Martin Filler The stunning new Federal Building in San Francisco leaves little doubt that its principal designer, Thom Mayne, of the Santa Monica based firm Morphosis, is now preeminent among his 60- something generation of American architects and th
The ICA is the first museum to be built in Boston in 100 years. The building includes an extensive program, from exhibition halls to a multipurpose theater, a restaurant, a bookstore, education/workshop facilities, and administrative offices. It stra
The new headquarters for The New York Times newspaper was commissioned via invited competition in 2000. RPBW’s winning design opens up a neglected corner of Manhattan opposite the Port Authority, with a 52-storey building whose themes of permeability
Hearst Tower revives the dream of William Randolph Hearst, the publishing magnate who envisaged Columbus Circle as a new media quarter in Manhattan. In 1920, Hearst commissioned the Viennese Joseph Urban to build a six-storey Art Deco block on Eighth
Julie V. Iovine The opening of the InterActiveCorp headquarters in New York is primarily being hailed as Frank Gehry’s first building in the city, but it is so much more. Sited on the Far West Side in Chelsea, the ten-story billowing glass structure,
Blair Kamin They are the Rolling Stones of architecture, aging bad boys who once shocked with their jagged forms, snappy slogans and outrageous provocations. In 1980, they ignited a winglike piece of exposed steel suspended above a university courtya
Sarah Amelar Withan elongated kidney bean of a plan, the Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center slips sleekly into a tight and jaggedly irregular site at the University of Cincinnati. Though the client had given architect Bernard Tschumi his pick of cam
James S. Russell The bladelike form that projects 178 feet from the shimmering, midnightblue bulk of the Guthrie Theater sums up everything willfully idiosyncratic yet keenly intuited about Jean Nouvel’s design. What he calls ‘the endless bridge’ ext
Carlos Jiménez Kansas City, Missouri, can boast of one of the most admired and privileged museums in the United States. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is not just a regional museum but, since it first opened in 1933, the cultural epicenter of one of
Suzanne Stephens The shardlike titanium-clad forms of the Denver Art Museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building burst on the city’s downtown with the energy of a lightning bolt. The museum addition, designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind in joint venture wi
Jeffrey Kipnis Like Minerva springing from the head of Jupiter a fully formed goddess clad in a suit of armor, the professional sports stadium was born a perfected building type. On the day that Emperor Titus opened the Colosseum almost two thousand
Joseph Giovannini Critics have long panned the Getty Villa in Malibu as the bagatelle of a rich man suffering a delusional overdose of megalomania. But 30 years after the building opened to mixed reviews, it’s time to look again: with a transformativ
Luis Fernández-Galiano
America, AmericaAmerica, America
De Boston a California
A Coast to Coast Journey
Nicolai Ouroussoff
Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo, Boston
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Diller & Scofidio, Renfro
Cynthia Davidson
Edificio New York Times, Nueva York
New York Times Building, New York
Renzo Piano
Paul Goldberger
Torre Hearst, Nueva York
Hearst Tower, New York
Norman Foster
Julie V. Iovine
Sede de InterActiveCorp, Nueva York
InterActiveCorp Headquarters, New York
Frank Gehry
Blair Kamin
Museo de Arte de Akron
Akron Art Museum
Coop Himmelb(l)au
Sarah Amelar
Centro deportivo Richard E. Lindner, Cincinnati
Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center, Cincinnati
Bernard Tschumi
James S. Russell
Teatro Guthrie, Minneapolis
Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis
Jean Nouvel
Carlos Jiménez
Museo de Arte Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
Steven Holl
Suzanne Stephens
Edificio Frederic C. Hamilton, Museo de Arte de Denver
Denver Art Museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building
Daniel Libeskind
Jeffrey Kipnis
Estadio de los Arizona Cardinals, Glendale
Arizona Cardinals Stadium, Glendale
Peter Eisenman, HOK
Joseph Giovannini
Villa Getty, Los Ángeles
Getty Villa, Los Angeles
Machado & Silvetti
Martin Filler
Edificio de oficinas del Gobierno Federal, San Francisco
Federal Building, San Francisco
Morphosis
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Decadence gets good press. Sunsets are indeed more dramatic than sunrises, and the fall of the American empire is a label that shelters a fertile intellectual industry. Many of the golden centuries for culture have been of lead in the economic and military field, awakening in the collective spirit that twilight mood that Jaime Gil de Biedma coined for individual experience: “...and to live like a ruined nobleman amid the ruins of my own intelligence”. The slope along which the dollar slides down and the swamp in which the United States troops stationed abroad sink are alarming signs that contrast with the technical and ideological leadership of the country: Wall Street and Washington may go through difficulties, but Silicon Valley and Hollywood are in good health, so the news about the death of the American power must be judged premature. And in any case, this material decline can eventually be the springboard of a new spiritual boom.
In the world of architecture, the coast to coast journey carried out through the projects in this issue gives more reason for optimism than for dismay. After twenty years of disappointing results, during which the center of architectural debate moved to Europe, the United States returns to the foreground of innovation and discovery with a happy crop of works that brings together the most articulate authors of the nation with the most influential architects of the Old Continent, in a cross-fertilization of positions and languages that allows to sketch out a certain Europeanization of American practice, simultaneous with the spectacular Americanization of European architecture following the worldwide success of the Guggenheim and the white heat of the Bilbao effect: The key works of the American avant-garde went up in Europe while European architects converted to the new iconic creed of emblematic construction and trophy architecture.
These sculptural forms spread today on either side of the Atlantic, and it would be impossible to classify the works presented here attending to the origin of their authors, because Europeans and Americans alike have become global architects in their aesthetic approach and in the geographic dispersion of their works. The predominance of private initiative over the public sector is, indeed, more evident in America than in Europe, and the dialogue with the existing construction has, inevitably, a lesser historical depth. But the stage on which these figures, ideas and money perform is, more and more, a single stage, and it is within this setting that the celebratory or critical action of architecture evolves, a narrative with few characters and a lot of noise, smoke and mirrors: a play of sound and fury where the grandchildren of the European century and the children of the American century await the birth of the Asian century, while they enjoy the golden light of their own sunset.
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