A

STYLES OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

The Modernist Influence

During the 1960s modernist architecture was still a widespread and powerful force. Buildings in the modernist style were part of the environment of virtually every urban area in America, and new ones were being erected every day. Although it was becoming increasingly evident that modernism had failed to meet its idealistic goals of raising the human spirit, it was still a basically good style and method in which to construct buildings. However, by the 1960s the modernist style began to be recognized as just one of many possible approaches. Throughout the decade architects began to branch out in various directions.

Brutalism

Some of the new stylistic options were not too far removed from the modernist style. Several architects, inspired by the late works of the French modernist Le Corbusier, created buildings that used many of the rational structural ideas of the modernist style. Instead of the sleek, buoyant steel-and-glass masterpieces of the International Style, however, these brutalist buildings were constructed using rough, blocklike materials, such as concrete and brick, fashioned into heavy and aggressive forms. An important brutalist work is Yale University's School of Art and Architecture building (constructed 1959-1963) designed by Paul Rudolph. Its rectangular forms made of large slabs of rough concrete are layered in a simplistic-looking crisscross pattern suggesting a structure made with children's building blocks. However, when one imagines the forms constructed out of light-weight steel and glass, the structure's early-modernist roots become recognizable. British architect James Stirling also created several brutalist works, notably a building for Cambridge University's history department in 1966. As Le Corbusier and other important architects suggested, the move to less perfect building materials paralleled a growing recognition of the unperfectible nature of the human condition.

New Forms of Expression

Despite many striking and original masterpieces modernism had not allowed for much overt individual expression. In fact, a modernist goal had been to subvert explicit content in favor of the beauty of pure, rational form. In the late 1950s and 1960s there was a resurgence of individual expressionism in architecture. The famous Sydney Opera House in Australia (1959) by Danish architect Jorn Utzon, with its huge, steeply arching shell forms, shows modernist engineering (but certainly not form) at its most fanciful. Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen designed the TWA terminal for International Airport in New York City (1962) in the shape of an eagle about to take off in flight; however, the building's "failure" in purity of form still allows for purity of rational function. Many other architects during the decade took advantage of the new freedom of form while still maintaining basic modernist concerns for function.

Historical Styles

One of the original intentions of modernist architecture had been to make a break from a tyranny to the history of architecture. At the beginning of the century many architects still used classical columns and arches as well as elements of form and ornament from various other historical styles to adorn their buildings. The modernists thought it looked ridiculous to have a skyscraper capped with a gilded dome; instead, they attempted to purge architecture of this type of outdated ornamentation and to develop a style that belonged to the twentieth century alone. With an increasing awareness of modernism's shortcomings, many architects saw no reason to exclude some of these impressive-looking older forms. By the mid 1960s a new historical trend began to emerge as a new generation of architects started to incorporate historical elements that had been deemed obsolete by the pure-form modernist architects. Roman arches, Corinthian columns, Brunelleschian loggias, flowing Baroque staircases, symmetrical facades, intricate wall ornamentation—all appeared in buildings that were still essentially modernist in both engineering and function. Louis I. Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966-1972), uses Renaissance cathedral ideas and forms of repeated, symmetrical nave bays and vaulted-arch ceilings but keeps the work in a modern context by using state-of-the-art engineering methods for lighting and air conditioning and other functional aspects. From afar Minoru Yamasaki's famous World Trade Center in Manhattan, conceived in the late 1960s and completed in 1974, looks like another example of the corporate modernist skyscraper. Up close, however, the Gothic ogivalarch decoration that repeats itself along the entire surfaces of the two towers becomes surprisingly apparent.

Complexity and Contradiction

These divergent trends in architectural style were addressed in an important book by architect Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which was written in 1962 and published in 1966. He discusses the divergent styles of his contemporaries and argues that all of architectural history has been a continuous mixture of inconsistent styles. Venturi claims that when scholars and critics summarize a specific period or style in architecture, they pick and choose examples that fit into a neat category. These mainstream masterpieces, he explains, might include a chapel by Michelangelo, but only its altar and its sculptural forms, and then maybe a dome of one of Guarini's buildings and just the facade of the Louvre. But the elements of these same buildings that are not "stylistically correct" enough—such as an unexplained asymmetry or an unconventional ornament—to fit into the main-stream of the period are ignored. Venturi offers a revisionist way to look at the entire history of architecture, one that includes all of these so-called inconsistencies. He concludes that these inconsistent trends are actually the mainstream, while the examples that fit nicely into stylistic categories are really the exceptions. Venturi also takes modernist architects to task for ridding architecture of all content, turning Mies van der Rohe's dictum "less is more" on its head by arguing that "less is a bore." He felt that architecture should not be pure but hybrid, inconsistent, and "of messy vitality and richness of meaning."

Postmodernism

Venturis book was influential, and it helped codify the aesthetic and stylistic trend that by the end of the 1960s was already beginning to become popular with a new generation of architects. Buildings de-signed by Venturi, who was admired primarily for his theoretical writings, and even more successful architects incorporated various styles and influences, including but not limited to brutalism, expressionism, historical neoclassicism, and the burgeoning pop and automobile culture. The buildings of this new breed of architecture emphasized individual expression and were often full of witty content that sometimes parodied past styles or the human situation. Charles Moore's complex of residential units for Kresge College in Santa Cruz, California (1965-1974), is modeled on the meandering nature of an Italian village and includes repeated quasi-neoclassical balconies. Parodying the modernist preoccupation with function, the whiteness of the stuccoed buildings is interrupted by primary colors that highlight such amenities as the laundromat and the public telephone. In general there began to be a much greater tolerance of individuality and stylistic freedom during this period. In the 1970s writer Charles Jencks labeled the budding movement postmodernism. Important architects who began to work in this loosely defined postmodernist style, besides Venturi and Moore, included Michael Graves, Philip Johnson, Robert Stern, and Frank Gehry.