Welcoming the 21st Century

Pompidou Center
Richard Roger & Renzo Piano
Paris
1977

High tech look

Plaza part of design to admire building but also as a meeting point and as an accomodation for big lines when there's an exhibition

- disney effect of if the line is visible and more entertaining people complain less

Started a lineup of good museums in paris

Escalator on the side makes people more passive to take in view

What is the most important building type of the 21st century

Museums

What'S the bilbao effect?

Bilbao was a small more insignificat town in spain until they got a museum built by a starchitect (Gehry) and now they're very known

Biosphere
Buckminster Fuller
Montreal
1967

USA pavilion for expo 67

sphere disapears at night leaving the inside to skine more

interior platforms with escalators allowed to guide visitors throuh exhibition passively

Eiffel Tower
Gustave Eiffel
1889
Paris

made for an exhibition

it was criticized for having no purpose but now is know as the city’s branding

higher view gives people a feeling of orientation (ex: on mount royal)

let people see the city of lights

what do pompidou center, biosphere and eiffel tower

very postmodernist ideas (inside out building, smaller building inside giant dome, tower with no real purpose) but built before the post modern era

"Eisenmen drawing "

" the simplest form of complexity"""

House VI
Peter Eisenman
1975
Cornwall, Connecticut

• bed split in half because program dicted so

• structuralism and deconstruction => litterature terms he applied to architecture

• the site doesn't dictate the building, they're two different things

• house numbered dissociates intent with product

Who are the Whites?

The new york 5 : Eisenman, Meier, Haddock, Graves, Gwathmey

opposites of the greys and the black

What is Eisenman's architecture like?

decay, anxiety, fragmentation

he separates vertical and horizontal forms

deconstructionalism and structuralism

Getty Museum
Los Angeles
Richard Meier
1997

Car free center : postmodernist idea (just like santa monica place)

- little train from parking to museum just like disney

Made from travertine from rome

huge terasses

host's getty's personal collection

one of those buildings you remember more than what's inside of it

overlooking the city (feeling of control like eiffel)

Spiral garden

What two museums by starchitects were competing and in what year?

Guggenheim museum
Bilbao Gehry
1997

Getty Museum
Los Angeles
Meier
1997

getty museum on left
kunst museum on right

both by richard meier
very into ramps in his architecture

pritzker prize
- fueled starchitecture culture
- first to win it was johnson
- kinda sexist
- now controversial bc pritzker in epstein file
- reinforces the culture of one person doing the projects even though a team is behind them

Rem Koolhaas

founder of OMA in 1975 in Rotterdam
- design and research firm
believes the program drives the architecture

Seattle Public Library
OMA
Seattle
2004

- More interesting on the inside than outside (opposite fo pompidou)
- Program becomes the shape of the building
- top floor continuous slope that makes you take time to go through it (just like maya lin vietnam memorial)

Compare the vancouver and seattle public libraries

they are two opposites of postmodernism

one goes back to antique architecture (classical inspirations)
one is bare minimum and very influenced by the program

Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao
1997
Frank Gehry

bilbao effect
captuers spontaneity like a sketch brought to life
whimsical architecture, joyful (opposite of Rossi or Eisenman)
Layering making it look spontaneous (interest in stacking fish scales)
Identifiable by its reflection in water

Disney Concert Hall
Frank Gehry
Los Angeles
2003

liked guggenheim so much wanted their own like many others
not the same impact as original
cladding reflects sun differently than in spain = reflected sun so much sidewalk melted shoes

Royal Ontario Museum
Toronto
Daniel Libeskind
2007

Art Gallery of Ontario
Toronto
Frank Gehry
2008

What are the characteristics of Daniel Libeskind's architecture?

He approaches in architecture topic that are often difficult, making people uncomfortable
=>this led to his architecture being often controversial

he's more of a theorist like eisenman

Jewish Museum
Berlin
Daniel Libeskind
2001

Addition moving out of original building as a souvenir of the erasure of jewish life

The Monument ot the Murdered Jews of Europe
2005
Peter Eisenman
Berlin

ondulated ground makes the tombstone like stones wave
disorienting labyrinth => web of death
Shows that architecture can be used as a negative symbol => postmodernism shows both ends of the spectrum with positive like disney and negative like this

Daniel Libeskind's proposal for ground zero

- idea of beginning again, a desire to rebuild and show power
- 1776 feet tall as a tribute to the year when america got created as a symbol of freedom

What's starchitecture?

famous architects of the 80's and 90's became a symbol of architecture but also let people understand the power of architecture itself (bilbao guggenheim)

- provided a personal approach to architecture showing that experience matters
- separated contemporary experience with historical meaning
- the rise of context : they tried to make strong connections like nationalism to architecture, very political
- is it the power of the architect or the architecture to change life?