This “architecture of transparency” recalled the work of early 20th Modernists, while being directly influenced by contemporary culture and technology. In 1995, the MoMA exhibition Light Construction chronicled another divergent path, focusing on works with such lightness of form that they appear intangible and ambiguous. Deconstructivism received critical attention in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition, Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley in 1988, which focused on the work of seven architects across the globe. But with the 1970s approaching 50 years of age, and with ample (and growing) scholarship about late 20th century architecture, shouldn’t we also be identifying the landmarks of the 1990s – while we still have them?Īrchitects and critics have been writing about Postmodernism for over 50 years, from Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) to more recent works that provide an analysis of the movement with the benefit of historical perspective. The 1990s produced architecture that many of us remember in concept and under construction, and this proximity doesn’t give us much elbowroom for perspective. Rather, it is a brief exploration of the cultural shifts that made the 1990s a pivotal time in architecture. This essay does not attempt to classify buildings with stylistic labels and checkboxes. The focus of this essay is ultimately a brief investigation of architecture of the 1990s, culminating in a list of important works of the last decade of the 20th century, so that we might better comprehend the context within which architecture of that era can be understood and evaluated. I would argue that the architecture of today, at the very essence of its values, forges on within the Modern tradition. To his point, they are not a rejection of Modernism, but a departure. In his article about the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, “The Presence of the Past,” architectural historian Charles Jencks identified six departures from Modernism: “historicism, neo-vernacular, adhocism, contextualism, metaphorical and metaphysical architects, and those who develop an ambiguous space.” He argued that these departures were all “partly Modern (because of the tradition from which they depart) and partly Other,” and it is this “double-coding” that unites them. In recent decades, architecture has departed from this path in exciting ways. While originally drawing from European and vernacular precedents, the American Modern architecture tradition produced innumerable regional schools of thought throughout the country linked by adherence to common principles. The American “Modern Movement” has a long tradition of explosive results when ideas either combine or diverge. There are those iconic buildings that change the course of an architect’s work, and those that are strong enough to change the course of architecture in general. It often takes time, and with time historical perspective, to recognize which of the buildings that spring up in a particular era are game changing. When we study their physical characteristics – the way their architects composed their materials, forms, and volumes drew from or reacted against regional vernaculars explored new, emerging technologies and adapted their buildings’ programs in new and innovative ways – we may grapple with changes in the architectural trajectory that we either love or revile, or settle into a conflicted state of both. There are those buildings that help us understand the path of architecture and its relationship to a particular place, people, and time. “Every era needs its landmarks.” A colleague at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission once told me this, while in conversation about Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates’ UN Plaza Hotel (constructed 1976-83 and designated a New York interior landmark in 2017).
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