents, such as Mies, the International Style was particularly well suited to large metropolitan apartment and office towers. The chaste elegance and subtle proportions of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) in Chicago and (with Philip C. Johnson) his Seagram Building (1958) in New York City represent modernism at its finest. Many of his imitators, however, seized on its commercial potential; it proved extremely efficient for large-scale construction, in which the same module could be repeated indefinitely. Inner spaces became standardized, predictable, and profitable, and exteriors reflected the monotony of the interiors; the blank glass box became ubiquitous.

Assessing modernism after a half century in which it was dominant, commentators pointed out that even though it was embraced by big business and big government, the lay public never grew fond of it. At most an austere classicism was conceded to it, but this was achieved in a coldly impersonal and often overwhelming way. Modernism had cut off architecture’s roots in the past by about 1930. Suddenly it became incorrect for a new building to show any resemblance to old ones; and for a period of time the study of historical styles almost disappeared from professional schools.

Between about 1965 and 1980 architects and critics began to espouse tendencies for which there is as yet no better designation than postmodern. Although postmodernism is not a cohesive movement based on a distinct set of principles, as was modernism, in general it can be said that the postmodernists value individuality, intimacy, complexity, and occasionally even humor.

Postmodern tendencies were given early expression in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; revised ed. 1977) by the American architect Robert Venturi. In this provocative work he defended vernacular architecture—for example, gas stations and fast-food restaurants—and attacked the modernist establishment with such satiric comments as “Less is a bore” (a play on Mies’s well-known dictum “Less is more”). By the early 1980s, postmodernism had become the dominant trend in American architecture and an important phenomenon in Europe as well. Its success in the United States owed much to the influence of Philip C. Johnson, who had performed the same service for modernism 50 years earlier. His AT&T Building (1984) in New York City, with its Renaissance allusions and its pediment evoking Chippendale furniture, immediately became a landmark of postmodern design.

Other postmodern office towers built during the 1980s aspired to a similar high stylistic profile, recalling the great art deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s or striving for an eccentric flamboyance of their own. Vivid color and other decorative elements were effectively used by Michael Graves in several notable buildings, while Richard Meier developed a more austere version of postmodernism, influenced by Le Corbusier, in his designs for museums and private houses. Outstanding American practitioners of postmodernism, in addition to Venturi, Johnson, Graves, and Meier, are Helmut Jahn, Charles Gwathmey, Charles Willard Moore, and Robert A. M. Stern.

Closely related to the postmodernist interest in historical styles was the historic preservation movement, which during the last decades of the 20th century led to the renovation of many landmark older buildings and to a tendency to resist new architecture that seemed to threaten the scale or stylistic integrity of existing structures. The stark, confrontational approach of modernism has been replaced by a more inclusive sense of the architectural heritage that acknowledges and seeks to preserve the very finest achievements of every period.

See also African Art and Architecture; Canadian Architecture; Interior Design; Oceanian Art and Architecture; Seven Wonders of the World.