on the oblique No one raised a white flag of surrender in the contentious style wars between modernists and post-modernists in the 1980’s. But in his encyclopedic new volume, Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive AvantGarde, New York architect, critic, and frequent Interior Design contributor Joseph Giovannini chronicles a stealth movement that settled the dispute when a loosely associated group of architects moved onto the next big thing: deconstructivism. In 1983, as if out of nowhere, a half dozen architects set sail for architecture’s wilder shores. Fragmented, angular, formally complex, idea-driven designs by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Thomas Leeser, and the speculative Peter Eisenman shifted architecture’s gears from static to dynamic: The buildings leaned, flowed, and flew. In 1997, the radical ideas gained momentum and wide acceptance when Gehry’s chaotic Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, a storm of titanium splashing on the banks of the River Nervión in Northern Spain, opened to universal acclaim. The design, with swimming, twisting fishlike shapes, detonated the “Bilbao effect.” Culturally ambitious cities around the world soon wanted buildings that answered to nonlinear laws of chaos science instead of platitudes of classicism or solid geometry. Out with bombast, in with energy, charge, and change. This led to a Mardi Gras of formal invention on four continents during the last two decades. Fractured forms, billowing shapes, and delirious spaces in convention centers, museums, and office towers captured headlines,
BOTTOM: COURTESY OF GEHRY PARTNERS
From top: The linen-bound cover of Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde by Joseph Giovannini (New York: Rizzoli, $50) has been designed by Pentagram’s J. Abbott Miller and Yoon-Young Chai. The Vitra Design Museum (1989) in Weil am Rhein, Germany, was Frank Gehry’s first use of curvilinear forms.
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