• Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House (1957–73) was one of the first-generation post
World War II prestige buildings.
Featured a series of successive interlocking shells of various heights on a lifted
platform which is representative of ship’s sails.
• Eero Saarinen’s two most famous works are the Gateway Arch at St. Louis, Missouri
(1961–66) and the TWA Terminal (1956–62) at New York’s John F. Kennedy
International Airport.
- The Gateway Arch was designed to match and if possible, exceed the Paris’ Eiffel
Tower’s in scale, technological prowess and symbolic stature. Most prominently,
it was referenced as America’s origins.
- The TWA Terminal was innovative as it was viewed as a bird with wings spread
18.82 TWA Terminal, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York
and poised to take off. Designed with no façade and right angle, the terminal
evoked a sense of grace and lightness through its undulating(wavy) interiors and
TWA red carpeted floors.
• Steel and Glass Skyscrapers
- A symbol of US metropolis
- Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) in Midtown Manhattan designed
with Philip Johnson. Its 38-story building is a vertical box with sharp edges. It has
glass from top to bottom and its visible edge of floor plate is covered with bronze
spandrels that give a light horizontal zippering effect to the floors during the day,
when light reflects off the glass—an effect even more pronounced at night, when
the reflection contrasts with the interior illumination.
- Horizontal spandrels create a pronounced grid pattern
- Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s was designed to perfect Miesian paradigm and
making modernism the language par excellence for corporations
- Form is the expression not of technological efficiency but of technological
elegance
• Salk Institute by architect Louis Kahn
- Salk’s Institute building (1960–63) in La Jolla had circulation towers and study
towers which separated from the laboratories by bridges to declare a physical
and psychological differentiation.
- Inspired by Luis Barragán, Kahn designed a empty plaza as an area of repose
instead of a lush garden.
• Brutalism
- In the mid-1960s, Kenzo Tange led many architects to consider developing
megastructures involving simple, large-scale repetitive structures packed with
program.
- Emphasized on material simplicity and secular anonymity
- The Foundling Estate in London (1973) brought modernism to a new pitch in
their fearless acceptance of largescale realities
- Many US campuses like Kane Hall at the University of Washington featured the
role of Brutalism.
- Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg, South Africa (1975), designed by
William Meyer, which fused the latest trends in megastructure with ideas from
Africa.
- Chinese-born I. M. Pei’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on the campus of
Cornell University (1970–73) refined the brutalist aesthetic. Used a set of distinct
vertical concrete masses holding the main mass of the gallery high in the air;
huge panes of glass fill in the open volumes -> transparent structure.
- Pei’s East Building, National Gallery (1974–78), in Washington, DC, has numerous
brutalist motifs, such as the stark masses, deep recesses, sharp edges, and wide
openings, but it was clad in a white sandstone that foreshadowed a new
generation of elegant, modernist civic structures.
• Archigram
- A publication begun in 1961 (alternative ideas).
- Produced by the young English architects Peter Cook, David Greene, Michael
Webb, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk, and Dennis Crompton.
- Called for a holistic vision of the city and its parts as a living, flowing, pulsing,
flexible organism
- They challenged the grid by Le Corbusier and emphasised the use of anything but
90-degree angles and thematized the curving and twisting of Le Corbusier’s
straight lines.
- Used bright colours a nonstandard format, and an explicitly cut-and paste style of
assembly to deliver visions of technologically advanced cities
- Embraced the language and images of the youth culture that was blooming in
England and abroad.
• Buckminster Fuller
- His goal was to develop ways to distribute nature’s resources to all through an
informed, efficient, flexible, and responsible attitude toward design
- Fuller saw housing as tightly interwoven with industrialization and social utopian
thinking.
- Earliest advocates of renewable energy sources
- Fuller’s geodesic dome was most efficient structure built as it would create local
triangular rigidity and distribute the stress
• Counterculture Architecture
- The early 1960s saw architects building with sod or discarded building elements
and studying vernacular practices around the world.
- Criticized the social norms of the age and exploitation of natural resources
- An example would be when a building that was once the scourge of the
neighbourhood, is now a tourist attraction (made by Art Beal, a garbage collector
for the town of Cambria, California.
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