The Contemporary

The modern movement ended its heroic period in the 1960s with a crisis of confidence. The rules that had seemed to follow inevitably from function and technique (the free plan, the curtain wall, the slab on pilotis) had produced both masterpieces and monotony, and the public had begun to judge the monotony. What followed was not a single new style but a divergence. Some architects asked what buildings mean, and returned to history, ornament and the sign. Some took the machine further and put it on show. Some set out to break the box altogether, first by fracture and then by continuous, computed variation. And a growing number, confronted with the energy crisis of the 1970s and the climate crisis since, asked what buildings cost the planet.

These four answers (meaning, technology, form and climate) organise this chapter. They overlap: a high-tech tower may also be a model of energy efficiency, a parametric façade may be tuned to the sun, and a postmodern skyscraper still stands on a steel frame. But each produced rules that can be stated, and most of them can be tried on the models.

Meaning: complexity, contradiction and the sign

The first and gentlest attack on orthodox modernism came from the Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi. His book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) defended the rich, ambiguous and contradictory architecture of Mannerist Rome, Baroque England and even of Main Street against the purity of the International Style. Simplicity achieved by leaving problems out, he argued, is only simplistic; architecture must accept the messy demands of use, structure and meaning and resolve them in a “difficult whole”. Against Mies’s famous economy he set a slogan of his own: less is a bore (Less is a bore). He preferred elements that do two jobs at once: both-and rather than either-or (Both-and, not either-or).

In 1968 Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour took a class of Yale students to study the Las Vegas Strip, and the book that resulted, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), is one of the most provocative in the literature. In a landscape seen from a moving car, they observed, communication depends on huge signs at the roadside, while the buildings behind them are cheap sheds. Buildings can carry meaning in two ways: as a duck, whose whole form is a symbol (the name comes from a poultry shop on Long Island built in the shape of a duck), or as a decorated shed, a plain shelter with meaning applied to its front (Duck or decorated shed). Modernism, they argued, had banished ornament only to turn every building into a duck; they preferred the honest shed and its sign.

The critic Charles Jencks gave the new architecture its name and its theory. In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) he defined it by double coding: a building should speak both to architects, in the language of modern technique, and to everyone else, in familiar signs drawn from history, the vernacular or commerce (Double coding). The postmodern buildings of the next fifteen years did exactly that, often with a wink: Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, Michael Graves’s Portland Building, James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and, most famously, Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York (1978–84), a steel-framed tower clad in pink granite, with a giant arched entrance at its foot and a broken pediment on top, borrowed from an eighteenth-century highboy.

Notice that the postmodern tower returns to Sullivan’s formula of base, shaft and capital, which the glass boxes of the 1950s had abandoned. Postmodernism was, among other things, a return to rules that modernism had declared obsolete.

Patterns and places

A quieter critique of modernism came from Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at Berkeley. A Pattern Language (1977) collects 253 patterns, each a recurring problem of the built environment and the core of its solution, arranged from the scale of regions down to window seats. Many are simply observations of what makes places good to be in. Rooms lit from one side only are gloomy and full of glare, so every room should have daylight from at least two sides, which means that buildings should be made of narrow wings (Light on two sides of every room). Outdoor spaces should be shaped as positively as rooms, not left over around freestanding objects (Positive outdoor space). A roof should be visible and low enough to feel like shelter (The sheltering roof).

Alexander’s patterns read like a catalogue of what traditional houses and towns did without thinking, and many of the best examples are older than modernism: Wright’s Prairie houses and the Arts and Crafts house around its garden satisfy most of them. The idea of a shared language of design, open to anyone, has had a long influence: on participatory planning, on the New Urbanism, and, unexpectedly, on the design of computer software.

Technology made visible: High-Tech

A second group of architects drew the opposite lesson from the crisis: the modern movement had failed not because it was too technological but because it had hidden its technology behind white walls and suspended ceilings. The critic Reyner Banham had pointed out in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969) that the services of a building (heating, ventilation, lighting, lifts) had become the largest part of its cost, yet architects treated them as an embarrassment. The High-Tech architects, admirers of Paxton, Fuller and the Archigram group’s drawings of plug-in cities, treated them as the architecture.

The manifesto was the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1971–77), designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with the engineers of Ove Arup. Its six floors are single open plates 48 m wide, carried on steel lattice girders that rest on cast-steel gerberettes pivoting on the columns (Column-free floors for any use). Structure, bracing and an escalator in a glass tube are on the piazza façade; on the street façade stand the services, painted by function: blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for the movement of people (Put the services outside, and show them). Rogers’s Lloyd’s Building in London and Norman Foster’s HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong carried the idea into the 1980s.

High-Tech’s ancestry includes the lightweight structures described in Frame and Skin: Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which enclose the most space with the least material (Enclose the most with the least: the geodesic dome), and Frei Otto’s tensile membranes. Its engineers, Peter Rice above all, made each joint and casting a piece of design.

Breaking the box: Deconstructivism

In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art, which had launched the International Style in 1932, mounted another exhibition that fixed a name: Deconstructivist Architecture, with work by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi. What united them, the curator Mark Wigley argued, was not a love of chaos but a way of revealing the instability hidden inside pure forms: walls that lean, grids that skew, volumes that collide and cantilever, windows that slash across a façade (Disturb the pure form). Their sources were the Russian Constructivists of the 1920s and, loosely, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.

Deconstructivism produced some of the most memorable buildings of the late century: Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station, Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1991–97), whose titanium curves were designed with software developed for fighter aircraft. Bilbao showed that the computer could make almost any form buildable, and opened the way to the next development.

Rules that make forms: parametric design

In parametric design the architect does not draw the form directly but writes the rules that generate it, with parameters that can be changed. The principle is older than the computer: Gaudí found the shapes of his vaults with hanging chains, Frei Otto with soap films, Félix Candela with the geometry of the hyperbolic paraboloid. All are methods of form-finding, described in Frame and Skin. What the computer added was the ability to apply a rule to thousands of elements at once, and to change it instantly.

The tower at the head of this chapter is generated by a rule of this kind: each floor is the floor below it turned by a small angle and scaled by a small factor. Changing the twist, the taper or the number of floors recalculates the floor plates, mullions and panes (Vary everything by rule). Real towers of the type include the Turning Torso in Malmö, which turns through 90° over 54 storeys, and the Shanghai Tower. The simplest rule of all is the attractor: choose a point, and make a property of every element depend on its distance from it (The attractor). In the façade below, each panel’s opening grows with its distance from the golden sphere; moving the sphere, or reversing the rule, resizes every opening.

In 2008 Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects declared that these methods had matured into a style, Parametricism, and gave it explicit rules in the Parametricist Manifesto: avoid rigid platonic forms, simple repetition and the collage of unrelated elements; make every form malleable, differentiate it gradually and correlate its systems. Critics answered that the rules licensed extravagant formalism. Yet the tools themselves have become universal: the same scripts that twist a tower are used to optimise its structure, daylight and energy, and the shared digital model of a building, or BIM, now organises its construction.

Climate: building for a finite planet

The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 reminded architects that the sealed, air-conditioned glass box depended on cheap energy. The answers they found were partly very old. Buildings in every tradition had been shaped by sun and wind (the courtyard, the wind-catcher, the deep eave, the thick wall), and Victor Olgyay’s Design with Climate (1963) had already turned that knowledge into a method, with charts of comfort and diagrams of the sun’s path. The sustainable architecture of the last half-century starts from its rules.

The simplest is the rule of the overhang. At noon the sun stands at an altitude of 90° minus the latitude, raised or lowered by up to 23.44° with the seasons. An overhang over an equator-facing window can therefore be sized to shade the whole window from the high summer sun while letting the low winter sun pass beneath it (Size the overhang to the sun). Once inside, the winter sun should fall on heavy materials (a concrete floor, a masonry wall) that store its heat and release it at night (Store the sun in heavy materials). Deep eaves (Alexander’s sheltering roof) turn out to be climate machines too.

The other great lesson of the period is that the envelope matters more than the equipment. The German Passivhaus standard, first realised at Darmstadt in 1990–91, demands so much insulation, such airtightness and such efficient recovery of heat from the exhaust air that a building needs almost no heating at all: about a tenth of the energy of an ordinary house of its time (The passive house: insulate, seal, recover). Its rules are performance targets rather than forms: they can be met by a terrace house, a school or a tower. Beyond energy in use lie the carbon locked into materials and the waste of demolition, which make timber, earth and the reuse of existing buildings the new frontier of the subject.

Rules today

The rules of the last sixty years look very different from the canons of the orders. Some are arguments about meaning, like Venturi’s; some are observations of human comfort, like Alexander’s; many are performance targets, like the Passivhaus criteria; and an increasing number are written as algorithms, like the twist of a parametric tower. Yet the old question has not changed. A building must still stand up, serve its use and give delight (the triad of firmness, commodity and delight with which this book began), and to these the present has added a fourth demand: that it should do so without exhausting the world that holds it.