architecture

Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century settlers able to erect or purchase buildings in what later became the United States arrived with knowledge of structure and design that in their places of origin was at once fixed and changing. Time-honored ideas about what and how to build were far more commonly agreed upon than commitment to particular architectural styles, an imbalance largely explained by social location. Town and country artisans and laborers building for themselves were bound by ancient construction and compositional conventions, whereas privileged groups and institutions—landed aristocracy, urban gentry, state, church, and university—hired master craftsmen or gentlemen amateurs to supply the latest fashions.

Colonial and Postcolonial (to 1810s)

Regardless of social location, however, European settlers in North America confronted unfamiliar conditions—climate, topographies, materials—that in some cases modified how they built. Rural New Englanders, for example, whose lands were as littered with rocks as dense with trees, seized upon wood as their primary building material, even though at home they had had more experience with stone: soft species of pine were easier to cut, peg, and haul than stones to haul, dress, and lay. Stone was more efficiently deployed to mark property lines, contain animals, and construct the large hearths necessary in a cold climate.

Settlers in New Netherlands, on the other hand, quickly built kilns for firing brick—the preferred material in the Low Countries, where trees could be scarce—and in short order began erecting gabled row houses, with narrow ends to the street or to the slips they dug in the manner of Continental canal cities. Kilns had been erected even earlier in Virginia during 1611, where clay for brick and oyster shells for lime were plentiful. Adam Thoroughgood arrived as an indentured servant in 1621, but by the time he built his residence (c. 1636–1640), he owned a 5,350-acre plantation. Befitting his new standing, his brick house—which survives and may be the oldest on the Atlantic Seaboard—made reference to late Tudor Gothic style, as did Bacon's Castle (c. 1655) in Surrey County, also in brick but on a much more generous scale for the even wealthier Surrey County planter, Arthur Allen. Like houses farther north, both displayed characteristically medieval oversized chimneys, asymmetric plans, and facades. Unlike the more northerly well-to-do, however, their owners consciously emulated what they mistakenly though had remained fashionable in England. But by the time of William Byrd II built Westover (1730–1734) in Charles City County, an elegant mansion that would have appealed to London admirers of Christopher Wren, English Georgian was showing signs of becoming the architectural preference of wealthy planters and merchants from New Hampshire to the Carolinas.

Very different was Spanish California, where the principal architectural embellishments were twenty-one mission complexes strung along El Camino Real from San Diego to Alcalá (1769) to San Francisco de Solano (1823). As in the East (before the 1780s), there were no architects in the West and few craftsmen except those summoned from Mexico. Priests were the designers and superintendents of construction and of impressed indigenous labor, creating in effect tiny urban cores awaiting urban surroundings. The San Juan Capistrano mission (1776) is representative. A plastered, brick and stone, single-aisled Romanesque church with red-tiled roof, a baptistry, sacristy, and apse is attached to the corner of a large, nearly rectangular court (into which residents could retreat if attacked) surrounded by an arched colonnade. The latter fronted guest and bedrooms; kitchen, pantry, parlor, and refectory; and facilities for making hats, candles, soap, wine, woolens, shoes, and olive oil, along with forge, metal and carpentry shops, and guardhouse. A covered walkway and thick walls provided cooling while broad, undecorated stretches of facade offered an aesthetic simplicity that would not be seen again on so large a scale in North America for over a century; except, that is, in the Spanish Southwest (and Florida).

In these other Spanish holdings, California's contradictory impulses were exaggerated. The Governor's Palace (1610–1614) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a long, low adobe rectangle, unornamented except by structural elements: rubble plinth, round projecting rafters, and regularly spaced posts supporting the colonnade roof. Similar simplicity characterizes Mission St. Francis of Assisi (1805–1815) at Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, the apse end of which, though crude adobe, has all the solemnity and some of the power (if nowhere the grandeur and beauty) of the Cathedral (begun 1282) at Albi, France. By contrast, Pedro Huizar's portal to the Church of San Jose y Miguel de Aguayo (1720–1731) in San Antonio, Texas, is as lavish as Spanish Baroque could possible be. Nothing in English North America rivaled this display, although private and public architecture there was, ironically, moving closer to English splendor as American independence approached.

What is called Georgian, speaking dynastically, or Palladian (after Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio), speaking architecturally, made great inroads after 1750. Whether ecclesiastical, residential, or commercial, it raised colonial standards of quality and elegance. Peter Harrison, a Newport, Rhode Island, ship captain and merchant, was not a professional architect if that means supervising construction and taking a stipulated fee, but as a gentleman amateur he kept current with the literature of his avocation. Buildings like the Redwood Library (1748–1750), Touro Synagogue (1759–1763), and the Brick Market (1761–1762) in Newport are squarely based on Renaissance and neo-Renaissance models depicted in the library he had assembled during his travels. Perfectly symmetrical, Doric or Ionic ordered, porticoed and pedimented, and built of brick and stone, his work—like that of William Buckland in the Chesapeake, Samuel McIntire in Salem, Massachusetts, and anonymous gentlemen builders elsewhere—interpreted English Georgian for traders and planters eager to announce their social prominence by architectural decree. Thomas Jefferson's Monticello (1768–1809), in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the most famous creations by a self-taught amateur who mixed French, Roman, and Palladian sources, epitomized this impulse. Born in Boston, Charles Bulfinch may qualify as America's first professional architect in that for a time he attempted to live off his earnings. His work (c. 1787–1830) has been included in the so-called Federalist Style, a modified English Georgian well represented by three Boston townhouses (1795–1796, 1800–1802, 1805–1808) for Federalist Party leader and merchant Harrison Gray Otis. Their three or four horizontally articulated stories, forming an unpretentious cube, flat or minimally sloping roof, piano nobiles, porticos opening directly to the sidewalk, and subdued decoration, yielded a quiet elegance strongly appealing to merchants in northeastern ports, where Bulfinch was much emulated. His broad range of buildings included university and market halls, banks, hospitals, prisons, numerous churches (like his exquisite 1816 Church of Christ in Lancaster, Massachusetts), state houses for Maine and Massachusetts, and alterations at Washington, D.C. (as Architect of the Capitol) from 1817 to 1829. Even before taking that post, Bulfinch more than any other architect had raised American design to a level of functional and artistic excellence few during the colonial period might have anticipated.

Eclecticism of Taste and Style

Eclecticism in architecture—selecting aspects of diverse historical styles to form new and acceptable compositions—characterized Europe and America throughout the nineteenth century. In 1929, historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock distinguished between eclecticism of taste—different styles employed contemporaneously but only one on a given building (as with Richard Norris Hunt's two versions of the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, for William Vanderbilt: Loire Valley Renaissance in 1892, Genovan Renaissance the next year)—and eclecticism of style, mixing different mannerisms in the same building (for example, Frank Furness's Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia [1871–1876] with English, French, Greek, and Egyptian references). The two eclecticisms coexisted in space, time, and a given architect's work, but if eclecticism of taste dominated during the first half of the century, eclecticism of style—with some exceptions—surpassed it in the second.

Formal American independence in 1783 spurred the demand for public architecture on state and national levels, and since the new republic also considered itself in some ways democratic, its leaders looked for architectural guidance to what they understood as the wellsprings of both, namely, democratic Greece and republican Rome. But Greek and Roman architecture was available to most Americans in treatises written during and after the Renaissance, the result being that publicly funded structures—and by mimesis privately funded buildings of a public nature, such as banks, churches, and some universities—were only generically neoclassical, some more Greek (Benjamin Latrobe's Bank of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia [1799–1801]), some more Roman (Jefferson's Rotunda [1817–1826] at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville). In the end, Greek prevailed because Greek temples, pedimented and colonnaded boxes of straightforward post-and-beam construction, offered simple interior spaces adaptable to virtually any program and geometrically precise exteriors that appealed to Americans, who in 1785 had overlaid the Northwest Territory in a geometrically precise survey grid. The combination of adaptability and order resonated among those whose self-proclaimed mission was to tame the wilderness.

Beginning with public buildings like William Strickland's Second Bank of America of the United States in Philadelphia (1818, the first in the country based squarely on the Parthenon) and Ithiel Town's Connecticut State Capitol (1827) in Hartford (a generic Doric temple), what became known as Greek Revival was used for every conceivable purpose in every nook and cranny of the land until its popularity waned in the East shortly before the Civil War (1861–1865), a bit later in the West. In Hopkinton, New Hampshire, for example, one of the churches, the library, town offices, what are now the firehouse and the general store, and several main street residences are in the style, all painted white because when erected, conventional wisdom held that Greek architecture had been uniformly white. Despite corrective scholarship, no one has yet repainted, happily so, since towns like Hopkinton display a harmony of form and color seldom seen in North America.

Despite its ubiquity, Greek Revival was not unchallenged. Beginning in the 1790s and gathering momentum over the next decades until it reached a zenith of popularity in the 1840s and 1850s, the Gothic Revival (sometimes called Romantic or picturesque architecture) took hold at first with ecclesiastical structures. Prominent church architects included New Yorkers Richard Upjohn, whose work reached Texas and California, and James Renwick, whose St. Patrick's Cathedral (1858–1879) is the best-known example of the genre. Alexander Jackson Davis was as adept with neo-Greek as with neo-Gothic, but made his most singular mark with picturesque villas, the most impressive being Knoll (1838–1842), renamed Lyndhurst after its remodeling and expansion (1864–1867). But the most influential advocate for picturesque design was Andrew Jackson Downing, America's premier landscape architect, whose naturalistic gardens, widely read publications, and house designs with partner Calvert Vaux earned nationwide respect. Gothic Revival church architecture is characterized by pointed arches, steep roofs, pinnacles, and window tracery often supplemented by battlements and buttresses. Residential neo-Gothic might include these features plus steep gables, elaborately sawn trim, projecting windows, verandas, vertically siding frequently, and asymmetrical plans as often as not. (Greek Revival did not have verandas and was never asymmetrical.) Gothic Revival houses were intended to interpret site and to open to the outdoors, thus appealing to part-time gentry who purchased country estates with fortunes made in town and to those of lesser standing whose income limited them to modest lots on the city's edge. If their motives included escaping what they believed to be the gathering hordes of unruly immigrants, Downing's commitment to picturesque architecture and landscaping stemmed from the idealistic notion that individual integrity and independence was best cultivated in a natural setting. But his best intentions—publishing self-build plans for $400 working peoples' houses, for example—were heeded by those who needed them least.

The lesser appeal of Egyptian, Tuscan, and Romanesque styles had also waned by the 1860s, after which the eclecticism of taste became somewhat type-oriented: most universities in neo-Gothic, but some in neoclassical; government buildings, banks, urban railroad terminals, and exposition buildings in neoclassical, neo-Renaissance, and Beaux-Arts (after the classical-and Renaissance-oriented École des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Eclecticism of style was more common on commercial buildings and residences of the rising middle class and the very rich, although Florentine Renaissance and Loire Valley châteaux styles found acceptance with the latter.

American architects began to train in Europe, particularly at the École des Beaux-Arts, or in new architecture programs at home (the Masachusetts Institute of Technology's opened in 1868, Columbia University's in 1881). After their studies, they often toured Europe as they began to read national professional magazines (the first was launched in 1876) inevitably featuring woodcuts and, later, photographs of Continental masterpieces. They read the immensely influential John Ruskin, whose preferred style was Venetian Gothic, and translations of the authoritative Eugêne-Emmanuel Violet-le-Duc, whose ideal was French Gothic. Most importantly, as American architects began to design for an immensely wealthy social class—newly created by post-Civil War industrialization—composed of arrivistes unfamiliar with aesthetic niceties but unerringly aware, as European parvenus since at least the Renaissance had been, that architectural patronage, if interpreted as connoisseurship by established elites, might eventually lead to social acceptance and, if interpreted by the general public as social service, might temper their reputation as rapacious exploiters of the commonweal. As all this happened, expert knowledge of time-honored styles and archeological accuracy in their deployment became indispensable for American architects, whose own social standing rose in direct proportion to their ability to provide nouveaux riches with simulacra of the very architectural styles that bygone aristocrats had made their own. Hence the hegemonic eclecticism after the Civil War.

The Architecture of National Power (1880s to 1930s)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, generic neoclassicism of lavishness not seen before began to dominate public and quasi-public architecture. State houses, city halls, courthouses, police headquarters, and other government structures no less than art museums, concert halls, libraries, and railroad terminals—sometimes grouped in City Beautiful civic centers—sprang up everywhere, not entirely as a result of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is true that 21 million visitors, equivalent to one-third the national population, thrilled to its Courts of Honor, a water basin surrounded by nine neoclassical behemoths. But neoclassicism was already on the rise, most notably in works by McKim, Mead, and White, like the Boston Public Library (1887–1895) or the Rhode Island State Capitol (1891–1903) in Providence.

As it evolved, neoclassicism became ever more imperial. McKim, Mead, and White's Pennsylvania Station waiting room (1902–1910) in New York City was 25 percent larger in volume than the gigantic tepidarium in the Roman Baths of Caracella (A.D. 206–217) on which it was modeled, while George W. Post's Wisconsin State Capitol (1906–1917) in Madison, loosely based (its dome not so loosely) on Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral (1666–1710) in London, dominated the countryside for miles around its hilltop site. Neoclassicism had its appeal in Europe, but "nowhere outside the United States were the classical orders to be drawn up in so many parade formations," wrote Marcus Whiffen in his American Architecture since 1890: A Guide to the Styles (1969). "More marble was used in building in the United States in the years 1900–1917," he added, "than was used in the Roman Empire during its entire history."

The explanation for this explosion exemplifies how architecture is put to use outside the world of art. By 1900, the United States had successfully fulfilled its "manifest destiny" on the North American mainland and was constructing a territorial and economic empire overseas. Indigenous people there and in the American West, not to mention native-and foreign-born factory and farm laborers across the country, were increasingly attracted to Greenbackism, populism, socialism, unionization—to radical movements in their many forms—in unprecedented numbers. Memories of shattering disruptions like the 1886 Haymarket Massacre and the 1894 Pullman Strike—only the tip of the class-conflict iceberg, in any case—were made even more vivid by events like the 1911 death by fire of 146 women locked inside their Triangle Shirt-waist Company factory in lower Manhattan so that union organizers could not get to them. Political protest had never been more heated, class conflict more violent, and outright anticapitalist sentiment more widespread than during the "years of marble" from 1900 to 1917.

In this context, state authorities correctly understood that the social order was under serious attack, and for the same reasons that the National Guard armories with medieval crenellation were erected in wealthy urban neighborhoods, so was government at all levels drawn to the architecture of Rome, not of its republic but of its empire, the most enduring Western empire in fact and in collective memory. The seldom-stated but visually obvious implication was that physical assault against the state and the quasi-public institutional structure supporting it, that it in turn supported, as well as political assault on capitalist arrangements and republican forms of government, would not prevail—that the objects of assault would endure forever. To face down social upheaval and to announce imperial objectives, government and quasi-government architecture referred to the "eternal city" as often as not.

Neoclassicism waned with state suppression and the decline of outspoken dissent during and after World War I (1914–1918) but revived in the Great Depression, and throughout Europe as well, particularly under authoritarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In the United States, it was much simplified from its earlier incarnation by square columns and capitals, spare ornament, crisp rectilinearity, and reduced use of pediments, porticos, and domes (which, when present, resembled spires). Examples are the Gallatin County Courthouse (1936) in Bozeman, Montana, the Library of Congress Annex (1938) in Washington, D.C., and the Soldiers Memorial (1939) in St. Louis, all erected with Works Progress Administration assistance. Fascist and National Socialist architecture differed only in scale: grander in Italy, positively grandiose in Germany. In the Soviet Union it was fussily ornate, recalling the turn of the century.

With the absence or reduction of private investment during the 1930s, governments financed an even greater amount of architecture than before, which is to say that during two historical moments of unusually high demand for social justice or social spending, authorities were unusually concerned with maintaining social order. It mattered not whether order was sustained by increased policing or liberal reform, whether the state was dictatorial or democratic, or—in the United States—whether it was the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, or the New Deal. Regardless of political ideology, governments buttressed legitimacy by appropriating classical architecture, which in times of crisis was the artistic court of last resort.

The Rise and Decline of Modernism (1880s to 1970s)

Three 1932 productions by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the Museum of Modern Art curator Philip Johnson—the exhibit Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, its catalog of that title, and their book, The International Style: Architecture since 1922—had the effect of equating all that was new with a single mode of expression, the name of which they invented and the existence of which they had no doubt. The characteristics of the International Style, they contended, were the sublimation of mass to volume; continuous, horizontally organized, regular but not symmetrical monochrome surfaces of one material; and the subordination of discrete rooms to free-flowing continuous spaces in open floor plans. Form and composition were determined by structure and interior program, they implied, preferably clad in steel, concrete, glass, and if need be, brick. Sixty-five of the seventy-three projects depicted in their book were European.

Book, exhibition, and catalogue were as narrowly selective as they were hugely influential, omitting, for example, all "new architecture," as it was often called in Europe, that did not conform to their aesthetic preferences. But for at least three decades, the International Style was widely accepted as real, as a distinctive school of design constituting the entirety of the so-called modern movement. Architectural modernism, however, was never a unified entity. Although it is true that repudiation of historically based styles—albeit in myriad ways—was largely worked out in Europe during the 1920s and early 1930s, rumblings of discontent had been heard on both sides of the Atlantic since at least the 1880s.

In the United States, the work of Henry Hobson Richardson in the 1880s, although distantly rooted in Romanesque, featured simplified single masses beneath unified roofs, near monochrome and mono-material, reduced applied ornament, and sensitivity to site. The Ames Gate Lodge (1880–1881) in North Easton, Massachusetts, is a striking example. The so-called Chicago School—notably Holabird and Roche, Adler and Sullivan, Burnham and Root, William Le Baron Jenney, and Solon S. Bemen—specializing in commercial architecture, took Richardson's simplifications further. Bemen's Studebaker Building in Chicago (1895) and Holabird and Roche's Mandel Brothers Store Annex (1900–1905) were grids of masonry-or metal-clad steel columns and beams infilled with glass. The full implication of dispensing with load-bearing walls was grasped in 1921–1922 when Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Germany proposed free-form skyscrapers entirely encased in glass panels clipped to the edges of floor slabs.

In his Prairie Houses (1900–1910s)—so-called because erected in undeveloped Chicago suburbs—Frank Lloyd Wright accented broad stretches of unadorned facade with long runs of crisp contrasting trim and windows in strips; inside, public spaces were merged to form partially open plans. His clean-lined rectilinear exteriors, more textured than the black white surfaces of a minimalist like Vienna's Adolf Loos but less ebullient than contemporary Art Nouveau and the several European Secessions (from historically based academic architecture) made considerable impact abroad. The four giants of the new European architecture—Le Corbusier in France, J. J. P. Oud in The Netherlands, Mies and Walter Gropius in Germany—each acknowledged (Corbusier later recanted) his influence. Perhaps the most innovative American other than Wright was the Californian Irving Gill, whose sharp-edged, rectilinear, virtually unornamented white stucco buildings were stripped almost as clean as Adolf Loos's.

During the 1920s, Chicago-area architecture was more widely admired in Europe, where modernism was taking firm root, than at home, where it languished among continuing historical revivals. When modernism did appear it likely came from abroad. Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra emigrated from Vienna in 1914 and 1923, respectively, to work briefly with Wright before settling in Los Angeles, where their houses for Philip Lovell (Schindler's, 1922–1926; Neutra's 1927–1929) in particular were closer in spirit to Corbusier's than to American contemporaries. Only two skyscrapers of the decade were truly modern: the McGraw-Hill Building (1929–1931) in New York City, by Raymond Hood and Andrè Fouilloux (from Paris), and the Philadelphia Savings and Fund Society (1929–1932), by George Howe and William Lescaze (from Zurich). Although a handful of Americans embraced the new architecture, its most conspicuous manifestations before the Wall Street Crash were by European émigrés.

The little that was erected during the depression occasionally flirted with modernism, as in the cases of New York City's Rockefeller Center (1931–1940), by a team of design firms in vertical Art Deco, or Wright's Johnson Wax Administration Building (1936–1939) at Racine, Wisconsin, in streamlined, horizontal "American moderne." But as the decade waned, the arrival of two German émigrés, Gropius in 1937 to direct Harvard's School of Design program and Mies in 1938 to assume the same position at the Illinois Institute of Technology, transformed architectural education and practice in the United States.

That was especially true with Mies, who later produced a master plan for his Chicago campus that in style and scale was revolutionary for this country. Nineteen low-rise structures (not all built) of welded steel frames painted black with glass walls or concrete infilled with brick and glass were followed by three apartment towers on Lake Shore Drive. Even before his enormously influential Seagram Building (1954–1958) in New York City was announced, others were adopting his manner, particularly Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill at their 1952 glass and metal Lever House, among others in New York City. From high-rise buildings the Miesian model spread to virtually every design type during the next two decades. What had taken hold throughout Europe immediately after World War I (1914–1918), in quantity mostly social housing sponsored by socialist and social democratic governments, found favor in the United States after World War II (1939–1945), initially among corporate clients. With the transition, modern architecture changed fundamentally, from low-rise, amply fenestrated brick and concrete structures to high-rise, almost completely fenestrated flat-roof slabs.

As modernism spread to every design genre, stylistic variations appeared, of course. But within the variety there remained commonality: either bland sterility or aggressive anonymity, especially apparent when modern buildings clustered—along Park and Sixth Avenues in New York City, for example, or at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus (1965–1987), mostly by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. As large chunks of city and suburb became virtually interchangeable and as it dawned on clients that architectural conformity compromised corporate and personal identity, the appeal of glass-box architecture began to wane, noticeably in the 1970s.

The New Eclecticism (1970s–)

In his book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), Robert Venturi condemned "the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern[ism]." He favored "messy vitality over obvious unity," "the ugly and ordinary architecture" he soon embraced in Learning from Las Vegas (1972). Most architects were reluctant to fetishize "the vulgar" but were receptive to his notion that modernism's "forced simplicity" did not adequately reflect the "ambiguities of contemporary experience." Indeed, retreat from the Miesian model was already under way before Venturi wrote.

The New Formalism of the early 1960s—strictly symmetrical, smooth-skinned, flat-roofed buildings with screens and grilles—was associated with institutional work of Philip Johnson, Minuro Yamasaki, and Edward Durell Stone. The acknowledged master of neo-expressionism (said to have evolved from 1910s and 1920s German expressionism)—characterized by the sublimation of right angles to sensuously sweeping curves made possible by suspended steel cable roofs and concrete (gunite) sprayed over metal frames—was Eero Saarinen, whose TWA terminal (1956–1962) at Idlewild Airport (later Kennedy) in New York City is the most famous of its type. Brutalism referred to massive asymmetrical structures, usually in poured concrete left rough, with small openings, deep recesses, and aggressive projections emphasizing the play of light and shadow; Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building (1958–1965) at Yale University was firmly brutalistic, more so than the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1959–1965) in La Jolla, California, or other structures by Louis Kahn, whose masterly work could not easily be categorized but who was influenced nonetheless by the genre.

As if to vindicate him, postmodernism arose shortly after Venturi's second book appeared. A kind of umbrella term in architecture in general from the late 1970s the 1990s, Pomo involved the return of ornament, poly-chrome, mixed materials, and historical design elements like Palladian windows, gables, pediments, elaborate moldings, and the classical orders, as well as unprecedented experimentation with shapes, composition, and the juxtaposition of formerly incompatible features as seen in the works of Charles Moore, Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, and many others, including Venturi.

As the 1990s opened, Pomo was surpassed in media attention by Decon—deconstructivist architecture—represented by prominent figures like Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry. As with Pomo, Decon borrowed freely from literary studies: a building was a "text" with no intrinsic meaning other than what was brought to it by "readers"—observers, critics, architects themselves. History had little to offer because knowledge is subjective, noncumulative. The architect was therefore free to design any thing in any way. The resulted surpassed even Pomo in its radical disassembling and reconstructing of parts to form heretofore unimagined wholes, perhaps most famously represented by Gehry's Guggenheim Museum (1991–1997) in Bilbao, Spain.

With architects practicing globally, with new materials and technologies at hand, and with every incentive to experiment, expressive possibility is greater than ever before, resulting in a new eclecticism. To mannerisms already mentioned, pluralism adds several identifiable categories: "green" or sustainable energy conserving design; conscious reworking of vernacular and "populist"—that is, commercial—traditions; revived classicism; neomodernism with its "minimalist" or extremely simplified versions; and high-tech, making art of structural and mechanical systems.

These categories are porous. Some architects work exclusively in one while others combine two or more in a single building or in their work as a whole, borrowing freely from each other all the while, benefiting as well from an "anything goes" professional climate. Nor are the categories as mutually exclusive or as historically correct as in the eclecticisms of taste and style. Nevertheless, "selecting aspects of diverse [but no longer exclusively] historical styles in order to form new and acceptable compositions" is the norm. In the absence of stylistic consensus, compositional possibility in the twenty-first century is virtually unlimited.

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—Robert Twombly