American Architecture

I INTRODUCTION

American Architecture, architecture that developed in the European colonies in America and subsequently in the United States. This development covers a period of almost five centuries, beginning with the establishment of Saint Augustine in Florida in 1565, English settlement along the Atlantic Coast in 1585, and Spanish settlement in New Mexico in 1598. Settlers from France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, and other countries arrived in the 1600s.

The full history of building in what became the United States reaches back 10,000 years, but European settlers almost universally ignored the many building traditions of Native American peoples. Over the five centuries after European arrival, transplanted European building traditions were gradually reshaped and redefined. They emerged as distinctly American building traditions by the early 19th century. Each of the European colonies in North America developed its own building tradition.

In the 1800s innovations in technology and the spread of railroads made possible the rapid growth of the Midwest and West. Mass-produced building parts, manufactured in the East, could be ordered from catalogs and shipped West by rail. A major fire in 1871 destroyed downtown Chicago, Illinois, and offered building opportunities for American architects, who over the next 25 years developed the first skyscrapers. This brand-new building type, devised in the United States, influenced architecture around the world from the late 1800s into the 2000s. During the 20th century architects and entrepreneurs vied to build the tallest skyscraper—a contest that continues today. Another unique building type developed in America was the single-family suburban house—a detached or stand-alone building, as opposed to the attached or semiattached suburban house popular elsewhere. It, too, influenced architecture outside the United States.

The emigration of European architects in the 1930s and 1940s brought European modernism to the United States, and in the second half of the 20th century America became a major architectural force. By the late 1900s and early 2000s American architects worked around the globe, while architects from Japan and Spain, to mention only two examples, received commissions for major public buildings in the United States.

II NATIVE AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

Conservative estimates suggest that at least 24 million indigenous people lived in North America, the Caribbean, and what is now Mexico when navigator Christopher Columbus stumbled into the New World in 1492. The native peoples can be classified in large cultural groups that together spoke as many as 600 languages. Over thousands of years they had developed unique methods of building adapted to the prevailing cultural and climatic conditions of their respective regions. In nearly all areas except the arid high plains and the Great Basin of the West and Southwest, individuals lived as part of family groups in extended communal houses. The arrival of Spanish explorers in the 1500s brought the horse to North America. The plains tribes adopted a nomadic way of life as a result, following on horseback enormous herds of bison (also called buffalo) and basing their culture on coexistence with the bison.

In the Northeast woodlands, Native Americans built dwellings with light wooden frames made of saplings and covered with large slabs of bark, or sometimes with hides. They could easily remove these coverings for better ventilation in the summer months. West of Lake Ontario, the indigenous peoples made similar although slightly smaller dwellings. On the plains they built portable cone-shaped dwellings called tipis (also spelled tepees), which they covered with tanned buffalo hides. In the Pacific Northwest, peoples who based their existence on salmon fishing fashioned large communal houses from broad split planks of cedar or redwood. In the arid Southwest, villages of clustered, stacked houses were built of stone in higher elevations and of sun-dried adobe brick along major rivers such as the Rio Grande.

Nearly all of these house forms, intimately connected with the pattern of life of indigenous groups, were rejected by the new European arrivals. Such forms were retained only in the American Southwest and in Mexico, where indigenous structures tended to resemble buildings of rural Spain. In those regions, Spanish arrivals used Native American labor to build presidios (military forts), haciendas (large estates), and mission churches on a scale larger than the natives used for their own buildings. But Europeans favored their own building forms and practices in virtually every other area they controlled in America. European settlers thus gradually forgot the ways in which native building traditions responded to the local environment. See also Native American Architecture.

III THE COLONIAL PERIOD: 1500 TO 1783

In the 16th century, many European nations claimed portions of the North American continent as colonial possessions. First to arrive were the Spanish, in the islands of the Caribbean Sea and in Mexico. Soon afterward Spanish exploration led to settlement of parts of Florida and then in what later became Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Other Spanish exploratory expeditions ventured north from Mexico into what became New Mexico and along the coastal area of what is now southern California.

In the 1600s French expeditions penetrated the interior of the North American continent, moving down the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. By the mid-17th century The Netherlands had established small colonies along the Hudson River (in what is now New York State), while the Swedes established a few settlements along the lower part of the Delaware River. The British founded several colonies along Chesapeake Bay in a region they named Virginia and farther north in an area they soon called New England. By the end of the 17th century the British had absorbed Dutch and Swedish colonies, so that a series of British colonial settlements extended from what was later South Carolina north to what became Maine.

Each group of colonists erected buildings reminiscent of those in their homeland, resulting in a highly regional architecture based on the vernacular building traditions (those of the common people) of Spain, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, and England. Moreover, two separate regional English colonial architectures resulted from the difference in social, economic, and religious objectives of English settlers of the northern coastal colonies and English settlers of the southern coastal colonies. During the colonial period, America lacked the kind of architecturally educated patrons who might sponsor the grand and formal styles of architecture then current in European countries. It also lacked the money to make that architecture possible.

A The Spanish Colonies

Spanish priests carried with them the memory of elaborate churches in Spain and Mexico on their assignments to build mission churches in Texas, California, and New Mexico. Where possible, as around San Antonio, Texas, along the coastal road in California, and in southern Arizona, they built mission churches that attempted to emulate in their details and their arrangement of massive forms the churches of the 1600s and 1700s in Spain and Mexico. One of the most striking examples is the mission church of San Xavier del Bac (1783-1797) near Tucson, Arizona. This rather simple yet elegant church was under construction while along the Atlantic seaboard the newly independent United States invented its Constitution, created its new government, and tried to shape a distinctly American architecture. Mission Santa Barbara (1815-1820), on the southern Californian coast, was one of the last Spanish mission churches built in what became United States territory. The builders based its facade on a temple shown in a Spanish translation of an ancient Roman book on architecture by Vitruvius.

B The French, Swedish, and Dutch Colonies

Along the southern Mississippi River and near the town of St. Louis (in what is now Missouri), French settlers built wooden houses fronted or surrounded by porches called galeries. Southern landowners later transformed this idea of a large sheltering porch into the two-story Grecian colonnade (row of columns with a roof), resulting in the familiar image of the Southern plantation mansion.

In New Sweden on the Delaware River, Swedish settlers introduced log construction, based on familiar vernacular methods back home. With trees so abundant in America, German and Scots-Irish arrivals picked up this building type—the log cabin—and took it westward into the hinterlands. The Swedes also introduced a form of gambrel roof—a roof with two slopes, the lower slope steeper than the upper. The English, who assumed control of New Sweden in 1682, borrowed this roof shape for their buildings.

In the Dutch colony that stretched up along the Hudson River, brick construction predominated in the towns. Narrow brick houses presented steep, stepped gables to the street. (The gable is a triangular end of a roof; Dutch gables were edged on the sides with steps). None of these houses survived. In the farmlands of northeastern New Jersey and on Long Island, a different house type predominated, apparently introduced by Flemish settlers. These broad houses had an entrance in the middle of the long side and sweeping roofs that extended out to shelter the entry door. An example of this type of house is the Dyckman house on the northern tip of Manhattan Island. This house was rebuilt about 1783 after the British army burned it during the American Revolution (1775-1783).

C The English Colonies

English settlers, like settlers in the other European colonies in America, employed building techniques and forms familiar in their homeland. Their earliest colonial buildings were late medieval in form and detail. The Jonathan Fairbanks house in Dedham, Massachusetts, is likely the oldest surviving wooden frame house in the former English colonies; the central section of the house was built around 1636. Its slightly projecting upper story and its heavy wood frame construction provide a good example of this transplanted late medieval building tradition.

The New Englanders had immigrated to America to separate from the established Church of England and to create communities and a church organization more like those described in the New Testament of the Bible. Their early meetinghouses were plain and unassuming buildings that looked like warehouses for worship. Of these, only the so-called Old Ship meetinghouse (1681) in Hingham, Massachusetts, survives. Its nickname derives from the huge timbers that form its exposed roof trusses (supports), said to have been hewn by ship's carpenters.

In the southern English colonies around Chesapeake Bay and in the Carolinas, the first settlers built wooden houses with structural posts placed directly in the earth. These houses were highly susceptible to rot and attack by termites, and none remain. A few ostentatious brick houses meant to display wealth have survived from the early colonial period. They include the Adam Thoroughgood house (1636) near Norfolk, Virginia, and the Arthur Allen house (called Bacon's Castle; 1650-1655) in Surry County, Virginia. Also surviving is the brick church of Saint Luke, built around 1682 to 1685 in Isle of Wight County. The church is essentially late Gothic in style, with pointed-arch windows and buttresses, and as part of the Church of England it is wholly unlike the deliberately austere meetinghouses of New England. The Southern colonies, unlike the Northern colonies, did not break away from the Church of England.

By the start of the 18th century, all the colonies along the Atlantic seaboard had come under English control and a more uniform culture began to develop. Architecture in the English colonies also underwent a dramatic change, moving away from ethnic vernacular traditions toward a stylish emulation of the fashionable architectural details used for public buildings and country houses in Britain in the late 1700s. The wealthiest colonists hoped to demonstrate that they were every bit as cultivated as their countrymen and countrywomen in England. Because trained architects were extremely rare in the colonies, educated gentlemen acquired libraries of current books on architecture and trained themselves in matters of design.

Numerous books illustrated with engraved plates showed the proper use of classical details. They made possible the use of sophisticated classical ornament in England and the ornament that began to appear in the colonies. This classically based architecture of the 18th century is called Georgian, in reference to the successive British monarchs named George who reigned from 1714 to 1830. Hundreds of Georgian houses survive; a good example is the Benjamin Chew house called Cliveden (1763-1767), which stands in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the former estate of the colonial chief justice of Pennsylvania. The design, attributed to Chew's legal colleague William Peters, consists of elements shown in several books popular at the time. Cliveden's stone construction represents local building in Philadelphia's Germantown area (most Philadelphia houses of that time were built of wood or, less often, of brick), and its finely proportioned white classical details are typical of the Georgian period in America. These details include the dentil (toothlike) molding at the base of the roof, the projecting center section capped by a classical pediment (triangular form), and the finely proportioned entry door frame with its Roman Doric columns and smaller pediment. In New England, Puritan restraint still influenced Georgian architecture, as in the simpler Jonathan Trumbull house (1740) in Lebanon, Connecticut.

Businessmen, lawyers, and artists who educated themselves in architectural design also designed public buildings in the colonies. One good example is Faneuil Hall, a marketplace with a meeting room above, given to the city of Boston by merchant Peter Faneuil and designed in 1740 by painter John Smibert. (Architect Charles Bulfinch greatly enlarged it in the early 1800s according to Smibert's design). Lawyer Andrew Hamilton designed an even better-known example: the large colonial legislature building in Philadelphia, more often called Independence Hall (1732-1753).

Colonial churches were based on fashionable models just constructed in England, such as those of English architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Americans knew these designs from plates in recent books. One fine example is the First Baptist Meetinghouse (1774-1775) in Providence, Rhode Island, designed by merchant and self-trained architect Joseph Brown. While the main block of the meetinghouse retained something of the proportions and restraint of earlier meetinghouses, its tower and steeple derive directly from plate 30 of James Gibbs's Book of Architecture (1728). This plate represents some alternate designs for Gibbs's church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (1720-1726) in London, England.

Although not normally thought of as an architect, Founding Father George Washington was a highly knowledgeable, self-educated architectural designer. Washington's great wealth as a Virginia planter enabled him to acquire books and to add to Mount Vernon, the plantation house he inherited from his brother. First refurbished in 1757 and 1758 and then nearly doubled in size in a second phase of building from 1773 to 1776, the remodeled Mount Vernon incorporated details from several popular architectural books. In the last major change, made after the Revolutionary War, Washington added a broad portico (1784-1787) overlooking the lawn toward the Potomac River. Despite his political differences with Britain, Washington nonetheless based his striking portico on one published in English architect Batty Langley's work The City and Country Builder and Workman's Treasury of Designs (1740).

IV NATIONHOOD AND AFTER: 1783 TO 1815

The period following the American Revolution started with fractious squabbling among the 13 states. These disagreements continued until a federal union was established and the Constitution was ratified in 1788. The years from about 1780 to 1820 are often called the Federal period and the architecture of this time Federal or Federalist, signifying that a conscious search took place for new forms that would mark a break with English influences. Some architectural designers made a moderate break from England, whereas others argued for radical change.

A Charles Bulfinch and New England

Bostonian Charles Bulfinch, who developed an interest in architectural design as a youth, ranks among the more conservative designers of this period. Bullfinch began his career as a businessman and self-trained amateur architect. He turned to architectural design as a full-time profession after his family lost its fortune. In time he designed scores of houses (in Boston and the surrounding countryside), public buildings, churches, and business buildings.

Bulfinch's first major design was for a new building type urgently needed by all the former colonies now become independent states—a state house or legislature building. Although some states adapted their former colonial governance buildings to this use, Massachusetts and other states opted for an entirely new building, free of the taint of colonial rule. Bulfinch developed his design for the Massachusetts State House in 1787, and the brick building went up from 1795 to 1798. Bulfinch created large rooms for the two houses of the legislature and for the governor and staff. He put the biggest room in the center, covered by a large wooden dome. He derived many of the details and elements from English buildings he had seen on a trip to Britain from 1785 to 1787, most notably the State House's colonnaded front porch and impressive dome. Although dependent on English design sources, Bulfinch's design established the dome as a feature indelibly linked to state capitols for more than 100 years.

In the New England states, designers of residential architecture emphasized strong abstract geometries and the proportions and placement of windows but showed great restraint in their use of classical ornament. The Governor Goodwin house (1811) of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, illustrates these principles well.

B Thomas Jefferson and Virginia

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson of Virginia took a very different view, however; he detested Georgian architecture, which he associated with colonial rule. Jefferson heavily criticized the magisterial buildings of Williamsburg, Virginia, formerly the colonial capital. For his own plantation house (begun in 1770), Jefferson departed from the English colonial practice of putting plantation houses on the banks of major rivers and instead placed his atop a small mountain. He adopted an Italian name, Monticello, for the estate. Although contemporary English books inspired his earliest sketches for the new house, he gradually turned to the work of 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Palladian aspects of his completed initial design include the building's symmetry, with two wings extending from a dominant central structure; its single story; and its large front porch with a pediment and Roman Doric columns.

Over the years, Jefferson constantly modified the house as he learned more. Soon after the American Revolution, Jefferson was appointed American diplomatic representative to the French court, and he delighted in seeing the latest in French progressive architecture in and around Paris. The single-story Hôtel de Salm in Paris greatly impressed Jefferson, and he later remodeled Monticello to make it appear more emphatically of one story and to give it a low Roman dome like that of the hôtel.

While in Paris, Jefferson also took note of a recent French book that showed the restored Maison Carrée, an ancient Roman temple in the town of Nîmes in southern France. When friends in Virginia who knew of his passion for architecture asked Jefferson to design the new state capitol for Virginia in 1785, he was pleased to help. The Virginia capital had shifted from Williamsburg to Richmond, where a new building was to rise on a bluff overlooking the James River. Jefferson initially hoped to design three adjoining buildings to house the three branches of state government, but he was instructed to squeeze all operations into one building. He took as his model the Maison Carrée, which was considered one of the most beautiful ancient buildings. Jefferson selected it not only for its simplicity of form, however, but also because it symbolized for him the pure architecture of Republican Rome, before the excesses of the Roman Empire. The Roman Republic seemed to present the perfect architectural examples for a new republic learning how to govern itself.

Jefferson sent drawings and a model of the new capitol from France back to Virginia to guide construction. The Virginia State Capitol (1785-1788) became the first building since ancient times to be based directly on an ancient classical prototype, and it marked the beginning of a classical revival in the United States. This revival, known as neoclassicism, swept Europe and America until the early to mid-1800s and even today influences the design of public and governmental buildings (see Neoclassical Art and Architecture).

The Roman architecture of Vitruvius possessed a clarity and mathematical precision in its proportions that appealed to Jefferson's logical and practical mind. Jefferson felt architecture exerted a powerful social and educational influence on its users, so when he began to design the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1817, he turned to Roman forms. For each of the university's ten instructional subject areas, he designed a separate pavilion, patterned after a Roman temple. Each pavilion used a different architectural style or order (the classical system that governed the shape of columns and other building parts). Jefferson wrote that these pavilions were to resemble an “architectural lecture,” silently educating university students about architecture. He grouped the ten large pavilions in two facing rows, five to a side, with a colonnade in the Roman Doric order linking the pavilions. Student rooms lay between pavilions, behind the colonnades. At the head of the group Jefferson placed a large cylindrical and domed library, inspired by the great Pantheon temple (ad 118-128) in Rome, which he knew from the plates in Palladio's Four Books of Architecture (1571).

V AMERICAN GROWTH AND EXPANSION: 1815 TO 1890

Thomas Jefferson's use of the Roman temple in Nîmes as a model for his Virginia State Capitol in 1785 marked the beginning of a series of historical revivals that swept both Europe and the United States in the 19th century. These revivals occurred in part because of increasing academic study of architectural history, study that produced books illustrated with engravings and woodcuts. Patrons and architects had more images of the past available to them, and increased travel to Europe additionally broadened their knowledge. A desire for symbolic meaning also encouraged the use of historic styles. A building was meant to make a statement about its use or the taste of the patron. Thus, Jefferson chose Roman architecture as a reference to the Roman model for the government of the new American republic.

A The Greek Revival

The American Greek Revival began about 1818. As a result of a desire for allusions, such as Jefferson had made by modeling the Virginia State Capitol on a Roman temple, many government buildings, as well as banks and other commercial buildings, were based on classical models. The government of ancient Greece was felt to be a fitting symbol for the developing American democratic system. A Greek temple facade on 19th-century banks and commercial buildings was intended to convey the trustworthy principles and the stability of the business. Architects even based residences on Greek temples, and although builders most often constructed these dwellings of wood, they painted them white to resemble stone. These white wooden temple houses, built across the nation from Maine to Mississippi and from Virginia to Illinois and Oregon, carried an implied reference to democracies in ancient Greece and in America.

In the northern states, Grecian-inspired houses were often simple boxes with classical ornament around windows and doors, although most of them displayed a roof pediment and a classical cornice (molding at the base of the roof, sometimes with brackets or dentils). On large plantation houses in the South, colossal two-story classical columns created a colonnade over which the roof extended. This extended roof generally covered a gallery or balcony at the second floor and kept sun off the walls, helping keep the inside temperature down. Tall French doors (paired doors with glass panes) on both floors could be opened wide to promote the flow of air through the house. The irony was that enslaved Africans built these classical temples that carried grand references to ancient democracy, and slave labor also made landowners wealthy enough to afford these mansions.

B The Gothic Revival

The Greek Revival style soon received a challenge from the Gothic Revival, a romantic style of architecture that favored darkness and the suggested mystery of medieval times. Landscape architect and writer Andrew Jackson Downing promoted this approach to both building and landscape design in America, starting in the 1840s. Downing produced several highly influential books in which he presented model designs for houses based on picturesque medieval houses and early Renaissance Italian villas. Architect Richard Upjohn, who advocated medieval styles for churches, aided Downing's cause. Upjohn considered the Gothic Revival particularly appropriate for churches, which became his specialty.

C New Building Types and New Materials

A problem was inherent with references to the past in architecture: Industrial development required new buildings for which no precedents existed. Architects had not been trained to systematically analyze new functional needs and create new building types arising from those functions. The railroad station clearly demonstrated this difficulty. What were railroad stations and what were they to look like? Mass transportation had never existed before the invention of the steam engine and the railroad in the early 1800s, so designing the first train stations presented a challenge to architects. Architects made all sorts of historic references in their designs, a few of which were highly fanciful.

Industrial development had two significant impacts on construction: mass production of new building materials such as iron, and railway shipment of those materials across the continent. The larger scale of buildings, the need for economy, and the desire for permanence led to the use of cast iron as a building material for urban buildings, especially warehouses and business blocks. Factories mass-produced a range of identical cast-iron parts that could be assembled into a finished building. By the 1850s, nearly identical buildings were going up in many large Eastern cities, their parts supplied by a handful of producers concentrated in New York, Baltimore, and other Eastern cities. Sections of precast iron were used even for the new dome of the U.S. Capitol (1851-1864) in Washington, D.C. What made this widespread use of iron possible was the ability to transport building parts anywhere the railway system reached.

With the rapid development of new towns and cities in the Midwest, the traditional method of constructing small structures—for example, houses, churches, and business buildings—had become impossibly slow. This method relied on the availability of highly skilled joiners and called for heavy, hewn-timber frames, with widely spaced principal timbers locked into place by complex mortise-and-tenon (dovetail) connections. As mechanized sawmills proliferated among the softwood forests of the Midwest, lumber became widely available in smaller dimensions (likewise shipped by rail), and carpenters in several places soon devised a much faster method of putting up buildings. They used closely spaced, narrow studs (vertical supports) for walls, which they fastened together not by complex joinery but by nailing the pieces to the studs. With the mechanized production of iron nails, this new method of wood-framed construction essentially replaced the traditional heavy timber frame. The new frames went up so fast that a house could be built in one day, and the frames appeared so light in weight that the term balloon-frame construction was soon coined. Historians associate Chicago, in particular, with the invention of the balloon frame. The small, wood-framed St. Mary's Church, built in Chicago in 1833 by Augustine D. Taylor, is an example of the technique's early use.

Compared with the architecture in many areas of Europe and in other parts of the world, the architecture of the United States developed with remarkable uniformity. This uniformity resulted from the hundreds of builders' manuals and pattern books published in the early 19th century. Pioneers trekking to Oregon in the 1840s and 1850s brought these manuals and pattern books with them, so that building in the Western territories duplicated in many ways construction 4,000 km (2,500 mi) to the east. These books, as their authors often noted, were produced specifically for an American audience, to address American building needs.

The printing and distribution of these illustrated books demonstrates how industry changed the process of building. Illustrated catalogs furthered the changes. These catalogs, published by iron manufacturers such as James Bogardus in New York City, enabled potential customers as far away as San Francisco to order building components. In some instances, entire sections of wood-framed buildings, fabricated in the East, were transported by ship around South America to destinations in Washington, Oregon, and central California via San Francisco.

The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City perhaps best demonstrates the scale of building made possible by the rapid expansion of American industry and by American ambition. Designed by John Augustus Roebling in the 1850s and 1860s and built under the supervision of his son and daughter-in-law, the Brooklyn Bridge became the largest suspension bridge in the world upon its completion in 1883. Numerous techniques devised by Roebling made this bridge possible, including the use of caissons (watertight chambers) for building the bridge's stone towers and of steel wire for the cables. To allow tall-masted sailing ships to pass under the bridge, Roebling positioned the road deck 36.6 m (120 ft) above the water. Stone towers, which rose to a height of 84.3 m (276.5 ft), made this high roadway possible and made the bridge the tallest structure in New York at its completion. The span from tower to tower of just over 486 m (1,595 ft) and the span between cable anchors of 1,054 m (3,456 ft) constituted a remarkable achievement.

D Second Empire and High Victorian Gothic

Industrial expansion underwent a dramatic shift after the American Civil War (1861-1865), when industrialists bought up thousands of small companies and enterprises and merged them into truly national companies and corporations. As a result, the profits of expanding industry became increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. It was a period labeled The Gilded Age by writer Mark Twain, and colorful and exuberant displays in architecture characterized it.

Two stylistic modes—Second Empire and High Victorian Gothic—dominated in the two decades following the Civil War. Architecture in the Second Empire style, patterned after work at that time in Paris, represented classical design. This ornate style featured layers of classical columns and abundant figural sculpture. Buildings were capped by multiple Mansard roofs (roofs with four sloping sides). Excellent examples in the United States include the Renwick Gallery (1859-1874, originally the Corcoran Museum) in Washington, D.C., designed by James Renwick, and the vast Philadelphia City Hall (1874-1901) by John MacArthur.

High Victorian Gothic architecture, inspired by contemporary work in England and by the critical writing of John Ruskin, appealed to an American desire for more picturesque variety in building styles. Twain himself was not immune to dramatic display, as seen in the High Victorian Gothic house built for him (1873-1874) in Hartford, Connecticut. Designed by Edward Potter, the Twain house is built of brightly painted brick and wrapped in broad porches. Memorial Hall (1865-1878), a multipurpose building at Harvard University, provides another excellent example of High Victorian Gothic. Designed by the firm of Ware and Van Brunt, Memorial Hall creates strong color contrasts through its materials—red brick, black brick, and cream-colored stone—and through roofs covered with bands of slate in red, black, and cream color.

E Richardsonian Romanesque

American architecture before and after the Civil War remained heavily indebted to ancient and recent European sources, but one American architect managed to assimilate various European influences and create a highly personal and individual style. Henry Hobson Richardson rose to national and international prominence with his design for Trinity Church (1872-1877) in Boston. Although the use of multicolored stone in the church came from High Victorian Gothic, and the round arches were inspired by 12th-century French Romanesque architecture, the broad pyramidal mass is Richardson's own. In the years afterward, before his early death at age 48 in 1886, Richardson simplified his work and created an architecture of strong, broad masses and minimal but exquisite detail. His designs exerted great influence across the United States and began to influence European architecture, particularly in Scandinavia.

VI INNOVATION AND TRADITION: 1890 TO 1920

American architecture in the years between 1890 and 1920 was dominated by academically trained architects, many of whom had studied at the acclaimed Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Their knowledge of the history of architecture surpassed that of most architects before or since, but they tempered this interest in the past with an ability to design buildings that fully accommodated the needs of their time. They received commissions from industrialists who had amassed enormous fortunes before the institution of personal income tax in the United States in 1913. These clients built sumptuous residences, both in fashionable residential neighborhoods of industrial cities (such as Fifth Avenue in New York City and Prairie Avenue in Chicago) and in exclusive summer enclaves (such as Newport, Rhode Island, and Bar Harbor, Maine). These grand houses were objects to convey “conspicuous consumption,” as American economist Thorstein Veblen would soon call the ostentatious display of wealth at that time. Architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had trained in Paris, became the designer of choice for several of these grand houses, particularly for the Vanderbilt family. For Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Hunt designed an enormous Italian Renaissance summer palace called The Breakers (1892-1895) at Newport. For Cornelius's younger brother, George Washington Vanderbilt, Hunt designed a huge French Renaissance chateau called Biltmore (1888-1895), which is surrounded by formal gardens, at Asheville, North Carolina. Although such over-exuberant display disturbed some socialists, it also inspired many other Americans to strive to achieve this American dream.

A Public Buildings

The spirit of grandeur in building prompted many cities to erect grand public buildings as well. The Boston Public Library (1887-1895), designed by the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, provided a model for this kind of public grandeur. Inspiration for the library's sumptuous entry staircase and voluminous upstairs reading room came from ancient Roman and Italian Renaissance sources. Although McKim, Mead, and White received many commissions for city townhouses and for summerhouses in the country, they specialized in major urban buildings. One of their best was the spacious Pennsylvania Station (1902-1910) in New York City. The train station's soaring public spaces provided a majestic gateway to the city; it was demolished in 1963, however, to make room for Madison Square Garden. Equally expansive is Union Station (1903-1907) in Washington, D.C., designed by Daniel H. Burnham. Both of these vast railway stations used classical Roman elements in their broad exteriors and barrel vaults (ceilings in the form of a half-cylinder) or groin vaults (intersecting barrel vaults, with ridges called groins at the intersections) for their huge interior spaces.

B Office Towers

As American business grew, the need for urban office space expanded. In most cities, architects could create office space only by building upward. Typical office towers had self-supporting outer masonry (stone or brick) walls, with the interior structure formed by a skeleton of iron columns and wrought iron beams. By the 1880s these office towers rose to 15 stories or more, requiring the outer stone or brick walls to be 2 to 3 m (6 to 9 ft) thick. In Chicago, for example, the Monadnock Building (1884-1892), designed by Burnham and John Wellborn Root, had a solid brick outer wall that was 2 m (6 ft) thick at the insistence of the client. The architects wanted to use metal throughout, but the clients did not trust this new building method.

In 1883 Chicago architects began to build office blocks with a skeleton entirely of metal; all the outer cladding of brick or stone, as well as the windows, attached to this internal skeleton. After inexpensive steel for a building's skeleton became more widely available during the 1880s, office towers grew taller and taller. The first architects to accept, and visually accentuate, this vertical character were Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan of Chicago. Their 10-story Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St. Louis, Missouri, features strongly emphasized vertical piers on the outside that enclose the steel frame inside. Sullivan used the same approach in his even taller 12-story Guaranty Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York. For the Schlesinger & Mayer department store (1895-1904, now Carson Pirie Scott) in Chicago, Sullivan designed a corner public entrance accentuated with elaborate cast-iron ornament. To emphasize the large, open floors for displaying merchandise inside, Sullivan used broad windows and clad the building's steel frame with wide horizontal bands of terra-cotta.

By the end of the 19th century, architects across the country had switched to skeleton framing completely of steel, which was lighter and less susceptible to fire damage than iron. The framing was protected from weather by masonry insulation and an outer skin of stone and glazed terra-cotta. One of the most visually startling early skyscrapers is the Fuller Building (1902-1903) in New York City, popularly called the Flatiron Building, by D. H. Burnham & Company of Chicago. Because this building stands on a narrow triangular lot, it seems even taller than its 21 stories when viewed from its pointed end. The Flatiron Building was the tallest building in New York City for a short time, but it was soon surpassed by the soaring Woolworth Building (1910-1913) a few blocks away, designed by Cass Gilbert. With a steel skeleton heavily braced to resist sideways pressure from wind, this so-called Cathedral of Commerce rises 55 stories, to a height of just over 241 m (792 ft). The Woolworth Building retained the record for the world's tallest building for almost 20 years, until the construction of the Chrysler Building in 1930. To emphasize the enormous height of the Woolworth Building, Gilbert stressed its vertical lines, using Gothic detailing and capping the office tower with a series of setbacks and a pointed Gothic crown.

C Prairie Houses

Soaring office towers represented a totally new building type in the history of architecture. Another entirely new American building type was the suburban, detached single-family residence. This building type became the focus of attention of Frank Lloyd Wright, who from 1897 to 1912 built houses in several suburbs rising up around Chicago. During those years Wright analyzed the needs of the American family and designed a new kind of house adapted to those evolving needs and to the flat landscape of the Midwest. Wright's new design, called the prairie house, had distinctive, long horizontal lines and planes on the outside. Inside, extended interconnected spaces, especially in public areas such as the dining and living rooms, distinguished the prairie house. In his open plans, a series of spaces extended from a central mass that housed the fireplace. Wright's approach to design was closely associated with that of the Arts and Crafts movement, in which the architect designed not only the house but also the interior detailing, furniture, lighting fixtures, and even doorknobs, hinges, and other hardware. Wright's prairie house style is well illustrated by the Ward Willitts house (1900-1902) in Highland Park, north of Chicago, and even better by the Frederick C. Robie house (1906-1909), on the south side of Chicago. A number of Wright's associates (mostly former office assistants) extended his prairie style in Chicago suburbs and in other Midwestern states, forming what became known as the Prairie School.

D The Columbian Exposition and Its Influence

Many architects and civic leaders at the end of the 19th century found the new office skyscrapers individually impressive, but not designed with any consideration for one another or for the city as a whole. Rather than being planned as integrated ensembles, cities seemed simply to happen by accident. This situation changed after the Columbian Exposition, a world's fair held in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of explorer Christopher Columbus in the Western Hemisphere. Scheduled for 1892, the fair was delayed for a year by organization problems. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and Burnham planned the Columbian Exposition as an example of how to design several buildings and the open spaces around them to form a cohesive group. They also integrated water from Lake Michigan as an important part of the design in the form of lagoons. For the sake of unity, all the architects involved in designing the major buildings for the fair agreed to use a classical Roman style, because it was the one style in which they had all been trained.

This choice of style inaugurated a wave of large-scale classical public buildings—such as city halls, art museums, and public libraries—and for a time this impeded the development of a distinctly American form of public building. However, the fair's design also influenced hundreds of cities across the nation to hire urban planners or to set up permanent urban planning boards or committees to make sure that growth was not only sensible and systematic, but also resulted in beautiful buildings, parks, and urban spaces. This nationwide activity became known as the City Beautiful movement and lasted from 1893 to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

VII THE MODERN MOVEMENT: 1920S TO 1970S

From 1910 on, a small group of architects in Europe had developed an extremely lean and functionally efficient architecture, stripped of virtually all ornament. This austere architecture had limited appeal in the United States, although a few architects in New York, Chicago, and the Los Angeles area independently developed their own versions of such a modern architecture. Best known among these are Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra, all of whom worked in southern California. European-inspired modernism made its first appearance in the United States in the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) building (1929-1932) in Philadelphia. Its design was prepared by George Howe, an American architect, and by William Lescaze, an architect born and trained in Switzerland. The building's lack of historical ornament, its smooth and polished stone surfaces, and its large planes of glass closely link it with the European modern movement, as do its upper offices in a tall, flat-topped slab with bands of windows.

The first modern European movement to have a wide influence in America was art deco, with its simplified shapes and geometric ornament. But American architects did not fully embrace European modernism until after World War II (1939-1945), when architects who had emigrated from Germany introduced it in the United States.

A Historicism

The 20 or so years following World War I (1914-1918) brought not only a renewed use of historical precedent in residential, business, and governmental architecture, but also a determined search for a clearly modern architecture. For governmental buildings, architects and government officials felt that classical architecture was particularly appropriate. The Supreme Court Building (1933-1935) designed by Cass Gilbert in Washington, D.C., provides a good example. From a distance, its inspiration from a classical temple is obvious. At close range, however, the building's sculpture in particular shows a degree of simplification and abstraction that connects it with art deco modernism of the time.

In the suburbs, which continued to expand rapidly with the rise of private ownership of automobiles, residences were built in historic styles that carried with them the romance of the past, such as colonial revival, late medieval Tudor, and Mediterranean. The best of these houses were designed by trained architects. Such houses exhibited a sure knowledge of architectural history in their accurate details, while at the same time satisfying modern living requirements. The various rooms might be in historic styles different from that used for the exterior, but seldom were historic periods mixed in any single room. These historically based residences are called period houses.

Another new building type that arose after World War I exploited historical references to the utmost: large motion-picture palaces. Just as the movies evoked emotions through an illusionistic medium, so too the movie palaces exploited elaborate ornamentation, designed to give the illusion of France or Spain in the glorious past, or of less familiar locales such as China, Maya Mexico, or ancient Egypt. (Egypt became especially popular after the discovery of the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922.) Some large movie houses, known as atmospheric theaters, had auditoriums designed to resemble town squares, with walls presenting a series of building facades and a smooth plaster vault painted blue to suggest open sky.

Even office skyscrapers continued to have designs based on historical styles into the 1920s. A competition for a new office tower for the Chicago Tribune newspaper, held in 1922, demonstrated dramatically the continued appeal of such designs. Most of the 270 entries to the competition, which came in from around the world, were executed in historically based styles, although some, primarily from Europe, were dramatically modern in style. The conservative jury selected a Gothic design from the firm of Howells & Hood, which drew its inspiration from a late Gothic tower added to the Rouen Cathedral in France in 1485.

B Early European Modernism and Art Deco

European architectural developments did have an impact on American architecture, and no development more so than a small international exposition held in Paris in 1925 devoted to the decorative arts. This exposition immediately influenced many American patrons and architects who desired to create a modern design that was not so austere or lacking in ornament as the modernism developed by the Bauhaus school in Germany or by Le Corbusier in France. The modernism that stemmed from the Paris exposition quickly came to be called art deco in a shortened version of the exposition's name, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts). It was a modernism that was not too modern and that incorporated elegant materials, including new materials such as aluminum, stainless steel, and early plastics. Art deco used a great deal of ornament with stylistic motifs such as zigzags and multiple curved forms. Its bold linear or flat geometric patterns were accentuated by strong color contrasts. In the 1930s, art deco detailing became somewhat less exaggerated and shifted toward linear continuity and smooth rounded surfaces in a style that came to be called streamlined moderne.

In the ever-larger office skyscrapers of the 1920s, American architects moved from historic detailing to more original and abstract art deco detailing. Skyscrapers in the art deco style had a soaring shaft with office space, upper floors that were set back from the floors below, and at the top additional setbacks that created a pyramid or spire in a final flourish. (Building and zoning ordinances in many American cities required setbacks of upper floors to allow light and air to reach the streets.) The best example of art deco style is the Chrysler Building (1928-1930) in New York City, by William Van Alen.

A race to build the tallest skyscraper also characterized the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Chrysler Building briefly held the record, with 77 floors and a needlelike spire that reached 319 m (1,046 feet). The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, almost immediately broke that record. Designed by architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, with engineers H. C. Balcom and Associates, the Empire State Building has 102 stories and a dramatic art deco spire that soars to a height of 381 m (1,250 ft). The Empire State Building's record height remained unsurpassed for nearly 40 years.

C The International Style

The center of modern architecture in Europe was the Bauhaus, a design school in Germany established in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius. Located first in Weimar, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925. Gropius resigned the directorship in 1928 and left Germany in 1934, after Adolf Hitler became Germany's leader. Architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe assumed the directorship of the Bauhaus from 1930 until the Nazi regime disbanded it in 1933. In 1932 an exhibition held at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York featured the work of Gropius and other European architects who had defined the modernist design philosophy, including Mies, J. J. P. Oud, and Le Corbusier. The organizers of the exhibition, museum curator Philip Johnson and architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, prepared a small book to accompany it. Both the book and the exhibition were entitled The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, and they introduced the American public to the new European approach to design. Although the initial public reaction to the International Style was not overly enthusiastic, the power of Johnson and Hitchcock's arguments in its favor gradually gained it broader acceptance. In the book they defined International Style modernism, discussing its rejection of historical styles and applied ornament and its emphasis on pure utilitarian functionalism. International Style architects, they noted, favored enclosed spatial volumes over opaque enclosing materials, smooth industrial finishes (especially metals and glass), and open, nonsymmetrical plans without any dominant axis.

Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie style work, published in Germany in 1911, had exerted a strong influence on the French and German architects who developed the International Style. Their modernism, in turn, influenced Wright himself, as demonstrated in portions of his best-known building, Fallingwater (1935-1938), located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wright had received far fewer commissions in the late 1920s and early 1930s than he had in the first years of the century, in part because of the Depression. Fallingwater, a private weekend house built for Pittsburgh department-store magnate Edgar Kaufmann, reestablished Wright as a major American architect.

Wright positioned the house directly over a stream, giving rise to the house's name, and on a spot used by Kaufmann and his family to view a lush rhododendron forest. To merge the house with its landscape, Wright used rough limestone and created strongly horizontal wings that appear to extend from the rocky ledges of the site. Like houses in the International Style, Fallingwater lacks conventional interior walls, although stone piers enclose the kitchen. The arrangement of Fallingwater's rough limestone vertical piers and smooth concrete horizontal planes in a somewhat abstract composition also shows the influence of the International Style.

D Form Follows Function, 1950 to 1970

In disfavor with the Nazi regime, Mies Van der Rohe received little work in Germany and hence was receptive to an invitation by Philip Johnson to come to the United States. Mies arrived in 1937 in Chicago, where he headed the department of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and served as chief planner and designer of the school's new campus. When World War II ended in 1945, Mies began to receive other commissions. He applied the principles of International Style modernism in the design of a pair of apartment towers (1948-1951) on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. These towers were among the earliest American apartment buildings in this style. The walls are of glass, divided into bays by thin steel columns that express the structure of the building, although they have no structural function. Mies conceived of his designs as universal and adaptable to a wide range of uses, including apartments, office towers, and governmental buildings. This feature of the International Style, in which one form serves multiple functions, has been summed up as “form follows function.”

The ideas Mies had pioneered in Germany lay behind the thinking of the group of international architects who designed the headquarters of the United Nations (UN) in New York in the late 1940s, although Mies was not part of the design committee. Drawing from a sketch by Le Corbusier, the panel of architects placed the many offices of the UN Secretariat in a tall, glass-sided slab; the auditorium in a curved, low structure; and other semipublic facilities of the UN in a low block with a glass exterior. New York architects Wallace K. Harrison and Max Abramovitz supervised the construction of the buildings.

The honor of first American office tower fully enclosed in glass belongs to the Equitable Savings and Loan Building (1944-1948, originally the Commonwealth Building) in Portland, Oregon, designed by Italian-born American architect Pietro Belluschi. This building used a reinforced concrete frame, sheathed in a skin of aluminum and green-tinted glass, and employed heat pumps as a new energy-efficient means for both heating and cooling the sealed structure.

Mies, working with Philip Johnson (by then an architect), achieved the purest expression of the International Style applied to an American corporate office tower in the elegant Seagram Building (1954-1958) in New York City. To produce a pure form for this prestigious commission and Park Avenue site, the architects used the simplest possible slab shape and sheathed the steel structure in elegantly detailed sections of bronze and floor-to-ceiling panels of bronze-tinted glass.

E Form Follows Form, 1950-1970

International Style purists sought to create universal prototypes for buildings that looked extremely simple in structure and that were capable of serving different functions. Many other architects, by contrast, emphasized the uniqueness and individuality of their buildings. This emphasis, in which buildings were conceived as sculptural forms, was later described as “form follows form.” Wright, for example, deviated from all previous museum plans in his design for the Guggenheim Museum (1956-1959) in New York City. To house the Guggenheim collection of modern art, Wright devised a spacious building consisting of a ramp that spirals upward and outward around a soaring central space covered with a domed skylight. Although Wright designed the building from 1943 to 1945, his design posed a number of construction problems that accounted in part for a delay of more than ten years in building the museum.

Another design that ran counter to the universal approach of the International Style was the Gateway Arch (1959-1965), the most visible portion of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the west bank of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen submitted the winning design in a competition held in 1947 and 1948; the memorial project itself had been conceived in 1934 and the land for it cleared in the early 1940s. Saarinen's dramatic arch follows the line of the structurally efficient and visually appealing catenary curve (the curve of a rope or chain that hangs from two points). Rising 192 m (630 ft), the height of the arch equals the span at its base. The arch is a hollow triangle in cross-section, tapering in width from 16 m (54 ft) at the base to 5 m (17 ft) at the top. The stainless steel outer surface has an inner lining of heavily reinforced concrete. Seat capsules ascend on rails inside the hollow arch to observation windows at the top. Few structures create such a memorable, monumental impression, either in sheer size or dramatic form.

Saarinen designed his other, equally memorable, buildings in accordance with their individual functions. They range from his cylindrical Kresge Chapel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1955) in Cambridge to the sweeping curves of his TWA Terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport (1956-1962) in New York City and his Washington Dulles International Airport (1958- 1962) outside Washington, D.C. His last building, the North Christian Church (1959-1963) in Columbus, Indiana, is memorable for its plan and for a sharply pointed spire that rises from the center of the roof.

Architect Louis I. Kahn of Philadelphia achieved a middle ground in the 1960s and early 1970s between the monumental symbolism of Saarinen and the utilitarian functionalism of Mies. Kahn sought to let function determine the form of a building, but he also sought to give his building a distinctive psychological character. He said a building should appear to say to the observer, “Let me show you how I was made.” In addition to revealing structural elements, Kahn believed it essential that a building provide natural light to all spaces and connect the occupants to the rhythm of the Sun. Buildings that show Kahn's fusion of functional clarity and symbolic communication include the Richards Medical Research Building (1957-1960) at the University of Pennsylvania; the First Unitarian Church (1959-1969) in Rochester, New York; the completed portion of his Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1959-1965) in La Jolla, California; and the Kimbell Art Museum (1966-1972) in Fort Worth, Texas.

One of the most unusual commissions Kahn received was for the Parliament Building of Bangladesh (1962-1983) in Dhaka. This plain concrete building focuses on the assembly chamber at its center. A corridor and committee rooms surround the assembly chamber, with offices and public spaces situated farthest from the center. Kahn placed a mosque on the building's west side, slightly angled toward Mecca, because he recognized the important link between political action and religious belief in Bangladesh. Kahn described the building as “a many-faceted precious stone, constructed in concrete and marble.” Its outer concrete walls appear light because the geometrical openings cut into them cast dark shadows.

VIII THE 1970S TO THE PRESENT

Two opposing design approaches mark the years following 1970. One approach continued International Style modernism on an even larger scale, in heroic, varied, and expressionistic buildings. The other approach reacted against the lack of symbolic imagery in such modernism by incorporating historical detailing and references to vernacular architecture while retaining some of the principles of modernism. The latter approach, sometimes known as postmodernism, appealed to the general public more than the abstract mechanical quality of the International Style had.

A International Modernism Revisited

The shift to a larger, almost antihuman scale began with giant skyscrapers built from 1965 to 1975 that successively claimed to be the world's tallest building. The first to claim the distinction was the 100-story John Hancock Center in Chicago (1965-1970) with a height of 344 m (1,127 ft). (Although the height given above for the Empire State Building is greater, it includes the spire.) The twin World Trade Center towers (1966-1973) in New York City followed with heights of 417 m (1,368 ft) and 415 m (1,362 ft). The Sears Tower in Chicago (1968-1974) next claimed the record at 442 m (1,450 ft). (The World Trade Center towers collapsed in 2001 after a terrorist attack.)

As the 20th century ended, the quest to build the world's tallest building shifted to Europe and Southeast Asia, and experience in skyscraper design made American architects especially desirable for these projects. The twin Petronas Towers (1996) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, held the record until the year 2003. Designed by Cesar Pelli, these soaring, tapered towers of metal and glass rise to 452 m (1,483 ft). The architectural firm of C. Y. Lee & Partners surpassed the Petronas Towers in 2003 with Taipei 101, a skyscraper in Taiwan that rises 509 m (1,671 ft). The building takes its name from its 101 stories. As Taipei 101 neared completion, architects were preparing for even taller projects.

B Postmodernism

Postmodern architecture ranges from work that closely resembles the International Style, with its elimination of traditional ornament, to work that is rigorously based on ancient or Renaissance prototypes. Individual postmodern architects have not limited themselves to a single style, however. From the early 1970s onward, postmodernist Richard Meier developed a crystalline geometric architecture clad in white metal. Although his early buildings resemble those of Le Corbusier from the 1920s, Meier later transformed this look into a style uniquely his own. Meier's High Museum of Art (1980-1983) in Atlanta, Georgia, shows the dynamic contrast he created between curved shapes and crisp rectilinear lines or forms. Meier received a number of commissions for art museums after the High Museum, culminating in five buildings that make up the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities (1984-1996) in Los Angeles, California. A generous budget enabled Meier to clad these buildings in square panels of tawny-colored travertine stone and matching panels of enameled aluminum.

Another architect who retained important aspects of International Style modernism is I. M. Pei. Born in China, Pei began working in the United States in the mid-1930s and became a U.S. citizen in 1954. His design for the East Wing of the National Gallery (1968-1978) in Washington, D.C., uses simple oblique masses that reflect the diagonals of Washington's street plan. Pei clad the walls of the East Wing in the same marble used decades earlier for the National Gallery's classical-revival main building, and he placed a large, glass-covered atrium at the East Wing's center. For the Louvre Museum in Paris, Pei designed a large, transparent pyramid entrance (1982-1989), using an open-grid frame of metal covered entirely in glass. The structure and materials are decidedly modern, but the pyramid form refers to the Egyptian art in the Louvre and to the important role France and French emperor Napoleon I played in making Egypt a subject of study in the early 1800s.

Chicago architect Helmut Jahn used large-scale forms of late modernism and emphasized and exploited the artistic effects of metal structural framing and colored glass sheathing. These interests are clearly apparent in his design for the United Airlines Terminal (1983-1987) at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

In contrast to these postmodern extensions of International Style modernism are various forms of postmodern architecture that employ historically based forms and details. Architects Robert Venturi and Charles Moore introduced the first variant, referring to historical architecture in their early work in ways that were witty and ironic. Venturi's humorous manipulations are evident in the house he designed for his mother, the Vanna Venturi house (completed 1964) in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, especially in its references to a classical broken pediment and its incorporation of moldings across the facade. More obvious in its irony is Moore's Piazza d'Italia (1975-1978), commissioned by an Italian American association in New Orleans, Louisiana. Moore used elements inspired by Roman classicism, both ancient and Renaissance, but changed their materials, forming his Ionic column capitals, for example, from spirals of bright stainless steel. Architect Robert Stern termed this variant of postmodernism ironic classicism.

Postmodern architects also played with the size and scale of classical forms and details, to puzzle and amuse the observer. The first major American public building to employ this postmodern irony was the Portland Building (1978-1984), an office building for the city of Portland, Oregon, designed by Michael Graves. Graves had previously focused on residences, and the Portland Building was his first important public commission. Numerous commissions for public buildings followed. Also in the late 1970s Philip Johnson, once the champion of International Style modernism, became the champion of postmodernism and its celebration of ornament. He declared his embrace of postmodernism in a highly visible way in the AT&T Building (1979-1984, now the Sony Building) in New York City. Johnson clad the building in pinkish-brown granite panels instead of in glass, and he created for the top an enormous parody of a Chippendale highboy chest with its triangular pediment broken by a huge circular notch.

Other variants of postmodernism include latent classicism and archaeological (or canonic) classicism. Latent classicism applies an abstract geometrical form to buildings, and any classical references it makes are less obvious than those of many postmodern buildings. This variant can be seen in the General Foods Corporation Headquarters (1977-1983) in Rye, New York, by the firm of Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates. Archaeological classicism occupies the other end of the scale. In this variant, architects copy classical forms and details exactly, even creating reproductions of ancient or Renaissance buildings. An early example of this style was the original Getty Museum (1970-1975) in Malibu, California, which reproduced an ancient Roman villa built outside Pompeii and buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad 79. The firm of Langdon & Wilson, with Norman Neuerberg as historical consultant, designed the museum. Later on, architect Allan Greenberg of Washington, D.C., used traditional classical elements, whether Roman or Greek in origin, in more subtle and creative ways.

By the late 1980s and 1990s the dominant variant of postmodernism adapted traditional architectural details in wholly original compositions, without the awkwardness and oddities of ironic postmodernism. Stern called this variant creative postmodernism, or modern traditionalism. Venturi, Moore, and Graves all moved in this direction, joining other architects such as Graham Gund, Thomas Beeby, and Stern. A representative example of this design approach is Stern's Observatory Hill Dining Hall (1982-1984) at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The dining hall combines red brick, white wood trim, and Tuscan Doric columns, referring to the adjoining buildings by Thomas Jefferson, but employs modern building forms and walls with large windows.

C Deconstructivism

Borrowing the term deconstruction and aspects of its meaning from French literary studies, some architectural theorists developed the idea of deconstruction in architecture in the late 1970s. In theory and in early designs, deconstruction involved the dismantling of architectural elements and the rearrangement of their constituent parts. In these designs architects did not concern themselves with the physical laws of the real world, and most of their early proposals were unbuildable. Later on, actual buildings resulted from some of these ideas, and the architects had to address the realities of construction and the weight of materials. The resulting buildings were typically disjointed in form, and they dramatically contradicted standard conventions of design and construction.

Architect Frank Gehry has enjoyed the playfulness deconstructivism allows. Gehry's designs range from a kind of austere modernism in the early 1970s to increasingly irregular compositions in the late 1980s and 1990s, with colliding angular forms and other unusual juxtapositions. As the geometries of his buildings became more complex and he introduced compound curves, Gehry and his staff relied increasingly on computer-aided design, adapting software developed in France for aircraft design.

The intriguing forms of Gehry's architecture attracted worldwide attention, and he received a commission for the Vitra International furniture assembly plant and museum (1987-1989) in Weil am Rhine, Germany. The museum portion of the building provides a good example of Gehry's use of curving and intersecting volumes and spaces. A second facility for Vitra (1988-1894) near Basel, Switzerland, also incorporates curving forms, with portions covered in sheets of zinc metal.

Gehry's approach culminated in his striking design for a branch of the Guggenheim Museum (1991-1997) in Bilbao, Spain. The computer became an integral part of the design and construction process by simultaneously solving design problems, developing construction details, working out structural technologies, and keeping track of building costs. Rare titanium metal came on the market as the Russian government sold its titanium reserves to raise urgently needed funds. As a result, Gehry could acquire this costly metal and have it fashioned into thin sheets to cover the curving surfaces of the Bilbao Guggenheim. The lightweight and reflective titanium surface accentuates the building's sculptural masses, which shimmer in sunlight.

D Urban Planning and the Postmodern City

Mainstream modernism of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was concerned primarily with office towers, corporate headquarters, and elegant showpiece houses for the upper economic classes. It showed little concern for humane urban planning or well-designed housing for other groups. Moreover, mainstream modernism was minimalist in style, with its lack of decoration and absence of references to the architectural experiences or preferences of the general public. By 1980 and the appearance of postmodernism, it had become clear that the public understood and appreciated historic references as a visual link to the past. The unchecked sprawl of most American cities had caused people to tire of bland, big-box buildings surrounded by acres of parking lots, of the enormous amount of space devoted to highways, and of the dispersal of everyday services that had once been grouped together within walking distance of home. This sprawl was especially pronounced in the so-called Sun Belt in the Southern tier of states where hundreds of thousands of Americans had migrated. In urban planning, too, a reaction set in.

A small vacation community called Seaside, on the coast of the Florida panhandle between Pensacola and Panama City, demonstrated clearly what a new kind of town planning could offer. The husband-and-wife architectural team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk laid out the basic plan of Seaside in the late 1970s. They designed the town to serve as a model of what larger communities could be, with a clear focus on a town center, an emphasis on landscape design, and requirements that buildings be kept low and in scale with the town as a whole. Special emphasis was placed on enabling residents to walk about the town so that they did not have to rely on automobiles. Individual houses and other buildings of Seaside reflected simple local building types adapted to the warm climate and thus not sealed and completely reliant on air conditioning. The architects wanted Seaside residents to be connected with one another and with the natural environment, rather than at the mercy of their machines. Duany and Plater-Zyberk thereafter drew up plans for a number of residential communities following these principles, and other architects and planners followed similar principles in a number of new communities around the United States.

American architecture at the beginning of the 21st century has avoided the single-style sterility that International Style modernism threatened to impose. Instead it remains open to a myriad of design approaches, suitable to a wide variety of locations, functions, and symbolic messages.

Contributed By:

Leland M. Roth

Design for World Trade Center Site

Polish-born American architect Daniel Libeskind produced this winning design for rebuilding the World Trade Center site in New York City. The twin towers of the trade center collapsed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Libeskind's design, called Memory Foundations, leaves bare the exposed bedrock at the site while restoring soaring towers to New York City's skyline.

AP/Wide World Photos/LMDC