The present day
Postmodernism, high-tech, free forms – and timber as the material of the climate.
Since the 1970s there has been no shared style. Postmodernism borrowed from history, high-tech displayed the technology and the computer made free forms possible. The city block returned, and now the climate has made renovation, reuse and timber the great questions of architecture.
Postmodernism answered the monotony of modernism with quotation, colour and irony.
The block and the street returned to urban planning, from the IBA in Berlin to new districts on old harbours.
High-tech exposed the structure and the services; the computer made free, double-curved forms possible.
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao of 1997 gave its name to the “Bilbao effect” and the age of iconic buildings.
Deconstructivists such as Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas broke open the box in slanting, fragmented forms.
The skyscraper went global: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai has been the world’s tallest building since 2010.
Cross-laminated timber has made tall timber buildings possible again, from Mjøstårnet in Norway to Sara Cultural Centre in Skellefteå.
The most climate-friendly building is often the one already standing: renovation and conversion before demolition.
Climate requirements have made the emissions from construction itself a new yardstick for good architecture.
Postmodernism. Criticism of modernism grew during the 1960s. In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1966 Robert Venturi wrote that architecture may be contradictory and ambiguous, and answered Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” with “less is a bore”. Together with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour he studied the signs and casinos of Las Vegas and argued that architects had much to learn from everyday commercial environments. The critic Charles Jencks symbolically declared modernism dead when the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St Louis was blown up in 1972. The postmodernists brought back pediments, columns, arches and colour, often enlarged, flat like stage scenery or with a hint of irony. Michael Graves’s Portland Building of 1982 and Philip Johnson’s skyscraper for AT&T in New York, with a top reminiscent of the pediment of a piece of furniture, became much-discussed examples. Recognise postmodernism by symmetry, strong colours, simplified classical forms and façades clearly meant to signify something.
The return of the city block. Alongside postmodernism came a reappraisal of the traditional city. As early as 1961 Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she defended dense, mixed neighbourhoods with streets full of life against the separated zones of modern planning. Architects such as Aldo Rossi in Italy and the brothers Rob and Léon Krier studied the types of the city – the block, the street, the square – as something that could be built upon. In Bologna the historic centre was restored in the 1970s with its residents remaining. The International Building Exhibition, IBA, in West Berlin in the 1980s repaired bombed blocks with new buildings along the old street lines, designed by architects from all over the world. In Barcelona old industrial and harbour areas were transformed for the 1992 Olympics. Since then the block has been the basic pattern of most European urban development. Recognise the new block city by buildings that form closed courtyards, shops on the ground floor and façades varied to resemble a city that has grown over time.
High-tech and the icons. Another way out of modernism was to push technology further. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and opened in 1977, displayed its structure, ventilation ducts and escalators on the outside, painted in colours according to function: blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity. Rogers’s Lloyd’s building in London of 1986 and Norman Foster’s HSBC bank in Hong Kong of 1985 developed the style known as high-tech, with steel, glass and exposed services. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, opened in 1997 and clad in undulating titanium sheet, made headlines around the world. It transformed an industrial city in crisis into a tourist destination and gave its name to the “Bilbao effect”. Cities all over the world commissioned iconic buildings from a small number of internationally famous architects, so-called starchitects, in the hope of the same result. Critics have pointed out that the result was often expensive stand-alone buildings with little connection to their site.
The computer as drawing board. Since the 1990s architecture has been designed on computers, and this has changed both forms and the building process. Frank Gehry’s office used software developed for the aerospace industry to describe and manufacture the double-curved surfaces in Bilbao. Zaha Hadid, who in 2004 became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, moved from dramatic drawings and paintings to buildings with fluid, dynamic forms, such as the MAXXI museum in Rome and the Guangzhou Opera House. Her colleague Patrik Schumacher launched the term parametricism for an architecture in which forms are generated by algorithms and rules rather than by hand-drawn sketches. Today entire buildings are modelled digitally, with structure, services and materials, before construction begins, in so-called BIM models shared by architects, engineers and contractors. Computers are also used to calculate daylight, energy use and climate impact early in projects. Computer-controlled machines cut timber, stone and steel with great precision, and experiments are under way with 3D-printed components and robots on building sites. This has made possible things that were previously impossible to draw, calculate or build, but it has also raised the question of what is lost when the hand sketch is no longer the starting point.
Deconstructivism. In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture with seven architects: Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi. They came from different backgrounds but shared a wish to break open the right-angled box into slanting planes, fragmented volumes and forms that seem to be in motion. Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris, with red pavilions scattered on a grid, was one of the first large works. Hadid, who made her breakthrough with a fire station for Vitra at Weil am Rhein in 1993, later built flowing forms in concrete, such as MAXXI in Rome and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, completed in 1999, makes its zigzag form and the voids running through the building into a story of loss. Deconstructivism was never a unified style, but it showed that the computer and new methods of construction could realise forms that had previously existed only on paper.
The global tower. Since the 1990s the centre of gravity of the skyscraper has shifted from North America to Asia and the Middle East. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur became the world’s tallest buildings in 1998, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, opened in 2010, is the tallest at 828 metres. In Europe London has acquired a series of towers with nicknames, from Norman Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe, the Gherkin, to Renzo Piano’s Shard of 2012. Towers have also become technically more advanced, with double façades for ventilation, structures that withstand wind and earthquakes and forms that reduce wind loads. At the same time they have provoked debate about what they do to the cityscape, about the energy they need and about whom they are built for. Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing of 2012, two leaning towers joined in a loop high above the ground, shows that a tall building need not be a tower. In Milan Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, two residential towers with trees on their balconies, has made greenery part of the façade.
Stillness and material. Against the iconic buildings stands an architecture that seeks the quiet and the lasting. The Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza builds white, carefully placed buildings that adapt to the terrain and the light, such as the swimming pools in the sea rocks at Leça da Palmeira. Tadao Ando in Japan makes smooth concrete, light and water his materials; in the Church of the Light in Ibaraki of 1989 a cross of light cuts through the altar wall. Peter Zumthor in Switzerland built the Therme Vals in 1996, a bath of layer upon layer of local stone in which water, stone and light are everything. He has written about atmosphere, about how a building sounds, smells and feels to the touch. A similar attitude can be found in architects such as Sverre Fehn in Norway and Rafael Moneo in Spain. What they share is a faith in craft, place and material, and in an architecture that ages with dignity.
Berlin after the Wall. No city shows contemporary architecture like Berlin after the fall of the Wall in 1989. The divided city was to become the capital again, and in the 1990s it was the largest building site in Europe. Potsdamer Platz, which had lain empty beside the Wall, was rebuilt with offices and housing designed by Renzo Piano and Helmut Jahn among others. The city’s director of building, Hans Stimmann, required new buildings in the centre to follow the old block lines and keep a traditional eaves height – a critical reconstruction of the old city. Norman Foster rebuilt the Reichstag with a glass dome, and the government quarter along the Spree was designed by Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened in 2005 with 2,711 concrete blocks, show how architecture can carry memory. The old city plan and the questions of a new age now meet in districts that have been transformed from borderland to centre.
Conversion and extension. More and more often the conversion of old buildings becomes architecture’s most important task. Tate Modern in London opened in 2000 in a disused power station on the Thames, converted by Herzog & de Meuron, where the enormous turbine hall became a public space. Norman Foster gave the Reichstag in Berlin a new glass dome in 1999, which visitors can climb above the debating chamber. David Chipperfield rebuilt the war-damaged Neues Museum in Berlin, reopened in 2009, so that the damage and the new parts can be seen side by side. In Paris Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have transformed post-war tower blocks by adding winter gardens and balconies instead of demolishing them. The challenge is to add something new without erasing the old, and to let the layers of time remain visible. A careful renovation is often combined with a clearly modern extension, so that it is plain what is new. The reuse of materials, such as bricks, windows and doors from demolished buildings, has also begun on a larger scale.
Timber and climate. Construction accounts for a large share of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, mainly through the production of cement and steel. Timber stores carbon and can be produced with little energy, which is why it has returned as a building material on a large scale. After centuries of city fires many countries had banned tall timber buildings, but the rules have changed so that fire safety can instead be demonstrated by calculation and testing. Cross-laminated timber – panels of boards glued crosswise, developed in Austria in the 1990s – and glulam have made it possible to build tall in timber again. In London the Murray Grove block of flats, nine storeys in solid timber, was completed in 2009. Mjøstårnet in Brumunddal in Norway became one of the world’s tallest timber buildings in 2019, and in Skellefteå Sara Cultural Centre opened in 2021 with a twenty-storey hotel. The debate now concerns how forests should be managed, how timber should be protected from moisture and fire, and building for long life and disassembly.
Climate requirements. Sustainability has become the dominant question of our time for architects, and it has changed both how buildings are made and how good architecture is measured. For a long time the focus was on energy use once the building is finished: thicker insulation, airtight buildings, heat recovery and the passive house, a German standard for buildings that need almost no heating. Now the climate impact of construction itself has moved to the centre. Life-cycle assessments calculate the emissions from materials, transport and the building process, and they often show that the production of concrete and steel weighs heaviest. Several countries, among them France, Denmark and Sweden, have introduced limit values or requirements for climate declarations for new buildings. Architects respond with less concrete, more timber and reused material, solar panels on roofs and façades, green roofs and drainage solutions that cope with cloudbursts. At the same time critics point out that the most sustainable course is often to build less, to use existing space better and to let buildings live long. It is a return to old virtues: robust materials, adaptable plans and care for maintenance.