ARCHITECTURE.

"Should there be a new style for the twentieth century?" This was the question many European architects had asked in a time of unprecedented social and technological change. But in spite of creative experiments, art nouveau chief among them, most architecture remained traditional as World War I began in 1914. The post-war world was distinctly different: old assumptions in politics and philosophy were aggressively discarded and new answers demanded. Architects responded with feverish attempts throughout the 1920s to devise a truly innovative approach that would suit modern conditions.

PATHS TO MODERNISM

In Germany the shattering effects of war led a younger generation of architects to shake themselves free from nineteenth-century ideological freight. A new mode emerged, expressionism. It was novel, yet rooted in prewar art nouveau and experiments with steel and glass in industrial buildings, including those of Peter Behrens (1868–1940), whose later IG Farben Dyeworks (1920–1924) was much admired. Expressionism was highly Romantic, borrowing forms from nature or the arts of the medieval German past. The 1919 Grosses Schauspielhaus interior, Berlin, by Hans Poelzig (1869–1936), engulfed theatergoers in what appeared an astonishing cavern of sharp stalactites. Here one sees close affinities to expressionism in contemporary painting and cinema. Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953) was involved pre-1914 with the Blaue Reiter group of Munich painters and doodled expressionist designs that mostly went unbuilt. Einstein Tower, Potsdam (1919–1921), was an exception: a sketch come to life in a curvaceous, sculptural mass of concrete, as if the astronomical observatory were morphing into a living organism. Caught up in the politics of the hour, expressionists called for art and architecture to serve the masses, a goal taken up in 1919 by Walter Gropius (1883–1969) at the Weimar Bauhaus design school, where a medieval handicraft aesthetic at first prevailed before machine-inspired functionalism took over. Expressionism proved short-lived and produced few tangible monuments, but many subsequent twentieth-century architects found its creativity and giddy, nature-based experimentalism inspiring as an alternative to the machine aesthetic.

Whereas expressionism flourished in postwar Germany, the Italian avant-garde developed futurism, founded upon an anti-Romantic obsession with machines of speed and war. Futurist painting, sculpture, and music had already spawned countless shrill manifestos when Antonio Sant'Elia (1888–1916) wrote Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914), calling for a complete break with nineteenth-century thinking and a rejection of classical, gothic, and other traditional styles. Monumentalism and heaviness should give way to lightness and energy, the airplane and the race car should provide inspiration. The futurist city would be as agile and dynamic as a shipyard; the futurist house would resemble a machine. As was the case for all futurists, Sant'Elia's tone was strident as he loudly proclaimed his hatred of the architecture of the past. When first starting out as an architect, he had been influenced by the Vienna Secession movement (headed by Joseph Maria Olbrich [1867–1908] and Otto Wagner [1841–1918]), but he soon turned away from decorative and ornamental approaches to the bare look of industrial facilities. In exquisite drawings exhibited as Città Nuova (1914) he envisioned a utopian city of the future where the machine aesthetic reigns triumphant. These illustrations uncannily predicted the coming form of the European city—but Sant'Elia did not live to see that future, as he died in battle in 1916.

The modernist architecture of the fledgling Soviet state in Russia was at first of a fantasy variety too, as the economic situation was desperate and little could be built. There were no clear lines between the dreams of architects, stage designers, and artists. The painter Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) conceived a colossal Monument to the Third International (1919–1920), a kind of reconceptualized Eiffel Tower in the form of an off-kilter dynamic spiral, exciting but entirely impractical. Tatlin's notions of constructivism were promulgated by the OSA (Union of Contemporary Architects) in 1925–1930, during which period a few constructivist buildings were actually erected. The culmination of this first phase of Soviet architecture came in 1931 with a competition for the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow. Architects from across Europe put forward some of the most exciting functionalist schemes ever proposed, including one by Le Corbusier (Charles-Éduoard Jeanneret, 1887–1965) for a parabolic arch that would support the main auditorium with suspended cables. It incorporated some of the dynamism of Tatlin. But the winning entry was anything but modernist—Boris Iofan's (1891–1976) overblown, stripped-classical wedding-cake skyscraper topped with a herculean statue of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). From here on, the government would sanction only a dull socialist realism style in art and architecture.

In Germany, the Bauhaus enshrined the "form follows function" approach, a reductivist mode that abolished ornament and historical reference and followed the cues of steel frames and plate glass, everything rectilinear and mechanical. Gropius was a key figure, but so too was his fellow countryman Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. The son of a stonemason, he worked under his father and later with Behrens but had no formal architectural training, thereby freeing him to experiment. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) briefly lived in Germany, and the young Mies was awed by an exhibition of his work in Berlin and the published Wasmuth Portfolio of Wright's architectural drawings (1910–1911). After a stint in the army, Mies participated in the visionary daydreaming of the early 1920s; his Glass Skyscraper drawings (1919–1921) pointed prophetically to the future in their embrace of the curtain wall—a non-loadbearing skin of glass that sheathes the steel skeleton inside. By 1926 Mies was in charge of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of artists and designers that had been struggling to decide whether to stick with the medieval handicraft aesthetic of expressionism or plunge into functionalism.

Mies epitomized the latter camp, and under his leadership Deutscher Werkbund became a leading force in promoting the functionalist credo through its journal, Die Form, and a much-lauded housing estate in Stuttgart, the Weissenhofsiedlung (1927). Mies laid it out, and seventeen mostly young European architects contributed designs, including himself, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Behrens, and Poelzig. Here some half-million visitors experienced architectural modernism, often for the first time. Traditionalists decried the general white-walled starkness, and the flat-roofed aesthetic later found deliberate antithesis in the peaked medieval roofs of clay tile promulgated by the Nazis, who detested Deutscher Werkbund modernism as degenerate, left-wing internationalism. They never got around to demolishing the Weissenhofsiedlung, and it has been restored (1981–1987) as a major world monument of the modern movement. A museum is currently proposed for one house designed by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967), a shoe box elevated on their trademark piers or pilotis and marked by long "ribbon" windows. It epitomizes Le Corbusier's "Five Points of a New Architecture" as spelled out in 1926: pilotis, roof terrace, open plan, ribbon windows, and free-façade design. His Citrohan house also debuted here, a low-cost type assembled from standardized parts.

The Weissenhofsiedlung attracted wide attention to modernism and made Mies famous. The Weimar government chose him to design the German Pavilion for the International Exposition, Barcelona (1928–1929). The forward-looking and democratic nature of the Weimar regime was given visual expression through a compendium of functionalist concepts: a flat, cantilevered roof-slab resting on slender steel columns; wall planes carefully arranged to provide an open plan; generous use of floor-to-ceiling plate glass; a grid system organizing the whole. The stonecutter's son chose sumptuous materials, including green marble, golden onyx, and Roman travertine for a stunning look. The original pavilion was dismantled in 1930, but so important has it become as a leitmotif of twentieth-century modernism, it was re-created in 1983–1986 on its original site.

Like Gropius, Mies fled to America to escape the Nazis and advocated for modernism there. He was greeted warmly by an intelligentsia familiar with his work from the landmark 1932 Museum of Modern Art show in New York and accompanying book, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, organized by art historians Philip Johnson (1906–2005) (later an important architect in his own right) and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987). Love it or hate it, Mies van der Rohe's sleek, functionalist European modernism was taken up by corporate America post-1945. Late in life he built in Germany again: the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, Berlin (1962–1968), has cruciform columns and a cantilevered roof harkening back to Barcelona. It forms part of the Kulturforum, the remaining buildings of which are by the architect Hans Scharoun (1893–1972), whose approach was very different from that of Mies: an exuberant sculpturalism in part derived from the expressionism Mies had sought in the 1920s to destroy. The rectilinear minimalism of Mies's museum could hardly be more different from Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie Concert Hall (1956–1963) with its dramatic staggered terraces of seats under a soaring tentlike roof. Mies thought he had solved the central problem of twentieth-century architecture with his dictum, "Less Is More," but many subsequent architects have found this unsatisfactory—including the recent postmodernists, who declare, "Less Is a Bore."

Inspired by the cubist paintings of Mondrian as well as by Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, a group of young Dutchmen created an architecture of extraordinary geometrical purity, De Stijl ("the style"). Their chief monument is the Schröder House, Utrecht, by Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), an odd intruder in a plain nineteenth-century neighborhood of brick rowhouses. Rietveld was a furniture designer whose cubistic Red Blue Chair of wooden panels was painted in primary colors (1917–1918); he approached the design of the house in the same way, assembling cardboard models that showed walls, roof slabs, and balconies as free-flowing sculptural units that appear to slide past each other and that are picked out in whites, grays, or touches of red or yellow.

MODERNISM ASCENDANT

The iconic twentieth-century architect is Le Corbusier, a kind of grand impresario whose oversize pronouncements and astounding breakthroughs drew the attention of every practitioner—for admiration or vilification, depending on their views of his brand of modernism. So important is his body of work that plans were begun in 2004 to inscribe all of it on the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage List. To this day his urban planning ideas inspire anger among those who blame him for advocating, all too effectively, for the destruction of old urban centers. First put forth in drawings for a "Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants" (1922), his urbanistic schemes were later promulgated by CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), a kind of working group of top modernist architects from many European countries. It was founded in a meeting in Switzerland in 1928 (CIAM I). In subsequent gatherings there was much discussion of the problems of low-cost housing, part of the leftist agenda of the group. CIAM IV met on a cruise ship, SS Patris II, in 1933 and considered how European cities could be redesigned to render them less dense. The CIAM participant José Luis Sert (1902–1983) went on to consider the thorny issues in a book, Can Our Cities Survive? (1942). Codifying the Patris discussions was Le Corbusier's doctrinaire Athens Charter (1943)—the ship had been steaming toward Athens—that pointed the way to heavy-handed approaches in postwar urban redevelopment, specifically the tall apartment tower surrounded by windswept open space. CIAM continued to meet for many more sessions. The Swiss critic Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) was especially influential. His Space, Time and Architecture (1941) soon became a classic theoretical text of modernism. The early CIAM meetings were important for achieving a critical mass in the nascent modernist movement and forging a functionalist consensus out of the myriad localized approaches of the 1920s. Postwar meetings grappled with what some increasingly perceived as functionalism's straitjacket.

Thanks in part to the tireless proselytizing of CIAM, modernism invaded every corner of Europe. In Sweden, Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940) had already bridged nineteenth-century approaches and modernism: inspired by a pre–World War I trip to Italy, he embraced a simplified classicism. His City Library, Stockholm (1920–1928), was minimalist: a cube of reading rooms topped by a gigantic simple cylinder lighting the main hall with clerestory windows. He owed the concept to the eighteenth-century French rationalist Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806). As chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition in summer 1930, Asplund decisively introduced modernism to Scandinavia with constructivist-derived functionalism, including a tall skeletal mast brilliant with neon signs. The furniture and interior design there launched the great twentieth-century Swedish tradition of modernist innovation for everyday living. Asplund's classicism inspired his affable friend Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) in Finland. By 1928 Aalto had embraced modernism. His concrete Paimio Sanatorium, Turku (1929–1933), had tall, radiating wings among the pine trees, oriented toward sunlight and view. The small house called Villa Mairea, Noormarkku (1937–1939), synthesized classicism, functionalism, and the Finnish vernacular, with a special feeling for wood. Later Aalto would assist in post–World War II reconstruction of damaged cities, seeking to soften technological modernism and mass-produced housing designs with references to nature.

ARCHITECTURE AND IDEOLOGY

Totalitarianism darkened Europe as economies collapsed in the 1930s. Architecture played a critical role in Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) plans for a reinvigorated Germany. A onetime Viennese water-colorist with a penchant for architectural subjects, Hitler saw the value of great public buildings in boosting national pride and signaling the permanence of his Thousand-Year Reich. His friend Paul Troost (1879–1934) had designed interiors for luxury ships and understood his Führer's lust for theatricality. Troost's Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich (1933–1937), was a museum for "pure" art, not the "degenerate" modernism then being purged. Its style became the official Nazi one: grandiose classicism, but simplified and rendered rigid and coldly sublime. The German architectural tradition of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) was married to a primitive Greek classicism. After Troost died, Albert Speer (1905–1981) took his place in Hitler's affections, conceiving a utopian rebuilding of Berlin as "Germania" with a preposterously oversized dome as its focus. Like Hitler, Speer saw Germany as a new Roman Empire dominating all of Europe and developed a suitably grandiose architecture, clad in stone. His built projects shared a megalomania, including the Zeppelinfeld Stadium, Nuremberg (1934–1937), for mass Nazi rallies and the Reich Chancellery, Berlin (1938), center of Hitler's cult of personality. Its echoing halls, one nearly five hundred feet long, were meant to instill awe in visiting dignitaries. Hitler's grim final days were spent in an underground bunker out back. Much of Speer's work was bombed to rubble during World War II, and he was later imprisoned for his role in organizing slave labor and death camps. He is the twentieth century's most controversial architect.

If the totalitarian regime in Germany rejected modernism, that in Italy was more receptive. Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) found an avid following among a young generation of architects, including the brilliant but short-lived Giuseppe Terragni (1904–1943), who helped found Gruppo 7 in 1926. Gruppo 7 was a gathering of Milanese modernists who pressed for what they called Rationalismo: anti-individualistic and pro-Fascist; embracing functionalism in design but tempering it with historical references to the glories of the Italian past. Terragni's Casa del Fascio, Como (1933–1936), a Fascist headquarters and community center, evolved through various conceptions into a harmonious and cubistic work of pure geometries and white walls stripped of any ornament. Its rationalist composition embodied in a grid-like reinforced concrete frame was apparently simple but actually quite complex, blending functionalist dicta with principles from the Roman past, including perfect proportions, an interior atrium, and marble cladding. It has won a legion of admirers. In time for Terragni's centennial in 2004 the New York architect Peter Eisenman (b. 1932) published Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques, a book he had worked on for forty years that celebrated the subtleties of Casa del Fascio and Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, also in Como. Never built was Terragni's proposed monument to the poet Dante (1265–1321) (1938) in the Roman Forum, likewise a fusion of modernist rationalism with reference to the historical past, specifically the hypostyle halls of Egyptian temples, where columns stood as thickly as trees in a forest—only at the Danteum the columns were to have been of glass. World War II discredited fascism, but the ideas of Terragni later helped inspire postmodernism: Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) pioneered neo-rationalism in the 1960s, seeking to infuse history into the modernist vocabularies of concrete, glass, and steel, much as Terragni had done.

A RESTLESS SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES

No sooner had international style come to the fore in the 1930s than did some architects seek to refine or even replace it. At the same time they experimented with new materials, trying to develop novel aesthetic approaches based on the innate qualities and strengths of each. Concrete was arguably twentieth-century architecture's signature material; it was used on a scale previously undreamed-of and with great boldness. Properly speaking it is ferro-concrete, a combination of concrete with steel reinforcing bars or meshes that can be used in many clever ways to create rigid or shell-like structures that mark a complete break from the architecture of previous centuries. Early applications were frequently technological, as in the pre–World War I bridges of Swiss civil engineer Robert Maillart (1872–1940). After the war he introduced a series of exciting innovations, designing concrete bridges that were ever-lighter and free from visual reference to earlier masonry technologies, culminating with the Salginatobel Bridge, Schiers (1929–1930). It comprises one sweeping arch hundreds of feet above a rocky mountain gorge, the whole forming a seamless structural unit of hollow-box reinforced concrete. Engineers still travel from around the world to admire this aesthetic gem. Maillart's influence was huge, for example on the concrete "shell structures" of the Spanish-born Félix Candela (1910–1997) in Mexico. The European genius in concrete after Maillart was Pier Luigi Nervi (1891–1979) in Rome, who combined technical innovations with an unsurpassed feel for pure sculptural geometries. At Valentino Park, Turin (1947–1949), he built exhibition halls that span hundreds of feet in one leap. They are formed of poured concrete arches and, between them, precast shells pierced by window openings. He collaborated with Gio Ponti (1891–1979) on Italy's tallest building, Pirelli Tower, Milan (1956–1958), its unusual lozenge-like plan and sleek surfaces an instant emblem of corporate sophistication in the postwar world (restored after being struck by an airplane in 2002). Ponti exemplifies the twentieth-century architect in the mold of Le Corbusier who participated in poetry, painting, writing, and design, all with a spirit of passionate exuberance. The magazine he edited for decades, Domus (meaning "house"), transmitted ideas of cutting-edge architecture and design to a wide readership in Europe and abroad. Like several top European architects, by the 1960s Ponti was designing buildings around the world.

For truthful expression of concrete as a structural material, all eyes were on Le Corbusier in the 1950s. With uncompromising rawness he allowed concrete to show at his Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly, France (1951–1955), much copied by younger architects in Europe and America. Exposed, rough concrete (béton brut), still showing the imprint of the wooden formwork into which it was poured, was likewise the keynote of his Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles (1946–1952) and other notable works of this period. A British husband-and-wife team, Alison (1928–1993) and Peter Smithson (1923–2003), greatly admired Le Corbusier's honesty and helped coin the term "new brutalism" in 1954 for any sort of tough, gritty functionalism, whether using béton brut or not. Their Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, Norfolk, completed that year, defined brutalism in England: the steel structure exposed to view and the whole complex resembling a gleaming-new industrial site, with a nod to Mies van der Rohe's recent Chicago work. (Later critics blasted it for a prison-like bleakness hardly appropriate for teaching children.) The Smithsons were active in Team 10, a group of young architects that broke away from CIAM and expressed appreciation for the rough new Britain of housing tracts and slum streets. At the Economist headquarters, London (1959–1964), the Smithsons offered a more refined approach, three small office towers rising above a pedestrian plaza and clad in fossiliferous Portland stone—a sensitive effort to resolve problems of urban site and scale.

In France, Jean Prouvé (1901–1984) was likewise among the important twentieth-century experimenters with situation-specific architectural design and the honest expression of materials, including unconventional ones. With no architectural training, he entered the field as an iron-worker, brainstorming with Le Corbusier and Jeanneret about portable housing units made of lightweight materials. His aluminum Tropical House (1949–1951), of small prefabricated pieces assembled on a grid system, was flown by airplane to the Congo as a demonstration of the possibilities for colonialist housing. At the same time he designed inexpensive homes for French citizens dislocated by war. Prouvé is a lodestar for recent architects who seek to use cheap materials in extraordinary ways, and Tropical House was retrieved from Africa in 2001 and taken on a celebratory tour of American museums.

Critiques of modernism coalesced in the 1970s into a definite revolt. It was called insensitive, inhumane, and authoritarian ("heroic" had a bad connotation to the counterculture). It had destroyed old neighborhoods for "urban renewal" and encouraged bland, box-like building. The high-rise apartment towers beloved of CIAM were singled out as especially awful to look at and live in, and many alternatives were put forward. In Britain, Team 10 member Ralph Erskine (1914–2005) designed Byker Wall, Newcastle (1969–1975), a multistory housing development that sought to diversify the modernist idiom (a complex, stepped profile; house-like shed roofs; brickwork of bold colors and patterns; varied balcony forms) and even engaged future residents in planning consultations in an effort to be democratic. Architects increasingly sought to avoid the bombast of the mid-twentieth-century "megastructure" by breaking up big compositions and paying sensitive attention to local context. The British architects Sir James Stirling (1926–1992) and Michael Wilford's (b. 1938) German museum, the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1977–1984) defined the emerging postmodern approach: the complex subdivided to render its scale more human and enlivened with brightly colored elements to engage the ordinary visitor; an abundance of witty allusions to the architecture of the past, from Rome and Schinkel to Le Corbusier and Aalto, all in a peppy pastiche; an embracing of the "complexity and contradiction" that American Robert Venturi (b. 1925) pinpointed as sadly lacking in modernism. Stirling called his museum "representational and abstract, monumental and informal, traditional and high tech." These tensions and ironies crop up frequently throughout subsequent postmodernism.

ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF GLOBALISM

At century's end architectural practice had gone global, with major firms routinely engaged in projects on many continents. Europe no longer enjoyed its old cultural preeminence. Perhaps sensing the shift, in the 1980s the French president, François Mitterrand (1916–1996), funded a series of architectural showpieces meant to demonstrate his nation's continuing greatness, the Grands Projets. Jean Nouvel (b. 1945) won rave reviews for his Institut du Monde Arabe (1987–1988): its south-facing wall forms a silvery metal-and-glass curtain suggestive of Islamic screens, with thirty thousand small, light-sensitive diaphragms that close like a camera lens to cut out sun glare—an innovative use of "smart" materials that respond to their environment. Another Mitterrand landmark was the Bibliothèque Nationale (1989–1997) by Dominique Perrault (b. 1953), four L-shaped glass towers each reminiscent of an open book and embracing a monumental central space. Paris has seen many important museums; previously, the Italian architect Renzo Piano (b. 1937) had collaborated with the Englishman Richard Rogers (b. 1933) on Centre Georges Pompidou (1971–1977), one of modern Europe's most recognizable buildings, visited by 160 million persons since it opened, five times the expected crowds. To keep the interior wide open for the display of art, the architects placed the steel support structure and mechanical systems on the outside, daringly exposed to view and color-coded for visual effect (blue=air ducts, green=water pipes, yellow=electricity), with escalators rising in clear plastic tubes.

In pursuit of ever-more-sweeping interior spaces, Rogers would go on to design London's Millennium Dome (1999), using a newly perfected technology, a mast-supported network of cables that suspend a tent-like roof. The Dome spans an incredible 738 feet, entirely free from interrupting supports. It improved upon the continental experiments of the German engineer Frei Otto (b. 1925), who collaborated with the architect Gunter Behnisch (b. 1922) on the striking Olympic Stadium, Munich (1968–1972): tall steel poles supported spidery cables that held up complex, flowing tent roofs of polyester fabric coated in plastic. All these innovations were extremely novel, suggesting new avenues toward solving the old problem of enclosing generous space.

Worldwide attention was brought to bear on Berlin after the reunification of the city in 1990 and the relocation of the national government there from Bonn. In ruins since the days of Hitler, the former parliamentary building, the Reichstag, was restored by Sir Norman Foster (b. 1935), a London architect, in 1993–1999. Mindful of history, he preserved the graffiti left on the blackened walls by Soviet soldiers in 1945. His landmark glass dome, a strikingly contemporary note atop the more-than-century-old building, was lit from inside at night. It symbolizes the transparency of democratic governments. A mirrored cone occupies the center of the dome to enhance the daylighting of a spiraling pedestrian ramp. The much-honored Foster and Partners firm has worked in forty-eight countries. Their 850-foot Commerzbank Tower, Frankfurt (1997), was Europe's tallest building upon completion. Their breathtaking cable-stayed road bridge, the Millau Viaduct, France (2001–2005), is the tallest vehicular bridge in the world, with seven concrete piers each higher than the Eiffel Tower.

No longer are great European buildings necessarily designed by Europeans, as evinced by the fame of two recent museums by Americans. I. M. Pei (b. 1917) created a glass pyramid for the Louvre, Paris (1985–1989), a controversial intrusion of the modern into a historic complex. For the much-praised Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain (1992–1997), the Californian Frank Gehry (b. 1929) conceived a fantastically complex, deconstructivist design clad in a shiny titanium skin. Critics heaped praise on it as boldly pointing the way to coming twenty-first-century approaches, which they predicted would be marked by increasing fragmentation and freedom. Daniel Libeskind's (b. 1946) annex to the Berlin Historical Museum and Peter Eisenman's Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, both works by American architects, are two other striking cases in point.

Deconstructivism gained notoriety in the 1980s as a transatlantic alternative to both international style and postmodernism. It defined an architecture that seemed to have been wrenched violently apart, twisted, and contorted, its complex visual effects made possible by computer-aided design (CAD) software. The Viennese firm Coop Himmelb(l)au emerged as a leading practitioner. Their UFA Cinema Center, Dresden (1993–1998), is a movie theater entered through a weirdly tilted glass structure resembling a faceted crystal. The architect Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) started out as a writer whose Delirious New York (1978) earned him fame as a visionary theorist with a radical, streetwise approach: forget trying to improve modern cities, he says, and instead embrace "the culture of congestion," the vibrant chaos of modern life. Subsequently he has gone on to develop a worldwide practice, and he won architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, in 2000. As the twenty-first century began, his status among young architecture students was cult-like, many calling him the greatest living architect. His firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has produced designs that defy categorization but are often classed with deconstructivism. They have inspired diverse reactions: admiration for their hip, intellectualized analysis of contemporary problems; dislike for their harsh, formless geometries and brash rawness.

OMA's largest executed planning project was a new city center for Lille, France (1988–2004), called Euralille, designed to accommodate commercial growth owing to the new Channel Tunnel linking France and Britain. Koolhaas embraces "bigness" and designed at a scale meant to be appreciated not on foot but from a hurtling high-speed train. Contrary to most contemporary thinkers, he favors big, signature buildings to capture the public imagination. Some saw in this a return to discredited principles of CIAM. Koolhaas's major building at Lille, erected on a tight budget, is the Grand Palais exhibition hall or Congrexpo (1994), nicknamed The Egg for its distinctive form, which is surfaced in black-pebbled concrete and corrugated plastic. He likes ovals, thinking back to New York and Wright's Guggenheim Museum, but here the oval embraces wild dissonance in its internal forms, shapes, and materials, the whole sometimes garish and vulgar, much like the modern cities Koolhaas so passionately admires. His followers are many, including the 2004 Pritzker Prize winner Zaha Hadid (b. 1950), born in Iraq but now a resident of London. Among her few built projects is the Bergisel Ski Jump, Innsbruck, Austria (1999–2002), a towering structure of pure sculptural drama.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, London was the setting for some of the most dramatic architectural developments in Europe. Foster and Partners experimented with strange CAD forms, including the warped glass ovoid of London City Hall (1998–2002), which has no front or back. Its shape is precisely configured to minimize the area exposed to direct sunlight and reduce dependence upon air conditioning. Many European architects have lately embraced this kind of ecologically sustainable or "green" design. Also by Foster and Partners is the extraordinary-looking 30 St. Mary Axe, or Swiss Re Headquarters (1997–2004), nicknamed the Gherkin for its swelling, bullet-like form. Advertised as London's first ecologically friendly skyscraper, its round plan helps drive a system of natural ventilation via openings in the curving, glazed façade, so the building uses only half the energy of a typical office tower. The same firm collaborated with engineers and a sculptor on Millennium Bridge, a stylish footway over the Thames (1996–2000). It connects to a new museum, Tate Modern (1995–2000), by a Swiss firm, Herzog & de Meuron—a good example of the postmodern preference for historic preservation, as it occupies a former power plant. Piano began work in 2000 on what was planned to be the tallest building in Europe, 1,016-foot London Bridge Tower, so thin and crystalline it was instantly nicknamed the Shard when the drawings were unveiled. If completed, it will be an appropriate symbol of London's growing financial and cultural preeminence among European cities. Designed at the very end of the period 1914–2004, the Shard proposal intriguingly recalls Mies van der Rohe's Glass Skyscraper scheme of more than eighty years earlier, history coming full circle. For all the phases it has undergone and challenges it has faced, architectural modernism remains exciting and innovative in Europe, constantly seeking new approaches and new relevance for an ever-changing world.

See alsoFrance; Futurism; Germany; Italy; Nazism; Russia; Technology; United Kingdom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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W. Barksdale Maynard