It’s Architecture Day here at Infrastructurist. Vanity Fair asked 52 experts to choose the five most important buildings created since 1980, they named a staggering 132 different structures. You can find the top 21, in order of popularity, here. And to see the complete results of the survey, click here.
Refreshingly, the Top 21 list isn’t entirely dominated by Frank Gehry (though he did nab the top spot with his epic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, pictured above). There’s also a good showing by Sir Norman Foster, whose HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong and Millau Viaduct in France also made the cut. And Rem Koolhaas came in with three buildings: the Seattle Central Library, the legendary CCTV Building in Beijing, and the Casa da Musica in Portugal. There’s also Osaka’s Church of the Light by the self-taught prodigy Tadao Ando, and even (gasp!) a woman on the list: Maya Lin, whose design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has won worldwide accolades. The list itself is a testament to the ingenuity and brilliance that have only blossomed as technology catches up with these architects’ creativity.
July 1st, 2010 at 11:46 pm
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July 2nd, 2010 at 9:16 am
I think you are getting post-modern and modern architecture confused.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_architecture
“Postmodernity in architecture is generally thought to be heralded by the return of “wit, ornament and reference” to architecture in response to the formalism of the International Style of modernism.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/modern_architecture
“Modern architecture is characterized by simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. “
July 2nd, 2010 at 11:37 am
I think it’s ok to call these modern broadly. I haven’t heard the term post-modern used for the last decade or so - mostly these kinds of things all get lumped together into modern (as opposed to traditional or vernacular)
The fact that “important” here is treated as synonymous with iconic nicely reveals what’s wrong with the architectural establishment today. Very few of these are widely replicable or scalable at all. I hope there are enough architects out there who are not playing the lottery to be the next Gehry and are designing the kinds of structures that will make up 99.99% of our inhabited world. I thought we had persevered through the era of starchitecture, but I suppose it still lingers on.
July 2nd, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Frank Gehry’s buildings are to architecture what schizophrenia is to mental health.
There. I said it.