The second-half of the twentieth century saw the demise of Modernism and its replacement by a style known as Post-Modernism, a term that actually covers a wide variety of design attitudes. Post-Modernism has perhaps been driven as much by theory as by rhetoric.

1. Buildings across Time, 4th Edition
Chapter Sixteen: Modernisms in the Mid- and
Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
Introduction
The second-half of the twentieth century saw the demise of Modernism and its
replacement by a style known as Post-Modernism, a term that actually covers a wide
variety of design attitudes. Post-Modernism has perhaps been driven as much by theory as
by rhetoric.
The most gifted regional designers have grounded themselves in local values, building
traditions, and form languages and have remained sensitive to local site conditions, while
leavening their design proposals with the yeast of modern compositional principles, new
technologies, and a lingering social conscience.
Like culture in general, and for better or for worse, pluralism best describes the current
situation.

2. Alvar Aalto
Viipuri Library
Alvar Aalto, Municipal Library interior, Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia), 1930-35. Aalto consistently
manipulated the ceiling plane in inventive ways. Here a field of skylights illuminates the main
reading room. The ceiling of the theater in the adjacent rectangle is an undulating plane of
matched boards that is both sculptural and acoustically beneficial.

3. Alvar Aalto
Paimia Sanitorium
Aalto: Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Paimo, 1923-33. None of Aalto’s commissions has been more
celebrated as an International Style icon than this one. Notable features are the long strip
windows and related spandrels and the extensive balconies for convalescing patients.

4. Alvar Aalto
Paimia Sanitorium
Aalto: Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Paimo, 1923-33. The plan appears at first glance to be randomly
organized. However, its splayed distribution of components is a response to orientation toward
the sun.

5. Alvar Aalto
Saynatsalo Town Hall
Alvar Aalto, Roof-and-courtyard-
level plans of the Town Hall,
Saynatsalo, 1951-52. The C-shaped
block has one of its sides slid back
just far enough to allow a slightly
deflected path through the
complex. One stair is orthogonal,
while the other cascades out of
the plaza over grass-covered
treads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WReoK6oCk

6. Alvar Aalto
Baker House
Aalto: Baker House,
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Boston,
1947-49. During a
teaching appointment
at MIT in the late 1940s,
he designed Baker
House, a campus
dormitory. Located on a
site parallel to the
Charles river, the seven-
story brick building has
its riverfront plan
arranged in a sine
wave-shaped curve,
permitting oblique
views from the
dormitory rooms up or
down the river.

7. Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio
Community Center
Samuel Mockbee, Mason's
Bend Community Center, New
Bern, Alabama, 2000. Mockbee
transferred his architectural
practice from Jackson,
Mississippi to the middle of
nowhere: Hale County in West
Central Alabama. Here he
conjured up from his collective
teaching experiences the
“Rural Studio.”
The community center, built by
four thesis students, has walls
made of rammed earth and a
faceted roof of tin and
Chevrolet Caprice windshields.
It looks like an excavated
archaeological site given a new
protective canopy.

8. Kenzo Tange
Olympic Sports Complex
Kenzo Tange, Olympic Sports
Complex, Tokyo, 1964. By the
end of World War II, it became
clear to Japanese architects that
they were faced with a
challenge: how to synthesize
traditional Japanese values and
principles with modern political,
economic, and technological
realities.
The dragonlike appearance of
Kenzo Tange’s building is
created by steel-reinforced-
concrete walls and a roof
supported by steel cables. The
plan is a spiral, with arriving
viewers drawn in along the
perimeter of the unwinding,
dynamic geometry.

9. Tadao Ando
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Tadao Ando, Modern Art
Museum of Fort Worth, 2002.
Ando's Modern Art Museum of
Fort Worth stands 100 yards
northeast of Louis Kahn's
Kimbell Art Museum, and a
short ride from Renzo Piano's
Nasher Sculpture Gallery in
Dallas. Ando's conceptual
sketches suggest that he used
the Kimbell's building section
as a starting point for his own
design. He produced a series of
side-by-side pavilions, but
Ando's museum works best
where it addresses a large, L-
shaped pool of water on its
northeast side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXHoLK6WPk

10. Robert Venturi
Post-Modernism: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
In 1966 Philadelphia architect
Robert Venturi published what
amounted to a challenge to the
Modernist establishment, a
Post-Modern architectural
manifesto with the title
Complexity and Contradiction
in Architecture. In it, Venturi
made the case for a non-
straightforward, multivalued
architecture: Venturi equated
the atmosphere, lighting
effects, and theatrics of Las
Vegas casinos with Counter-
Reformation art.
Venturi wittily restated the
Miesian dictum "Less is more"
as "Less is a bore."

11. Robert Venturi
Post-Modernism: Guild House
Robert Venturi and John K.
Rauch, Guild House,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
1960-63. Venturi celebrated the
ordinary in this housing unit for
the elderly. From the mundane
signage to the false, gold-
anodized television antenna and
aluminum window frames, the
building presents itself as an
unapologetic product of mass
culture.
More famous is Venturi's 1962
Post-Modern house for his
mother in Chestnut Hill,
Pennsylvania. The house requires
an almost painful effort from the
public to understand it.

12. Philip Johnson
Post-Modernism: AT&T Building
Johnson/Burgee: AT&T Building, New York City, 1984. No twentieth-century architect has
received more attention for historicism than Johnson. At the base of the AT&T Building is a giant
Serliana, which has been compared by some to the façade of Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, and at
its crown, a broken pediment, which has been compared by some to a grandfather clock or a
tall, eighteenth-century chest-of-drawers.

13. Philip Johnson
Post-Modernism: AT&T Building
Johnson/Burgee: AT&T Building, New York City, 1984. No twentieth-century architect has
received more attention for historicism than Johnson. At the base of the AT&T Building is a giant
Serliana, which has been compared by some to the façade of Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, and at
its crown, a broken pediment, which has been compared by some to a grandfather clock or a
tall, eighteenth-century chest-of-drawers.

14. Charles Moore
Post-Modernism: Piazza d’Italia
Moore: Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, 1975-79. Charles Moore brought to Post-Modernism a
gentle but studied playfulness that made his buildings immediately accessible to the public and
professionals alike. Moore's Piazza d'Italia consists of a flamboyant, sometimes irreverent, neon-
outlined, wildly Neo-Classical backdrop for a contour map of Italy, set in a pool of water that is
demarcated by concentric rings of marble paving. It is as much spectacle as architecture.

15. Michael Graves
Post-Modernism: Portland Building
Michael Graves, Portland
Building, Portland, Oregon,
1980. The Portland Building is
famous as a rendered
elevation. It is replete with
quotations from the classical
language: the giant keystones
on the facade, the pair of
fluted pilasters of inde-
terminate order, and the
tiered stylobate at street level.
Graves was also a force in
reintroducing color into twen-
tieth-century architecture, as
here with the green base, ter-
racotta-colored columns, and
tan flanking walls punctured
by square windows.

16. Robert A.M. Stern
Contextualism, Allusionism, and Ornamentalism
Robert A.M. Stern makes use of contextualism, allusionism, and ornamentalism in his
architecture. Contextualism means the design works well with the surrounding setting.
Allusionism means that it cleverly alludes to other times and places. Ornamentalism describes
architecture that makes extensive use of ornament.

17. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
New Urbanism
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Seaside coastal residential community, Florida, 1981.
With this project, they established a design philosophy that has become known as the New
Urbanism, meaning an urban design drawn from historical patterns, with emphasis on
walkability, mixed-use structures (residential/retail), abundant green space, and mass-transit.

18. Louis Khan
Salk Institute
Louis Kahn, Salk Institute for
Biological Sciences plaza, La Jolla,
California, 1959-65. The work of
Louis I. Kahn (1901-74) represents
the fusion of seemingly
contradictory sources. He received a
Beaux Arts-influenced architectural
education at the University of
Pennsylvania, while the medieval
vernacular forms of Italian hilltowns
also inspired him. Kahn further
absorbed some Modernist
principles, and he traveled in
Europe, where Greek temples,
ancient Roman construction
systems, and the works of
Brunelleschi created lasting
impressions on him. He admired the
simple geometries of Boullee and
Ledoux.

19. Louis Khan
Salk Institute
Probably no twentieth-century
building has become more of a
pilgrimage site for admiring
architects than Kahn's Salk Institute
for Biological Sciences ( 1959-65) in
La Jolla, California. The project
began with a parti, or sketch of the
underlying design concept,
indicating a split between
laboratories at one end and a place
for community at the other. It
evolved to have a configuration not
unlike Thomas Jefferson's University
of Virginia campus, with the lawn
becoming a paved plaza between
canted, concrete faces of laboratory
towers, all ennobled by a narrow,
linear seam of water leading to the
ocean and the horizon.

20. Louis Khan
Kimbell Art Museum
Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art
Museum interior, Fort Worth,
Texas, 1966-72. Kahn was
never more successful than
here. In his site plan, one
enters into a court through a
grove of trees, with reflecting
pools to each side. He chose
as his spatial and structural
unit an apparently barrel-
vaulted bay, which is actually
covered by a pair of
cantilevers meeting at a
continuous skylight. Kahn
placed sixteen of these units
side by side in three,
combining many spatially by
replacing the load-bearing
walls with longitudinal beams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIyIOv541V8

21. Louis Khan
Kimbell Art Museum
As materials he chose
poured-in-place concrete,
travertine, oak, and stainless
steel, all bathed in natural
light, with much of it
reflected by baffles beneath
the skylights. The spaces are
ancient Roman in their
monumentality, gravity, and
exquisite finishes, yet
humane in their combined
effect. Almost sepulchral in
character, the apparently
barrel vaulted units house
the museum galleries. As
much a poet-or even a
mystic-as an architect, Louis
Kahn was interested in
expressing the eternal rather
than the transitory.

22. Jørn Utzon
Sydney Opera House
Jørn Utzon, Sydney Opera
House, Sydney, 1957-73.
With downtown Sydney
in the background, the
sail-like roofs of the
Opera House rise above
tiered platforms on a
paved peninsula. No
modern building has
become a more visible
architectural symbol for a
country than this one.
However, immense
problems with its
construction and
associated cost overruns
stigmatized him on the
international scene.

23. Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles
Boston City Hall
In the late 1960s no building made a greater impact on the American architectural scene than
the Boston City Hall. It began as a 1962 competition-winning design submitted by Gerhard
Michael Kallmann, Noel Michael McKinnell, and Edward F. Knowles. It is an example of a mid-
20th century architectural style known as Brutalism.

24. Justus Dahinden
Mityana Pilgrims Shrine
Justus Dahinden, Mityana
Pilgrims Shrine, Uganda,
1983. Conceptually, this
building could once have
been a hemisphere, its
sections now disengaged to
reveal its inner workings.
Dahinden’s use of tinted,
poured-in-place concrete
recognizes the long-
established African adobe
building tradition, as do the
relatively unadorned but
dramatic building volumes.
Because the church is
dedicated to three African
martyrs, Dahinden raised up
three, tall segments of
spheres, each based on a
quadrant-of-a-circle plan.

25. Frank Gehry
Nationale Nederlander
Frank Gehry, Nationale
Nederlander ("Dancing
House"), Prague, 1997.
Early in his career Gehry
realized that he often
preferred buildings in an
incomplete state of
construction to the
finished products because
of their openness and
incompleteness. Gehry
began to explode buildings,
breaking them up into
discrete volumes in a way
that, to some, reflects the
fragmentation in modern
society, which placed him
temporarily in the
Deconstructionist camp.

26. Frank Gehry
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Frank Gehry, Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao,Bilbao, 1997.
This museum has aroused a
kind of popular and critical
interest equaled by few other
twentieth-century
constructions. His exhilarating
structure replaced dock
facilities on a site adjacent to
the Nervion river in a gritty
manufacturing city. Out of a
four-story mass blossom
"pleated petals" of titanium
attached to a steel frame.
With Bilbao, Gehry became a
so-called "starchitect,"
meaning one whose buildings
bring status to his clients and
their communities.

27. Richard Meier
High Museum of Art
Richard Meier, High
Museum, Atlanta, Georgia,
1981-84. Cornell University
graduate Richard Meier has
continued the early
directions of Modernism.
Qualities abstracted from
these and other sources
include columnar planning
grids with clearly expressed
building skins enclosing
volumetric space; planar
elements that slice through
masses and penetrate one
another; and impeccable
white-panel exteriors
comparable to the late
works of the Austrian
Secessionists Josef Hoffmann
and Otto Wagner.

28. Richard Meier
High Museum of Art
In the High Museum, he
borrowed the
continuous ramp of the
Guggenheim Museum in
New York, and made it
the dominant circulation
path around the
circumference of a glass-
enclosed atrium, off
which he arranged art
galleries, which have
artificial illumination.
The ramp in the
foreground takes visitors
to the bulging entry
vestibule, then into the
three-story, switchback-
ramped rotunda that
gives access to the
gallery floors.

29. Richard Meier
Rachofsky House
Richard Meier, Rachofsky
House, Dallas, 1991-96.
The exterior of this house
for a modern-art
collector is clad in white-
enameled aluminum
panels with aluminum
fenestration and
insulated glazing.
The metal-faced front
elevation that shields the
living volume gives way
on the north and west
elevations to taut curtain
walls that inflect the
interior toward a small
body of water to the
southwest.
https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=puO6Fk9Khk0

30. Rem Koolhaus/OMA
CCTV Headquarters
Office for Metropolitan
Architecture, CCTV Headquarters,
Beijing, 2012. When the Dutch
architect Rem Koolhaas published
Delirious New York in 1978, he
established himself as a thinker
about urbanism with a highly
original, intellectualized, and
edgy view of the architectural
scene. Koolhaas brought a
cerebral European perspective to
this architectural study of New
York City.
His 768-foot-tall CCTV
Headquarters needs all of the X-
bracing that it can get, given the
outlandish cantilever. This tower-
object is the largest structure in
China.

31. Zaha Hadid
Vitra Fire Station
Zaha Hadid, Vitra Fire Station,
Weil am Rhein, Germany,
1993. At the Architectural
Association in London, Zaha
Hadid was taught by the only
slightly older Rem Koolhaas.
she has since become an
international architectural star
laden with real commissions
and arguably the most famous
female architect of all time.
Her first built project, the Vitra
Fire Station, is a projectile-like
construction of concrete and
metal that figuratively slashes
through space. Due to
changes in local fire districts, it
became a display area for the
Vitra furniture company's
chairs.

32. Zaha Hadid
Bergisel Ski-jump
Zaha Hadid, Bergisel Ski-
jump, Innsbruck, Austria,
2002. This structure has a
square, concrete shaft
capped by a cantilevered,
helmet-like, metal-and-glass
summit that accommodates
a cafe as well as waiting
athletes, and looks out from
its mountaintop site over the
Tyrolean Alps and down on
Innsbruck.
Evolving in space like a piece
of Futurist sculpture, from
tight turn to a straight run,
the metal ski-ramp
figuratively uncoils before
reaching down into the
sloping landscape.

33. Zaha Hadid
Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Arts
Zaha Hadid, Rosenthal Center
for Contemporary Arts,
Cincinnati, 2003. On the
interior of this downtown
Cincinnati building, Hadid
continued her intense enquiry
into the nature of dynamic
space. In an exhibition space
designed to accommodate only
temporary shows, walls soar,
light penetrates dramatically,
stair ramps figuratively leap,
and floors bend.

34. Zaha Hadid
MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts
Zaha Hahid, MAXXI
National Museum of
XXI Century Arts,
Rome, Italy, 1998-
2010. Her long-in-
development art
museum in the
Flaminio neighborhood
of Rome is a melange
of piloti-porticoes,
concrete volumes, and
glass, with flowing
building masses
responding to two
adjacent and different
city grids. Hadid's
museum appears as a
coiled snake preparing
to strike.

35. Maya Lin
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans
Memorial, Washington, D.C.,
1982. It can be said with
certitude that no built object
in the twentieth century has
received greater initial
condemnation or greater
ultimate acclaim than Maya
Lin's Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in the west end of
the National Mall. Carving a
walkway down into the earth
and raising a folded, black
granite-veneered retaining
wall inscribed with the names
above it, she simultaneously
created a sepulcher and a safe
harbor.

36. Eero Saarinen
TWA Terminal
Eero Saarinen, TWA
Terminal, Kennedy
International Airport, New
York City, 1956-62. His
works are remarkably
varied, but all resulted from
a relentless, exploratory,
inventive attitude toward
new materials and
technologies. For the TWA
Terminal, Saarinen opted
for a fluid, sculptural form
expressive of flight. He
created thin-shelled
concrete vaults supported
by free-form, poured-in-
place concrete piers, so that
the terminal's “billowing”
roof resembles a great bird
alighting.
https://www.youtub
e.com/watch?v=xg
KFdkZeYBg

37. James Stirling
Staatsgalerie
James Stirling, Plans of the
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1977-83. At the
center of James Stirlings’s museum,
there is a open-air stone rotunda with
an internal ramp. Stirling made the
rotunda a sculpture garden, and
presents this space almost as a ruin.
Elsewhere, he left stone blocks strewn
on the ground as though dislodged
over time.

38. Norman Foster
Reichstag Dome
Norman Foster, Reichstag interior,
Berlin, 1993. Foster has explored the
potentialities of twentieth- and twenty-
first-century technologies, but with a
consistent concern for the
environment. In 1993 he won a
competition for the redevelopment of
the century-old German Reichstag, left
in ruins after a suspicious fire in 1933
amid the Nazi Party's grab for power,
and further mutilated when Allied and
Russian armies entered Berlin in 1945.
Foster added a transparent glass dome
and spiral exterior ramp above the
legislative chamber and an internal
faceted cone that reflects light
downward and works like a chimney to
channel heated air upward. The focus is
on ‘transparency in government.’

39. Steven Holl
Light Manipulation in Architecture
Steven Holl has established himself as a
skilled watercolorist and a
contemporary master of natural- and
artificial-light manipulation in his
architecture.
Simmons Hall dormitory, MIT,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002. This
massive block with huge cut-outs and a
seemingly endless grid of windows
looks like a dormitory for the digital
age. On the inside, in the free-form
lobbies, Holl took the opportunity to
display his skill in introducing natural
light.
Linked Hybrid, Beijing, China, 2009.
What sets these structures apart are
the "links" that span high up from
building to building.

40. Renzo Piano
Pompidou Center
It is hard to say what is more
impressive about Italian architect
Renzo Piano the geographic cover age
of his practice or the consistently
exceptional quality of his work. Along
with Richard Rogers, Piano achieved
international recognition in 1976 with
the competition-winning design for
the Pompidou Center in the
Beaubourg section of Paris.
The principal architectural features of
the Pompidou Center hang on the
outside of the building, where the
white web of diagonally braced steel
framing, bright blue air handling
ducts, red exhaust stacks, and
exterior escalator snaking up the
front facade surround a transparent,
multi-story, rectangular volume.

41. Renzo Piano
Pompidou Center
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers,
Pompidou Center, Paris, 1976.
The innards of a building that had
long been concealed or downplayed
are allowed here to become the
principal architectural expression. The
site quickly became one of the most
visited in Paris.
Renzo Piano is the only architect in
this book to have done nautical
design, resulting in the
superstructures of the sister ships
Crown Princess (1989) and Regal
Princess (1991). Piano sought to make
the ships modest and humane, by
connecting passengers as much as
possible with the experience of the
sea.

42. Renzo Piano
Tjibaou Cultural Center
Renzo Piano, Jean-Marie Tjibaou
Cultural Center, Noumea, New
Caledonia, 1991. More like wispy
sculpture or part of the local flora than
buildings, these tall, unconventional
constructions announce the
conventional galleries below them.
The fingerlike vertical members are
made of laminated wood. Piano
placed a series of tall, perforated, sail-
like structures along a forested ridge
between a lagoon and the ocean, their
forms based on local huts but reaching
dramatically skyward like attenuated
fingers. The "huts" are constructed of
double layers of laminated wooden
uprights atop hinge-connection bases.

43. Renzo Piano
Nasher Sculpture Center
Renzo Piano, Nasher Sculpture Center interior, Dallas, Texas, 2003. Piano created five long,
narrow, parallel pavilions for the Center. The lateral walls of his pavilions have smooth travertine
on their faces, while shorter end walls are completely glazed. Above, stainless-steel rods
support slightly arching steel ribs that, in turn, support extremely clear glass atop an aluminum
mesh, its complex pattern of oblique holes to allow in abundant but only indirect sunlight.

44. Daniel Libeskind
Freedom Tower
Daniel Libeskind was born in Poland in
1946 but studied architecture in
England and in the United States at
Cooper Union in New York City. At one
time labeled a Deconstructivist, he is
perhaps better described as some one
intent upon expressing ideas and
happening to use architecture as his
means of communication. His working
method has involved typography and
collage. Libeskind won the international
competition for the World Trade Center
after the towers were tragically
destroyed by terrorist-piloted airliners
in 2001. in his proposal, which included
an angular, faceted, spiky, 1776-foot-
tall "Freedom Tower."

45. Jean Nouvel
Torre Agbar
Jean Nouvel, Torre Agbar,
Barcelona, Spain, 2005. This
structure is an office tower
for the local water company
and is meant to be
something of a critique of
the American sky scraper,
suggesting its form has not
yet been fully explored.
Rising thirty-four floors, it
became an immediate local
icon and cannot help but be
compared to the nearby
towers of Antonio Gaudi's
Sagrada Familia. Nouvel's
high-rise is a double shell,
with the outer shell being a
fixed-glass louver system,
with panels illuminated by
LEDs at night.

46. Santiago Calatrava
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
Santiago Calatrava, Margaret
Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, 2012.
Born in Spain in 1951,
Santiago Calatrava is an
architect and an engineer
and, arguably, a sculptor too.
He uses new technologies,
structural logic, and
metaphorical references to
forms found in nature to
produce his work.
In recent years, Calatrava has
made unique suspension-
style bridges (such as the
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in
Dallas, shown here)
something of a specialty.
Many of his bridges involve
masts for suspension cables.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHgU037x_g4

47. Sustainable Design
LEED
One of the most visible
instruments of green-
architecture advocacy is the U.S.
Building Council's Leadership in
Energy and Environmental
Design (LEED) certification
program, which rates everything
from air quality to noise levels.
https://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=tlVseOWToL4

48. R. Buckminster Fuller
Geodesic Domes
R. Buckminster Fuller, Geodesic
dome, U.S. Pavilion, Montreal
International Exposition 1967.
In the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller
traveled far and wide, lecturing
to every student who would
listen. Within his multi hour
presentations were detailed
discussions of his geodesic
domes illustrated by his hand
drawings. Most of his built
projects were geodesic domes,
or domes made of light, straight
structural members held largely
in tension. The best known of
these was constructed in 1967
for the Montreal International
Exposition, or Expo '67.

49. Herzog and de Meuron
National Stadium
None of Herzog and de
Meuron's buildings has
achieved a higher
profile than the
National Stadium in
Beijing (2007), built for
the 2008 Summer
Olympics. Inspired by
traditional Chinese
ceramics and made of
steel tube sections, the
outer skeleton of bent
trussed columns and
crisscrossed trusses
behaves as a space
frame but looks to have
been woven, to the
point that locals
dubbed it the “bird's
nest.”