What Will Our Skyline Look Like?

By Richard Lacayo

Dream about the future, and you dream in buildings. In the places where you first learn to think about tomorrow--in H.G. Wells, at the World's Fair, in The Jetsons--tomorrow is first of all a skyline fresh out of the cellophane. Personal whirly copters dart among glinting steel towers, everything looks like the Seattle Space Needle, and nothing is crummy or made out of wood.

One glance at the present will tell you the future is never all that futuristic. That's not a glinting steel anything over there. It's one more plasterboard mattress outlet. And the sheer volume of things already built means the world to come will consist largely of the world that is already here.

All the same, architecture may be on the verge of the greatest style shift since the end of World War II, when the glass and steel towers of bare-bones Modernism shouldered everything else to the margins. A very different future is visible today in a small outburst of buildings that repudiate the very notion of upright walls. Bellied-out sides, canted planes, solid walls that look like fluttering strips of ribbon, blade-edged triangular outcroppings and brassy materials that shimmer like something Cher would wear to the Grammys--what's under way here is a rethinking of space and form as complete as any since the spirals of the Baroque overtook the spare symmetries of the Renaissance. If this is the future, then the right-angled Modernist box is about to be lowered into its grave.

For now, the most famous product of this new impulse is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Frank Gehry's cascading structure, which has tripled tourism to funky Bilbao, has been a watershed, an instant icon that was featured in the latest James Bond movie and has mayors everywhere clamoring for their own "Bilbao." As a consequence, any number of designs that once seemed too radical to imagine, much less assemble, are being readied for construction. One of them is Daniel Libeskind's tumbling addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which looks like a cross between a building and an avalanche. Another is the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati by the Iranian-born, diagonally inclined British architect Zaha Hadid. Several of the most spectacular works in progress are by Gehry, like his annex to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, a whiplashing addition to a city where, when it comes to new architecture, you can usually hear a pin drop.

Why this now? Maybe it is just a recognition that fractured forms are the ones best suited to the times. This explanation appeals to a lot of architects, who are prone anyway to a kind of Hegelian metaphysics, a sense that they are not just designing department stores and offices but rendering the spirit of the age in steel and stone. In recent years, some of the more theoretically inclined among them, such as Peter Eisenman and Steven Holl, have been connecting their designs to things like French literary analysis, the kind that presumes to dismantle the falsehoods of language, or the "chaos theory" of physics, with its universe built on bubbling disorder. To put it mildly, these are notions that conventional buildings, with their aura of stability and authority, don't do much to express. But a building that looks as if it's in the grip of a spastic seizure? Well, that's getting there.

Sheer boredom with the slabs of Modernism and disenchantment with the mild remedies of Postmodernism are other reasons that something very different is happening. Exploded boxes appeal right away to that place in the brain that hates not just Modernism but also modernity, the part that cheers when some atrocious housing project gets brought down with dynamite. As it happens, Modernism itself flourished in a world that had been blown away by the physical and psychic clearance project of World War II. Postwar corporations wanted triumphant office towers that owed nothing to the rubble of the old world. And in the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, Modernism's great pioneers, glass and steel proved capable of being worked into something not just new but superb, beautiful enough to bear comparison with the ornate and voluptuous past. But in less capable hands, or on smaller budgets, the just-so geometry of Mies--architecture for Everyman!--became architecture for the nobodies, the dreary cartons that everybody works in, drives past and ignores.

The seriously tilted constructions that are erupting now required a technological leap, namely the emergence of more sophisticated versions of computer-assisted design, CAD, which make it easier to conceive and build the most complex irregular forms. When the billowing Sydney Opera House was under construction four decades ago, it went millions of dollars over budget because of the difficulties in translating Joern Utzon's arching sail forms into a structure that would actually stand up. These days you could practically dash the thing off on your Palm Pilot. Adventurous architects are working with the same software used by aircraft engineers and special-effects designers, who also think about things like how curved and folding surfaces respond to real pressures. For their radically fashioned New York Presbyterian Church in Sunnyside, the Los Angeles-based architects Greg Lynn, Doug Garofalo and Michael McInturf worked with the same program that was used to create the raptors for Jurassic Park.

Even if a building is not sliced and shredded at the design stage, there is another way in which the box is being overwhelmed. The standard office tower can be covered these days with electronic signage, huge liquid-crystal display screens, Jumbotron TVs and zip strips of news and stock quotes. Modernism forbade the use of carvings and other decorative attachments on building surfaces. That created something like an optical vacuum that advertising is finally moving to fill. In such places as New York City's Times Square, billboards and electric signage are becoming the ornamentation of the information age.

The architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown say this is merely a return to the venerable practice of covering buildings with words and pictures. Egyptian temples were a billboard of hieroglyphics. Byzantine churches were spread over with huge gilded mosaics, the Jumbotrons of the 10th century. "Times Square is the place of now and the place of the future," says Venturi. "An environment that is sparkling, decorative and information-giving." They predict that such public buildings as schools and courthouses will increasingly borrow the features of commercial buildings, like neon signage and shop-window fronts.

If the future brings a world of clamorous buildings, it is possible that the cool virtues of Modernism will be rediscovered. "For me, Modernism is a way of understanding the most direct way of making things," says Richard Meier, who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles. "Technology gives us the ability for a continual exploration of that question 'How do we come down to the essence of things?'" What worries some people is that a few decades of promiscuous creativity will clog the world with second-rate imitation Gehrys, strenuously entertaining streetscapes and Times Squares in every town square. "The Guggenheim in Bilbao is a unique object," says Robert Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture. "Three Bilbaos in a row would be a fun house." So if the fun gets all too tiring, maybe those simple boxes will come back again after all.