Late 20th Century
Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou, the Pyramid of the Louvre, Bilbao Guggenheim. Architecture as global brand-making and high-tech spectacle.
Part of Architectural Wonders
15 moments in this segment.
- — Pirelli Tower. Gio Ponti + Pier Luigi Nervi in Milan. 127m of tapered concrete and glass. The first European tower to claim modernity could be slender and sophisticated, not just American-style massive.
- — Brasília. Lúcio Costa's pilot plan + Oscar Niemeyer's buildings. The new capital built from scratch in three years. Catedral Metropolitana, Palácio do Planalto, the National Congress. UNESCO World Heritage.
- — Salk Institute. Louis Kahn for Jonas Salk in La Jolla. Two laboratory blocks facing the Pacific, with a single channel of water down the central plaza. Often called the most beautiful modernist building in America.
- — TWA Flight Center. Eero Saarinen's swooping concrete terminal at JFK. The peak of mid-century "jet age" optimism. Closed in 2001; preserved and reborn in 2019 as the lobby of the TWA Hotel.
- — Habitat 67. Moshe Safdie's Expo 67 housing experiment in Montreal — 354 stacked precast concrete cubes forming 158 apartments. A built thesis on modular high-density housing.
- — Kimbell Art Museum. Louis Kahn in Fort Worth. Vaulted concrete ceilings with slit skylights; the light is "silvered." The reference example for how to light a museum from above without damaging the art.
- — Sears Tower (Willis Tower). SOM in Chicago. 442m, the tallest building in the world for 25 years. The bundled-tube structural system invented here became the standard for supertall towers.
- — World Trade Center Twin Towers. Minoru Yamasaki. 110 stories each — the world's tallest buildings for a year (until the Sears Tower). Loathed on opening, beloved by the 1990s. Destroyed Sept 11, 2001.
- — Sydney Opera House. Jørn Utzon's sail-shaped roof — a construction problem he and Ove Arup spent eight years solving (the spheres trick). Utzon resigned in 1966 and never saw the finished building.
- — Centre Pompidou. Piano + Rogers. The building inside-out — escalators, ducts, and structural elements colour-coded on the exterior. Shocked Paris in 1977; now beloved.
- — Lloyd's of London. Richard Rogers's second great inside-out building. Stainless-steel modular pods with the lifts, plumbing, and stairs on the outside. The high-tech architecture movement's defining tower.
- — Louvre Pyramid. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid over the museum's main entrance. Parisians initially hated it; now it's the iconic image of the Louvre. 673 glass panes (the Da Vinci Code arithmetic notwithstanding).
- — Bilbao Guggenheim. Frank Gehry's titanium-clad museum that single-handedly turned Bilbao from rust-belt to global tourist destination. The "Bilbao effect" became the city-marketing rationale for every starchitect museum that followed.
- — Jin Mao Tower. SOM's Pudong tower. 88 floors (a lucky Chinese number). The eight-fold symmetry references the pagoda; the diagonal cross-bracing is the structural innovation. Made Shanghai's Pudong skyline possible.
- — Petronas Towers. César Pelli in Kuala Lumpur. Twin towers connected by a sky bridge at the 41st-42nd floor. Tallest buildings in the world until 2004. Made Malaysia's political point about Asian arrival.
